Servir l’ État ou se servir soi-même ? Les “courtiers du tabac” dans l’hégémonie de l’État-paysan au Malawi. Trajectoires sociopolitiques d’une élite paysanne dans l’espace productif du district de Kasungu, Région Centrale

摘要

Since the mid 1990s, both the liberalization of the political market and the liberalization of tobacco industry have deeply changed the face of the productive space in Malawi. Tobacco production which represents almost 40% of the national GDP is now undertaken by a dispersed population of smallholder growers but it is more and more subject to a strong surveillance due to the changing needs of the international market. It then engages specific interactions between the political elites and rural growers. Through an deep exploration of the apparatus of control of peasants' work, this master thesis analyses the terms of the political relation between the political centre and it's rural peripheries. This work focuses on a category of producers coopted by the management of the industry to serve as brokers for the hegemonic discourse displayed by international companies trying to implement "good practices of productions" among smallholder growers. Those specific producers draw on their privileged position within the industry to impose themselves as important elites within local political arenas. Drawing on a three month ethnographic fieldwork and the gathering of 85 non directive interviews, this work tries to depict how economic, social and political question are intermingled. It eventually offers new thoughts on the problem of the "capture" of african peasantries initiated by Goran Hyden in the early 1980s.