ABSTRACT
This study is concerned with some contemporary development discourses about rural (black) African work in which gendered representations figure prominently. In attempts to make African women’s work visible, where once it was not, some analysts have slipped into representing African rural men as not doing very much at all. Discourses of ‘lazy’ men have a long history in European ideas about rural sub-Saharan Africa, occurring wherever rural men resisted colonial labour regimes and coercive forms of rural development. An early example from Kenya is discussed, together with a situation on the Zambian Copperbelt, in which Africans themselves developed stereotyped ideas about work and idleness as aspects of ethnic identity. Underemployed male peasants are also central to Lewis’s 1950s’ theories of developing economies. The second part of the study centres on the role of time-use research in a recent World Bank document on gender and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. A careful dissection of its lead study suggests that this research is presented in ways which underplay men’s contribution to farming. The study suggests that the context for this highly politicised representation of gender relations in rural households lies in the need to explain why market liberalisation strategies of the last 15 years have not produced sufficient growth in African agriculture. The implication is that such growth could occur if only underemployed (‘lazy’?) African men would work harder.
