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.
Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa’s burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa’s cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa’s cities do work on some level and to the extent that they do, they function largely through fluid, makeshift collective actions running parallel to proliferating decentralized local authorities, small-scale enterprises, and community associations. Drawing on his nearly fifteen years of work in African cities—as an activist, teacher, development worker, researcher, and advisor to ngos and local governments—Simone provides a series of case studies illuminating the provisional networks through which most of Africa’s urban dwellers procure basic goods and services. He examines informal economies and social networks in Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, Senegal; in Winterveld, a neighborhood on the edge of Pretoria, South Africa; in Douala, Cameroon; and among Africans seeking work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He contextualizes these particular cases through an analysis of the broad social, economic, and historical conditions that created present-day urban Africa. For the City Yet to Come is a powerful argument that any serious attempt to reinvent African urban centers must acknowledge the particular history of these cities and incorporate the local knowledge reflected in already existing informal urban economic and social systems.
Governance has become an important concept in the politics of African development. It is therefore a crucial concept for social science analyses focusing on Africa. In public discourse Africa's future is being shaped by a combination of external interventions backed by African elites who cooperate with the donors, whose understanding of the importance of 'good governance' they share. This groundbreaking book disentangles the analytical aspects of governance from its political and normative connotations. The 'African exception' - the difference in 'development' between Africa and other regions of the South - can be understood by analysis focusing upon the specific forms of governance played out in politics and economics. The perspective of neo-patrimonialism is crucial but not sufficient here. The first section of the book explores African governance in two functional spheres: the political realm and the economic. Section two looks at new areas of governance in Africa: violent social spaces, HIV/AIDS and entrepreneurial urban governance.
From its modest beginnings in the mid-19th century, Dar es Salaam has grown to become one of sub-Saharan Africa's most important urban centres. A major political, economic and cultural hub, the city stood at the cutting edge of trends that transformed twentieth-century East Africa. Dar es Salaam has recently attracted the attention of a diverse, multi-disciplinary, range of scholars, making it currently one of the continent's most studied urban centres. This collection from eleven scholars from Africa, Europe, North America and Japan, draws on some of the best of this scholarship and offers a comprehensive, and accessible, survey of the city's development. The perspectives include history, musicology, ethnomusicology, culture including popular culture, land and urban economics. The opening chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the history of the city. Subsequent chapters examine Dar es Salaam's twentieth century experience through the prism of social change and the administrative repercussions of rapid urbanization; and through popular culture and shifting social relations. The book will be of interest not only to the specialist in urban studies but also to the general reader with an interest in Dar es Salaam's environmental, social and cultural history. James Brennan is a Lecturer in History at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research interests include nationalism and urbanization in Tanzania, and he is currently researching the historical role of radio and other mass media in East Africa's political culture. Andrew Burton is an Honorary Research Fellow of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, based in Addis Ababa. He has published widely on East African urban culture; and his current interests are the history of youth, urbanization and delinquency in Eastern Africa. Yusuf Lawi is the former Head of the Department of History at the University of Dar es Salaam; and is currently Senior Lecturer in History and Deputy Director of the University's Centre for Continuing Education. He specializes in environmental and social history.
"This is a substantial contribution to the understanding of an important aspect of African Christianity; the place of dreams in daily life, and their significance as interpreted by a representative body of African Christians ..."--Andrew Walls.
This wide-ranging volume presents the most complete appraisal of modern African history to date. It assembles dozens of new and established scholars to tackle the questions and subjects that define the field, ranging from the economy, the two world wars, nationalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics to religion, development, sexuality, and the African youth experience. Contributors are drawn from numerous fields in African studies, including art, music, literature, education, and anthropology. The themes they cover illustrate the depth of modern African history and the diversity and originality of lenses available for examining it. Older themes in the field have been treated to an engaging re-assessment, while new and emerging themes are situated as the book’s core strength. The result is a comprehensive, vital picture of where the field of modern African history stands today.
This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.
Originally published in 1987, this book shows that there is still considerable continuity in the practices and ideas of marriage in Afican against a background of social and economic change. This book discusses the diverse marriage forms in Africa and explores the different systems some of which can be understood in terms of Levi-Strauss's distinciton between complex and semi-complex structures, while others throw up questions of filiation, child custoidanship and rights secured through bridewealth transactions.
Sheds new light on the social, cutural and politico-economic processes underlying the development of major African cities. Combines Africa's colonial legacy, the contrasts between poverty and wealth plus external influences of the global economy with a systematic assessment of national and urban means of production, access to and control over land and shelter along with formal and popular planning activities. Numerous examples and detailed case studies integrate various scales from global to intra-urban, placing them in an analytical framework that will be directly relevant to other Third World regions.
African History Books have been written and rewritten thousands of times. But what is bizarre about all these African History Books is that they are divided into three groups: one that deals with Colonial History, one that deals with Mediterranean History, and one that deals with Pre-history. The first one tells us about the Europeans all over the African continent. The second one tells us about the Kemets, the Persians and the Greeks in North Africa. And the last one tells us about primitive Negroes who did not themselves have any idea of the notion of History; so someone else has had to write their History in their place. There is no wonder that Basil Davidson has had to come to the embittering conclusion that what is referred to as African History today is nothing but "African History Without Africans" (1999). This is the book in which the true face of what may be referred to as African History is shown in full beam to a world that has cessed to believe in it.
![Conference on the Government of African Cities: [proceedings].](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/DecsjrKw-0sC)
