ABSTRACT
Debates about economic differentiation in rural African communities tend to centre on processes of distribution (or maldistribution) of wealth which are linked with political-economic changes in wider society. These changes have included historical interventions such as the arrival of the colonial powers, and their selective use of local elites to establish and further their regimes; or the promotion of export crop production, and the associated fortunes that were waiting to be made from cornering the profit margins on groundnuts or cotton; or (in Nigeria) the fall-out of the oil boom and its enormous system of patronage, whose tentacles spread from the Federal Government into every local government area of the country. There was also a vigorous debate during the 1980s, in which drought and famine were represented as destructive forces on the social order (‘moral economy’) which, to a large extent, was believed to have earlier protected rural households from the irreversible effects of asset loss and incapacity to feed themselves (Watts, 1984). The importance of taking account of such exogenous forces is evident, though empirical data to demonstrate worsening inequalities is not always easy to find, or to evaluate objectively.
