Social Change in Nigeria Essay Example for Free

Social Change in Nigeria Essaythroughout Africa societies that had been predominantly rural for most of their history were experiencing a rapid and profound reorientation of their social and scotch lives toward cities and urbanism. As ever greater numbers of people moved to a small number of chop-chop expanding cities (or, as was often the case, a single main city), the fabric of life in both urban and rural areas changed in massive, often unforeseen ways. With the largest and one of the most rapidly growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria has experienced the phenomenon of urbanization as thoroughly as any African nation, but its experience has likewise been uniquein scale, in pervasiveness, and in historic antecedents. Modern urbanization in most African countries has been dominated by the emersion of a single primate city, the political and commercial center of the nation its emergence was, much often than not, linked to the shaping of the country during the coloni al era.In countries with a coastline, this was often a coastal port, and in Nigeria, Lagos fitted well into this pattern. Unlike most new(prenominal) nations, however, Nigeria had not just one or devil but several other cities of major size and importance, a number of which were larger than most other national capitals in Africa. In two areas, the Yoruba region in the southwest and the Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri areas of the north, there were numbers of cities with historical roots stretching back considerably before the advent of British colonizers, giving them distinctive fleshly and cultural identities.Moreover, in areas such as the Igbo region in the southeast, which had few urban centers before the colonial period and was not highly urbanized even at independence, there has been a massive growth of newer cities since the 1970s, so that these areas in 1990 were also highly urban. Cities are not only independent centers of concentrated homophile population and activity they als o exert a potent influence on the rural landscape. What is distinctive about the growth of cities in Nigeria is the length of its historical extension and the geographic pervasiveness of its coverage.