The funeral in the village: urbanites' shifting imaginations of belonging, mobility, and community

Throughout Africa, the continuing involvement of urbanites with the village of origin—for some time, seen as a special trait of urbanization in the continent—seems to be under heavy strain. For the Yoruba area, where urbanization has a relatively long history, Dan Aronson spoke in 1971 of “a single-role system” still uniting city and village, with people constantly moving to and fro between the two poles in different phases of their lives. In the same year, Joseph Gugler suggested for the Igbo, with their powerful “Tribal Unions,” that urbanites lived in “a dual system” between city and village (1971). From quite a different perspective, Claude Meillassoux (1975) and Samir Amin (1973) characterized wage-laborers in Africa as “semi-proletarians” because most of them retained a footing in the village economy; this would be the explanation why wages in the capitalist sectors could remain relatively low as the costs of the reproduction of labor were borne by the village economy.