Reverse Rural-urban Migrations: An Indication of Emerging Patterns in Africa?
Webster Whande, Senior Researcher, Corruption and Governance Programme, Climate Change Project, Cape Town
In recent years, analysts have pointed out that rural-urban migration, and urbanization in general, will be a key source of conflicts on the continent. This, it is argued, because those moving into the cities are the restless youths with not much prospects for jobs. While aspects of this argument might be true, research conducted at the University of Cologne indicate this might simplify a complex situation on the continent. It fails to acknowledge the agency of African citizens to improvise, as has been characteristic over generations when situations were difficult. Additionally, this argument ignores the emerging trends in how Africans cope with vulnerabilities in urban areas.
While not widespread over the continent, these trends point to an alternative response to urban problems other than conflict. In recent years, Africans have started breaking with old rural-urban migrations experienced during colonial times, leading instead, to multiple directions in movement to pursue livelihood possibilities wherever they emerge.
The consolidation of African cities, particularly in the southern Africa region, was largely on the basis of coerced labour. Rural-urban migration has been a key feature of urbanization since then. Migrants to South Africa’s gold mines and farms, Zimbabwe’s farms and asbestos and gold mines and Zambia’s copper mines all came from as far and wide as Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and with variants of internal circular movements. Perceptions that vulnerabilities in urban areas will be a major source of conflicts in the future is in part locked in this pattern of migration, and not on the emerging trends of migrating in multiple directions. I contend below that Africans are already showing that the poverty of urban areas might not lock them into conflicts.
Firstly, there is growing evidence that the outcomes of the 1980s Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes (ESAPS) – widespread cuts in public finance in health, education and agriculture – was an increase in informal activities, among other responses. The growth of the informal sector on the continent is widely credited to the hardships brought by the ESAPS. Informalisation of the African economies happened in many key sectors, including an increase in urban agriculture, electricians and backyard car and refrigeration mechanics.
A recent study indicates that Zimbabweans partly withstood the impacts of the political and economic meltdown over the last ten years through backyard gardens and growing crops on open council land. Research in Kenya has also pointed to the increased urban informal agriculture even as migrants maintain rural homes and fields. It is from this perspective of local agency that projections of increasing conflicts in African cities are perhaps a little premature.
Secondly, it appears the hardships of the ESAPs contributed to some reversal of the colonial logic of migrating from rural to urban areas. The urban poor combined informal economic activities in the city with migrating to natural resource rich rural areas. Miners from the copperbelt of Zambia found their way to the fishing shores of the Kariba, Zimbabweans moved to communal areas – whether as part of their ancestral homes or new expansion frontiers in the low population and resource abundant areas of central Zimbabwe and the Zambezi valley. Some responded to the benefits of the Communal Areas Programme on Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) and moved to districts that could ‘harvest’ wildlife and derive financial benefits.
Recent research from West Africa, particularly Ivory Coast, indicates that there have been urban-rural migrations that the situation can actually be classified as de-urbanisation. Perverse incentives for gold mining in Ghana has similarly seen, though not to the same scale as Ivory Coast - young men unable to find jobs in cities claiming land to mine for gold in rural areas.
Thirdly, migrants between urban and rural areas have adopted different strategies that enable them to straddle the urban-rural economic possibilities without the threat of missing out on the opportunities presented by both. Termed multi-local livelihoods, extensive research in Ghana shows households are able to pursue livelihood possibilities between rural and urban areas. Combining agricultural based livelihoods and other economic activities; women are becoming the most mobile demographic group on the continent. This, as the traditional male dominated hard labour opportunities have dwindled. The occupation of new economic niches by women indicates the changing patterns of migrations and the fact that conflict might just be the last resort to increasing hardships in urban areas.
Particularly innovative in their movement, women cross-border traders have also abandoned the long-term migration patterns of spending up to two years in urban areas and sending remittances back home. They participate in short-term temporary migrations, some lasting a day, two weeks or longer as their trading activities allow. The frequency of movement between urban and rural in this cross-border context has increased.
Fourthly, the migration of relatives to urban areas is often not an individual decision, as recent research from Namibia has shown. In many cases these migrations are part of household decisions. While it is anticipated that the migrant will support relatives in rural areas through remitting cash, clothes and other goods, in times of hardships resources equally flow from rural areas to urban areas. In the Limpopo province of South Africa, migrants to Johannesburg are often recipients of a wide range of natural resources including marula nuts, mopane worms and dried vegetables. The supply of natural resources to migrants who are as yet to find their footing is a common support structure.
Finally, the limitations of colonial movement from rural to urban areas are still reminiscent today, even though there has been an increase in populations of Africans in cities. The maintenance of dual home is associated with preserving of dignity among migrants in Southern Africa. Rural areas continue to conjure images of a retirement home for many and, even as they lead hardship lives in cities, they build rural homes for their retirement. They also invest in livestock, land and other natural resources such as water. In Cameroon this has led to the coining of the phrase bush fallers, those who return to build opulent homes whether to return to or to just make a statement that they have ‘arrived.’
These emerging patterns of migrations have one thing in common, the centrality of land and natural resources in rural areas. It is the centrality of rural land and natural resources that indicate forecasts of conflicts in urban areas might need to adopt a more cautious approach.
