The transformation of the land tenure system, land appropriation and formation of the ruling class in the mauri country (Niger)

Abstract

The difference in kind between the pre-colonial and the postcolonial relations of production can he noticed through the gradual dissolution of relations based on a personal tieless gift-giving based on the market economy. The liberation of the labor forces this engendered and of channeled into a new system of constraint, led to the beginning of a private appropriation of land. The movement falls within the ambit of the law in which the codification of land relations based on ownership facilitated the task of the social groups whose rise to power is henceforth conditioned by the constitution of an economic power. A distinction must no doubt be made between the incomes derived directly from the land and those derived from trade and speculation. Agriculture is not yet in fact a capitalist sector. The nature of the investments and the means used still belong to the former mode of production, that is why only the social groups with money incomes from elsewhere make a profit from agriculture, whose profitability still depends on the volume of labor available from production and on speculations in the product at the level of circulation.