Poverty in Colonial Africa: An Exploratory Study

Recent studies have challenged earlier narratives of Africa as historically stagnant and impoverished, instead revealing patterns of booms and busts. While this has advanced understanding of long-term growth, significant gaps remain in our knowledge of historical poverty, especially among self-employed rural populations. This chapter uses published social tables to examine rural poverty in six African countries—Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Uganda—between 1920 and 1960. Using the ‘cost of basic needs approach,’ we establish historical absolute national poverty lines and categorize poverty into three levels: absolute, modest, and vulnerable. We then compare subsistence production across rural livelihoods to these benchmarks. This study is the first to use social tables to assess rural poverty across multiple African contexts in the colonial era. Our findings contribute to ongoing debates about poverty persistence and the role of colonial structures in shaping long-term welfare trajectories.