Recomposing the Colonial City

Abstract

One of the prevailing concerns of African urban history has been the reframing of African peoples as active shapers rather than passive inhabitants of twentieth-century cities. Yet this effort to accord African urbanites agency – effectively to look past the actions and intentions of the state – has been hampered by an enduring assumption that “real” urban space is predominantly manifest through material infrastructure. Focusing on written descriptions of early colonial Sekondi, the British West African colony of the Gold Coast’s first railway and port city, published in an African-owned newspaper (the Gold Coast Leader), this essay examines how the city’s “middle class” conceptualized and constituted city space from c. 1900 to 1920. Treating such writings as products of, in Henri Lefebvre’s phrasing, “rhythmanalysts” – figures uniquely positioned to “listen” to the city and recognize its multiple cadences – it argues middle-class residents viewed colonial urban space as a “lived” dimension that was inherently dynamic, fluid, and beyond the state’s control. More specifically, it gives serious analytical purchase to their repeated insistence that music and musical events were effective ways to recompose city space and encourages scholars of urban Africa to regard music-making as a mode of city-making worthy of further attention.