Spaced out

African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective
Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola (eds)
2005, University of Rochester Press
440 pages

Reviewed by Marleen de Witte

Often represented as sites of poverty, crime, and despair, Africa’s cities are also places bustling with energy, places of creativity, innovation, and hope. The essays collected in African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective give a deep historical insight into the current dynamics of urban Africa. Even though Africa has an urban history that dates back thousands of years, it is the historical encounter between Africa and Europe, but also Islam, that has spurred and shaped the development of "modern" city spaces. The essays emphasize these links between pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary times, and between indigenous and external urban styles. This historical emphasis is enriched with approaches from anthropology, geography, architecture, literature, and art. Covering sub-Saharan Africa’s major geographical and cultural regions, one of its great values is its focus on both megacities such as Nairobi and Lagos, and on smaller cities and towns such as Kano, Ngaoundéré, Opuwo, Libreville, Isiolo, and Touba. The themes addressed include Christianity and Islam, colonial ideologies and race relations, identity, migration, globalisation, architecture and urban planning, poverty and crime, and are arranged into four parts.

'Apartheid’s modernist ideals still serve as a blueprint for post-apartheid urban design, both for Opuwo residents and for urban planners'
After an introduction (Coquery-Vidrovitch) to the state of African urban history today and the major themes and questions of the book, the first part deals with the construction of ‘built space’, as a concept, closely linked to ideas about ‘modern’ spaces, and literally, as in urban planning. In the late nineteenth century the palace of the Fulbe ruler in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, was relocated from the city centre to the eastern side of the mosque (DeLancey). In this rearrangement of urban space, Islam was used as an intercultural mediator between Fulbe, Hausa and Kanuri ideas of urban planning. Where the cities of the Sokoto empire were thus fundamentally shaped by Islam, European forces influenced the development of built spaces in the French colonies and in Namibia. French stereotypes of Islamic and African civilisations permeated colonial policies of urban planning, that hence differed in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa (Ralph). Whereas in Rabat, Morocco, French planners and architects accommodated Arabic ‘aesthetic’ forms, in cities like Dakar, Senegal, indigenous architecture was considered ‘merely African’ and to be replaced by civilised spaces. The issue of the power of those who control resources over the creation of urban space is made more explicit in the case of Opuwo, Namibia (Müller-Friedman). Apartheid’s modernist ideals still serve as a blueprint for post-apartheid urban design, both for Opuwo residents and for urban planners, thus perpetuating previous racial distinctions in other forms. Built forms are not as neutral as they may seem.

Part two shows the impact of ideas about race, class and ethnicity on the organisation, and particularly segregation, of urban space. In colonial Kenya Europeans promoted the city as a ‘modern’ and European space, opposed to the ‘traditional’ rural areas where Africans belonged. This racialised rural-urban divide, Otiso argues, led to a still persisting feeling of alienation and apathy among Africans in Nairobi. Behind the policy of racial segregation were European stereotypes of Africans and Asians as ‘inherently unhygienic races’ (Murunga). In South Africa, racial segregation was even more marked. Yet, racial categories were blurred by class and age interests, in Visser’s case of the Afrikaner working class, and in Sandwith’s case of the coloured, educated elites. Race was thus not the only factor in the creation of new cultural urban spaces.

Part three looks at the hybrid nature of African cities as ever transforming sites of global and African influences. In late nineteenth century Libreville, Gabon, the presence of West African and Vietnamese immigrants tied this commercial port town to the wider Atlantic and French imperial world (Rich), leaving a profound imprint on town patterns. The case of Isiolo town, Kenya, (Amutabi) is interesting for its correction of the grand narrative of Kenya’s urban history centred on Nairobi and Mombasa. Unlike these major cities, Isiolo reflects the combined forces of a pre-colonial pastoralist economy and a colonial legacy of Christian-Islamic conflict. The global nature of Islam is again discussed in the case of Touba, Senegal (Ross). Touba is unique in that it is new (founded in 1887), autonomous, and tied to a large international network of Muslim towns. Its urban space, shaped by African, Islamic and global religious forces, is an example of ‘alternative urbanisation’ that transcends colonial agency. Cities, as places of cultural melange and intellectual creativity, often generated debates about foreign influences and African authenticity. Genova approaches the question of urbanity through the prism of three Francophone novels that take very different views on the nature of the city in relation to African identity.

The last section deals with the historical roots of the problems of urban development today, such as crime, poverty, and decay. For Nigeria, Fourchard traces these to the economic crisis of 1929; for Victoria in Cameroon, Ekali traces the current urban problems from the pre-colonial era to the present. In Zimbabwe, the problems caused by the current land reform are not new either, but have long endurance within government institutions and are very similar to the problems of the colonial era (Feremenga). The urban degeneration and violence in Mogadishu, Somalia, are of a different order, caused by the city’s lack of a central and legitimate government, and its division into more than eight wards controlled by different warlords (Eno).

Each essay presented in this volume provides interesting avenues for further exploration of the urban situation across Africa. Taken together, the essays cover many subjects and themes connected to urbanisation and urban history in Africa. They bring out several important realisations. First, the emergence of modern cities in Africa preceded colonisation and cannot be traced to the African-European encounter alone. Second, cities are never single entities, but form part of larger African and often global networks. This clearly calls for a move beyond the nation-state as the primary focus of research, to a multinational approach of African urbanisation. At the same time, we need a focus on ‘urbanisation from below’, on the ways in which urban populations construct, occupy, contest, move through, interpret and imagine city space, thereby sometimes accommodating and often challenging urban planning from above.

Despite the book’s title, however, the essays hardly deal with urban space. The concept of space is broadened to include cultural spaces, religious spaces, identity spaces, but only a few, notably in the first section, discuss physical, ‘spatial space’. The prominence given to space in the title seems to derive more from the current academic fashion for it, than from a shared focus on space and spatiality. The title could just as well have been African Cities. As such, it provides highly recommended reading for everyone interested in the historical background of present-day African cities and their contradictions.

Marlene de Witte is a lecturer in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.