Migrancy and the Study of Africans in Towns1

Abstract

THE study of African populations may be said to raise some special theoretical issues in those many areas of Africa where labor migrancy prevails. These are areas where, by and large, the African town population is not clearly distinct. It still mostly consists of Africans who are spending parts of their lives in town, in between periods spent in the rural hinterland, and who continue thinking of the hinterland, rather than the town, as their permanent home because of the greater security there. One kind of theoretical challenge raised by this phenomenon of migrancy has recently been taken up with marked success. That is, the ongoing nature of the urban social systems has been successfully distinguished from the temporary or shifting nature of the migrant personnel. This is one of the greatest single theoretical contributions made by a recent notable series of studies of Rhodesian Copperbelt towns (e.g., Epstein 1958; Mitchell 1960a; Gluckman 1960). These studies demonstrate that African urban systems, such as trade unions, can and should be studied as urban systems in their own right, independently of the fact that the migrant members are recruited from rustic (tribal) life and keep melting away into it again. As Gluckman has it (1960:57), African miner is a miner. His activities at work, and the relations he forms at work, need to be considered in relation to an industrial context, not a tribal one. Thus the Copperbelt work has seemed to forswear relating the urban African to his tribal background, if by this we mean considering his connections with tribal systems in the hinterland. It has recognized the validity of tribes as categories of interaction within the setting, but has mostly avoided explaining town-located phenomena by reference to tribal systems located the town. As a working principle for the study of African towns (or urban societies, or urban social systems), this principle of ignoring what goes on outside would seem to be unexceptionable. In much the same way, when an anthropologist works in the tribal hinterland, one would expect an analysis of the local social systems-age-sets, clans, lineages, or whatever they might bewithout much regard for the turnover of personnel caused by migrant members going away to work in and without reference to what goes on in that outside field. On the other hand, it seems evident that in regions of labor migrancy a case exists for the study of migrancy itself as a supplement to the study of towns and town-located systems.2 The fact that the same individuals are apt