We Africans have mastered the art of living between worlds. Somewhere between colonial boarding schools and cousin WhatsApp groups in the village, a new identity emerged, not entirely modern, not entirely traditional, but something in between.
A hybrid soul
Today’s African middle class often sees itself as upwardly mobile and cosmopolitan. Yet beneath the suits, LinkedIn profiles and urban apartments lie something deeper: the quiet resilience of peasant DNA.
Just sixty years ago, most Africans were peasants, subsistence farmers who lived communally, tethered to land, kinship, and the cycles of nature. The shift to urban life, education, and salaried employment created a new class. But it did not erase the old one. Instead, it layered one identity over another.
We now see professionals who discuss forex markets by day, yet worry about a cow back home by night. People who fly Emirates to Dubai but build retirement homes in ancestral villages. Those who pay for international school fees while collecting sacks of cassava from their aunties on weekends. The performance of modernity often masks the persistent pull of origin. The peasant may no longer till the land, but the logic of survival, the community ties, and the deep rural belonging remain intact.
Even in death, the peasant roots reveal themselves. Across the African diaspora, many request to be buried “back home”, a wish that burdens both grieving families and entire communities. Thousands are raised to ship bodies to ancestral lands, sometimes at the cost of supporting the living. This is not just sentiment – it is symbolic. Despite decades abroad, many African descendants feel truly at peace only when their remains return to the soil of their forebears.
The question is not whether we’ve become modern. The question is: What kind of modernity have we crafted?
One that rides the escalators of airports while whispering prayers to ancestors. One that shops at supermarkets but still finds meaning in land inheritance. This is not contradiction it is creativity. But it’s also a reality we often hide.
This quiet pull toward the ancestral home becomes most visible during public holidays, especially around Christmas. Cities like Kampala empty out, their traffic jams replaced by an eerie silence.
Like a ritual migration, convoys of middle-class families stream toward their villages, ostensibly for celebration – but unconsciously in search of grounding.
Children chase goats, adults swap phones for firewood, and suddenly, the chaos of urban life gives way to a strange peace. When they return, their faces are often calmer, as if rural air and ancestral soil have reset something no spa or office retreat ever could. It’s a telling sign: beneath the urban ambition lies a deep, perhaps reluctant, need for reconnection with the land and the spirit of place.
Among Africa’s transitional class, there’s a growing discomfort with the term peasantry. It sounds backward, unsophisticated, beneath us. Yet many of us are peasants in disguise, polished peasants, you might say.
Our careers were built on the shoulders of parents who sold livestock, and our ancestral land remains the final resting place when the journey ends. While funeral activities in urban and peri-urban areas are increasingly managed by undertakers, caterers, and sleek external services, the presence and role of rural relatives remain crucial, especially at the burial ground. They are the ones *who have kept the homestead intact, the graves swept, and the family stories alive. And when all is said and done, it is they who will still visit your grave, pour libations, and remember your name.
The danger is not in being hybrid but in denying it. When the educated sneer at the peasant, they sever the very roots that gave them wings. Worse still, they fuel a cultural arrogance that alienates the majority still living and working on the land.
So what if we embraced our duality? What if Africa’s future is not in choosing tradition or modernity but in harmonising both? What if we stopped pretending and started integrating, policy with culture, science with soil, and cities with clans?
The middle class is not as divorced from the peasantry as it likes to think. It is the child of it – It carries the DNA. And in a world increasingly disconnected, perhaps the greatest strength of the African identity is this: we remember where we come from, even if we no longer live there.
So before we discard the word peasant, let us ask: *Who are we when the salary stops, the Wi-Fi fails, and the funeral calls
