Abstract
Anthropologists have undertaken fieldwork in cities of sub‐Saharan Africa since the 1930s. Before the seminal works from the Rhodes‐Livingstone Institute on the Copperbelt cities during the 1950s, female South African anthropologists had already worked in “townships.” French anthropologists also studied rural–urban migration in the 1950s. Until the 1960s, changes in kinship, marriage, and family life, as well as the significance of ethnic categorization, were recurring themes of urban ethnographies. Since then, anthropologists have studied various topics in small and big cities, including everyday life, self‐built living spaces, economic activities, power and politics, gender and youth, consumption, and infrastructures.