Did enslaved persons form a class in or for itself in the Nigerien Sahel before the legal abolition of slavery? Did ex-slaves develop a sense of shared interests, and possibly class consciousness, as ex-slaves following the legal abolition of slavery? The first section of the paper presents evidence that suggests that both these questions should be answered negatively. The second half of the paper analyses the possible causes for the non-development of forms of class consciousness and class struggle rooted in the common experience of enslavement (actual or inherited) in the Tahoua region of the Republic of Niger before the mid-1990s. The paper looks at the organisation of production, at processes of wealth distribution and redistribution, and at the nature of labour relations as articulated between elite employers and dependent workers of free and slave status. It examines the main transformations in these dynamics at different moments of the twentieth century. It concludes by considering a methodological question: whether it is heuristically productive for Africanist historians to look for those phenomena that have been characterised as the main ingredients in the process of proletarianisation in European history, or whether the superposition of a Marxist framework on African societies may divert attention away from other institutions and processes that are not best captured by a Marxist conceptual tool-kit. This final section develops some comparisons across African regions where an elite (capitalist?) class was able to exclude slaves and slave descendants from ownership of the means of production (primarily land), and regions where such exclusionary strategies did not occur or succeed.