constituted two-thirds of total exports and 28 per cent of
monetary Gross Domestic Product.

The working class therefore arose merely as a by-product of the
efforts of the imperialists to extract cheap raw materials from the
country, rather than as a product of the development of industrial
production. For this reason, it had several clearly distinguishing
characteristics.

To begin with, obviously the working class was numerically
very small: less than 400 thousand in a country of then about 9
million people. This small size of course resulted from the ob-
jective function of the country’s economy: namely to supply cheap
raw materials for the industries of British and the capitalist world
generally. The table below shows the distribution of the labour
force in the wage economy for the years following independence.

SECTORAL DISTRIBUTION OF WAGE EMPLOYMENT
(in thousands).

1962 1963 1964 1965 1966

Agriculture 203.8....165.5 .. 163.6...339.2:.: 1262
Mining 8.8 7.4 7.8 12 6.2
Manufacturing 23.4 22.2 23.6 25.1 29.9
Construction 41.2 28.3 33.7 2145 37.4
Transport 24.3 24.4 25,4 26.4 27.6
Public Utilities 4.9 3.9 4.6 4.8 5.3
Commerce 16.9 1% T T fo 17.8 20.9
Other Services ThY 12.1 74.9 81.3 83.0
Total 1970 IR0 3512 ANy Joey

Like elsewhere in the colonised world, the working-class was
always forced to maintain close socio-economic ties with the sec-
tors of its social origins, that is the rural agricultural and/or
pastoral productive systems. As is well-known, in the colonies
capitalism comes face to face with various pre-capitalist social or-
ders; and far from destroying and horizontally integrating them
under the armpit of bourgeois property relations as it does back
home, it instead simply moulds these various SOCi0-economic
systems and retains their outward format so that they can better
serve the interests of colonial exploitation. Thus while all over
Africa colonialism extracted sections of the population from their

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