For a long time, work appeared to be unthinkable in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly because of the long exploitation of natural resources by the colonial powers, which made it something alien to human life. This is partly what justifies the questioning by an author who, some twenty years ago, wondered whether work could be an object of scientific study in the sub-Saharan context. The aim of this article is to answer this question. Through a review of the literature and a reasoning by analogy, we probe the situation in France at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, in order to feed a prospective reflection about work in sub-Saharan Africa today. Our main conclusion is that it is quite possible to isolate work from the daily experience of sub-Saharan Africans, and to make explicit the concepts with which one operates such an approach. This constitutes a scientific investigation of work.
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