The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities

Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging

M. Diouf, R. Fredericks, M. Diouf, R. Fredericks

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137481887
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities pushes the frontiers of how we understand cities and citizenship and offers new perspectives on African urbanism. Nuanced ethnographic analyses of life in an array of African cities illuminate the emergent infrastructures and spaces of belonging through which urban lives and politics are being forged.

1

Too Many Things to Do: Social Dimensions of City-Making in Africa

AbdouMaliq Simone

The Terms of Urbanization in Africa

Urbanization has much to offer African economic and social wellbeing. This remains the case despite the clear problems inherent in the ways that cities have been put together. These problems include shrinking rural livelihoods, insufficient value-added production, excessive emphasis on rents and administration, and low-cost informal labor. Nevertheless, although much is known about all of the things wrong, biased, distorted, and underdeveloped in African cities, it is also critical to understand urbanization as something capable of stirring productive relationships among people, materials, and places, regardless of specific histories, political conditions, or positions within larger economies.

The relationship between the character of actual existing cities and processes of urbanization is, of course, never straightforward (Brenner 2009). In Africa, this relationship is very heterogeneous. There are primary and secondary cities intensely integrated into global systems of transaction—sites of thriving stock markets, built environments, and popular cultures. There are others that function simply as large military encampments where everyday life centers on struggles to seize goods and territory or ward off incursions by others. There are cities with well-elaborated policy regimes, and others that seem to function through incessantly renegotiated informal accords. There are cities where residents make serious money because nothing official seems to work, and there are cities where people barely survive because everything has to be improvised. These multiplicities follow from how the turbulent relationships among, often, very discrepant agendas and impetus for city-making were stitched together.

The history of urbanization in contemporary Africa has not proceeded in single directions. It embodies the aspirations and procedures aimed toward industrial development, modernization, sectoral specialization, as well as individuated practices of accumulation and subject formation. Moreover, it embodies the constantly mutating collective strategies for creating spaces of operation and livelihood occasioned by the fluid deal-making that has characterized much of city governance throughout late colonial and postcolonial times (Burton 2002, Coquery-Vidrovitch 1991, Fourchard 2006, Salm and Falola 2005). Cities reflect the countervailing exigencies of economic development, citizen formation, and political control (Bayart 2006, Cooper 2008, Gervais-Lambony 2003). What makes “economic sense” according to prevailing norms does not always go together with what makes “social” or “political” sense. Cities are, thus, the bringing together of identities, social positions, and conventions that have been stabilized through different historical eras and social ascriptions that have remained fluid throughout them (Hopkins 2009, Myers 2003).

There have been many explanations for African urban growth and for the massive rural-to-urban migration that took place from the end of World War II to the onset of the global recession in the early 1970s. Obviously, many factors are at work. Rural migrants were forced to the city, in some instances, by land shortages or by the collapse of rural economies. Here, it is important to keep in mind the heterogeneity of rural circumstances. Increasing differentials in wealth and capacity had varied impacts on different rural regions and categories of urban residents. So did the increasing differentiation of land use and production for domestic consumption, as opposed to (or alternating with) domestic production.

Given these circumstances—and without having a lot of resources, political will, and technical capacity to work with—most African cities have frequently demonstrated a substantial ability to link the agendas and practices of individual household livelihood to a broader series of economic, cultural, and religious activities. Here, individuals actively take part in events, places, and networks where many different activities do and could happen. Homes become workshops, workshops become associations, and associations become components of interlinked production systems. Buying, selling, making, cultivating, exchanging, and socializing are tied together in specific, yet changing, patterns of interaction that enable individuals to make effective use of their time, resources, and opportunities (Piermay 2003, Schler 2003).

Because many cities were built with temporary labor markets and curtailed residential rights, they forged highly uneven relationships with territories external to them, and often had fractured linkages with rural areas; moreover, they functioned as places of mediation between locality and mobility, always having to find ways of incorporating new kinds of residents and their articulations to other places (Goerg 2006, Guèye 2007, Guyer and Belinga 1995, Yntiso 2008). As a result, cities were a context for making claims, of figuring particular narratives of legitimacy that enable individual and collective groups of residents to access resources and opportunities such as land, services, participation in institutions, and other entitlements (Abbink 2005, Cueppens and Geschiere 2005, Freund 2009, Hilgers 2009, Lund 2006). Particular modes of address are constituted where residents “put themselves on the map” and seek to have particular identities and needs recognized. These modes of address frequently change, stretching and shrinking to accommodate or exclude particular actors and territories (Boujou 2000, Hilgers 2008, 2009).

As a result, authority is often diffused across sometimes competing, sometimes complementary institutions, and is replete with different meanings and formulas, as well as different forms of consolidation. Some institutions have formal attributes and structures; others are more ephemeral and dispersed, not easily categorized or defined (Bellagamba and Klute 2008, Kelsall 2008, Lund 2006, Miran 2006, Nielsen 2009, Rakodi 2006).

Urbanization Without Cities

Historically, in much of Africa, what was to be gained through an engagement with cities—knowledge, complex social practices, and economic capacity—could never be fully instantiated within the city. Even when substantial rearrangements in cultural life and social economy were precipitated by an urban presence, the potential interconnections among emerging networks of social practice, economic specialization, and cultural reformation were constrained. Clear vehicles of institutionalization were usually foreclosed, largely by the dearth of available public spheres that were not heavily scrutinized or repressed by existing regimes (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1991).

At the same time, for certain migrants, urbanization reflected economic advancement, freedom from the social constraints of rural life, education, and prospects of enhanced social status; therefore, the connections between the attainment of education and urban employment and varying government policies related to cultivating an established urban population became factors in migration (Salau 1979). The complexion of migration varied among regions. The migration of entire families took place more often in West and Central Africa, where the role of women in farming was no larger than that of men, and where there was a strong tradition of trade (O’Connor 1983). The degree to which the elaboration of rural–urban linkages facilitated migration and the extent to which the linkages, in and of themselves, intensified a sense of difference between places were also significant. This sense of difference could be potentially converted into a resource for both rural and urban life. Kinship ties provided a link that enabled people to find a place in the city, and an opportunity to return to ancestral homelands if things did not work out. This is a linkage reinforced by communal land tenure systems and a gendered division of labor, where women were generally responsible for food production.

The sense of linkage went beyond these kinship ties. The concentration of administrative power in cities was so sudden that it had a jarring effect on the rural areas, which were also the objects of this administration. Rural areas were forced to change, particularly as substantial amounts of low-cost imported foodstuffs began saturating urban markets (Hart 1982). Moreover, rural areas resisted the various ways in which they were to be incorporated into more nationally focused production and political systems. Administration was limited in its scope and ability to incorporate rural areas within its ambit (O’Connor 1983). Thus, urban and rural areas existed, in part, as disarticulated spheres. Structuring and plying linkages among them have not only been necessary to reduce “mutual estrangement” and facilitate some sense of overarching coherence. Linkages have, furthermore, become economic instruments in their own right. Linkages are things that can be used and manipulated to facilitate a better life in both domains, compensate for difficulties, and circumvent various social and governmental controls. Increasingly, as people faced conflicts around changes underway in rural areas, the city became a place of refuge, a source for tipping the scales in favor of one party or another, and a place for the short-term accumulation of resources. For urban residents, rural areas became a place to send family members in times of difficulty, to hide assets, to feed urban households, or to garner support or inputs for various urban projects (Englund 2002).

Practices of making something out of the city other than what was expected by a fuller incorporation in capitalist production had to “search” for different organizational forms and auspices under which to operate. Such practices increasingly depended on the identification of loopholes and under-regulated spaces in changing colonial economies. Once identified, these practices acted as compensations and alternatives potentially capable of being appropriated by diverse actors with different agendas (Bertrand 1998, Ferguson 1999, Schler 2003).

Fluidity, thus, remained both a fundamental strength and weakness. These “alternative” economic and cultural practices were unable to remake the city in ways that could serve the objective of expanding agricultural activities for the bulk of rural residents. Nor could they expand the integration of the bulk of the city and its residents into capitalist circuits. Instead, these practices acted as a limiting constraint to both endogenous and capitalist economic expansion. They found ways to urbanize relationships derived from ruralized solidarity and to identify possibilities for urban sustainability in particular ways of engaging under-supervised rural domains. Thus, urban Africa’s pursuit of “independent” agendas and aspirations largely took place in this “closed” circuit. These agendas both intersected with and ran parallel to the narrow ways in which the overall urban economy was linked to global capital (Mabogunje 1990).

Contesting the Present

This urban history has produced a situation, today, of intense contestation in many cities of the region. There is contestation in terms of the fundamental rights and obligations embedded in relationships between children and parents, between extended family members, between men and women, patrons and clients, citizens and government officials, among others (Marie 2007). Basic questions as to the place of self-initiative, individual decision-making, and the conditions of belonging to family and other social groups are intensely debated. People are working out many different kinds of accommodation between the needs of autonomous individual action and the security of life that largely remains rooted in long-term forms of social belonging (Marie 1997, Rodrigues 2007, Tonda 2005, 2008).

These dynamics have a direct impact on what governments and civil society can do in terms of managing and changing urban life. Fundamental issues about what people are able to do together and what they can legitimately do on their own are often replete with great tension, controversy, and fluidity. Marked generational divisions remain, and many youth come to rely upon a range of apparent “transgressions” in order to keep open the space by which they can see themselves crafting their own lives (Diouf 2007). There are districts that make a concerted attempt to keep the “larger city” at a distance for fear that progressive integration would mean the loss of the very existence of its residents. However, without incorporation, these districts often experience protracted conflict, which erodes the basis for any consistent authority. For example, in the Kisangani district at the periphery of Kinshasa, I have personally witnessed how adolescent youth are largely in control and run things by virtue of turning all of the familiar conventions upside down—where those practices and behaviors usually most representative of trust and confidence are actively construed as instances of terror. In less extreme ways, some districts are composed of “households” where kinships relations are strikingly absent. Instead, provisional, transitory arrangements of relative strangers prevail whose affiliations are cemented in their ability to ward off obligation and comparison about access to resources and opportunity.

Furthermore, residents have to decide where to locate themselves, how to effectively balance affordability, personal security, economic opportunity, and tenure. For example, some residents have to decide it is more advantageous to spend sizeable amounts of available income to locate themselves in “regular” situations in central parts of the city, or save income by living in more provisional conditions at the periphery (Englund 2002, Ferguson 1999, Guyer et al. 2002, Owusu 2007, SITRASS 2004). There are decisions to make with regard to how much to invest in particular kinds of work or business, how much to invest in maintaining kinship and social relations, and whether residents should affiliate themselves with particular forms of patronage. The intersection of the various ways of working out these decisions theoretically provoke a great deal of discussion and, again, questioning. What are the right things to do; what are the right alliances to make; what are the most effective ways to use limited resources to acquire assets; and, how can these assets be maximized? At the same time, the possibilities that these deliberations can take place in a systematic way in public domains and at scale are often shut down by existing political power. This shutting down of public discussion then disrupts the basic conditions of mediation and problem solving. The trappings of democratic procedures—through municipal elections and decentralization—often become a substitute for wide-ranging public deliberations of policy (Devas 2004).

As such, the greater visibility of demands for justice, democracy, efficiency, and morality that is taking place across African cities is a fruitful place to support a process where political contestation can be waged in terms of those who have been previously kept out of the process. However, what the poor actually win in such a process largely depends on the existence of political parties and institutionalized policies that backup claims for rights. Here, the problem is that more powerful political forces can define the categories and identities through which these claims can be made. For example, the growth of religious movements, both Christian and Muslim, are having an important impact in reasserting practices of economic advancement outside of patronage and communal systems. Moreover, they express commitments to the value of hard work, education, and solidarity across ethnic and regional groupings. The extent to which such religious movements can give rise to a new generation of entrepreneurship is cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Too Many Things to Do: Social Dimensions of City-Making in Africa
• 2 The Funeral in the Village: Urbanites’ Shifting Imaginations of Belonging, Mobility, and Community
• 3 Citizenship and Civility in Peri-Urban Mozambique
• 4 “Dealing with the Prince over Lagos”: Pentecostal Arts of Citizenship
• 5 The Road to Redemption: Performing Pentecostal Citizenship in Lagos
• 6 “The Old Man Is Dead”: Hip Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth
• 7 Beautifying Brazzaville: Arts of Citizenship in the Congo
• 8 Representing an African City and Urban Elite: The Nightclubs, Dance Halls, and Red-Light District of Interwar Accra
• 9 Seeing Dirt in Dar es Salaam: Sanitation, Waste, and Citizenship in the Postcolonial City
• 10 “Ambivalent Cosmopolitans”? Senegalese and Malian Migrants in Johannesburg
• 11 Walls and White Elephants: Oil, Infrastructure, and the Materiality of Citizenship in Urban Equatorial Guinea
• 12 Nigerian Modernity and the City: Lagos 1960–1980
• List of Contributors
• Index