Ajala travel: Mobility and connections as forms of social capital in Nigerian society

Abstract

Nigerian society is a complex amalgam of systems of stratification and inequality although the question of how far social mobility has changed the norms of its sedentary moral economy has not received the kind of scholarly attention it deserves. This chapter advances the argument that, while human mobility is indeed an integral part of the country’s ancestral migrant meta-narratives, with most of its settlements coming into being due to the actions of migrants, mobility has assumed a different form since independence in 1960.