The International African Seminar series was inaugurated in the 1950s, when a conference on Urbanization in Africa was mounted in Kampala. Since then, further conferences have been convened in other university towns across Africa on a variety of topics concerned with problems of change and adaptation throughout the region. However, this discourse did not extend to South Africa, because the policy of apartheid isolated the academic community from the wider debate until 1990, when the foundations were laid for a more democratic and liberal society. It was in the context of this opening up in South Africa that a conference on changing patterns of settlement was first conceived. This seminar was convened in 1996 at Rhodes University in collaboration with the International African Institute, leading to the production of this latest volume in the series. This serves to celebrate the formal recognition of those who have been particularly concerned with the impact of change within South Africa over the years, initiating a wider, regional debate.

Fitting the occasion, the topic of this work and the way it is handled are bracing and draw attention to the sheer complexity of political and economic upheaval, extending beyond South Africa to the whole sub-continent. The drift towards towns has been exacerbated by movement within urban areas, and across ethnic groupings and international boundaries, even by the uprooting of whole populations. This challenges the relevance of prevailing assumptions concerning sedentary populations and traditional communities that are tied to their ancestral homelands. The contemporary world is characterized by movement, displacement, and shifting populations, and not by stable communities, which are the exception rather than the norm.

In approaching this fluid situation, the editors outline the debate on models that can be applied, and they develop a comprehensive argument, setting the tone for the remainder of the work. The emphasis here is on the present and not the past, and the regional setting facilitates a comprehensive grasp of the processes involved as part of a wider pattern. The range of examples in the successive chapters testifies to the sheer scope of this process and the cumulative implications of mobility. The chapters themselves progress from a range of local studies to more theoretical contributions that seek to set the problem in a global context.