According to Isaacman (1990), anthropologists and historians have linked peasant diversity and differentiation to labour migration and the growth of an urban working class. They focus on oscillating peasant workers who played a critical role in the colonial history of Eastern and Southern Africa. First (1983), Kitching (1980), Parkin (1975), Stichter (1982) and Isaacman (1990) concur that oscillating peasant workers straddle the boundary between rural and urban, and, therefore, represent a distinct and important social force as a partial peasantry in the countryside. The quoted scholars view straddling as an effective coping strategy to ensure the
79 social reproduction of the peasant household. Cliffe (1978), Murray (1981) and Isaacman (1990) argue that the concept of a peasant worker is too blunt an instrument and that these oscillating migrants were proletarianised workers with a rural residence and a patch of land. It should be noted that the arguments above carry important implications in the study of peasant politics since they highlight the question of how rurally based migrants actually perceived their own social identity.
Bernstein (1988) distinguished peasants according to labour processes and property relations. Other indicators of peasant differentiation, as noted by Chayanov in Bernstein (1990), include; inequality derived from issues of privilege and deprivation; variations in relative wealth and poverty of households; differences in accumulation and consumption of use- values; vulnerability of individual households to disasters; and the demographic differentiation which correlates the size and relative prosperity of households with their position in the cycle of generational reproduction. According to Chayanov (1966) in Prakash (1985), since the career of a family took it from a small nuclear family to a larger one with grown-up children who then married and split away, the circulation of resources among peasants took on a cyclical character. Chayanov’s argument was criticised for assuming that each peasant household will have a child at a given interval, and add on from three to five offspring to each family. It can be argued that this condition may not be met by peasants in different cultures, regions or periods. According to Prakash (1985), recent demographic studies have talked of fertility patterns oscillating according to health, hygiene and education levels. Prakash (1985) highlights that the age of marriage, prevalence of a joint family system, village co-operation, the availability of bonded labour, and the migration of individual family members can alter the consumption needs and labour supply of the peasant household in many ways quite independently of the growth of a nuclear family. Furthermore, it has been noted in various regions of colonial India that mortality caused by famine and disease can have a random impact on the demographic structure of peasant families.
Bernstein (1988) and Friedmann (1980) identified and differentiated the following groups of peasants; petty commodity producers, forced commodity cultivators, independent household producers, sharecroppers, labour tenants (squatters), and oscillating peasant workers, each of which was enmeshed in different labour processes and property arrangements which varied additionally by gender and generation. They viewed petty commodity producers as those who controlled their own labour and means of production but rarely the terms of exchange. Petty
80 commodity producers stand in sharp contrast to both those peasants forced to grow specific crops under a highly regulated labour and marketing system, and to independent household producers who sought to resist or minimize commodity production in favour of production for use (Little, 1987, Pelisier, 1978 and Sturzinger, 1983 in Isaacman, 1990).
Unlike other peasants labour tenants or squatters had only conditional access to the land acquired by giving up control of a portion of their labour while sharecroppers, on the other hand, jealously guarded their labour and instead yielded a percentage of their crops to get temporary access to land ( cf. Groff, 1980, Keegan, 1986 and O’Brien, 1983). Cooper in Bundy (1979) highlights that African squatters were the key to the flourishing of peasant agriculture and were the prime targets of the state’s assault on the peasantry. Bundy (1979) emphasizes that the attack on African squatters did not always result in immediate and total victory. In Zimbabwe peasant squatters used ‘weapons of the weak’ to resist white attacks. Bundy (1979) noted that in spite of the attack on the African squatters, marketed agricultural produce in the late nineteenth century came from the peasant and from the capitalist in the twentieth. Although Zimbabwean squatters were offered employment their refusal to accept agricultural employment unless some access to land, however minimal, was offered prolonged the labour system (Morris, 1976). Isaacman (1990) elaborates that peasant households in which members periodically worked in towns or on estates notably in Zimbabwe were involved in a distinctly different labour process and property relations from the domestic unit remained intact. Because of differences within the African peasantry the degree of the peasants’ partial autonomy varied.
According to Scott (1976), although the vulnerability of peasants in general to subsistence crises grew under the colonial transformation, some peasants were naturally more vulnerable than others. Scott (1976) further argues that a more undifferentiated peasantry will experience economic shocks in a uniform fashion since structurally its members are more or less in the same boat. A head tax, for example, would stir almost unanimous resentment in a village where the relatively even distribution of income makes the burden comparable for most villagers. Scott (1976) highlights that communitarian structures not only receive shocks more uniformly but they also have, due to their traditional solidarity, a greater capacity for collective action. Hence, the more communal the village structure, the easier it is for a village to collectively defend its interests. Although Scott (1976)’s findings related to Lower Burma, they apply to the peasantries in many parts of the world with Zimbabwe being a good
81 example. The First Chimurenga (1896-7) in Zimbabwe, which united the Shona and Ndebele, was a resistance to hut tax.
Isaacman (1990) identified hidden forms of peasant resistance as they struggled against both claims on their labour and produce and the denigration of their cultural heritage. He noted that these hidden forms of peasant protest succeeded only if they remained clandestine. When, for example, colonial officials discovered actions such as feigning illness, illegal intercropping, and sabotage, they almost invariably depicted them as an indication of the ‘lazy and uneconomic nature of the African’ (Isaacman et al., 1980, and Watts, 1988 in Isaacman, 1990). This is clearly evident in the letter from the Governor’s Office in Salisbury to the Secretary of State on 22 August 1945 in which Mr. Munro describes the Zimbabwean man, ‘the male native in the Reserves appears to suffer from an extraordinary form of lethargy.’ This victor’s history of the view of the male native as suffering from bone laziness is present in primary sources left by those running the system.
In India, like in many parts of the world, colonial rule undermined the viability of small- peasant subsistence production and replaced it with control by landlord/money-lender/traders that used the debt-credit mechanism as a form of ‘debt-bondage’ (Chatterjee, 1986). Bhadhuri (1973) points out that the ‘debt bondage’ depended on lack of alternative employment in a labour-surplus economy and on the ability of the semi-feudal landlords to resort to extra- economic, and often extra-legal, means of coercion to secure the conditions of bondage. According to Banaji (1977), the continuation of such forms of exploitation of peasant labour should be viewed as a case of formal subordination of labour by capital, and as the extension of capitalist domination. In Zimbabwe kaffir farming created a form of debt-bondage which tied the peasants to their landlords.