ABSTRACT
However, despite the evidence of transience adduced, there are signs also that migrants coming to town stay longer on each occa sion. These men, as Plotnicov has shown from his Jos (Northern Nigeria) study (1967, pp. 283-5), are increasingly reluctant to maintain close rural ties and even more reluctant to retire to the rural areas. Migrant labour may set up a chain-reaction in this regard as when, in Central Africa for example, it became more and more institutionalized as the rural areas’ principal mode of involve ment in the money economy. In other words, interaction between village and town correspondingly increased and migrants stayed for ever longer periods in the industrial centres. The result was that, by 1951, two-fifths of the men on the Copper Belt, for example, had lived ten years or more in urban areas and about the same proportion had wives living with them. Previously, all three agencies - the government, the mining companies and the tribal authorities -h ad restricted in various ways the movement of women to the towns (Heisler, 1971). In terms of money values, urban incomes were two and a half times as large in Zambia as estimated per capita peasant incomes in 1954, three and a half times greater in 1964, but seven times greater in 1960 (ibid.).
