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II
THE LABOUR PROCESS IN SOUTH-GHANAIAN
PEASANT FARMING
Human production, whether of a primary kind like agriculture or of
secondary nature such as handicrafts or industry, occurs under different
social conditions at different stages of historical development. When we
direct our attention to the labour process as purposeful activity, however,
and thus view production as 'the metabolic interaction between man and
nature', we do not at the same time bring to light the social relations under
which the process of production is taking place. To put it more concretely:
a study of the ways in which the Mfantse farmer grows his crops 'does not
[also] reveal the [social] conditions under which it takes place'. I
Postponing discussion ofthe social relations under which peasant
crops are produced until later in this chapter, we shall focus here on the
labour process in peasant farming as a way of producing use-values and on
its principal elements. For the time being, therefore, issues of distribution
and exchange are ignored. In the first part of this chapter we shall consider
the men and women who actually cultivate the land as direct producers, as
well as at the instruments of labour that they apply to what object(s) and
in what particular ways.
For the Mfantse peasant farmer cultivation is a cyclical activity
which carries him from January at the end of Obese, the dry season,
throughEsusow, the main rainy season in MayIJune and Eburobuekyir, 2
the small rainy season in September/October into November and December
of the next Obese. Starting in January or February the first task in the
farming cycle is the clearing of the bush. The burning in about March of
cut-down shrubs and plants which have been left to dry for some weeks,
makes the fact of new plots being cleared both more visible and odorous.
In this area, to clear a piece of land for cultivation only occasionally
means clearing virgin forest; outside the official reserves (and, of
course, wherever a farmer has preserved the forest tree as protection for a
cocoa farm), only a few patches of such forest remain in this part of
Southern Ghana. Clearing operations may nevertheless involve the felling
of trees, depending on the length ofthe fallow period. Farmers therefore
distinguish between kwaa 3 or virgin forest and odoto or thicket. The latter
term applies to a more or less heavily wooded area which has been under
fallow for more than five years and possibly for as many as twenty.
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