Agrarian Responses to Outmigration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

IN THE LITERATURE ON THE EFFECTS of rural population change, the common emphasis has been the economic and institutional consequences of rapid growth in population and the labor force. Interest has focused on such consequences as increases in labor productivity, changes in land tenure systems, and effects on common-property resources (e.g., Boserup, 1965; Binswanger and McIntyre, 1984). The obverse situation in which the effects to be studied are consequences not of population growth but of substantial labor outmigration has attracted less attention-largely because such outmigration has tended to occur in the later phases of agricultural development, by which time the focus of research interest has shifted decisively to the urban economy. Yet, in Africa various policies and activities during both the colonial and post-colonial eras have induced considerable rural labor exodus at early stages in the development process. At the same time, fertility levels have remained fairly high while mortality rates have declined sharply. It is thus a matter of considerable interest to investigate the consequences for rural living conditions of this combination of demographic circumstances. What impact have these conjunctural processes had on rural institutions, particularly those affecting labor relations and class formation? How have these processes been modified by the adverse economic circumstances of recent years and the forced reduction in the durban bias of policy, with presumably a resulting slowdown in the rate of rural outmigration? It has been suggested that the contemporary phenomenon of massive outmigration from the rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa may represent a continuation in a different guise of earlier migratory movements provoked by domestic slavery and slave trade on the continent. Nonetheless, in order to understand the types of agrarian response evoked by these relatively free flows of people, it is important to position the modem rural exodus correctly within the relevant historical context in which it originated. Beginning particularly after the Berlin Conference of 1884 (when the European powers partitioned Africa into