ABSTRACT
A drawback to the latter view of urbanization is that the criteria
upon which the definition itself have to be based seem to involve some circularity. The real difficulties, however, lie deeper. They consist, firstly, in the fact that most social scientists, being Westerners, are accustomed to think of ‘town’ and ‘village’ as separate things when, in fact, conceptualism on these lines is not made in every culture. Indeed, ironically enough, it is especially irrelevant to the particular type of African urbanism found in the Western Sudan, where, as explained, cities are often inhabited by farmers. In these Yoruba towns, there is the ilù, or nucleated settle ment, but it does not stop short at the mud walls enclosing the town. It extends into the farmlands beyond, and so the ilù boundaries are co-terminous, in a sense, with those of the furthest plots farmed by members of the residential unit within the clustered settlement itself. Conceptually, in other words, the Yoruba city is not distinguished from its farming hinterland; the whole complex is to be seen rather as a unit radiating out from a core consisting of the oba (king) and council (Krapf-Askari, 1969, pp. 25-6). As mentioned, Yoruba towns are often large in size; but in Sierra Leone, Mende settlements, though small, have a very similar pattern. This is based on a local group of kinsmen recognized under the expression kuwui, meaning literally ‘compound’. In a limited sense, kuwui is simply an aggregate of individual farming households occupying a particular place; but, sociologically speaking, the Mende town and the countryside around it really form a single system of kinship. The town is made up of many separate localities containing the compounds of its inhabitants, and with each ‘urban’ locality is associated one or more ‘rural’ localities, comprising village and farmlands (Little, 1967b, pp. 101-5).4 The Africans concerned recognize social differences between people whose residence is in the town and those residing in the ‘bush’. Since, however, the inhabitants of both depend basically upon the same subsistence economy, village and town do not constitute a polarity. There is, in consequence, no real rural-urban continuum.
