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Women Stay on the Farm No More: Changing Patterns of Rural–Urban Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Josef Gugler
Josef Gugler
Affiliation:
Professor of Sociology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, and Entwicklungssoziologie, Universität Bayreuth1
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Extract

Women could be said to be ‘the second sex in town’ in colonial Africa in that men predominated in the urban centres spawned by the political economy of colonialism. An explanation has to consider both employment and family separation. Although colonial governments, missions, commercial firms, and mines recruited men, it is not clear to what extent this was a matter of preference on the part of the major employers rather than the response of peasant households. Not at issue are the reasons for the latter's integration into the cash economy and the rôle of coercion, whether in the form of forced labour or indirectly through the imposition of tax. But what considerations were borne in mind when households deliberated about which of their members to dispatch? Whatever the part played by both employers and suppliers in determining the composition of the labour supply – and this so far totally neglected topic demands research – the result was that in many, if not all, African colonies, almost as a rule, domestic servants, secretaries, and nurses were male.

Type
Africana
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 347 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

2 Gugler, Josef, ‘The Second Sex in Town’, in Canadian Journal of African Studies (Toronto), 6, 1972, pp. 289–301,Google Scholar reprinted in Steady, Filomina Chioma (ed.), The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 169–84.Google Scholar

1 Such policies are still in effect in South Africa, where the gold mines are prohibited by law from providing family accommodation for more than three per cent of their African work-force, and many other men are also recruited on short-term contracts in various sectors of the economy.

2 For a more detailed discussion of rural–urban migration, see Gilbert, Alan and Gugler, Josef, Cities, Poverty, and Development: urbanization in the Third World (Oxford and New York, 2nd. edn. 1990), ch. 3.Google Scholar

3 Myra Marx Ferree and Josef Gugler, ‘Sex Differentials in Rural–Urban Migration: variations across the Third World’, South–South Conference, Montreal, May 1985.

1 Using data including all ages rather than age-specific data avoids the problems arising from the widespread – and gender-specific – misreporting of age.

2 See Kaplan, Irving, ‘The Society and its Environment’, in Nelson, Harold D. and Kaplan, (eds.), Ethiopia, a Country Study (Washington, D.C., 1981), p. 71.Google Scholar

1 Namibia does not conform to this trend, but the 1951 data are suspect because the sex ratio for the total population is utterly implausible. And, of course, this is still a settler colony.

2 For a case-study, and its replication a generation later, see Gugler, Joseph, ‘Life in a Dual System: Eastern Nigerians in town, 1961’, in Cahiers d'études africaines (Paris), 11, 1971, pp. 400–21Google Scholar, and ‘Life in a Dual System Revisited: urban-rural ties in Enugu, Nigeria, 1961–1987’, typescript.

3 U.S. Department of Commerce, Women of the World, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1984), p. 41.Google Scholar

1 Oppong, Christine, Marriage Among a Matrilineal Elite: a family study of Ghanian senior civil servants (Cambridge, 1974),Google Scholar reprinted as Middle Class African Marriage: a family study of Ghanaian senior civil servants (London, 1981).Google Scholar

2 Nelson, Nici, ‘How Women and Men Get By: the sexual division of labour in the informal sector of a Nairobi squatter settlement’, in Bromley, Ray and Gerry, Christ (eds.), Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Chichester, New York, Brisbane, and Toronto, 1979),Google Scholar reprinted and revised in Gugler, Josef (ed.), The Urbanization of the Third World (Oxford and New York, 1988).Google Scholar

3 For a discussion of the position of women in urban labour-markets on the Third World, see Gilbert and Gugler, op. cit. ch. 4.