Description:
R. Botte — Social class formation in an African pre-capitalist society. In pre-colonial Burundi unequal economic relations, stemming especially from Mehrarbeit bound with landholding, allow for the appearance of a landless peasantry—i.e. a social class. Economic processes, based on the king's political control of landrights, may lead to dispossession, insofar as the control of men— expressed in actual Mehrarbeit is fundamentally based upon the control of land. Mehrarbeit, especially in war, makes for subjects' reproduction qua freemen or self-sustaining peasants. Its refusai, demonstrated by the deliberate relinquishing of land and freedom, appears as an expression of antagonistic social relationships. When a landless peasant (umushumba) enters the service of a master (shebuja) this constitutes both a class- and a person-to-person relationship. According to the dominant ideology the mushumba becomes both a 'son', due to his introduction into the field of kinship/production relationships, and a useless person, insofar as his refusai of Mehrarbeit expresses his refusai to ensure the reproduction of the social system.