The African city: A history

The African City: A History

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 1-214

  Freund, Bill ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU NATAL   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84924158307     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511618307     Document Type: Book

References (95)

1. Neil Parsons, “Settlement in East-Central Botswana c.1820-1900” in R. Renee Hitchcock & Mary Smith, eds., Settlement in Botswana: The Historical Development of a Human Landscape(Marshalltown: Heinemann, 1982), 120.
2. Thomas Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1996), 125.
3. D. N. Beach, Zimbabwe Before 1900(Gweru: Mambo Press, 1984), 25.
4. David Phillipson, “Aksumite Urbanism” in David Anderson & Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa’s Urban Past(Oxford & Portsmouth, NH: James Currey & Heinemann, 2000), 61.
5. Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century(Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 74.
6. John Romer, Ancient Lives: The Story of the Pharaoh’s Tombmakers(London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), 4.
7. Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation(London & New York: Routledge, 1989), 206.
8. J. D. Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom, 1890s-1970s(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 45.
9. J. D. Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom, 1890s-1970s(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 31.
10. From an account of 1848 cited by Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 381.
11. Richard Alston, The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt(New York & London: Routledge, 2002), 247.
12. André Raymond, Cairo: City of History(Cambridge, MA&Cairo: Harvard University Press and American University of Cairo Press, 2001), 120.
13. Gaston Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 82.
14. R. A. Adeleye, “Hausaland and Bornu” in J. F. Ade Ajayi & Michael Crowder, History of West Africa, I (London & New York: Longmans & Columbia University Press, 1972), 511.
15. In Thomas Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives: An Historical Anthology (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1975), 287.
16. H. Ellert, Rivers of Gold(Gweru: Mambo Press, 1993), 56.
17. Farouk Benatia, Alger: agrégat ou cite? l’intégration citadine de 1919 à 1979(Reghaia: SNED, 1980), 23.
18. André Raymond, Cairo: City of History(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Cairo: American University Press, 2001), 207.
19. Karl Staudinger, In the Heart of the Hausa States (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press Monographs in International Studies, Africa Series 56, 1990), 229.
20. Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar(London: James Currey, 1987), 150.
21. Michael Mason, The Foundations of the Bida Kingdom(Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University, 1981), 57.
22. W. A. Shack, “Urban Ethnicity and the Cultural Process of Urbanization in Ethiopia” in Aidan Southall, ed., Urban Sociology(London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 260.
23. Louis Binger, Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée par le pays de Kong et le Mosi, I (Paris: Hachette, n.d.), 297, my translation.
24. Quoted in Ray Kea, Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast(Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 23.
25. John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra(Oxford, Portsmouth & Cape Town: James Currey, Heinemann & David Philip, 2000), 48.
26. This festival has since become transformed through various mutations and, amongst other things, taken over by twentieth-century St. Louisien politicians.
27. Cited in Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 134.
28. Farouk Benatia, Alger: agrégat ou cité? l’intégration citadine de 1919 à 1979(Reghaia: SNED, 1980).
29. Ibadan, however, lacked a single palace representing city authority. Indeed, it was under colonialism that an attempt to create an Olubadan, or overarching ruler, of the city was first seriously made. The very high levels of violence and disorder which represented an inheritance from Ibadan’s distinctive history were a problem the British had to deal with, as RuthWatson has recently discussed in ‘Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan’: Chieftaincy and Civic Culture in a Yoruba City (Oxford & Athens, OH: James Currey & Ohio University Press, 2003).
30. Marion Kilson, African Urban Kinsmen(London: C. Hurst, 1974), 1-2.
31. André Raymond, Cairo: City of History(Cambridge, MA& Cairo: Harvard University Press & American University of Cairo Press, 2001), 322.
32. K. M. Buchanan & J. C. Pugh, Land and People in Nigeria(London: University of London Press, 1955), 72.
33. Thomas Spear, “‘A Town of Strangers’ or ‘A Model Modern East African Town’” in Anderson & Rathbone, Africa’s Urban Past (Oxford & Portsmouth, NH: James Currey & Heinemann, 2000), 199.
34. Philip Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa,” American Historical Review, XC, 1984, 606.
35. From Luise White, The Comforts of Home; Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 48.
36. Michael Banton, West African City(London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 17.
37. A term used in a classic article on Cape Town, South Africa by M. W. Swanson.
38. It should perhaps be noted that much of the “European” population was fairly poor. Some distance from the centre, a segregated working-class suburban environment for Europeans emerged from the late nineteenth century onwards. This was the birthplace of the French novelist Albert Camus.
39. Cited in Jean Comhaire, Urban Conditions in Africa; Select Reading List on Urban Problems in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1952).
40. In “Tribalism in British Central Africa,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, I, 1960, 57.
41. In a later evolution, Epstein moved to a position that saw urbanization as a profoundly important but not entirely predictable or straightforward process (“Urbanization and Social Change in Africa,” Current Anthropology, VIII, 1967, 275-95). Mitchell for instance promoted the more “sociological” concept of social networking to understand Copperbelt transformation and described neo-tribal elements as historically transitional (Mitchell, ed., Social Networks in an Urban Situation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969). Eventually he compared the Copperbelt town to the US city attracting immigrants and rejected anthropological concepts of “culture” as being irrelevant to the city (Cities, Society and Social Perception, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). It can be argued, and has been most eloquently by James Ferguson in Expectations of Modernity recently, that in so doing, he moved to a point where he could no longer grasp the failed modernism of the economically decaying contemporary Copperbelt.
42. The French Soudan before 1960.
43. Claude Meillassoux, Urbanization of an African Community(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 141.
44. This point has also been made by Cooper for Mombasa and by Post & Jenkins for Ibadan.
45. Parry’s piece is included in the Raftopoulos & Yoshikuni collection. For Phimister & van Onselen, see “The Political Economy of Tribal Animosity: A Case Study of the 1929 Bulawayo Location ‘Faction Fight’”, Journal of Southern African Studies, VI(1), 1979, 1-43.
46. John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra(Oxford & Portsmouth, NH: James Currey & Heinemann, 2000), 155.
47. Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa; A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 192.
48. For example, the Igbo in Port Harcourt as portrayed by HowardWolpe, Urban Politics in Nigeria; A Study of Port Harcourt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
49. Later in the colonial period, Nairobi attracted many women who worked as prostitutes and defined themselves as Bahaya. These women, from northern Tanganyika, did not become Muslim.
50. Susan Geiger, TANUWomen: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955-1965 (Portmouth, NH, Oxford, Nairobi & Dar es Salaam: Heinemann, James Currey, EAEP & Mkuki nya Nyoka, 1997).
51. Parry in Raftopoulos & Yoshikuni, 1999, 57.
52. Quote from Kateb in M. L. Maougal, “Algérie capitale Alger” in the collection La ville dans tout ses états (Algiers: Casbah, 1998); my translation.
53. Carole Rakodi, “Colonial Urban Policy and Planning in Northern Rhodesia and its Legacy,” Third World Planning Review, VIII(3), 1986, 213.
54. J. S. Lafontaine, City Politics: A Study of Leopoldville 1962-63(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 119.
55. Ahmed Sikainga, Slaves Into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 176.
56. Frederick Cooper, Struggles for the City; Migrant Labour, Capital and the State in Urban Africa(Beverly Hills & London: Sage, 1983).
57. Just as did New Bell in postwar Duala. Cameroun witnessed a sustained and violent anti-French insurrection just after the peak of Mau Mau.
58. Maynard W. Swanson, “The Urban Origins of Separate Development,” Race, X, 1968, 31.
59. David Welsh, “The Growth ofTowns” in Monica Wilson&Leonard Thompson, Oxford History of South Africa, II (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 173.
60. The termin David Coplan’s “The African Performer and the Johannesburg Entertainment Industry: The Struggle for African Culture on the Witwatersrand” in Belinda Bozzoli, ed., Labour, Township and Protest (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979), 202. Of course, this is not to say that the cities were often the site of cultural performance intended to sustain and reinforce ethnic and rural loyalties, as for instance Deborah James’ studies of women’s music and dance in more recent Johannesburg locales indicates.
61. According to Eddie Koch’s “‘Without Visible Means of Subsistence’: Slumyard Culture in Johannesburg” (in Belinda Bozzoli, ed., Town and Countryside in the Transvaal [Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983], 151-75), amaphakati-those in between-was a Zulu word used in Johannesburg in this context.
62. Bonner, 172, in Philip Bonner, Peter Delius & Deborah Posel, eds., Apartheid’s Genesis 1935-62 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1993).
63. For the parallel context in other parts of Africa, see the work of Frederick Cooper, and especially his Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
64. The percentage of whites living in urban areas increased from 51.6 percent in 1911 to 78.4 percent in 1951 (Welsh, 1971, 173).
65. Harry Bloom, Transvaal Episode (Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1959), 14-15.
66. Ray Phillips, The Bantu in the City (Alice: Lovedale Press, 1935), 292.
67. Ray Phillips, The Bantu in the City (Alice: Lovedale Press, 1935), 331-198.
68. Doug Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987), 68-81.
69. Ivan Evans, Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 51.
70. From Selected Poems (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1982), 24. Used by permission of M. W. Serote.
71. Josette Cole, Crossroads: The Politics of Reform and Repression 1976-86 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 62.
72. Ineke van Kessel, “‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa,” dissertation, University of Leiden, 1995, 265.
73. Charles Carter, “‘We Are the Progressives’; Alexandra Youth Congress Activists and the Freedom Charter 1983-85,” Journal of Southern African Studies, VII (2), 1991, 213ff.
74. Van Kessel, 122.
75. Jeremy Seekings, “The Origins of Political Mobilisation in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal Triangle Townships 1980-84” in William Cobbett & Robin Cohen, ed., Popular Struggles in South Africa (London: Review of African Political Economy & Zed Press, 1988), 65.
76. David M. Smith, ed., The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa (London: Routledge, 1992), 253.
77. Vivian Bickford Smith, Elizabeth van Heyningen & Nigel Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 139.
78. Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 140ff.
79. Sid Lemelle, “‘NiWapi Tunakwenda?’ Hip Hop Culture and the Children of Arusha” in Lemelle & Dipa Basu, eds., The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Culture (London: Pluto Press, forthcoming).
80. Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious(London: Picador, 1998), 20.
81. Raymond, 368.
82. In Under Siege: Four African Cities; Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, Documenta 11, Platform 4, Kassel Art Festival, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Kantz, 2002), 208.
83. Deborah Potts, “Urban Strategies: Adopting New Strategies and Adapting Rural Links” in Carole Rakodi, ed., The Urban Challenge in Africa; Growth and Management of Its Large Cities(London/Tokyo/New York: United Nations University Press, 1997), 452.
84. Of course, inWest Africa particularly, strong autonomous women’s organisations have deep roots in many societies.
85. In Under Siege, 283.
86. Both Myllyllä and Tati Arne Tostensen, Inge Tvedten & Mariken Vaa., eds., Associational Life in African Cities(Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2001).
87. Rem Koolhaas in Under Siege, 183.
88. For dahira see Momar Coumba Diop, “Fonctions et activités des dahira mourides urbains (Sénégal),” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 81-83, 1982, 79-91.
89. By Pierre Janne in Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2000. In fact the most recent census figure given was 26 percent.
90. For a convenient guide to the first stages of the crisis through 2001, Marcle Pape & Claudine Vidal, Côte d’Ivoire, l’année terrible 1999-2000(Paris: Karthala, 2002).
91. In fact, the origins of the Ouattara are mentioned in Chapter One.
92. For Internet references to these events see Hindustan Times, 25.04.03;
93. Voice of Americaonline, 3.2.03;
94. httw://afrol25.1.03.
95. Bantustan is a commonly used sobriquet for the “homelands” created as part of the apartheid system intended to progress through decolonisation towards an independence that would not threaten the white South African core. In fact, the Kwa Zulu authorities never aimed at independence.