Labor mobility and the rural exodus

The impact of modern developments on West Africa's rural societies is manifested in a number of ways, none of them easy to measure. Those who consider the commercialization of agriculture to be an enormous source of various pathologies would emphasize the impoverishment, class contradictions, and social disorganization that they imagine to be characteristic of rural life today. These judgments imply a comparison with earlier times that is even harder to make concretely. Not everyone would express his or her opinion as decisively as Polly Hill (1977:172): “This miserably inefficient, competitive, ill-equipped rural economy, where most men work far less hard than they would wish, shuffles along much as it did forty years ago – only relieved by the migration of some married men and their dependents.” But in this chapter I will pursue such themes with some degree of analytical interpretation and rather less documentation. Probably no topic captures the vicissitudes of recent changes in the countryside more completely than the massive shifts in population that have accompanied urbanization since World War II.