In the popular consciousness, South African poverty is a phenomenon of the homeland or urban township and ghetto, more rarely of rural areas in the core economy. Such a perspective is determined largely by the higher visibility of the poor in the former localities in the recent past, for reasons of geography and political sensitivity. This study aimed to redress the balance, starting from two broad premises: first, that the technical and organisational changes in production and the growth of surplus labour observable in Hanover on a microscale are representative of secular trends in commercialised agriculture in the Karoo region as a whole; and, second, that the causes of poverty generation in that region cannot be satisfactorily examined in isolation from the wider political and economic processes within which they are embedded.

The Annaba economy today is Algerian. It is run entirely by Algerians except for the steel mill outside of town. The goods provided are tailored to its mostly Algerian customers (jillabas, harissa, henna), plus selected Western goods made in Algeria or imported from Europe (plastic buckets and gas bottles, Peugeot sedans for those with the money and connections, sitcoms for the few with TVs, commercial films for everyone). Goods are dispensed primarily in a modern suq, or bazaar, although the government also runs a supermarket and department store. French and other Europeans are physically absent from Annaba today for the most part, but Western economic influences persist, like only partly covered-over layers of historical sediment laid down orignally in the colonial period.

This article examines well-known facts about Asante trade in the nineteenth century with a view to defining the contribution of trade to accumulation. The question of accumulation becomes significant when considered in relation to recent directions in Asante economic, social and political history. These have featured the role of the precolonial Asante state in the development of its economy (Wilks, 1967; 1975; McCaskie, 1980), stratification (Wilks, 1975; McCaskie, 1980; 1983; 1986; Arhin, 1983a; 1983b; 1986a), and what may be called the paradox of colonial rule, that it liberalised accumulative forces in order to enhance its exploitative opportunities (Arhin, 1974; 1975).

The century-old Lebanese presence in West Africa has been the subject of mixed reaction from the host societies. While many Africans, including political leaders, have defended this presence in the belief that it has been very beneficial for their countries, others have strongly criticised it, arguing that the Lebanese have blocked the way to Africans in trade, repatriated their capital and used many kinds of malpractices in their trading activities. In Senegal, which is the subject of this article, French small and medium traders opposed the presence of the Lebanese during the colonial period because the latter became their main competitors. The groundnut trade was the country's main economic activity and there was a great demand for this product in Europe. The major European companies were keen to increase exports and, in this, they relied on the Lebanese who, in the first decades of this century, acted as middlemen.