1920s–1930s: (Urban Tribalism and the Birth of African Cities — Migrant Workers as Urban Tribesmen, Johannesburg Built on Gold, Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi,…

1920s–1930s: (Urban Tribalism and the Birth of African Cities — Migrant Workers as Urban Tribesmen, Johannesburg Built on Gold, Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi, and Salisbury Growing Steadily, Rural-Urban Migration as Perhaps the Most Important Theme in Africa’s Modern Social History, Towns as Cultural Melting Pots Where New Identities Formed, and Women Finding Escape from Patriarchal Authority in Urban Settings): Ethnic rivalry was fostered by increasing competition for resources, jobs, and access to the territory-wide economy — group solidarity necessarily involved categorizing and caricaturing others, and the colonial economic environment encouraged tribal tensions. Migrant labor had initially supplied the mining economy, involving men on short-term contracts from rural areas who have been characterized as urban tribesmen, raiding the industrial economy for cash wages to be used back in the tribal homeland. Increasingly from the 1920s, however, longer-term contracts and the settling of workers with their families in mining areas laid the foundations of an urban working class. Johannesburg, built on gold, was the most notable example, but across the continent cities grew through the 1920s and 1930s — Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi, Salisbury — swelled by people migrating from the countryside in search of work. This rural-urban migration is perhaps the single most important theme in Africa’s modern social history. Urban identities were never straightforward: early immigrants were temporary residents with roots in the village, often recreating aspects of tribal and rural culture in towns, where competition for resources gave tribalism a powerful hold. Yet towns also became cultural melting pots — cosmopolitan environments where ethnic groups rubbed against one another, and intermarriage, shared experience, and the exchange of ideas, languages, and customs produced distinctively urban cultures. Women often found in the town an escape from the patriarchal authority of the homestead and village, gaining a degree of economic freedom from male control. The African city — that supposedly European creation — was in fact being remade daily by the Africans who inhabited it.