The African Port City: Docks and SuburbsSocial Change in Modern Africa. Aidan SouthallModern and Traditional Elites in the Politics of Lagos. Patrick Cole

Abstract

Long ago I made a banally obvious classification of African cities into those with a traditional core (Type A) and those which are entirely the creations of colonial action (Type B).' No writer on the subject, including me, has found this classification entirely satisfactory, yet none has escaped from it. In all cases where an African city has a traditional core, that core has had significant effect upon the nature of its development. Though cities in Africa are obviously now the preeminent centers and channels of capitalist development, recent writers have gone out of their way to stress the positive contributions that Africans, in their culture and social action, have made in the evolving pattern of events. I have also argued that the impact of colonialism on intrinsically African urban development has been destructive.2 I think both propositions are true. I wish to bring this argument up to date by considering the literature in the light of two recent studies, each of which is the best of its type. Lagos is the greatest city in Black Africa; Lagos and Mombasa are the two greatest port cities of Black Africa. Sandra Barnes's study of Lagos and Frederick Cooper's study of Mombasa are complementary opposites.3 Cooper deals excellently with labor in the port of Mombasa, the city looming as a presence not directly addressed. Sandra Barnes's study is the most successful attack to date on the problem of the anthropologist studying a great metropolis. Here the port of Lagos and its large labor force is only an indirect presence. Mombasa was the first capital of Kenya but, though only a provincial city now, it serves a territory far larger than Kenya, including Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the southern Sudan and parts of eastern Zaire, northern and northwest Tanzania, and southern Ethiopia. Lagos serves Africa's most populous country and neighboring parts of adjacent countries. In both cases, these two ports are the major channels of capitalist penetration in their respective regions.