African Urban History Research Articles

Race and ethnicity in South African urban history: A call to investigate “mingling” as well as “separation” in the city

Race and ethnicity in South African urban history: A call to investigate “mingling” as well as “separation” in the city <sup />

Contradictory excessiveness: abandoned trolleys in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT This essay explores the significance of abandoned trolleys in South Africa. As an international student who later settled in South Africa, I did not initially notice abandoned trolleys. However, as I became more familiar with the senses of South African society, I began to spot trolleys abandoned in seemingly random locations throughout the country. Using Jacob Dlamini’s charge that studies of South African urban history should foreground the senses, I take up the sight of abandoned trolleys as symbols of the contradictory excessiveness of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing from my own experiences and photos, and the work of Ivan Vladislavić’s emphasis on “tomasons,” I illustrate their centrality within South Africa, albeit from the margins of society. By zeroing in on an object that tends to be overlooked, the polarizing contradictions that exist between people can be distilled from the abstract into the human.

The future of health in Africa must include urban health

ABSTRACT The future of health in Africa is at an exciting juncture. African urban history provides a context for current urbanisation trends on the continent. Connecting fragmented disciplines and professional sectors of health and urbanists, provides a key to improving health outcomes. This can only come from strong leadership and a push for more focused Africa-centric interdisciplinary research on urban health challenges and opportunities. There is an urgency around building authentic partnerships to support African scientific and policy capacity along with global collaboration and exchange around urban health in a context of rapid urbanization, globalization, inequality and climate change.

Recomposing the Colonial City

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.

PRODUCING NEW SPATIAL(IZED) (HI)STORIES ON CONGOLESE CITIES: REFLECTIONS ON TEN YEARS OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN UGENT AND UNIKIN

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This article presents the context and some of the results of ten years of collaboration in the field of African urban history between researchers from Ghent University (UGent), and mainly its Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, and scholars of the Université de Kinshasa (UNIKIN), which, in part, has benefited from the forum created by the Ghent African Platform (GAP). What ties together this collaborative work, is the conviction that ‘History matters’ when thinking not only about the past, but also about the present and the future of cities in today’s DR Congo. Moreover, we argue, it is the combination of our complementary expertise in socio-demographic history and architectural/ urban planning history that has enabled us to develop new narratives on space and society in these urban environments. These, we believe, hold a relevance for the historiography of Congo’s colonial past as well as for current discussions on colonial heritage and urban development. By demonstrating that we have gained much through stimulating a cross-disciplinary and inter-generational conversation that brings together (the expertise from) scholars working on Congo/Africa and coming from different backgrounds, academic cultures and age, we explicitly want to advocate setting up forms of relationship between the ‘North’ and ‘South’ that go beyond the common trope of ‘Capacity Building’. A number of specific pieces of work related to the cities of Kinshasa and Matadi will be discussed, illustrating how we have also deliberately sought to target different audiences by producing different kinds of output, from academic publications to exhibitions, reports for policy makers to outreach activities in the cultural arena. As such, we believe that this ten years of collaboration on African Urban History is fully in tune with GAP’s main agenda of creating a cross-disciplinary forum where scholars from North and South, and from different generations can meet and exchange ideas, and we hope to embed our future collaboration in an even broader community, both at UGent and UNIKIN.&#x0D; KEYWORDS: DR CONGO, URBAN HISTORY, CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY, COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Producing New Spatial(Ized) (Hi)Stories on Congolese Cities: Reflections on Ten Years of Collaboration Between Ugent and Unikin

This article presents the context and some of the results of ten years of collaboration in the field of African urban history between researchers from Ghent University (UGent), and mainly its Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, and scholars of the Université de Kinshasa (UNIKIN), which, in part, has benefited from the forum created by the Ghent African Platform (GAP). What ties together this collaborative work, is the conviction that ‘History matters’ when thinking not only about the past, but also about the present and the future of cities in today’s DR Congo. Moreover, we argue, it is the combination of our complementary expertise in socio-demographic history and architectural/ urban planning history that has enabled us to develop new narratives on space and society in these urban environments. These, we believe, hold a relevance for the historiography of Congo’s colonial past as well as for current discussions on colonial heritage and urban development. By demonstrating that we have gained much through stimulating a cross-disciplinary and inter-generational conversation that brings together (the expertise from) scholars working on Congo/Africa and coming from different backgrounds, academic cultures and age, we explicitly want to advocate setting up forms of relationship between the ‘North’ and ‘South’ that go beyond the common trope of ‘Capacity Building’. A number of specific pieces of work related to the cities of Kinshasa and Matadi will be discussed, illustrating how we have also deliberately sought to target different audiences by producing different kinds of output, from academic publications to exhibitions, reports for policy makers to outreach activities in the cultural arena. As such, we believe that this ten years of collaboration on African Urban History is fully in tune with GAP’s main agenda of creating a cross-disciplinary forum where scholars from North and South, and from different generations can meet and exchange ideas, and we hope to embed our future collaboration in an even broader community, both at UGent and UNIKIN.

2016 Selected Bibliography

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 2, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources 2016 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY CURATED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI This selected bibliography is published here for the benefit of our readers and subscribers. The price listed here is the price from the Publishers’ catalogues at the time of catalogue publication and does not include packing and postage. 2nd and 3rd edition reprints are not included in this list. Also, some titles may be available only on print on demand which is now quite common practice. Some titles below are in stock at The Maghreb Bookshop, others can be ordered on request. Achcar, Gilbert, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising, Saqi Books, 2016, £12.99 David Anderson and Jonathan Fisher, Africa’s New Authoritarians, Aid, Securitisation and State-Building, 2016, 176pp, notes, bibliography, index, paperback, £18.00 Has the West tacitly endorsed autocracy in Africa to safeguard economic its interests, or have African rulers manipulated aid and the threat of terrorism to bolster their illiberal regimes? The answer is more complex than that. Abderrahman Beggar. Histoire et mémoire bouraouïennes I (Toronto: York University, The Canada-Mediterranean Centre, ‘Moisaic. Essays’ series, 2016). 155 pages. Paperback Cet ouvrage de A. Beggar est bien étoffe, riche d’enseignements et son écriture vivante, agréable a suivre. Bien plus, comme il traite a la fois de poésie, de littérature, d’histoire, d’art, de philosophie et même de politique. Le regard que son auteur porte sur la pensée critique de Hedi Bouraoui, sa force créatrice, et son analyse de «l’ignorance... comme distorsion des structures», peut fort bien s’inscrire dans la tradition de la critique théorique. A cet regard, la démarche est louable a plus d’un titre car non seulement elle témoigne d’une vision éminemment humaniste - puisque ‘intolérance se nourrit de l’ignorance - mais elle a également le mérite le faire appel a des comparaisons, des parallèles et des rapprochements, noire des convergences avec d’autres écrivains. Nous recommandons chaudement la lecture de ce livre. — Rank Darragi (Université de Tunis) Bellin, Eva and Lane, Heidi E (edit.,) Building Rule of Law in the Arab World. Tunisia, Egypt, and Beyond, 2016, 311 pp, notes, bibliography, index, cloth,£70.50 Bentrovato, Denise, Narrating and Teaching the Nation. The Politics of Education in Pre- and Post-Genocide Rwanda, 2016, 254 pages , notes, bibliography, index, cloth, V&R unipress, Göttingen 214 CURATED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI The book investigates the politics of education in pre- and post-genocide Rwanda, examining the actors, interests, and discourses that have historically influenced educational policy and practice and in particular the production and revision of history curricula and textbooks. This study combines a systematic historical and comparative analysis of curricula and textbooks in Rwanda, stakeholder interviews, classroom observations, and a large-scale investigation of pupils’ understandings of the country’s history. Written at a crucial time of transition in Rwanda, it illuminates the role of education as a powerful means of socialisation through which dominant discourses and related belief systems have been transmitted to the younger generations, thus moulding the nation. It outlines emergent challenges and possibilities, urging a move away from the use of history teaching to disseminate a conveniently selective official history towards practices that promote critical thinking and reflect the heterogeneity characteristic of Rwanda’s post-genocide society. Vivian Bickford-Smith, The Emergence of the South African Metropolis Cities and Identities in the Twentieth Century, 2016, 340 pp, notes, bibliography, index, cloth, £64.99 Focusing on South Africa’s three main cities - Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban - this book explores South African urban history from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, it examines the metropolitan perceptions and experiences of both black and white South Africans, as well as those of visitors, especially visitors from Britain and North America. Drawing on a rich array of city histories, travel writing, novels, films, newspapers, radio and television programs, and oral histories, Vivian Bickford-Smith focuses on the consequences of the depictions of the South African metropolis and the ‘slums’ they contained, and especially on how...

Urban history in the new South Africa: continuity and innovation since the end of apartheid

The Soweto uprising of 1976 confirmed to most observers that the anti-apartheid struggle (in contrast to anti-colonial struggles in many other parts of Africa) would be largely urban in character. This realization gave impetus to a rapid growth in the hitherto small field of South African urban history. Much new work predictably sought to understand the nature of conflict and inequality in South African cities and its possible resolution.

African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective. Edited by STEVENJ.SALM and TOYINFALOLA. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005. Pp. xl+395. £50/$75 (ISBN 1-58046-163-8). Urbanization and African Cultures. Edited by TOYINFALOLA and STEVENJ.SALM. Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005. Pp. xv+464. $45, paperback (ISBN 0-89089-558-9).

The profile of African urban history has risen considerably of late, with the appearance of a number of important monographs and edited collections. What is more, with the plethora of younger scholars as well as more established historians now exploring Africa's urban pasts, its profile is set to rise further. African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective represents the latest contribution to this emerging sub-field. A companion volume, Urbanization and African Cultures, is of a more interdisciplinary character. Both are drawn from contributions to a 2003 University of Texas conference.African Urban Spaces will be of more interest to readers of this journal, not only because of its historical focus but also its higher quality and greater cohesion. It covers an impressive geographical and temporal range, with chapters on primary and secondary cities throughout Africa, spanning the precolonial past to the present. It is introduced by one of the pioneers of Africa's urban history, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, who teases themes from the collection and signals promising avenues for future research. However, poor referencing mars the introduction, a symptom of the apparently loose editorial role exercised over the book as a whole. Greater intervention could have strengthened the collection considerably: not only to ensure consistent referencing (authors variously adopt endnotes and social science/intratext systems) and to minimize typographical errors, but more seriously to tighten the sloppier passages and chapters. The quality of the chapters varies considerably, some representing useful scholarly contributions, others being pedestrian accounts offering little or nothing new.

The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960

Until recently the abundant literature on South African urban history has seen violence in towns and cities in terms either of anti-colonial protest or of labour consciousness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined the urban violence with which it was concerned as exclusively political. More recently, however, questions of spatiality, township culture, generation, and gender have offered alternative or supplementary explanations.This article moves from the South African historiography to the less well known history of Southern Rhodesian towns and townships. In particular it focuses on Rhodesia's main industrial centre, Bulawayo. Between 1929 and 1960 there were four dramatic events in Bulawayo which involved varying degrees of violence. These were the ‘faction fights' of December 1929; the railway strike of 1946; the general strike of April 1948; and the so-called zhii riots of 1960. There have recently been authoritative analyses of the 1946 and 1948 strikes. This article therefore concentrates on the events of 1929 and 1960.The 1929 ‘faction fights' have been claimed for political economy by a classic article which sees them essentially as a response to changing patterns of colonial labour exploitation; the 1960 riots have been claimed as the first achievement of confrontational African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. This article argues that an alternative explanation can be found in internal African struggles for dominance of an emerging black urban culture. It analyses the 1929 violence as a struggle between ‘stylish’ young labour migrants and a longer established township elite. It analyses the 1960 riots as a ‘war’ between the township poor and the newly prosperous traders and rentiers. Both episodes greatly complicated the prospects for a unitary urban nationalism or for effective and combined labour action.

African urban spaces in historical perspective

Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. It presents original research and integrates historical methodologies with those of anthropology, geography, literature, art, and architecture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and cultural influences of sub-Saharan Africa. The themes include Islam and Christianity, architecture, migration, globalization, social and physical decay, identity, race relations, politics, and development. This book elaborates on not only what makes the study of African urban spaces unique within urban historiography, it also offers an-encompassing and up-to-date study of the subject and inserts Africa into the growing debate on urban history and culture throughout the world.The opportunities provided by the urban milieu are endless and each study opens new potential avenues of research. This book explores some of those avenues and lays the groundwork on which new studies can build. The contributors include: Maurice Nyamanga Amutabi, Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Mark Dike DeLancey, Thomas Ngomba Ekali, Omar A. Eno, Doug T. Feremenga, Laurent Fourchard, James Genova, Fatima Muller - Friedman, Godwin R. Murunga, Kefa M. Otiso, Michael Ralph, Jeremy Rich, Eric Ross, Corinee Sandwith, and Wessel Visser. Toyin Falola is the Nalle Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin; Steven J. Salm is Assistant Professor of History, Xavier University of Louisiana.

African Urban History: Past and Present Perspective

History of cities in Africa is a recent field of research which interrogates – in the last two decades – the ways in which Africans shape the patterns of urbanisation and how urbanisation influences African social and cultural practices. The development of numerous case studies testifies to this new interest in African cities. Focusing on the West African region, the article explores the extent to which political and social history has benefited from the emergence of this new subfield of research and concludes that a substantial part of the extant literature is still based on the traditional approach. Consequently a West African urban history is yet to emerge despite the existence of ancient traditions of urban settlement in this area and the uniqueness of that phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa.Lagos Historical Review, vol. 5 (2005), 1-21

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction Shirley Brooks and Bill Freund This special issue of Transformation focuses on the changes that are occurring in the post-apartheid South African city, exploring both the continuities and disjunctures from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Cities are important drivers of economic growth as well as key sites of social change. They are a focus of interest for geographers and other social scientists attempting to understand the dynamic forces shaping South African cities both in their own terms, and in the context of cities in other parts of the 'developed' and 'developing' world. Cities are locales for ambitious plans to address social inequality while promoting economic development, particularly in the wake of institutionalised discrimination and segregation under apartheid, yet as Mabin points out, the results are often a 'broad failure of policy and planning to shift the conditions of life in the cities'. 'Fragmentation' is a recurring metaphor, one chosen to represent urban change in South Africa in a recent collection (Harrison et al 2003) reviewed in these pages (Mabin, this issue). Does this term have much or any meaning, and is it an appropriate tag to place on complexity? The papers presented here provide a variety of perspectives on this and other debates about post-apartheid urban transition. They also show the richness of the considerable literature on urban space, urban struggles and urban change which has characterised the last decade. This issue began with an offer by Alan Mabin to produce a translated version of a special issue on South African political geography by an Italian journal. It took on its own life but we do publish a couple of the pieces that were originally offered to us and only otherwise exist in Italian. Interested South Africans may be surprised to learn that urban issues in this region have been taken up and debated by scholars in Italy, France, Germany, Britain and the USA amongst other countries. Bénit and Gervais-Lambony's paper begins the debate by locating South [End Page i] Africa's cities in the contemporary moment, one characterised by the word 'globalisation', with all the meanings that might (or might not) inhere in that word. It is certainly the perception of city governments that globalisation is a script, dictated from the outside and unavoidable, to which South African cities must respond. This has a set of impacts that are carefully outlined by the authors. In particular, this script writes certain visible spaces within the city - the 'shop windows' - into the performance of global competitiveness, while writing other spaces - 'the back of the shop' - out of the play altogether. So much for a vision of achieving social justice for the poor: cities' images as attractive locations for global capital must be maintained, even at the expense of most of their citizens. If this is a bleak view, Zarina Patel's article does suggest that some success has been achieved in improving living environments through the implementation of sustainable development strategies such as Local Agenda 21 in South African cities, projects showcased at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. She highlights 'informal political activity leading to environmental change' that can be identified in South African cities, while at the same time noting that real political will is often lacking and institutional change needed. She is not very happy with the sustainable development paradigm, however. Instead she proposes a landscape approach that brings urban populations and their interface with the physical environment directly onto the centre stage in a less prescriptive way. It is useful however to move away from the present moment to view South African cities in the context of a broader sweep of history. This ambitious task is attempted by Alan Mabin, who sets post-apartheid change (which he argues has occurred in often unexpected ways) against the backdrop of South African urban history, in particular the history of urban segregation and all that that policy implied for cities. In charting changing forms of segregation in South African cities, Mabin tackles the controversial concept of 'fragmentation' and tries to assess its validity in the context of both apartheid-induced changes such as forced removal to...

SPATIALITIES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT TRANSITION: NOTES ON AND FOR A SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIAL JUSTICE DISCOURSE

ABSTRACT Drawing on theoretical debates encouraging the engagement of empirical investigation into the morality of specific places, the paper considers two key periods in the re-conceptualisation of the South African city and its bearing on the interpretation of the social justice concept during the transitional period 1994–2000. The research demonstrates that at the intersection of what these cities are interpreted to be and what they could be, multiple understandings of social justice were in evidence. It is found that these interpretations of social justice are not only constructed through very particular interpretations of South African urban history and its geography but also reveal conceptualisations of this concept less prevalent in contemporary geographical moral discourse. The paper concludes with remarks regarding the implications the research holds for understanding and investigating different types of social justice interpretations in South African cities.

‘Velddrift’: the making of a South African company town

Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long shadow cast by mining and the urban metropoles, with their centripetal pull on labour and the state, making the company town an archetypal urban form on the rural periphery.

BLANTYRE TRANSFORMED: CLASS, CONFLICT AND NATIONALISM IN URBAN MALAWI

There are good reasons why the remarkable outpouring of work on Southern African urban history that has taken place over the last twenty years has largely bypassed Malawi. To the overwhelmingly rural character of the Malawi economy must be added the weak impact of settler colonialism in the interwar period and hence the failure of Blantyre, one of the oldest colonial settlements in Central Africa, with a history going back to the foundation of the Blantyre mission in 1876, to develop as a substantial commercial centre. This feature was reinforced in turn by Sir Harry Johnston's decision, taken in 1891, to site the colonial capital at Zomba and by the construction in 1907 at Limbe, five miles from Blantyre, of the railway terminus for the protectorate.Urban development in Malawi was therefore not concentrated on a single dominant commercial and administrative centre, as was the case in neighbouring Tanganyika. Rather it was split between three equally impoverished settlements, containing small populations ranging in size in 1945 from approximately 4,600 in Blantyre and Zomba to 7,100 in Limbe. Far more Malawians, in consequence, experienced urban culture as labour migrants in Johannesburg or Salisbury, where an estimated 10,000 Malawians were living in 1938, than they did working at home.

South African urban history, racial segregation and the unique case of Cape Town?

Cape Town has enjoyed an academic and popular reputation for being the most relaxed of South African cities in terms of ‘race’ relations. Part of this reputation is based on the belief that there was much less segregation in Cape Town than elsewhere in southern Africa before Apartheid. This article reviews this contention. Attention is drawn to the extent of segregation that did exist in the city by the early twentieth century. In particular, an explanation is offered for its non‐residential forms, a hitherto neglected exercise in South African urban historiography. But the limits of segregation in Cape Town, the features that have contributed to its reputation for uniqueness, are also examined and explained. These include the existence of considerable ‘miscegenation’, an enduring non‐racial political tradition and the fact that social segregation was far from comprehensive. The task of explaining these occurrences necessarily involves exploring Cape Town as a place, and thus needs to be a work of urban history. Using Paul Maylam ‘s terminology, it needs to be a ‘history‐of‐the city’, not just the ‘history'‐in‐the city’ that has been the dominant form in South African historiography.

South African urban history

Johannesburg, in certain respects the Republic's leading urban centre, celebrates her centenary in 1986. Acquisitive citizens and indifferent officials have, however, long driven much of her past from the streets. Today carnival history is being manufactured hurriedly beyond remote tarmac parking grounds and behind ticketing turnstiles. Although its popularization is also overdue, scholarly interest in South African urban history fortunately has not attracted only whimsical attention. In the brief review which follows an attempt is made to sketch the outlines of the South African urban past, to capture the flavour of substantive research into South African urban history and to contour the intellectual climate in which this has been conducted and shaped. Emphasis is placed on research reported in scholarly outlets. Not unexpectedly there is a wide range of other publications which contain elements of urban historical interest, these ranging from newspapers and magazines to general historical texts and finely liveried, lavishly illustrated Africana. For the purposes of this presentation, the ‘modern period’ of South African urban history is closed during the 1950s.