This article provides an overview of Africa’s contemporary social formation. It is argued that the labour question in Africa has undergone a decisive transformation under neoliberalism. While under colonial rule the formation of labour reserves was mainly the result of political engineering, especially in regions of white settlement, today labour reserves are driven by the spontaneous operation of generalized monopoly capitalism and have become coextensive with the continent. This changing labour question is the most basic element of an apparent tendency of structural convergence among the continent’s macro-regions; it amounts to a generalized condition of semiproletarianization, insofar as the bulk of the population is unable to meet its basic needs within the wage relation or outside it. Peasant and worker households straddle various labour regimes in rural and urban areas and seek to secure their social reproduction by a combination of wages, petty production and trade, simple use values, and unpaid reproductive labour. Data sourced from the ILO are used to qualify some of these trends, including their gendered dimensions.
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