African Urban Studies: Past Accomplishments, Future Trends and Needs

There was a time when anthropologists were considered avant-garde.' But today in the eyes of a large number of thoughtful African leaders, our profession is often viewed as reactionary in outlook and pursuit and romantic in its devotion to ethnological and ethnographic salvage operations. Luckily those of us who have worked in urban Africa have, by and large, escaped this unfortunate categorization. We are "urban anthropologists" and if that won't do, we are either "students of modern Africa" or even "sociologists". While these designations are acceptable to some African politicians and academics, the latter, in particular, fear that we might import the approaches and the "lingo" of North American sociology which in turn would be as likely to arouse as much antagonism as old-fashioned social anthropology. Whatever the outlook for social science in Africa, one thing is certain: there will be a steady and rapid increase in the number of scholars studying urban Africa." I would like to think that this movement of scholars is not merely a reaction to the closing of conventional areas of interest to the social anthropologist. Perhaps the view is current that the study of African urban life, both in the older towns of West Africa and the more recent urban centers in East and Southern Africa, can and does contribute heavily to the anthropologist's main concern the systematic study of structure and function of social institutions.