ABSTRACT
Large-scale capitalist farms reduce peasants’ access to land and subordinate agricultural workers to authoritarian labour regimes. The different forms of agricultural production that have emerged are central to the debate on agricultural policies in different countries in all the regions of Africa. African countries, like European ones, have been shaped by their contrasting agrarian histories. Both Barrington Moore Jr. and V. I. Lenin placed the “agrarian question” at the centre of their arguments. Moore did, however, reflect a common assumption that modern society and democratic politics have urban, indeed bourgeois, origins. The neglect of gender interests undermines his strategy for the “democratic” revolution, unless the effective representation of women’s interests as labour and in production can be achieved. Rural electoral politics in southern Nigeria turned on the claims of contending politicians to secure for supporters of successful parties private benefits to the few and public spending for the many.
