Urban Dynamics in Black Africa

An Interdisciplinary Approach

William J. Hanna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138540125
• eBook ISBN: 9781351300582
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Urban Dynamics in Black Africa presents a succession of worlds where we can study the development and the crystallization of major social change. The authors trace the development of former villages, towns, and colonial outposts into major cities within the international community. Open-air markets continue their trading beside modern department stores as individual Africans create contemporary lives from old and new.

William J. and Judith L. Hanna, in this unique work, introduce new data and the methods of dependency theory, class and gender analysis; they offer connections between Africa's internal dynamics, its legacy of imperialism, and the international political and economic arena. At the same time, the book provides a model for studying the evolution of political institutions. Urban Dynamics in Black Africa illustrates how social classes modify and are modified by existing cultural forms. The book examines Africa in its independence by contrasting development and dependency, role adaptability and conflict, in a powerful conceptual matrix. Detailing the urban conditions that exist throughout Africa as well as their costs and benefits, this work shows how contemporary political conflict in urban Africa is based upon both ethnic and non-ethnic ties; and how these ethnic and non-ethnic ties serve as the bases of a system of political integration unique to poly-ethnic communities.

As a synthesis of the relevant available knowledge on African towns and town-dwellers, this book is concerned primarily with the effects of external intervention and socioeconomic modernization upon the birth and development of Africa's new towns and the rapid expansion of its old ones. It considers the impact of migration and town life upon Africans.

1

Introduction

One bright fall morning we left our room near the center of Nairobi and walked to the edge of the city. We passed through many worlds: A modern city with tall buildings, international shops, and large imported cars. A shanty town of open markets for petty trade and squatter houses made of locally available materials. There were other worlds, too. A barefoot, robed warrior bedecked with beads and feathers passed through these worlds, pausing in wonderment before a fancy modern shop in the wealthy westernized section of Nairobi where members of the upper echelon of African society, dressed in Euro-American suits, made their purchases alongside the tourists and European residents.

What are these worlds like? How did they come to be? This book attempts to answer these questions for the area referred to as Black Africa. Our explanations are not rooted in a particular theory or ideology. Rather, our effort is eclectic, drawing upon many academic disciplines and scientific ideologies.

In this introductory chapter we undertake four tasks: discussing the importance of African urban areas, examining the possibilities of generalization over geographical space and historical time, introducing concepts that inform later descriptions and analyses, and presenting a framework that energizes the progression of our ideas. Throughout, we take the stand that the urban areas of Black Africa—and the urbanization process—cannot be divorced from the larger historical and dynamic contexts or processes of which they are a part. Thus African cities are not important as isolated islands of human life but as structures and processes enmeshed in broader, interacting relationships. Although the relationships are not always explicitly discussed, they are implicitly assumed.

Importance of African Towns

Urban areas are of enormous political, social, economic, and cultural importance to the countries in which they are located, as well as in the international arena. Reissman’s assertion applies generally to Black Africa: “The study of the city perforce has become the study of contemporary society. The centers of decision and the triggers for social change are located in cities, and it is urban not rural societies that control the world’s destiny” (1964:3). African towns, especially, contain the fuels of socioeconomic change; they are the forges of new national communities. In a sense, then, this entire study demonstrates the importance of towns in Black Africa. However, several dimensions require special comment.

IMPORTATION AND INNOVATION

The urban areas of Black Africa are in contact politically, socially, economically, and culturally with the non-African world as well as with the rest of Africa. The practices and perspectives of Britain, France, the Magreb, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries usually first penetrate in the towns, there intermingle with indigenous counterparts creating strong stimuli for change as well as crises of adjustment. The town “is a place where one generation may enter in blankets worn like togas and with torn and elongated earlobes, only to emerge in the next as Western-educated and Western-dressed civil servants” (Werlin 1963:7). This pattern was operative in the early years of European contact—most African towns are the offshoots of this contact—and it remains true in Black Africa today.

In Africa, as throughout the world, urban areas provide an environment generally favorable to innovation. Not only does the urban milieu appear to be essential for the development of some types of social organization (Sjoberg 1960b: 15-16) and mobility (LaPierre 1965:394), but great advances in art and science are probably fostered by the kind of intensive interaction and concentration of capital that takes place in urban areas (Kuznets 1963:115, n. 1).

The political arena is a visible place for importation and innovation. The idea of Western constitutional democracy, typically brought to African towns during the first half of the twentieth century, made an important contribution to the formation and direction of independence movements: the first nationalist party in Nigeria was established in Lagos; the major nationalist movements of Ghana were established in Cape Coast, Takoradi, and Accra; political groups in Zaire were most deeply rooted in the towns and were led almost exclusively by townsmen (Bustin 1963:77). The histories of virtually all other nationalist movements have been closely linked with major towns. In the post-independence period most of the ideas for nation building, economic development, even repression and revolution have been born in the towns, as well as in nearby universities and barracks.

SOCIETAL CENTERS

The towns of Africa are the epicenters of their societies—as indeed they must be if, as has been argued, the increase in societal scale that has been taking place “requires those concentrations of control centers and population we call cities” (Greer 1962:194). They are the centers of polity, society, economy, and culture, and the hubs of communications and transportation networks.¹ The towns of Africa “are not merely the focal points where the break with tradition may be seen most clearly, but also the centers in which a major restructuring of African society as a whole is taking place, a restructuring which is reaching deep into the countryside” (Gutkind 1962:185). Thus the reciprocal influences of town and countryside, although mutual, are not symmetrical. There are many dramatic statistics that can be cited to illustrate this centrality. We found, for example, that although the capital city of Ghana, Accra, has only 7.5% of the country’s population, 52% of the country’s men and women who have attended a university reside there. And Hance reports that Dakar, with only about 16% of Senegal’s population, accounts for more than two thirds of the country’s commercial and manufacturing workers, over half the employees in transportation, administration, and other services, and approximately 95% of the country’s electrical consumption (1970:209-210).

The urban impact upon an entire society operates in a variety of ways. To illustrate, town-dwellers often work to improve their rural home areas by sending money back for the construction of modern homes, schools, hospitals, and roads equivalent to those in the towns where they live. Villagers who return home from the town often introduce new perspectives and practices while criticizing some of the old ways. Political organizations formed in the towns have been exported to the countryside, as have the new symbols of citizenship and nationhood.

Of course, change also emanates from Africans who live in rural areas. In Sierra Leone for instance, rural protests were so frequent and intense in the years following World War II that we may talk about a peasant revolt. It reached a high point in October 1950, when an estimated 5,000 rural and small town residents rioted and destroyed property worth the equivalent of approximately two million dollars (Kilson 1966:60). Zaire provides examples of the potential impact of rural protests upon both colonial (Weiss 1967:183-299) and independent African regimes.

DEPENDENCY NEXUS

Black Africa’s urban areas are meshed within a nation-state as well as an international system. In other words, they are part of a whole. Urban theorist Castells makes a parallel point: “It is absolutely necessary to study the production of spatial forms on the basis of the underlying social structure” (1977:8).

Structural dependency provides a useful theoretical approach to understanding African cities, regarding each city as a point of linkage in a chain of dependency that begins in a foreign center (usually the former colonial power’s capital), reaches to the African country’s urban areas, ends in villages and rural areas, and serves as a system of management and control. Walton writes of “a unit of analysis based on distinctive vertically integrated processes passing through a network from the international level to the urban hinterland” (1976:53). The dependent “partner” (whether African primate city, upcountry town, or village) has its autonomy limited, its leadership co-opted, its sociocultural system distorted, and its economy exploited.

The first link in the chain of dependency is between the foreign metropolitan center and the primate African city. London and Nairobi or Paris and Dakar may serve as examples. We suggest that the nature of the primate city, its change processes, and indeed its very existence cannot be understood without reference to the city’s dependence upon foreign capital and events. Imperial actions influenced or determined the early growth of many cities, including their geographic location and architectural layout. The spatial concentration of colonialists, as well as socio-economic correlates, distorted the African national political economy in ways that contributed to a perpetuation of dependent underdevelopment after national independence. Clearly, outside influence and African dependency continued into the present. For instance, many urban business people depend upon foreign import wholesalers, foreign-owned local industry, and foreign-controlled banks. This dependence affects investments, market strategies, employment, and so forth. Furthermore, the political leadership of a city is often intricately linked with key political actors in the European metropole. Collaboration becomes a means to continued political power and economic wealth. The system of dependency is often maintained, writes Walton (1975:88), “through an alliance of industrial and commercial ruling elites in the advanced nations and a small group of similarly placed indigenous elites that profit handsomely from these transactions.” In our view, political and administrative elites should be added. (See Hanna and Stepick 1979:5; Amin 1969; Magubane 1976:185).

The foreign metropolitan center also affects African urban immigration. Amin (1974) argues that the economic “rational choice” of the migrant to leave his or her region of origin is determined by the overall strategy of the colonial and neo-colonial policies of modes and factors of production and by the shift from the exploitation of natural resources to the exploitation of human labor in major urban centers. The exploitation of agricultural potential is limited primarily to export production in the interest of non-African countries and against the economic rationality of Africa’s real development (ibid.:87). Amin points out that in Tanzania the poor Masai do not migrate, but farmers of the rich regions of Kilimanjaro do. The Bassari of East Senegal, among the poorest people in the area, do not migrate, whereas the Serere with higher incomes do. The push effect, Amin suggests, is closely related to the social transformations the rural areas undergo as a result of integration into the international capitalist system. Amin, therefore, rejects Berg’s (1965) view of seasonal migration as an effective adaptation of the labor market to economic conditions, suggesting that it is a response to the system of export-oriented exploitation (cf. Heissler 1974).

The international distribution of economic wealth and political power has undergone some change over the past decade. For some countries, the most important international actors outside Black Africa may be oil-producing states, and the most important international changes may be related to the price of oil. For example, Kenya’s 1978 oil bill was US$300 million, but in 1979 the figure is approaching US$500 million. Throughout Black Africa, the price of gasoline at the pump has increased dramatically, and the lines of automobiles waiting to fill up have extended to a mile or more. Thus dependency continues, but its international structure has for some countries undergone change. (The center of raw material and commodity demand remains in the West, however.)

In the chain of dependency the second link is between a core African city and a small periphery town. Enugu and Umuahia in Nigeria, and (pre- or post-Amin) Kampala and Mbale are examples of the relationship. Writing about East Africa’s major cities, Soja and Weaver (1976:241) argue: “These centers functioned during the colonial period to concentrate the wealth produced in their increasingly expanding hinterlands—largely through decisions involving infrastructural location (e.g. roads and electricity) and institutional regulations—and to channel this accumulated wealth for the primary benefit of the colonial elite, both within and outside East Africa.”

In such cases, the political, economic, even social and cultural life of the small town is critically dependent upon the major city. Local politicians in Umuahia were constantly traveling to Enugu, the regional capital, or the national capital, Lagos, to make arrangements, seek favors, or get orders. Building a local brewery or ceramics factory was based upon decisions made outside the town. A successful local political leader usually depended upon support from key regional or national figures. The allocation of scarce resources to competing local groups was often determined outside the locality. Therefore, local politics and economics were far from autonomous.

Third, there is a dependency link between the town and its surrounding countryside. The town as center of local political control and economic management is perhaps essential in an economic system based upon farming, fishing, and herding. It is often in the town that production-controlling cooperatives are located. Cliffe (1976:123) writes: “Excessive authoritarian control seems in fact to be a feature of many agricultural schemes throughout Africa. The essence of such schemes is such as to require a significant bureaucracy as a bridge between outside capital and technology and the small producers.” Furthermore, “the staff runs the central services, maintains liaison with outside agencies, and controls the activities of members.”

Of course, the achievement of national political independence has affected structural dependence, most notably the first link in the chain of dependency. The relationship between key politicians in Lagos and London has obviously changed over the past two decades, as Nigeria’s use of oil as a bargaining chip in the Rhodesia / Zimbabwe conflict over black/white control has demonstrated. On the other hand, the internal social structures and change processes of perhaps all the countries of Black Africa remain profoundly affected by the vertical links within and beyond their borders.

Urban Analysis

Scholars and policymakers generally agree that there is a further need for analyses of urban dynamics and change in Black Africa. In 1956, Forde wrote of “the need for systematic study of the social conditions and trends among urbanized and industrialized African populations” (p. 13). A decade later, the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Scien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Patterns of Urban Growth
• 3. Urban Migration and Commitment
• 4. Impact of Migration and Town Life upon the Individual
• 5. Urban Conditions
• 6. Urban Ethnicity
• 7. Nonethnic Perspectives and Practices
• 8. Bases of Political Conflict
• 9. Bases of Political Integration
• 10. Patterns of Change
• Bibliography
• Index