Myth of the African Family in the World of Development*

Abstract

All social processes were conceptualized in polar terms: the extended African family was giving way to the nuclear family; status was becoming achieved rather than ascribed; kinship ties were being dissolved by the solvent of the market. Throughout the 1970s, various writers, sociologists and economists as well as anthropologists, struggled to clarify the links between economic development and African social organization. The African Family System' is now taking on the status of a popular myth in the world of development consultants, repeated without serious attention to its assumptions, implications or empirical basis. The implications of African women's role in farming for the process of development vary with different views of the authority structure of African families. The demographic elements of the myth of the African family are clearly borrowed from an eclectic reading of the ethnography of Africa with special emphasis on descent theory.