Since the 1960s researchers have emphasised the continuing importance of rural–urban connections as a special aspect of urbanisation in Africa. It is clear that since then, in many parts of Africa, the involvement of urbanites with their ‘home’ village has increased rather than decreased. Four of the articles in this issue were originally papers presented at two ASA panels (Toronto, 1994) which set out to explore these rural–urban connections. The content of the exchanges and the moral involvement of city people and villagers in such relations vary greatly. The variations have important implications for regional differences in, for instance, the development of new modes of accumulation or the cementing of ethnic networks. The other article (by Dickson Eyoh) addresses the effects of recent political changes in this context—a theme also raised by the other articles. In many parts of Africa democratisation seems to evoke an obsession with ‘autochthony’, origin and belonging. The increasing role of elite associations, as an alternative to multi-party politics, makes the rural connection of vital importance to urban politicians. Hence ‘the village’, and more generally the region of origin, acquire new importance as a power base in national politics.

The development of elite associations has been a consequence of the growth of multi-partyism and the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon in the 1990s. The attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions has encouraged the formal distinction between ‘natives’ and ‘strangers’ in the creation of a politics of belonging. The article argues that this development has also led to the replacement of political parties at the local level by ethnicised elite associations as prime movers in regional and national politics.

A prominent feature of political liberalisation in Cameroon (as elsewhere in Africa) is the increasing resort by elites to idioms of community (regional, religious and ethnic) and neo-traditional institutions like chieftaincy as a means of mobilising political support and reasserting control of local populations. Focusing on the anglophone part of Cameroon this study examines the historical roots of the salience of these phenomena in current struggles for power. It uses the circumstances surrounding the death of a chief in the South West Province to explain the ways in which elite reliance on these phenomena facilitates the linkage of locally specific, culturally encoded political conflict with competition for power at the national level, and provokes local populations into resisting state power, often through the reinvention of traditions of their own. The study concludes that popular scepticism about whether current political struggles will lead to fundamental changes in state–society relations is rooted in the ways in which elite politics are played out in local and regional spaces.

This article examines home-town linkages among the Ije§a Yoruba of south-western Nigeria, focusing on their implications for local development activity. The author argues that elite non-residents play an especially important role in determining the agenda of activities and that, despite limitations and constraints, the maintenance of home town linkages by members of the elite provides their community with crucial access to financial and other resources. The motives for the continued maintenance of these ties are discussed. Finally, the article provides a perspective for comparison with research in other parts of the world, where rural-urban linkages primarily connect migrants with family and household; in the case considered here, involvement with the community as a whole is equally important.

This article investigates the nature and structure of linkages between the urban elite and local institutions in their home villages in the Nso' area of north-west Cameroon. It argues that indigenous institutions provide a frame of reference for the negotiation of identity and the provision of security in a context where state institutions seem to have lost their raison d'être. The notion of a home village has become a defining factor in the urban–rural nexus which allows the elite to acquire resources from external sources which they in turn invest in the production of social and symbolic capital. The materialisation of this capital is manifested in the acquisition of neo-traditional titles. Under conditions of dire financial and material hardship some local traditional authorities have started to ‘commodity’ what was previously earned through merit and service to the group.

The history of the town of Mokolo, in the heart of the land of the Mafa (in northern Cameroon), exhibits a specific pattern of urbanisation that seems characteristic of Islamic frontier zones generally in Africa. The town was founded as a settlement for converted slaves towards the end of the nineteenth century by Fulbe chiefs who regularly raided the area. Since that time urbanisation has largely gone hand in hand with Islamisation. It has involved, therefore, a marked change of identity for Mafa converts in the town, with drastic consequences for their relationship with their areas of origin in the mountains. The article emphasises, moreover, that the implications of Islamisation/urbanisation differ along gender lines. Although for both men and women the Muslim community in town provided specific forms of social security, the motives for migration, and the ways men and women were included in the urban community, differed sharply. In the 1980s, owing to political changes at the national level, the pressure to convert to Islam decreased throughout northern Cameroon. Since then the number of migrants to town who do not convert has increased rapidly. Mokolo used to be a Muslim town. In the 1990s, however, it has become more and more a Mafa town, and thus symbolises the revival of Mafa ethnicity as a truly region-wide force.