The impact of commercialization on the role of labour in African pastoral societies

As pastoral systems undergo commercialisation, all parts of those systems (livestock productivity, range use, household economies and the socio-cultural system itself) adjust to the new goals of production. This paper considers one of the elements in this adjustment, that of the changing role of labour. The evidence is compared from different African pastoral areas, to ascertain whether there are any trends in the way different types of labour are organised when pastoralists commercialise.

The paper summarises (in the first part of the paper) how the necessary balance between labour and livestock is achieved in subsistence-oriented pastoral systems. This balance is inherently unstable, due to human and livestock population dynamics, but pastoral societies have various mechanisms for gaining temporary equilibrium. Commercialisation introduces a further source of destabilisation to which pastoral systems have had to adjust.

The second part of the paper reviews some of the most significant changes in patterns of labour that have been introduced with commercialisation. Although not all members of a pastoral society may be commercialising to the same degree, the process entails a re-organisation in the division of labour within and between households which affects all members of that society (and often neighbouring societies). These changes range from erosion or transformation of the traditional equilibrating mechanisms outlined in the first part of the paper, to innovations only made possible through the infusion of new capital. We conclude that the shift in the value of livestock from primarily use value to market value, which is the hallmark of commercialisation, has resulted in more rigid and permanent forms of socio-economic stratification in which, among other effects, there are qualitative transformations in the organisation of labour.