Have the social classes of yesterday vanished from Africanist issues or are African societies made up of new classes? A French anthropologist’s perspective

Abstract

The concept of social class and how it relates to the African context was theorised in France during the 1960s and 1970s in Africanist sociology and anthropology. The author summarises the major contributions of these works as well as providing his own analysis. He concludes that the variety of empirical data and the abrupt shifts in societal evolution of the continent over the past century have unfortunately dictated a speculative and quasi-experimental use of the concept of class in much of the literature. He also comments on the interventions on class that were published in ROAPE and its blog, Roape.net, in recent years.