How did Africans organize production in order to sustain their livelihoods or occasionally produce
a surplus in pre-colonial Africa? In this chapter we will investigate this broad question. The chapter
will show that Africans were innovative and adaptable to changing circumstances. At the same
time, the opportunity to establish systems that would generate sustain surplus production was in
most times and most places hampered by prevailing factor endowments (i.e. the relative supply of
land, labour and capital), geography and the disease environment.
People in pre-colonial Africa were engaged in hunting and gathering, agriculture, mining and
simple manufacturing. Agriculture involved most people, so the chapter looks mainly at farming
activities. The chapter explains that farmers in those days faced two big challenges: a hostile
environment and scarcity of labour. In many regions the environmental conditions were
unfavourable for production. And almost all regions suffered from a shortage of labour. We will,
however, see that there were many different systems of production in pre-colonial Africa, to suit
the variety of conditions the people faced.
The production systems had to be flexible to deal with the existing conditions. Pre-colonial
Africans could make an impression on nature. As a Malawian proverb says: ‘It is people who make
the world: the bush has wounds and scars.’ They were not, however, able to transform nature on a
large scale, since economic development was not far advanced in the pre-colonial period. Without
modern machinery such as tractors, and modern inputs such as chemical fertilisers and pesticides,
they were to a large extent at the mercy of the land and the weather. Minor temporary changes in
conditions could have severe effects on people’s livelihood, for example, two weeks’ delay in the
rains could reduce the crop yield by one third.
The chapter does not capture all spatial and temporal differences in economic activities in precolonial Africa. What it aims to do is to focus on some of the major differences in production
systems and the key factors that can explain why the systems developed as they did. It begins with
outlining the factors that affected production and how these were organized. It then discusses the
Looking at the geography of the continent enables us to understand other factors that affected
production. Map 1 shows the five main ecological regions in Africa. These are the tropical rain
forest, the savannah, the highlands, the deserts and the temperate zones. The last two produced
very little in pre-colonial times. The deserts are huge but have always been very scarcely populated.
The temperate zones include only the southern tip of Africa and in pre-colonial times these were
populated only by a small number of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. So the rest of this chapter
discusses the first three regions – forests, savannah and highlands – as these are the ones most
relevant to our study of production. Before we do that, however, let us first provide a very brief
summary of some of the generic conditions affecting economic activities in pre-colonial Africa.
Scholars have not been able to conclusively identify to origins and diffusion of food production in
Africa, but the origin of food production in West Africa did not lag far behind that of the Near East.
Food production using iron tools is believed to have spread across Africa through the Bantu
migration that began c. 1000 BC. Population density was low in most regions and at most times in
pre-colonial Africa. Because people were widely spread out, land was in abundance but labour was
scarce. Conflicts over land seldom developed and there were no economic incentives to give people
property rights to land. In these vast African landscapes, pastoralists could move freely in search
of grazing land without coming into conflict with the settled farming communities. And the
abundance of land meant that the farmers could use extensive agricultural methods. This means
that they did not use a lot of inputs to keep the land fertile. Once land was exhausted, or they wanted
to increase yields, they opened a new field.
What held up production, then, was not an insufficient supply of land but an insufficient supply of
manpower. Plenty of strong young people were needed to work the land and open new fields.
Without a big labour force, farmers were limited in their use of extensive agriculture. Shifting
cultivation and land rotation (instead of crop rotation) was common. Labour was very valuable,
and institutions that regulated the use of labour, such as the family, kinship systems and slavery,
played a crucial role in Africa’s pre-colonial economic history.
The African environment was in many ways more severely hostile than that of other continents.
Two factors that limited exploitation of the natural resources were the generally thin soils, animal
diseases and crop pests. Soil quality obviously differed from region to region, but we have no
reason to assume that it was low overall. The problem was that in most regions of pre-colonial
Africa the soil nutrients were concentrated in the topsoil. This meant that the good soil was
vulnerable to erosion, and its fertility was severely depleted when the land was exposed to wind
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and heavy rain. Another problem was that the thin topsoil made plough agriculture inefficient,
because turning up the soil with a plough would bring the less fertile soils to the surface. This is
one reason why the plough was used in only a few regions of pre-colonial Africa. Summing up,
farmers had to work with – land that was of fairly good quality in most regions, but with fragile
soils that were difficult to exploit.
The other limiting factor, diseases and pests, restricted what animals could be kept and what crops
could be grown. Sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) and rinderpest effectively prevented livestock
rearing in many places, and swarms of locusts could devastate crops. Animal diseases could wipe
out herds, so stock loss was a constant threat to the growth of pastoral and agropastoral societies.
These diseases also affected agricultural societies by limiting crop production, because where
disease was endemic the farmers could not keep cattle and thus did not have manure to use as
fertiliser for their crops. And there was another factor that limited crop production – a factor that
farmers in those days could not have known about. If you look at a world map, you will see that
geographically the continent of Africa is aligned along longitudes rather than along latitudes. It is
a botanical fact that species tend to diffuse more successfully along latitudes than along longitudes.
In other words, if you travel east or west you will see more variety of plant species than if you
travel north or south. This meant that the domestic crop repertoire – in other words, the range of
different crops for human and animal use – was relatively poor in Africa. So there was a limit to
how many new crops farmers could introduce to enhance productivity.
As we shall see in the next three sections the various ecological regions offered its own specific
conditions for production. This helps to explain the great variety of production systems that existed
in pre-colonial Africa. As we have noted above, Africans were not passive victims of their situation.
On the contrary, African agency is a key to understand how production systems developed and
changed in pre-colonial Africa.