ABSTRACT
We ended the last chapter with a quotation illustrating not only characteristic ‘ploys’ of an opportunistic society, but one of the ways in which the effects of an urban-centred institution - party politics - ‘ripples out’ into the countryside. Of course, the interplay of modern and traditional aims and interests has significance as well for even more basic institutions of marriage and family. The latter subject will be duly considered, but in the meantime the segmenta tion described above raises the question of pluralism.1 In other words, how far is it helpful to conceive of the urban social structure as being constituted from a multiplicity of autonomous but inter dependent groups? True, there are also countervailing forces at work, but the pluralistic formulation has roots in the colonial as well as the indigenous situations. In the latter, for example, it is a matter of pronounced cleavages between African units of the urban population, which involve age-old enmities and alliances. One of the most obvious in Ghana is the hostility of the Zabramas and the Gaos against the Hausas, and the friendship between the Moshies and the Zabramas; the Fulani are not popular with any group. These groups regard themselves as Moslems, but Islam is not strong enough alone to override these differences and so the migrants have only one thing in common: they are foreigners. As such they are shunned by the indigenous inhabitants for whom any migrant is straightaway assimilated with the natives of the Northern Terri tories : he is a ‘bushman’, a naked barbarian. The migrants retort in similar terms and refer to the people of the Coast as ‘sons of slaves’ (Rouch, 1954, pp. 59, 62).2 More dramatically and tragically, too, the recent Nigerian civil war had its basis largely in relations of hostility between the Ibo and the Hausa.
