This study highlights the interaction between settler migrant farmers and their host societies in the Western cocoa producing areas and some food producing areas of central part of Nigeria between the 1920s and 2014. The choice of date is informed by the time of the introduction of commercial cocoa production in Western Nigeria while 2014 is the year in which the dislocation of the peace in the food producing area, occasioned by the Chibok girls kidnap saga began. Using extant literature and field data in the study areas, the paper asserts that contrary to popular generalisations in some literature that ethnicity, economic interest, cultural and religious differences have engendered conflicts among indigene-settler relations, the people in our study area have coexisted peacefully. The paper examined the geo-economic imbalance in the distribution of resources which necessitated migration; the common need for capital formation to exploit the resources; use of non-economic methods like kinship ties, ethnic affiliations, and some customary obligations have remained important indicators in the rural social and economic life. It is the observation of this paper that the rural farming societies of our investigation, though an agglomeration of different ethnic nationalities, yet maintained a symbiotic economic and social cooperation in a system-devised method of absorbing the shocks and sometimes strained relationship among them, in a participatory way.
Keywords: Farmers, Indigene, Labour, Migration, Rural, Settler
