Metropolitanism, capital and patrimony: theorizing the postcolonial West African city

Abstract

This article theorizes on a productive critical method of investigating the postcolonial ‘cityscape’, by relating liberal capital and metropolitan modernization to the discursive processes from which postmodern landscapes emerge in (West) Africa. When applied to a variety of texts, the method illuminates urbanization in Africa as a sustained process of influx of indigenous labour communities creating new physical, temporal and moral spatialities. Although the physical metropolitan space bears the features of multinational corporate capitalism, and attests to the staying power of imperialism and capitalistic commodification, its temporal and moral spaces unfold as a post‐urban ‘script’ against Victorian evolutionist urbanism. Supported chiefly by its ‘informal economics’ (crafts trade, street vending, shoe‐polishing, ‘smuggling’, etc.), Africa is ‘re‐villagizing’ itself by superimposing its indigenous cultures, institutions, traditions, norms and practices such as traditional medicine, highlife music, public morality, grandmother baby‐sitting, home catering services, thrift houses, ritual funerals, palmwine drinking homes and home languages, onto its urban scapes of sky‐rise buildings, hotels, commercial neighbourhoods and tarred roads. This cultural imbrication has enabled the reinvention of new notions of geopolitics and history that challenge stiff imperializing categories such as the urban and the rural, the global and the local.