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Rural–Urban Migration and the Rural Alternative in Mwase Lundazi, Eastern Province, Zambia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Jan Kees van Dong
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Rural-urban migration tends to play a central role in analyses of Zambian society. Zambia is, by African standards, a highly urbanized country and has experienced an explosive urbanization since independence. Migration from the rural areas is seen as a major cause for rural stagnation. Consequently it is a major policy goal of the Zambian government to reverse this trend towards more urbanization. The political and academic discussion about this policy is mostly in terms of large aggregates of people; rural versus urban, or peasants and capitalist penetration. For example migration from rural areas to urban centers is seen as a logical consequence of maximizing benefits in individual choices given the market situation (Fry and Maimbo, 1971; Bates, 1976). Another view sees this migration as logical in the interests of international capitalism. Rural-urban migration provides cheap labor of benefit to an export oriented enclave economy. The role of rural areas is limited to the reproduction of labor and this conflicts with a possible role of rural people as commodity producers (Cliffe, 1978).

The danger of such reasoning is that it casts rural people in a passive role, determined by the logic of rural-urban terms of trade or the workings of an all encompassing capitalist system. It implies a centralist view of development (Long, 1977) and overlooks the fact that diverse reactions of peasants are possible, given the influence of a Southern African capitalist system on their economies (Ranger, 1978). This is illuminated by this study of Mwase Lundazi, a chieftainship in Lundazi district, Eastern Province.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 83 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1984

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