Verandahs of power: colonialism and space in urban Africa

Abstract

Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa. By Garth Andrew Myers. Space, Place, and Society. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Pp. xxii, 199; 16 illustrations. $19.95 paper. Verandahs of Power is a departure of sorts from traditional Africanist writing about the colonial era. Garth Myers follows well-trodden ground in looking at the colonial state's exercise of power in urban eras, but he also offers a nuanced and even sympathetic-though still critical-look at colonial officials and Asians employed by the colonial state. In addition, he lets his narrative cross the boundary between colonial and postcolonial and thereby brings to light many interesting continuities between the agendas of colonialist governments and those that succeeded them. The book is a study of British attempts to use urban space both to earn the goodwill of their subjects and to exercise power in Nairobi, Lusaka, and Zanzibar, and the continuation of those efforts in postcolonial Lilongwe. The analytical thread that holds it together is the work of Eric Dutton, who was the long-time chief secretary in Zanzibar, but who also worked in Lusaka and Nairobi. His protege, Ajit Singh, a Sikh architect who worked on urban planning and design in Zanzibar and later in Lilongwe, serves to extend the story to revolutionary Zanzibar and independent Malawi. Myers uses several metaphors to hold the four cities together. The most prominent of these is the House of Wonders, the most prominent building in Zanzibar and the administrative center of colonial Zanzibar, which Myers uses to describe the colonial hierarchy. The House of Wonders was built by the Omanis, but conveniently it has three verandahs that encircle it one above the other, allowing it to work as metaphor for state-imposed racial hierarchy. Thus we have the bottom verandah inhabited by the governed, the middle verandah inhabited by Indian and African bureaucrats (whom Myers refers to as the colonized middle), and on the top level the British. A second analytical device that he employs is the work of Timothy Mitchell, which argues that the state attempts to enframe, contain, and observe urban space.1 In each of the four cities the state has attempted to use urban planning to enframe, contain, and observe urban space. The people on the top verandah set the policy, the people on the middle verandah play a crucial role in implementing it, and the people on the bottom verandah quickly undermine it and impose or reimpose their own notions of how urban and domestic space should be used. In each of the four cities this pattern unfolds in different ways and with different results, but Myers does a good job of fitting it all into the theory. He convincingly modifies and extends Mitchell's work by showing that it is not just colonial regimes that behave this way. Myers's bigger contribution to the field is to write about colonial officials and Indians as real people. While there is a growing recognition that colonial policy was not the result of a monolithic and single-minded colonial state, we rarely actually get to meet flesh-and-blood colonial officials. His description of Eric Button is fascinating and goes a long way toward showing the tragic side of the colonial experience. …