Wages are not a major theme in the analyses of the African economy. This situation is explained by a lower wage society than in the rest of the world (55% world average, 25% in sub-Saharan Africa). Intra-African disparities are also large (e.g., less than 5% in Niger, and more than 81% in Mauritius). The theories and models of the situation of the wage society in Africa can be divided into three groups. (1) Those that call for a segmentation of the labour market. The founding contribution is that of Lewis, with a start of savings from the migration of a traditional and informal sector to a modern sector. Gunnar Myrdal’s contribution is also important in two respects, the impetus given to the civil rights movement by his 1944 book, and the book’s identification of poverty trap situations that complement and explain the limitations of the initial Lewis model. (2) Structural macroeconomic approaches. A more precise understanding of the scope of short-term policies is made to better target the specific structures of the labour market in the analysis of wages. (3) Finally, syntheses call for an analysis of actors’ games and industrial relations, such as the Cooper studies on the history of labour in Africa. A general framework for analysing the relevance of these different approaches is proposed here.