THE ABANDONMENT of hill settlements, both towns and villages, is a widespread feature in tropical Africa not only in the savanna grasslands but also in the forest areas. It has been reported from the Fouta Djallon at the western end of the Sudan zone, from the Nuba Mountains and Ingessana Hills at the eastern end of the zone, and from Rhodesia.1 The literature on the movement of population from the hills is probably richest for West Africa, particularly for Togo, Dahomey and Nigeria. It consists, on the one hand, of widely scattered references in ethnographical, anthropological, sociological and agricultural writings and, on the other, of detailed case studies, although here again the abandonment of the hills is often only casually mentioned.2 These case studies are unrelated, and are usually presented without reference to any broader frame-work. It is suggested that sufficient detailed work has now been done on the abandonment of the hills in West Africa for it to be worth while to attempt to evolve a set of generalizations having more than local validity. An attempt will therefore be made in this paper to present a synthesis of common features derived from the author's field work and the published case studies. The first part of the paper is concerned with the hill settlements, the second with their abandonment and the factors involved, and the third with the economic and social changes associated with the movement of the settlements.