Futures of the Family in Rural Africa

A wide range of factors affecting the future of the family in Africa are surveyed. The author draws attention to the following points: the diversity of preexisting social forms and the differential impact of external pressures; the common features related to the nature of an agricultural system with relatively open access to resources and its relationship to migration and the growth of population; the effects of increasing population upon land and limited material resources; the lack of a joint family organization in the Asian sense which renders fission at the domestic level an increasing possibility; the strength of wider kinship ties of lineage which weaken under changing modes of livelihood; the effects of mass schooling and mass bureaucratic employment upon the economy with the development of salaried farming as a new mode of adjustment; the concomitant existence of neotraditional farming; and the reaction of all types of farm families to the high degree of uncertainty in all spheres of social life and the effect of such uncertainty upon decision making and activity within the household.