The Myth of the Amorphous Peasantry: A Northern Nigerian Case Study

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present some rather detailed statistical ("grass-root") material bearing on the question of rural inequality, in the hope that this may help to bring discussion by economists out into the open. I am seeking to demonstrate that there are circumstances in which "inequality" may be a more realistic assumption than "uniform poverty," in which case it is the economic relationship between the different sections of the rural population which requires examination, together with the different scarcities (or groups of scarcities) from which these various sections suffer.