In our original perspectives and hypotheses on Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa, we stated that these small centers are “the most strategic key to problems of Rural Development…points of articulation between the national systems of marketing, distribution and policy development on the one hand and the interests and productivity of the rural poor on the other.” They are “points of articulation of incentives for greater productivity…at which local rural interests are aggregated and expressed to government and party…sources of new ideas and belief systems…what some would call ‘modernizing centers,’ sources of innovation, politicization, mobilization and national integration” (Southall, 1979: 371).

As knowledge grew, our hopeful optimism was punctured and this rosy, positive picture faded. We had recognized the stagnation of the rural sector, the over-centralization and over-bureaucratization of goverments, increasing the fiscal burden, weakening popular local institutions, benefiting mainly elites and even resorting to counterproductive coercion (Southall, 1979b: 375-7). In short, we had recognized that rural development efforts so far have been disappointing and that hypotheses on rural development “must take the form of assuming conditions which do not now prevail.” None the less, with hindsight, we see that our propositions tended to state aspirations as facts, in the wrong tense and the wrong mood. We now recognize in them the same flaws that we still recognize in many other grant-seeking documents.

We had also entertained the hypothesis that a three-tiered structure of local points of concentration, somewhat analogous to the Chinese three-tiered commune-production brigade-production team hierarchy, was likely to emerge if positive small center development took place; it was a valid model even without the Maoist ideology (Southall, 1979:377).

One of the earliest and most systematic studies of urban concentrations in Nigeria was made by Mabogunje (1968) who found that historically, there have been two main types of such concentrations. First, there were pre-industrial and pre-colonial urban settlements which grew as centers of import and export trade and commerce involving gold, salt, pepper, minerals, craft products, textiles, gunpowder, slaves, coral beads, ivory, horses, and manufactured goods. Second, colonial and postcolonial industrialized centers offered urban context for population concentration. In a broad sense, these two categories correspond to the African Type A and Type B town formations presented by Southall (1961: 6-13).

By their 1917 Township Ordinance in Nigeria, the British Colonial Government established first, second and third class categories of townships on the basis of which population, utilities and services, including water supply, roads, and electricity, were provided. Such basic infrastructures produced changes in the economic foundations of the township and facilitated the work of increasing numbers of administrators and professionals. Apart from rearranging the economic, political, and administrative spatial integration of these townships, the new developments increased the use of urban technologies thereby attracting further population growth.

The two categories of urban population concentrations referred to above may merely be regarded as dated analytical distinctions because in the contemporary Nigerian situation, the pre-colonial, pre-industrial features in any one town vary in content in comparison with the post-colonial industrial characteristics; both co-exist and the latter may be regarded as extensions and revivals of the former. On the basis of this insight, it is obvious that there are several sources of urban population concentrations in Nigeria, each center having its own peculiar cluster of spatial, socio-economic, and socio-political characteristics.

In the past ten years, increasing attention has been focused on what are variously termed small cities, secondary cities, and intermediate cities in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. A number of conferences and workshops have been held, and research projects generated. The first of these seems to have been the 1978 Madison, Wisconsin conference on the role of small urban centers in rural development in Africa (Southall, 1979). In addition, the International Institute for Environment and Development organized a comparative research project on the role of small and intermediate urban centers in development (Hardoy and Sattherthwaite, forthcoming); the United National Center for Regional Development sponsored a similarly-titled effort, with case studies of twelve small towns and intermediate cities in seven developing countries (UNCRD, 1983); the Asian Institute of Technology organized a conference on small towns in national development (Kammeier and Swan, 1984) while the East-West Population Center had a conference on intermediate cities in Asia (Fawcett et al., 1980). The East-West Center conference, like the Madison conference, focused on one specific region—in this case, Asia—whereas the other projects included cases from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the same period, government and international agencies, most notably the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), planned projects in which ideas about systems of cities, and the role of secondary cities, have been central. (See Rondinelli, 1984 and, for a critical review of USAID's approach, Bromley, 1984a).

The major concern in these efforts has been the role of small and intermediate cities in development, and most have taken an approach based in urban and regional planning.

This paper charts the catalytic forces of urbanism in a small area in Southern Uganda. It shows that the roads, the rail lines and the rail station played a major role in spreading urbanism in the countryside. But the main focus of the paper is on Mukono township. It is argued that the life cycle of Mukono township is closely linked to the interests of landlords. Mukono, the place and Kyagwe, the region, were accorded prominence in the oral traditions of the development and consolidation of the pre-colonial Buganda state. Throughout colonial and post-independence times, Mukono served as headquarters for Kyagwe county. Since 1974, Mukono has also been the district headquarters of the East Mengo district.

Mukono township as perceived by the local people consists of two dozen building structures situated at a major crossroads. Mukono is crossed by the major roads connecting the northern counties and districts to the capital city and the major road connecting Uganda to the Kenyan seaport of Mombasa. There are also minor roads connecting Mukono to the surrounding agricultural areas and the fishing points of Lubanga on Lake Victoria.

In reality, Mukono is much more than the shops, tea rooms and bars at the crossroads. Mukono is surrounded by undulating hills on which are situated institutions that serve important functions to the environs. Mukono has been famous because of its schools which educated quite a sizeable number of prominent Ugandans. During the 1920s, the Church Missionary Society acquired twenty acres under the British-introduced free hold land tenure system.

Over thirty years ago a Nuer said to me: ‘We do not want what you Turks call progress. We are free men. All we want is to be left alone.’ (Jackson, 1955: 150)

This brief essay sketches an outline of the social history of small towns and their role in transforming the social and physical environment of the pastoral Nilotes of the southern Sudan. In broad terms, it is a review of historical and ethnographic facts which have a wider currency in pre-colonial Black Africa. I am less concerned, however with the detailed peculiarities of this centuries-long Nilotic experience, than with an understanding of how unintended circumstances have, over time, engendered the many problems imposed upon local peoples in the contemporary world.

The increasingly common dependence on history for anthropology emerges clearly in the course of these remarks and observations. In the effort to highlight process rather than detail, the paper begins with some relevant observations written by 19th century travellers in the region, authorities in their own time who through their writings, invited and encouraged more intensive European occupation of these territories. Clearly, their observations on the effects of alien exploitation in the southern Sudan were not intended to serve this end, yet the 19th century sources offer muted echoes of the more recent observation by Southall (1979: 213) that “Most small towns [in Africa] appear as the lowest rung of systems for the oppression and exploitation of rural peoples.” A corollary to this insight is the obvious fact that small towns have been a vital resource for those in a position to oppress and exploit.

In his introduction to the 1978 Conference papers on Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa, Southall (1979: 1-2) suggests that the relations between these centers and their hinterlands are largely oppressive and exploitative, and, in the absence of fundamental social transformation, unlikely to change. The Zambian rural centers studied by this author (Siegel, 1979) strayed some from this general pattern. Nearly all were relatively recent extensions of the national and provincial governmental agencies. And given Zambia's foreign exchange crisis at that time, and the consequent shortage of goods and services of every kind, the influence of these peripheral centers was far more ineffectual than exploitative.

Exploitative relations did exist, but these were focused upon the continuing political, economic, and social domination by the neighboring “primate” cities of Ndola and Luanshya, both of which were colonially created administrative, commercial, and industrial centers in Zambia's historically dual and increasingly polarized economy (Baldwin, 1966: 40-57, 214-21; Barber, 1967; Southall, 1979: 14). When combined with the foreign exchange crisis, the producer's price structure then in effect had so limited rural livelihood opportunities in central Ndola Rural District that nearly half of the able-bodied males had left their homes to single women, the very old, and the very young (Siegel, 1984: 104-8). Zambians in general disparage the drudgery and poverty of “sleepy” village life, and this is especially true in the Copperbelt, where there is an 80-year-old history of derogatory stereotypes about the “backward,” “weak,” and “lazy” Lamba villagers (Siegel, 1984: 54-85, & n.d.).

The notion that urban centers are oppressive and exploitative of their hinterlands has a history of its own, as reflected in the various theories concerning the origin of the state (Service 1978).

Despite the prevailing presence of exploitation of the rural by the urban in present day Zaire, it is still too early to pretend to put forward a precise definition and measurement of this exploitation process, especially as far as Zairian small urban centers are concerned. No systematic field research has so far been undertaken on these small centers.

However, this study will show that in south-eastern Zaire the social environment of small urban centers is too suffocating to allow them to play a positive role in the development of the rural masses. Some stifling mechanisms are encountered in the small urban centers, which impede the efficient circulation of goods and services between the centers and the rural areas and exacerbate the exploitation of the rural people by the small urban centers to the greatest advantage of the urban elite and of world capitalism.

The geographical area of south-eastern Zaire, corresponding to the administrative Region of Shaba (formerly Katanga), seems a suitable field for the study of small urban centers. It constitutes, together with the economic pole of Kinshasa and the administrative Region of Bas-Zaire, one of the most industrialized areas in Zaire. Copper mining industry—including production of secondary minerals such as cobalt, zinc, iron, gold, platinum, cadmium, germanium, rhenium—is predominant in southern Shaba. The Gecamines alone supplies the Zaire state with 75 percent of its foreign exchange. It employs a personnel of more than 300,000 units and carries on its different productive activities on a concession of 20,000 sq km. Its extractive and service activities are concentrated in cities (Lubumbashi, Likasi, Kolwesi) and in small urban centers with populations growing from year to year (Kipushi, Kambove, Kwadingusha).

A large number of black workers from white-owned farms in the Albany and Bathurst districts have migrated to a small city, Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape. In an attempt to illustrate the process by which people from rural areas settle in and adjust to urban life, this paper focuses on the manner in which migration presently occurs. From the 1940s farms in the Albany and Bathurst districts were rapidly losing labor, largely on account of mechanization and land rationalization. At that time many farm dwellers were migrating to Grahamstown and to some extent Port Elizabeth. The past few decades witnessed a massive further migration from these farms and this, together with natural increase, contributed to the 53.9 percent increase in Grahamstown's black population in the 1970-80 decade. Most of those who emigrated to the town have tried to establish themselves in the urban area even though their new places of residence have apparently impossible demands and challenges.

In South Africa many researchers (e.g. Wilson, F. 1972) have rightly highlighted the economic and administrative constraints which prevent many migrant workers from accepting town as their permanent home. This paper seeks some understanding of the basic motivation of people who emigrate to town and decide (usually quite unequivocally) to live there permanently. Since fewer studies have been made of small towns than of the large cities, the case reveals some of the lesser known aspects of urbanization in Southern Africa: the interdependence between town and country, the immigrants' overwhelming commitment to urban living, the relevance of chain migration, the role of the extended family in facilitating urban adaptation and the utilization of rural resources by those who are settling in town.

This paper is an attempt to assess the Braudel/Wallerstein model of the modern world-system by looking at the development of a new commercial elite in a small urban center in Morocco (Braudel, 1979; Wallerstein, 1974). The modern world-system model raises a host of questions which cannot be properly addressed in a brief paper. After reviewing some of these questions, this study will focus on the role of trade in the spread of capitalism and the idea that capitalist trade can be distinguished from non-capitalist trade. If capitalism spreads through trade, one might expect that an analysis of the commercial sector might be at least as illuminating as one of the spread of capitalism in the rural or industrial areas—which are the more common sorts of analysis to date. The primary concern is to delineate how homogeneously capitalist the commercial sector of this urban center is, and what changes have occurred in its structure with the appearance of a new elite. The paper begins with an outline of the geographical and historical background and then proceeds to a discussion of the modern world-system and the theory of unequal exchange, which has been posited as the mechanism for maintaining the peripheralization of much of the world. The main section of the paper which follows tries to assess the structure of the commercial sector and the development of a new commercial elite in Essaouira during the 20th century. In the conclusion, the paper assesses the importance of the modern world-system as an explanation for the structure and behavior of the Essaouiran commercial sector and the new elites.