African Urbanism, Mobility and the Social Network.

The article discusses African urbanism, mobility and the social network. African urban studies have achieved a place in comparative African sociology in part because an ever-larger number of Africans have decided to seek alternative ways of making a living. This almost always means leaving the rural areas for a short or prolonged residence in town, While Africa remains the least urbanized of the continents, an urban environment has become the social and economic habitat for possibly 9%-11 % of the continent's population. A significant and new development is the larger number of Africans, particularly those with some years of urban residence, even if broken by frequent visits to kin and friends in the rural areas, who are staying for a longer period and will, probably, make the urban areas their permanent home. Extended kinship is not necessarily incompatible with African urban society, nor does the mobility of Africans invariably weaken all traditional kin and group ties. The area from which data of the study presented is taken contains an extremely heterogeneous African community representative of some twenty-five tribes.