Rural kin networks persist for migrants scattered across urban criminal economies

Evidence

By the 1960s the Frafras were dispersed throughout Ghana as unskilled labourers, petty traders, soldiers and, in popular repute, thieves. They circulated between town and countryside, being usually linked to an extended family network based on their home village. When I first went there maybe 10,000 Frafras (out of a total of a quarter million) were living in Accra, many of them in a sprawling slum called Nima. This was a migrant shanty town, the chief red light district of the city’s lower classes, and a criminal ‘badlands’ only sporadically policed from the outside. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2295

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Bears directly on the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme of moral panics — here a ‘badlands’ reputation formed by classed, external policing judgments.