ABSTRACT
Migrants come from West African savannah territories: Upper Volta, Sudan, Niger, northern Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, and Nigeria. In both Ghana and the Ivory Coast they form a distinct mixed group held apart by both the indigenous coastal people and the migrants. The famous nineteenth-century raiders, the Sudanese Samori and the Nigerian Babaku, trying to extend their influence further southward, attracted a lot of young and determined men to the middle part of the Ghana and Ivory Coasts. In the case of most migrants interviewed in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, it was apparent that they wished to send their children to their own villages as soon as they were weaned, on the pretext that coastal conditions are not good for children. Most frequently the children who are torn between their parents in this way settle on the coast, casually brought up by the mother and educated by the father at minimum expense.
