ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the factors which lead to the emergence of a sense of communal identity among urban immigrants from many ethnic communities living together in the section of Kumasi known as the zongo. In the ethnographic setting the emergence of such a sense of communal identity may be observed very clearly in the domestic context since immigrants from many different ethnic groups, both kin and non-kin, actually reside together in large multi-celled dwellings. The chapter also describes the way in which economic factors lead to residential heterogeneity, both in terms of the kinship and the ethnic composition of domestic groups. It focuses on the socio-cultural consequences of the processes, and on the specific ways in which economic factors lead to particular patterns of domestic organisation which in turn create new identities and values.
