Contemporary Plantation Capitalism and the Contested Legacy of an Oil Palm Land Grab in Sierra Leone

• In Event: Commodity Frontiers, Land, and Global Production

Abstract

West Africa is a relatively understudied frontier of contemporary plantation capitalism and one of the front lines of the booming palm oil industry. This study explores the legacy, dynamics of class struggle, and contestation of a 2011 land grab in Malen Chiefdom, Pujehun, Sierra Leone, fourteen years after the establishment of a massive oil palm plantation, the largest plantation in the country, by French agribusiness giant Socfin. This case is situated in, and sheds light on, contexts wherein there is a long-term project to establish plantation zones in the hinterlands of a rentier state previously characterized by petty commodity production and subsistence farming. Highlighting the temporally contingent and contested nature of dispossession and class formation in this context, the study makes the case for the revived salience of the concepts of proletarianization and enclosure, revealing the ways elites must maintain dispossession via military occupation, social engineering, and exploitation to establish contemporary plantation capitalism in West Africa.

Authors

• Joshua Lew McDermott, Southeastern Louisiana University

• Fassie Manju, Njala University