Postcolonial African Cities

Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Predicament

Fassil Demissie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415495653
• eBook ISBN: 9781317991373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The book focuses on contemporary African cities, caught in the contradiction of an imperial past and postcolonial present. The essays explore the cultural role of colonial architecture and urbanism in the production of meanings: in the inscription of power and discipline, as well as in the dynamic construction of identities. It is in these new dense urban spaces, with all their contradictions, that urban Africans are reworking their local identities, building families, and creating autonomous communities – made fragile by neo-liberal states in a globalizing world.

The book offers a range of scholarly interpretations of the new forms of urbanity. It engages with issues, themes and topics including colonial legacies, postcolonial intersections, cosmopolitan spaces, urban reconfigurations, and migration which are at the heart of the continuing debate about the trajectory of contemporary African cities. The collection discusses contemporary African cities as diverse as Dar Es Salaam, Dakar, Johannesburg, Lagos and Kinshasa – offering new insights into the current state of postcolonial African cities.

This was previously published as a special issue of African Identities.

Imperial legacies and postcolonial predicaments: an introduction

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Fassil Demissie

The idea for a special issue of African Identities focusing on contemporary African cites caught in the contradictory logics of an imperial past and postcolonial predicaments emerged while convening a colloquium on ‘Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contest History’ which was organized by the Centre for Black Diaspora at DePaul University in 2005–2006.¹ The colloquium was aimed at exploring the cultural role of colonial architecture and urbanism in the production of meanings, in the inscription of power and discipline, as well as in the dynamic construction of identities. Like other colonial institutions, such as the courts, police, prisons and schools that were crucial in establishing and maintaining political domination, colonial architecture and urbanism played pivotal roles in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although a number of the colloquium participants addressed the connection between colonial past and postcolonial present, the venue was not designed to explore in depth the postcolonial predicament of African cities. A separate undertaking was carried out to invite other scholars to participate in the discussion about postcolonial African cities where intense social and spatial claims to postcolonial citizenship and modernity are constantly negotiated in the context of the deepening crisis of African states to provide adequate quality of life and security to an impoverished citizenry. Increasingly, African cities and the material and social condition of their existence are further undermined by the globalization process which limits their capacity to provide even the minimal conditions of habitable living for their inhabitants.

This special issue of African Identities is an attempt to forge a productive encounter between postcolonial African cities and recent scholarly intervention to problematize African cities as spaces where the urban inhabitants are reconfiguring and remaking urban worlds, deploying their own forms of urbanity born out of their historical and material circumstances. It is in these new dense urban spaces with all their contradictions that urban Africans are reworking their local identities, building families, and weaving autonomous communities of solidarity made fragile by neo-liberal states.

Urban Africans throughout the continent are creating and recreating dense social networks, flows, exchanges, and knowledge with their own architectural and urban development imprints. Indeed, the pace of the new forms of African urbanity has been accelerated in recent years by the deepening political and social crisis that has engulfed African cities. This has necessitated wider discussion and debate about postcolonial urbanity. Recent studies bear testimony to the fact that such debates about postcolonial African cities have indeed begun within the continent; urban Africans, despite limits of resources, are remaking and imprinting postcolonial cities with their own forms of urbanity (Simone and Abouhani 2005; Enwezor et al. 2002).

In recent decades postcolonial theory and postmodern urban geography have turned their probing lenses on various forms of cultural production associated with the postcolonial city. What has not been examined in depth, however, is the connection between African cities and the postcolonial setting. Despite the decidedly spatial imagery of many of the models of postcolonial narratives, most of the debates surrounding these texts have focused on such factors as race, gender, language and nationality in the construction of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities, rather than geographical issues of spatiality.

In much of the postcolonial literature following the departure of colonial rule, a moment of euphoria erupted among postcolonial elites who had hoped that colonial cities in Africa would be transformed into engines of national development, not just for the individual countries but for the continent as a whole. Modernization projects such as airports, universities, hospitals, expansion of highways, hydroelectric projects, the construction of new civic buildings, new apartment buildings, banks, insurance companies as well as national theaters were undertaken by the postcolonial states and private individuals as markers of modernity and modernization. The location, style and materials used to produce these projects were influenced by broader trends in international urban design, politics and economics.

The immediate decade of postcolonial Africa saw the advent of increased state intervention not only in the planning of the economy, but also in the rise of a closely related impetus related to physical planning to accelerate the modernization process. Great hopes were placed in rural and later urban development by state bureaucracies, international aid specialists, urban planners and architects. These hopes which underpinned the decolonization process began to unravel as the postcolonial state sank further into deeper crisis brought about by globalization and the neo-liberal policies of the International Monitory Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. At the same time, the idea of the African city as a unified and dynamic space associated with the ‘national project’ of the postcolonial state — as a space of social and cultural integration as well as with the production of national consciousness — began to dissolve. Since then, African cities have witnessed the multiplication of social actors and transnational affiliations, as well as the increasing prevalence of forms of subjectivity that are more fluid, mobile and flexible than during the earlier decades. At the same time, African urban dwellers are creating a dynamic social and material world born out of their historical circumstance despite the harsh and often brutal conditions imposed by the policies of the IMF, the World Bank and the postcolonial state.

Imperial legacies

Throughout Africa, the physical imprints of colonialism are evident in the form of military garrisons, churches, hospitals, trading centres, prisons, schools, agricultural and mining barracks as well as urban centres. These colonial built forms scattered throughout the continent were constructed at different times characterized by different architectural and urban planning traditions of various European colonizing powers (Portugal, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and England) which are stark reminders that colonialism was not just an economic, political or military project. It was also spatial whose imprints are still visible throughout the continent long after colonialism's official demise.

Colonial cities in Africa were designed and built by various European powers along the coast or in the interior to extract rents, crops, and minerals from rural areas and for exporting goods internationally. The strategic location of these cities was determined by their relative closeness to the sea or navigable river, and proximity to mineral, agricultural and local labour resources. Given the differing motives of European colonial powers in establishing colonial cities in Africa, the function of these cities was tied to the metropolis. For example, in West Africa, colonial governments began to implement large-scale production of goods such as timber, rubber, cocoa, and palm oil by organizing a trade monopoly. These projects heavily taxed peasants, provided support to local rulers, and required the implementation of policies that relied on forced labour. On the other hand in Central and Southern Africa, colonial capital began to exploit the vast reservoir of minerals and agriculture by relying on migrant labour. To obtain a cheap labour force for mining, settler agriculture and later manufacturing, land was expropriated, taxes were imposed and African agriculture was left to stagnate and deteriorate.

As trade and commerce began to expand throughout Africa, cities began to attract migrants from rural areas to work in the commercial sectors of the colonial economy. In addition, European settlers of various countries and nationalities, as well as those from other countries, began to migrate to many parts of colonial Africa, particularly to the settler colonial societies of Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Algeria, in large numbers, often at the encouragement of the colonial governments to work and administer the embryonic colonial economy.

The expansion of the labour intensive incipient manufacturing economy enlarged the need for more labour to process raw materials and commercial products of an increasingly integrated colonial economy. As more displaced African workers moved to the cities in search of work and to raise money to pay for rising colonial taxes and debts, the subsistence basis of African peasantry in the rural areas began to change fundamentally, hastening the steady stream of impoverished African peasants migrating to the cities. The process was also accelerated by chronic rural poverty and the inability of the rural areas to sustain African subsistence production. In addition to the meagre and desperate living conditions of Africans in the rural areas, recurring drought, soil erosion, livestock overstocking and competition from settler farms contributed to the decline of African agricultural production. Colonial agricultural and labour policies also significantly put additional pressure on African agricultural production in terms of restricting farmers' access to land, capital and labour, which, together with the declining capacity of the rural areas to support farmers and their families, drove thousands of Africans in search of employment in the cities. For those who migrated to better their lives and those of their families, colonial cities offered new hope with uncertain futures. However, despite precarious employment and a relatively higher wage than earned in the rural areas, African wages did not keep up with inflation. Fluctuating economic cycles and periodic swings in colonial economic activity often produced destitution and urban poverty. Those without any visible formal employment resorted to all sorts of informal employment, often leading a precarious existence working as washers, street vendors, barbers, shoe shines, etc. However, the majority of the Africans migrating to the cities were temporary migrants, circulating throughout their working lives between colonial cities and rural areas.

African peasants who have chosen to migrate to colonial cities rather than face starvation, found themselves in wretched slums, sprawling shanty towns and other temporary places of residence without any visible means of support. The overcrowding and unhealthy conditions created an environment for the transmission of many communicable diseases, particularly tuberculosis.

Initially, little attempt was made to enforce racial divisions by the local colonial authorities even though different areas in the city were set aside for different races. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial medical practice and racist discourse provided the pretence for imposing residential segregation in many colonial cities. Colonial medical discourse and Christian missionary healers identified the African body as the source of communicable diseases — a body that was considered to be a threat to the settler white population (Vaughan 1991). Colonial municipal health officials therefore began advocating the creation of segregated African townships away from European residential centres. As Swanson (1977) has argued, the ‘Sanitation Syndrome’ and the general European fear of large number of Africans living in close proximity began to shape colonial urban polices and practices. Thus colonial medical discourse provided the context for the radical spatial reorganization of cities on the basis of race which resulted in the creation of ‘native townships’ to accommodate the growing urban African population. On the eve of the First World War, numerous ‘native locations’ began to be established in many parts of colonial Africa. However, the size of these ‘native location’ differed widely and these residential areas emerged to be the foundation of African residential areas in colonial cities.

Colonial administrators and planners responded to the growth of Africans in colonial cities by attempting to shape the built environment in ways they thought might lessen the threat of plagues, overcrowding and violence to Europeans. For example, colonial municipal officials in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Harare, Nairobi, and Kinshasa as well as in other colonial cities used public health concerns informed by the prevailing colonial medical discourse and practice to remove and relocate Africans to less desirable parts of the city.

With the accelerated industrial expansion and African urbanization, housing conditions in African townships worsened. Overcrowding and the substandard housing conditions together with the spread of communicable diseases began to threaten the health of the African workforce employed in the mines and in the emerging industrial and commercial sectors. With these concerns embedded in paternalism, ‘civilization’ and progress, municipal authorities and local business leaders began to call for improvements in the living conditions of the African townships.

In the aftermath of the First World War colonial administrators, doctors and other municipal functionaries turned to the new discipline of town planning both to further residential segregation and also to persuade the African urban population that their interest (jobs, housing, and health) would be best served in the newly segregated areas built at some distance from European residential areas. Situated on the distant horizon and out of sight, these segregated African residential areas were built on the least desirable land characterized by a landscape of monotony and abject poverty. It was from these shanties and urban slums that thousands of African workers — gardeners, ‘nannies’, street cleaners, office and factory workers in overalls, suits and work dresses, travelling by bus and on foot, converged on the colonial cities to relieve Europeans of the mundane tasks of daily life. Ironically, these segregated spaces also served as an incubator for the development of African trade unions and national liberation movements.

The development of colonial cities in Africa coincided with the use of architectural and urban planning technologies designed to domesticate the urban geography and ecology of the city where the ‘sword, cross, money … colonial administrators and its military men, the church and its proselytizing activities’ (De Boeck and Plissart 2004, p. 28) became essential utilitarian tools of the alleged colonial ‘civilizing mission’ — a vision informed by the nineteenth-century Western notion of development aimed at transforming the ‘backward and primitive’ societies of Africa into an Enlightenment project through education, sanitation, and trade and wage labour. These colonial endeavours were understood within the narrative construct of civilization forces and modernity radiating out from the newly industrial European epicentre to suburbs, the rural hinterland and the ‘Dark Continent’. Racial segregation through zoning, legislations limiting the movement of African to cities, and other colonial laws were introduced to ensure tighter control over African populations. The aim was to create a permanent clerical, artisan and unskilled class of urban workers with temporary residence permits, but without any rights.

While residential segregation is a feature of colonial cities in Africa, housing, urban and industrial legislations have specifically evolved out of colonial state policy to control and regulate spatially the existence of Africans in urban areas. It was through the differential allocation and control of urban space that the colonial state has been able to maintain the rigid system of control which has been one of the pillars of colonial rule in Africa. Thus, state control over the allocation of urban land has had direct implications for the character of African housing and the amenities provided to Africans living and working in the urban areas. Yet, the degree of control over the movement of Africans to the cities depended to a large degree upon the effectiveness with which local municipalities enforced influx control legislation already in place. Local authorities were reluctant to enforce the laws in part because the legislation represented a barrier to local industries' access to cheap African labour. Therefore, to a great extent, local municipalities resisted the state's attempt to tighten influx control regulations. Because of the attractive wages in the industrial sector, especially the early 1930s, Africans were moving in large numbers to the cities. Hence, the implementation of various urban policies had little impact on the pace of African migration and urbanization. The phenomenal growth of the African urban population and its precarious existence in the segregated townships was viewed as a dangerous threat requiring systematic regulation and control.

From the beginning, African workers and their families reluctantly accepted mine, commercial and industrial employment in colonial cities. As colonial subjects and workers, they endured multiple forms of exploitation, both in the workplace and where they were forced to live. Others endured personal and family sacrifices and made painful adjustments whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Imperial legacies and postcolonial predicaments: an introduction
• 2. Metropolitanism, capital and patrimony: theorizing the postcolonial West African city
• 3. Casting a long shadow: colonial categories, cultural identities, and cosmopolitan spaces in globalizing Africa
• 4. Viewing postcolonial Dar es Salaam, Tanzania through civic spaces: a question of class
• 5. Transforming urban landscapes: soccer fields as sites of urban sociability in the agglomeration of Dakar
• 6. Narrating the African city from the diaspora: Lagos as a trope in Ben Okri and Chika Unigwe'stories
• 7. The city beyond the border: the urban worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera
• 8. Governing the city? South Africa'le to deal with urban immigrants after apartheid
• 9. Cinema and the edgy city: Johannesburg, carjacking, and the postmetropolis
• 10. Visual fragments of Kinshasa
• Index