The African City

Anthony O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135671358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explores various characteristics of tropical African cities, with special reference to change in the post-independence period. It stresses the diversity of urban forms and urban experience to be found within the region, distinguishing the more general features from those peculiar to individual cities. Much has been written about urban Africa, but nearly all relates to particular cities: this book provides a context for such studies. This review provides an essential foundation both for theoretical clarification of the processes of urbanization and for practical planning decisions.

The topics covered range from rural-urban migration and national urban systems to the urban economy, housing, and the spatial structure of cities. The sharp contrasts between indigenous and colonial urban traditions are emphasized, but so also is the evidence for convergence today, as indigenization takes place in the colonial cities while Westernization proceeds ini those of indigenous origin.

This book was first published in 1983.

1 Introduction

Why write – or indeed read – a book on the city in tropical Africa? For the author the interest and importance of the subject is totally compelling, but some who glance at these pages may not share that view. For those elsewhere in the world with an interest in urban studies, tropical Africa might seem of little importance. It is one of the least urbanized world regions, and in most of its component countries less than a quarter of the population live in cities or towns. Although it is quite wrong to regard its cities as entirely products of the recent colonial era, it does not have continuous urban traditions extending back several millennia as in the Middle East. It has no cities yet comparable in size to the largest in Europe or North America, or to Bombay, Calcutta, Pekin and Shanghai; and it has not experienced twentieth century urban growth on the scale of Sao Paulo or Mexico City. Each of the two giants in tropical African terms, namely Lagos and Kinshasa, reached a population of two million only in the 1970s.

For people within Africa, and for others interested in the African scene, the question may not be ‘why study Africa?’ but ‘why study the cities?’, since the vast majority of people live in a rural environment. In terms of development, for instance, it is declared government policy almost everywhere that priority attention should be given to the rural areas, even if such policies are often less evident in practice. Most academic observers share this view, as increasingly do outside advisers such as those in the aid agencies.

So why should the cities of tropical Africa command our attention? The very fact that the level of urbanization is so low is surely itself of interest, and raises challenging questions. Coupled with that is the fact that while levels of urbanization are low, the present rates of urbanization, in the sense of progressive increase in the proportion of the total population who live in cities and towns, are among the world's highest. Until recently rates were higher in Latin America, but now that a clear majority of people in many Latin American countries are urban dwellers, Africa has taken the lead in respect of current change. Despite data limitations there is no doubt that the present urbanization rate in most African countries is much higher than in most parts of Asia, including both India and China (Table 1).

The combination of low levels, but high rates, of urbanization means that tropical Africa provides almost unparalleled opportunities for the outside observer to see ‘cities in the making’. It also provides enormous challenges for all who are directly involved in the process – whether as a government minister in an air-conditioned office or as a squatter living in a disused quarry.

It can certainly be argued that no other contemporary change in tropical Africa is either as dramatic or as significant as the growth of its cities, especially now that the transfer of nominal political power from London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon is complete. That change was largely concentrated into the early 1960s, and many would say that the actual change, both in terms of real power and in terms of most people's lives, was by no means as far-reaching as had been hoped.

The direct impact of rapid urbanization is of course greatest for those who actually move, permanently or temporarily, from a rural to an urban home; but profound effects are also felt by the existing urban dwellers, and by the rural residents whose sons and daughters or even second cousins move to town. The importance of the extended family throughout tropical Africa contributes greatly to the social and economic impact of city growth.

The significance of the urbanization process in tropical Africa is enhanced by the fact that the cities exert all kinds of influence out of all proportion to their modest size. This is emphasized in much of the writing of Gutkind (1974 etc), while Hanna and Hanna (1981: 3) assert that'the towns of Africa are the epicenters of their societies … the centers of polity, society, economy and culture.’* Many other observers share this view, whether they see the influence as largely benevolent, with the cities providing services for the rural population and acting as agents for the spread of whatever is meant by ‘modernization’, or as largely malevolent, with the cities exploiting the rural population, extracting a surplus from them and becoming parasitic upon them. Undoubtedly, the cities form the critical links in every country between the population as a whole and the outside world. Nearly all transactions are channelled through

Table 1 Urban population in four world regions

Source: Patterns of Urban and Rural Population Growth, United Nations, New York, 1980, p. 11.

Note: ‘Urban’ is here based on national definitions, and generally includes all centres over 5000 or 10,000.

them; and they have largely determined the evolving structure of the space economy, as a glance at any road map would demonstrate.

The speed and significance of contemporary urbanization mean that many difficult decisions are faced as a matter of urgency. Collectively, the decisions of all the inhabitants are vitally important, but much responsibility lies with a limited number of decision-makers in national and municipal administrations and in private concerns which include multinational corporations. Their decisions, made today while the cities are still small and situations fluid, will largely determine the structure – spatial as well as economic, social and political – of the much larger African cities of the future. This book does not aim at offering recommendations to the policy-makers, but it does aim to spread an awareness of some of the issues involved.

Terms and concepts

Having already made frequent references to ‘urbanization’ perhaps we should note that there are at least two senses in which that word is commonly used. Hauser (1965: 8–9), for instance, distinguishes between urbanization as a change in the pattern of settlement and urbanization as a social process. Little (1974: 4–5) does likewise with special reference to Africa, and then concentrates especially on the latter aspect. Friedmann (1973: chapter 4) has spelled out the distinction more fully than anyone else, and has written essentially about the former aspect. Throughout this book also the emphasis is firmly placed upon urbanization in the first sense, essentially from a geographical standpoint, leaving social change to the sociologists. In both senses ‘urbanization’ is, of course, a mental construct rather than a material phenomenon, and since this book is concerned more with diverse and changing reality than with theoretical formulations ‘the city’ has been preferred for its title.

We shall not even delve into the meaning of ‘the city’, since this has already been done with special reference to Africa by several writers (e.g. Mabogunje 1968: chapter 2; Peil 1977: 259–72), generally by referring back to scholars such as Wirth (1938). An outstanding recent discussion, conducted at a global scale but with much reference to Africa, is that of Hannerz (1980). Our concern is simply with the growth, distribution, character and relationships of those large and concentrated settlements that are cities in every sense of the word. There is of course no clear-cut division between cities and towns, though the latter word is used whenever centres with fewer than about 100,000 people are being discussed. These smaller towns merit more attention than they receive here, or from most writers on urban Africa, but they have at least been the subject of a recent symposium volume (Southall 1979) and bibliography (Schatzberg 1979).

While we refer constantly to the urban population, this is really a much less clearly defined group in tropical Africa than in many parts of the world. This is not because of problems in defining cities as settlements, which are no greater than elsewhere, but because so many people are involved with, and move frequently between, city and countryside. ‘They participate in the urban economy while remaining loyal to a rural community; they operate in geographically separate but culturally and economically integrated systems’ (Gugler and Flanagan 1978: 64). In speaking of the urban population, therefore, we refer not to a highly discrete set of people, but rather to those living within the cities and towns at a particular point in time.

In contrast to some studies, no specific chapter is devoted to women, for the discussion throughout concerns women as much as men. As in nearly all writings, however, there is a heavy emphasis on the adults despite the fact that almost half the inhabitants of most African cities are children. Indeed, education is one of many important topics not covered here. Even more glaring omissions in the eyes of some readers will be the matters of urban politics and social stratification or class. Fortunately, these are the central issues in an Africa-wide study by Sandbrook (1982), which is thus largely complementary to the present volume.

Problems of data availability

On questions such as the emergence of classes and the concentration of political power precise data can hardly be gathered anywhere in the world. Other phenomena lend themselves more readily to measurement, but in many cases lack of data is a major problem in tropical Africa. Population censuses have been conducted in most countries, but the figures which they provide are sometimes unreliable and often very out of date. The range of questions asked in these censuses varies greatly over time and space, and often it is very limited. It is particularly unfortunate that all recent Nigerian censuses have yielded grossly distorted results (officially declared invalid in some cases), since that country probably accounts for over 30 per cent of tropical Africa's urban dwellers. Other statistics, such as those for employment, may be both reliable and up to date, but may provide only a partial coverage of the situation. In addition to many subjects on which the facts are simply not known for many cities, there are of course others on which data do exist but are kept secret – justifiably or otherwise.

As a result it is very rarely possible to provide a series of comparative statistics for a wide range of cities, especially in tabular or map form. Sophisticated data analysis can be applied to specific aspects of individual cities (Ayeni 1979), but on a pan-African scale this is normally out of the question. Generally, it is far more realistic to aim for an appreciation of broad orders of magnitude, with such recent and reliable figures as are available provided merely as illustrations of specific situations. On most of the topics discussed here, such broad orders of magnitude can be indicated, and they often differ from what is widely believed.

Africa and elsewhere

A further purpose in writing on this subject is indeed to challenge some of the views that are held in various quarters at present. One is that urbanization involves largely the same processes throughout the world (Rayfield 1974: 183; McNulty and Horton 1976: 179), and that Africa is simply following a path trodden at an earlier date by Europe, North America and the Soviet Union. This view has, of course, been challenged by many others, one notable recent discussion of the subject being that by Berry (1973), who stresses the co-existence of divergent paths of urbanization. However, he and others do suggest that while the less developed countries are not following the same path as the more developed, they are all following a single distinct path.

In their valuable review of the literature on urbanization in these countries, Friedmann and Wulff (1975: 40) observe that ‘constructing broad generalizations about Third World cities is always a hazardous business’. Yet academics have frequently met to discuss ‘The Third World City’, and several books have appeared with this theme, if not this title (e.g. Breese 1966,1969, McGee 1971, Dwyer 1974, 1975, Bromley and Gerry 1979, Nelson 1979a, Gilbert and Gugler 1982). Abu-Lughod (1977: 2) introduces another volume as ‘an introduction to urbanization in the Third World within a unified theoretical framework which we believe is powerful in illuminating many of the phenomena consistently found in the cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America’. But how much do they really have in common? She rightly stresses that students of urbanization must not ‘dismiss as “deviant” more than half the world's largest cities’, but is it likely that we can make many valid generalizations about so many? Or even about the cities of the whole continent of Africa? Does a knowledge of either Mexico City or Calcutta, or even of Cairo or Johannesburg, give much indication of what is happening in Lagos or Kinshasa? Perhaps there are some common features, but in many ways the tropical African situation differs sharply from those of North Africa and South Africa, as well as those of Asia and Latin America. Indeed, it is often hard to generalize even for the whole of tropical Africa, and a major theme of this book is the diversity to be found within this region. So is there really even such a thing as ‘The African City’?

Themes in the study of the African city

A few features are common to nearly all tropical African cities. One is the dire poverty in material terms. Many studies of Latin American cities single out ‘the urban poor’ for special attention, but across Africa from Dakar to Maputo this would mean the vast majority of the inhabitants. Perhaps fewer are totally destitute than, say, in Calcutta; but no more than 5 per cent could be considered affluent, with a further 10 to 15 per cent in a middle-income range (though even these would be distinctly poor by European standards).

Another widespread feature is ethnic diversity, with sharper divisions between racial groups than in some other parts of the world, and sharp ethnic divisions within the indigenous population. These are important enough in African urban life to warrant a chapter to themselves, and are, perhaps, especially significant in so far as they cut across class divisions. A third feature shared by most tropical African cities is the maintenance of intense urban–rural relationships arising out of the fact that most men and women living in them were born and brought up in the countryside. Specific attention is given to these relationships in chapter 9, but the way in which the cities are bound up with indigenous peasant society, as well as the international capitalist economy, is relevant to every topic discussed.

One of the most important common characteristics of tropical African countries is their common experience of colonial rule and the recent attainment of political independence. Most have existed as entities for less than a hundred years, and as independent states for less than twenty-five, and so they are engaged in a critical process of nation-building in which the cities play a vital role. The colonial episode provided a major impetus for urban growth everywhere, but a distinction must be made between those areas where it brought this for the first time and those where it impinged upon well-established indigenous urban traditions.

This provides a recurring theme throughout the book, qualifying almost every attempted generalization. Thus, while throughout tropical Africa people feel a powerful attachment to ‘home’, the significance of this sentiment is very different in those cities which are regarded as ‘home’ by many of their inhabitants from that in the larger number of cities where almost everyone thinks of some rural locality as ‘home’.

A geographical study in the 1980s can hardly reject all efforts at generalization, but it can be much concerned with the issue of how widely any generalizations apply. It can also raise queries about excessively crude dichotomies which are so widely used in the social science literature. If developed v. less-developed countries is one such dichotomy of which we must beware, indigenous v. colonial cities may be another. Other examples are generative v. parasitic cities, and formal v. informal sectors within cities. Perhaps we even need to challenge the urban v. rural dichotomy itself. Every one of these certainly has some value, but all can distort reality if overused. Brookfield (1975: 53) has noted that dichotomies, or polarized constructs, are necessary for social science theory, but warns that ‘inevitably they grow into stereotypes’. In respect of most phenomena a spectrum or continuum is far closer to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Series
• Series Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Urban traditions, distribution and growth
• 3 Rural-urban migration
• 4 Ethnic groups
• 5 The urban economy
• 6 Housing
• 7 Spatial structures
• 8 Urban systems
• 9 Urban-rural relationships
• 10 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index