ABSTRACT
This paper poses the question whether there are beginning to be substantial numbers in Nairobi who are wholly and permanently dependent upon wage employment and whose ties with their villages of origin have become severed. The term ‘proletariat’ is used in that sense, in preference to the most customary term ‘working class’, because the latter implies social relations and attitudes which are more properly treated by sociologists. This paper focuses more narrowly on economic status. It looks first at the statistical evidence and then at the evidence collected by sociologists and social anthropologists who have done relevant ‘field’ work in different parts of Nairobi. Its principal conclusion is that many people do now stay much longer in Nairobi but that, in contrast especially with Europe in the nineteenth century, links with the rural areas remain as strong as ever. If this is so, then, as Dr Grillo has persuasively argued in his book on railwaymen in Kampala, it has important implications for the pattern of urban development (Grillo 1973) but these are treated only incidentally in the present paper.
