ABSTRACT
Local strategies for making a living also include all the ways in which people have tried to stave off impoverishment. Some people living in migrant-labour areas try to farm intensively. In Koguta, some households managed to grow coffee, tomatoes and onions for sale. The josomo from Koguta made a judgement early on in the colonial era that the road to upward mobility lay through education, rather than through farming. In Koguta, as in many other of the more densely populated parts of Africa, the next generation will be virtually landless, their options little different from rural dwellers in South Africa. In regions like this, the material bases of household formation, household structures, divisions of responsibilities and norms of behaviour are all under strain as people contend with the many different processes pushing them deeper into poverty. Poverty, and diversified livelihoods, by undermining interdependencies, may make it less likely that men and women combine to form households in the first place.
