Hidden Trade in Hausaland

Abstract

There have been few attempts to study the functions of rural West African market-places in relation to the socio-economic life of the communities they serve,I and many of the questions which require propounding receive an implicit answer. Thus it is conventionally supposed that where cash percolates into every crevice of the economy, as it does in the Hausa village in northern Nigeria to which this article relates, most cash transactions involving farm produce will then necessarily occur in a market-place. No one asks what happens if the nearest market-place is inconveniently distant (as is obviously common where nucleated settlements are lacking) and few have been interested to explore such extra-market transactions between farmers as must surely commonly occur in West Africa's forest zone because of the great bulkiness of root-crops and plantain. The fast-growing literature2 on West African marketing and market-places lays increasing stress on the role of city markets,3 on the marketing of different types of produce4 and on market typology and location.5 As most of this new-style research is undertaken by economists, geographers and rural sociologists, so it is becoming distinctly old-fashioned to study 'the village market', which is thought to have been 'done already' by social anthropologists, to the extent that a stereotyped, even sentimental, image of 'the village and its market' bars the way to further investigation. Perhaps it is because most of the few wholly 'marketless areas' which have been studied happen to be either anomalous or economically backward,6 that the study of more localised 'marketlessness' has been ignored. However, it is certain that modern studies of marketing nexuses ought to be based on the much better understanding than we now possess of the great variety of functions which may, or may not, be served by the humble local market. The extreme technical difficulty of operational research in West African marketplaces has been insufficiently emphasised,7 partly accounting, as it does, for the under-development of the subject. Although, as Mintz has written, market-places are useful 'for the scholar in getting at an important aspect of the rural economy', yet: