Are There Classless Societies In Africa?
By A Correspondent
"A society is a group of people with solitary ties through whose interactions systems of life and institutions are established to allow for the possibility of nurture, defence and survival." The society is stratified and the stratification is in a hierarchy - from the lowest to the highest social class. People are placed in classes according to their abilities and performances. The term "social class" has a number of definitions; it's simply defined as a stratum of people of similar social position.
Karl Marx defines a social class as "consisting of persons doing the same kind of job," and he recognises two main classes, the Bourgeoise (Property Owners) and the Proletariat (Workers); the former "The Haves" and the latter "The Have-Nots." Max Weber defines a social class as "a group of persons with the same market value." By market value he means people who earn about the same income. But he differentiates a social class from a status group which is not determined by its market value but by the prestige the society confers on its members. For instance, the village school master is held in high prestige although he may be very poor. In traditional African society, the chiefs form the highest status group but they are not the richest.
Certain features help to differentiate one social class from another. Each social class forms a subculture of its own. It's this subculture which helps to differentiate one social class from the other. The personal appearance of members, their way of dressing, the type and quality of clothing, their household furniture and utensils, the type of food and how they eat, the language they use or how they speak, their activities and leisure, the type of training they give to their children, the type of occupation they engage in, their political affiliation, their opinion on political or moral issues together form the style of living or sub-culture of the class or group.
For a person's status determines the kind of life he should live. A social class determines a person's attitude towards things, and his attitude determines his behaviour.
The determinants of social class include such attributes as money, occupation, education and family. Money is necessary for an upper-class position; yet one's class position is not directly proportional to his income. An airline pilot has less status than a college professor at half the income; a clergyman may outrank a prize-fighter at fifty times his income.
To understand the place of money in class determination, we must remember that a social class is basically a way of life. It takes a good deal of money to live as upper-class people live. Yet no amount of money will gain immediate upper-class status.
Occupation is another determinant of class status. As soon as man developed specialized kinds of work, he also got the idea that some kinds of work were more honourable than others. In a primitive society, the spear maker, the canoe builder and the medicine-man each holds a definite social status because of his work. The high prestige occupations generally receive the higher incomes; yet there are many exceptions. A popular night club singer may earn as much in a week as a Supreme Court Justice earns in a year.
Social class and education interact in at least two ways. First, to get a higher education one needs money plus motivation. This poses no problem at all to the upper class. Second, one's amount and kind of education affect the class rank he will secure. In short, education opens up avenues for good occupation which carries with it good income.
One's family determines his social status and it is the father's status that determines the status of the children. So every person takes his social class from his family of orientation.
Now let's find out if there can be a classless society, a society in which there are no different social classes or status groups - a society in which all the people have the same level of class, prestige and status as being preached by Ghana's revolution.
In his exposition of African Socialism, ex-President Leopold Senghor describes the traditional West African societies as classless, and with no wage earning sector.
Ex-President Kwame Nkrumah, in his book "Consciencism" published in 1964, also clearly states that there were no classes in traditional African Society. Nkrumah states that by the Marxian kind of class, classes are related in such a way that there is a dis proportion of economic and political power between them. In such a society, there exist classes which are crushed, lacerated and ground down by the encumbrance of exploitation.
In this sense, there were no classes in traditional African society. Nkrumah says in the traditional society, no sectional interest could be regarded as supreme; nor did legislative and executive power aid the interests of any particular group. The welfare of the people was supreme.
Nkrumah further adds that Colonialism came and changed all this. First, there were the necessities of colonial administration. For its success, the colonial administration needed a cadre of Africans who, by being introduced to a certain minimum of European education, became infected with European ideas. By this they acquired a certain prestige and rank to which they were not entitled by the demands of the harmonious development of their own society.
Language
In addition to them, groups of merchants and traders, lawyers, doctors, politicians and trade unionists emerged who, armed with skills and levels of affluence which were gratifying to the colonial administration, initiated something parallel to the European middle class.President Nyerere also denies the existence of classes in traditional African society. He doubts "if the equivalent of the word class exists in any indigenous African language, for language describes the ideas of those who speak it, and the idea of class or caste was non-existent in African society." These views, based on East African societies, are similar to those held of West African societies.
After a critical study, sociologists have been able to disprove the notion that traditional African societies were classless; no society can be classless or has been classless. The class structure of traditional African societies was not well formed; this was because the class difference was not much. The style of life was more or less the same. This is why Nkrumah and others first believed that the traditional African societies were classless.
Even in its simple and ill-formed social stratification, the traditional African society had an upper class consisting of chiefs or the traditional rulers who commanded the highest honour and prestige. Below them was a class of the village elders, kingmakers and the chief's linguists who were believed to be the interpreters of tradition and custom, and they "knew how to speak." They also formed an important status or social class in the hierarchy as looked from above.
The prosperous agricultural producer, the successful hunter, weaver, fisherman or the medicine-man or the powerful fetish-priest also commanded some measure of prestige and honour as well as respect. BY their prosperity they usually married more women and had a large household. This considerably raised their social status because in the traditional African society the more wives and children a man had the greater his esteemed position and prestige. These people could conveniently be described as constituting a third important social class on the hierarchy from above.
If this simple class system existed in traditional African societies, on what basis did the protagonists of the classless societies defend their claim? They might, perhaps, have been influenced by the fact that the traditional African societies had a common, simple style of life in which it was highly rare to see well-to-do persons despising the relatively poor persons. The welfare of all members of the society was the most important thing, and there was no room for sectional interest. This is, perhaps, well-explained in the traditional beliefs of the people.
There was the fear that if you lived a significantly different life, say living in affluence other people might envy and kill you by whatever means available. Or more still, there was the fear that the gods of the society would be very cross with you and "remove" you from the society.
From the foregoing, one clearly sees that there are no classless societies - no society can be said to be classless. Even Kwame Nkrumah, a chief protagonist of classless societies, later on realized this and accordingly recognised the class system of societies. In his subsequent book, "Class Struggle In Africa", Nkrumah admits that social classes exist.
And again contrary to the view in which most African spokesmen were agreed that African society had no class stratification, a Ghanaian newspaper (now defunct) The Spark espoused in 1963 ideas which followed orthodox Communist doctrine. It asserted that "classes do exist in Africa both in the sense of economic groups occupying different portions in the productive system (that's as employers, self-employed workers etc.) and in the sense of different income groups.
The Spark often disagreed with Nkrumah. The paper disclosed, "the denial of the existence of these classes is ultimately a denial of the need for socialism in Africa." In conformity with orthodox doctrine, The Spark could not conceive socialism without a class struggle
