Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T02:14:36.143Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BETWEEN WORLD HISTORY AND STATE FORMATION: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON AFRICA'S CITIES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2011

LAURENT FOURCHARD
LAURENT FOURCHARD*
Affiliation:
Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Les Afriques dans le monde, Institut d'Études Politiques de Bordeaux
*
Author's email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The dramatic urban change taking place on the African continent has led to a renewed and controversial interest in Africa's cities within several academic and expert circles. Attempts to align a growing but fragmented body of research on Africa's urban past with more general trends in urban studies have been few but have nevertheless opened up new analytical possibilities. This article argues that to move beyond the traps of localism and unhelpful categorizations that have dominated aspects of urban history and the urban studies literature of the continent, historians should explore African urban dynamics in relation to world history and the history of the state in order to contribute to larger debates between social scientists and urban theorists. By considering how global socio-historical processes articulate with the everyday lives of urban dwellers and how city-state relationships are structured by ambivalence, this article will illustrate how historians can participate in those debates in ways that demonstrate that history matters, but not in a linear way. These illustrations will also suggest why it is necessary for historians to contest interpretations of Africa's cities that construe them as ontologically different from other cities of the world.

Keywords

Apartheidcivil societycolonialcrimeculture/culturaleconomicpostcolonialpowerprecolonialstateurban
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , July 2011 , pp. 223 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article could not have been written without the advice of the following friends and colleagues: Vivian Bickford-Smith, Denis Constant Martin, Vincent Foucher, Henri Médard, Jenny Robinson, Samuel Thomas and Jean-Louis Triaud. It has also benefited from some insightful comments when it was presented at the following conferences: Anglo-American Conference of Historians, University of London, July 2009; African Center for cities, University of Cape Town, March 2009; Centre d'Etude d'Afrique Noire, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux, January 2010. I must also thank the several anonymous reviewers of the journal for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

1 UN Habitat, The State of African Cities, 2008, A Framework for Addressing Urban Challenges in Africa (Nairobi, 2008), 4.

2 Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, ‘Rapid urbanization a major challenge for Africa’, 16 February 2010, Wilton Park, Sussex, accessible at: http://www.unhabitat.org.

3 Christine Kessides, The Urban Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction (Washington, 2006); UN Habitat, State of the World's Cities, 2010–2011, Bridging the Urban Divide (London, 2008), 50.

4 Brenner, Neil, ‘Global cities, local states: global city formation and state territorial restructuring in contemporary Europe’, Review of International Political Economy, 5:1 (Spring 1998), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Rem Koolhaas et al., ‘Lagos, Harvard Project on the city’, in Arc en Rêve centre d'architecture (ed.), Mutations, événement culturel sur la ville contemporaine (Bordeaux, 2000); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London, 2006); UN Habitat, The Challenge of Slums, Global Report on Human Settlements (London, 2004).

6 See recently Bates, Robert, ‘State failure’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11 (2008), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herbst, Jeffrey, ‘Responding to state failure in Africa’, International Security, 21:3 (1997), 120–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an urban dimension of this analysis see ‘Cities in fragile states’, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, and Crisis States Research Center at: http://www.crisisstates.com/download/publicity/CitiesBrochure.pdf.

7 Dominique Malaquais, ‘Cosmopolis: de la ville, de l'Afrique et du monde’, Politique africaine, 100 (Décembre 2005-Janvier 2006); Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities. Between Modernity and Development (London, 2006). AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come. Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham and London, 2004); Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Johannesburg, Durham, 2008).

8 See, however, Bill Freund, The African City: a History (Cambridge, 2007); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, History of African Cities South of the Sahara, From the Origins to Colonization (Princeton, 2005); Renata Holod, Attilio Petruccioli and André Raymond, The City in the Islamic World (Leiden, 2008); Andrew Burton (ed.), The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa, c. 1750–2000 (Nairobi, 2002).

9 H. J. Dyos, ‘Urbanity and suburbanity’, quoted in David Anderson and Richard Rathbone (eds.), Africa's Urban Past (Oxford, 2000), 9.

10 See for instance, Simone, For the City; Carole Rakodi (ed.), The Urban Challenge in Africa: Growth and Management of its Large Cities (Tokyo, 1997); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, 1999).

11 Patrick Le Gales, European Cities: Social Conflicts and Governance (Oxford, 2002), 27. For overview papers criticizing this bias in African urban history, see Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, ‘The process of urbanization in Africa from the origins to independence: an overview paper’, African Studies Review, 33:4 (1991), 1–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fourchard, Laurent, ‘L'histoire urbaine en Afrique: une perspective ouest africaine’, Histoire Urbaine, 9 (2004), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christopher Saunders, Writing History: South Africa's Urban Past and Other Essays (Pretoria, 1992), 12, 22.

12 According to Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question, Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 91.

13 Georg Iggers and Edwar Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harlow, 2008), 391.

14 Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1998); Nuttall and Mbembe, Johannesburg, 25.

15 Quoted in Pierre Yves Saunier, ‘Global city, Take 2: a view from urban history’, in Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen (eds.), Another Global City. Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York, 2008), 20.

16 See the pioneer works of Charles Van Onselen, New Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (Johannesburg, 1982); Frederick Cooper (ed.), Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills, 1983).

17 For a critique of this particular reading of the apartheid city see Sarah Nuttall and Mbembe, Achille, ‘A blasé attitude: a response to Michael Watts’, Public Culture, 17 (2005), 198Google Scholar.

18 Didier Péclard and Hagmann, Thobias, ‘Negotiating statehood: dynamics of power and domination in Africa’, Development and Change, 41:4 (2010), 541CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Despite an increasing (but very uneven) integration of the continent's economy into the world economy, the 19th century does not necessarily represent a radical change in Africa's urban past. To integrate the development of ancient and early modern cities remains beyond the scope of my current pursuit.

20 Richard Alston, The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt (New York and London, 2002), 366–7.

21 Abu-Lughod, Janet, ‘The Islamic City: historical myth, Islamic essence and contemporary relevance, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 19 (1987), 155–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Raymond, André, ‘Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and recent view’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 21 (1994), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 David Philipson, Archaeology of Aksum 1993–1997 (Nairobi and Addis Ababa, 2000); Roderick J. McIntosh, Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organising Landscape (Cambridge, 2005).

23 Jean-Louis Triaud, ‘L'islam en Afrique de l'Ouest. Une histoire urbaine dans la longue durée’, in Adriana Piga (ed.), Islam et villes en Afrique au sud du Sahara. Entre soufisme et fondamentalisme (Paris 2003), 129.

24 This paradigm is still at the core of recent productions such as Michael R. T. Dumper and Bruce E. Stanley (ed.), Cities of The Middle East and North Africa: a Historical Encyclopaedia (Santa Barbara, 2007), xix–xx; Susan Slyomovics (ed.), The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History (London, 2001).

25 Freund, The African City, 45, 62; Coquery-Vidrovitch, Histoire des villes, 36–7.

26 For the different urban colonial projects see Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London, 1997); Mia Muller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian imperialism (London and New York, 2007); Hélène Vacher, Villes coloniales aux 19ème et 20ème siècles. D'un sujet d'action à un objet d'histoire (Algérie, Maroc, Libye et Iran), Essais et guide bibliographique (Paris, 2005).

27 For a world analysis see Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), 188–91.

28 See the special edition of the Journal of Southern African Studies, 21:1 (1995) co-edited by Hilary Sapire and Jo Beall; Harries, Patrick, ‘Histoire urbaine de l'Afrique du Sud: nouveaux axes de réflexion’, Le Mouvement Social, 204 (2003), 17–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Oxford, 2000), xix.

30 Garth Andrew Myers, Verandas of Power. Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (Syracuse, 2003); Zeynep Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley, 1997).

31 Cooper, Frederick, ‘Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), 1516–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andreas Eckert, ‘Urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial West Africa’, in Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong (ed.), Themes in West Africa's History (Oxford and Ohio, 2006), 213.

32 John Lonsdale, ‘Town life in colonial Kenya’, in Burton, The Urban Experience, 221; Parnell, Susan, ‘Race, power and urban control: Johannesburg's inner city slum-yards, 1910–1923’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29 (2003), 615–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tsuneo Yoshikuni, African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Social History of Harare before 1925 (Harare, 2007), 2.

33 Maylam, ‘Explaining the apartheid city’, 34; Suzann Parnell and Mabin, Alan, ‘Rethinking Urban South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21:1 (1995), 61Google Scholar; Achille Mbembe and Nuttall, Sarah, ‘Writing the world from an African metropolis’, Public Culture, 16 (2004), 347–72Google Scholar; Mbembe and Nuttall, ‘A blasé attitude’, 198.

34 As mentioned by Bickford-Smith, Vivian, ‘Urban history in the new South Africa: continuity and innovation since the end of apartheid’, Urban History, 35 (2008), 288–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Robinson, Jennifer, ‘Cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35:1 (2011), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; AbdouMaliq Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at Crossroads (New York and London, 2010).

36 Georges Balandier, Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (Paris, 1955).

37 Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.), Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002); Fasil Demissie (ed.), Postcolonial African Cities. Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Predicaments (London and New York, 2007); Garth A. Myers and Martin J. Murray, ‘Introduction: situating contemporary cities in Africa’, in Myers and Murray (eds.), Cities, 8.

38 Simone, Abdoumaliq, ‘On the worlding of African cities’, African Studies Review, 44:2 (Sept. 2001), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Neil Brenner and Roger Keil (eds.), The Global Cities Reader (London, 2000), 10.

40 Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford, 2004).

41 Robinson, Jennifer, ‘Global and world cities: a view from off the map’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26:3 (2002), 531–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Josef Gugler (ed.), World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequality (Cambridge, 2004).

43 Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (eds.), Globalizing cities. A New Spatial Order? (Oxford, 2000).

44 Richard Grant, Globalizing City: The Urban and Economic Transformation of Accra, Ghana (Syracuse, 2009), 7.

45 James Ferguson, Global Shadows Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham and London, 2006), 37–8.

46 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.

47 Potts, Deborah, ‘The slowing of sub-Saharan Africa's urbanization: evidence and implications for urban livelihoods’, Environment and Urbanization, 21:1 (2009), 253–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; C. Beauchemin and Bocquier, Philippe, ‘Migration and urbanization in francophone West Africa: a review of the recent empirical evidence’, Urban Studies, 41:11 (2004), 2245–72Google Scholar.

48 UN Habitat, The State of African Cities, 3.

49 See for instance, Yves A. Faure and Pascal Labazzée (eds.), Socio-économie des villes africaines: Bobo et Korhogo dans les défis de la décentralisation (Paris, 2002); Matthieu Hilgers, Une ethnographie à l'échelle de la ville. Urbanité, histoire et reconnaissance à Koudougou (Burkina Faso) (Paris, 2009); Eric Denis, Villes et urbanisation des provinces égyptiennes, vers l'oeucuménopolis (Paris 2006).

50 Only a minority of ex-slaves found wage labour in towns but statistical collection during the early colonial period was haphazard according to Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988), 33–7.

51 Robin Law, Ouidah: the Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (Athens and Oxford, 2004), 5; Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City, Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2007), 7–8.

52 Ibid. 193–7; Law, Ouidah, 184, 201, 223; Lovejoy, Transformation in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983, 1995), 222–5; Raymond R. Gervais and José Curto, C., ‘The population history of Luanda during the late Atlantic slave trade, 1781–1844’, African Economic History, 29 (2001), 46Google ScholarPubMed; Jose Curto, C., ‘The anatomy of a demographic explosion: Luanda, 1844–1850’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 32, (1999), 401CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge, 1995), 44.

53 Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge, 2000).

54 As in the case of Mali and the town of Man, see Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durhan and London, 2006).

55 Mann, Slavery, 8–14.

56 Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Oxford, 2001).

57 Mann, Native Sons, 15, 79.

58 Ibid. Brigitte Reinwald, ‘Citadins au future? L'insertion dans anciens combattants dans l'espace urbain de Bobo–Dioulasso’, in Jean-Luc Vellut, Villes d'Afrique. Explorations en histoire urbaine (Paris, 2007), 179–200.

59 Frederick Cooper, Decolonisation and African Society, the Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996).

60 Eckert, Andreas, ‘Regulating the social: social security, social welfare and the state in late colonial Tanzania’, Journal of African History, 45:3 (2004), 489CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in South-western Nigeria (Portsmouth, 2003).

62 Carolyn Brown, We Were All Slaves, African Miners, Culture and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (London, 2003); Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, City of Steel and Fire: a Social History of Atbara, Sudan's Railway Town, 1906–1984 (Portsmouth, Oxford, 2002); Severine Awenengo, Hélène Charton, Odile Goerg, Steven Robins, ‘Urban planning, housing, and the making of “responsible citizens” (Dakar, Nairobi, Conakry, Cape Town)’, in Simon Bekker and Laurent Fourchard (eds.), Governing Africa's Cities in Africa (Pretoria, forthcoming).

63 K. Hansen and M. Vaa (eds.), Reconsidering Informality: Perspectives from Urban Africa (Upsala, 2004); Paul Zeleza, ‘The spatial economy of structural adjustment in African cities’, in P. Zeleza and E. Kalipeni (eds.), Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels: African Cultural and Economic Landscapes (Trenton, 1999). For a global southern perspective, see Nezzar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy, Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia (Lanham, 2004).

64 Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Marie Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi (eds.), Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, 2002) 3.

65 Teresa Barnes, We Women Worked so Hard: Gender, Urbanisation and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930–1956 (Oxford, 1999); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); Judith A. Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890–1940 (Oxford, 2002); Claire Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990 (Bloomington and Indianapolis 1997). On the involvement of women in illegal liquor trade see Justin Willis, Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850–1999 (Oxford, 2002); Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth and Oxford, 1996).

66 For two different examples see Barbara Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, 1997); Rebekah Lee, African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa (London, 2009).

67 Sophie Didier, Mariane Morange, Margot Rubin, Jean-Fabien Steck, ‘Informality, public space and urban governance. Evidence from Abidjan, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lomé and Nairobi’, in Bekker and Fourchard, Governing; Lindell, Ilda, ‘The multiple sites of urban governance: insights from an African city’, Urban Studies 45 (2008), 1879–901CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Alice Sindzingre, ‘The relevance of the concepts of formality and informality: a theoretical appraisal’, in B. Guha-Khasnobis, R. Kanbur, and E. Ostrom (eds.), Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies (2006, Oxford).

69 Fourchard, Laurent, ‘Lagos, Koolhaas and partisan politics in Nigeria’, International Journal of Urban and International Research, 35:1 (2011), 40–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Edgar Pieterse, ‘Exploratory notes on African urbanism’, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, June 2009. Malaquais, Dominique, ‘Villes flux: imaginaires de l'urbain en Afrique aujourd'hui’, Politique africaine, 100 (2006), 17–37Google Scholar; Nuttall and Mbembe, Johannesburg, 10–15; Simone, For the City.

71 Simone, ‘On the worlding’, 28

72 As mentioned by Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 91.

73 Terence Ranger, Bulawayo Burning. The Social History of a Southern African City, 1893–1960 (Oxford, Rochester, Harare, 2010), 131–66.

74 Charles-Didier Gondola, Villes miroirs. Migrations et identités urbaines à Kinshasa et Brazzaville, 1930–1970 (Paris, 1996), 137–270. For following periods, see Janet Mac-Gaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Oxford, 2000); Bob White, Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu Zaïre (Durham, 2008).

75 Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Oxford, 2000).

76 Gary Kynoch, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999 (Athens, Pietermaritzburg, 2005).

77 David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge, 2004), 139; Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge, 1987), 63–74; Triaud, ‘L'islam’, 136–40.

78 Timothy Cleaveland, ‘Timbuktu and Walata: lineages and higher education’, in Samil Jeppie and Soulemane Bachir Diagne (eds.), The Meaning of Timbuktu (Cape Town, Dakar, 2008), 79.

79 Mark Horton and John Middelton, The Swahili: the Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford, 2000), 18–20, 182–3; Thomas Vernet, ‘Les Cités Etats swahili de l'archipel de Lamu, 1585–1810, Dynamiques endogènes, dynamiques exogènes’, PhD, University of Paris 1 (2005), 385–7.

80 Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (London, Nairobi, 1995), 4.

81 Ibid. 62, 76; Jean Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa, c. 1884–1914 (Oxford, 2006), 18.

82 See the classical works by Max Weber, Die Stadt (Tubingen, 1947); Charles Tilly and Wim P. Blockmans (eds.), Cities and the Rise of States in Europe AD. 1000 to 1800 (Boulder, 1994); and more recently, Patrick Legales, European Cities; Brenner, New State Spaces; Bernard Lepetit, ‘La ville moderne en France: Essai d'histoire immédiate’, in J. L. Biget and J. C. Hervé (eds.), Panoramas Urbains. Situation de l'histoire des villes (Fontenay, 1995), 173–207.

83 John Peel, D. Y., ‘Urbanization and urban history in West Africa’, Journal of African History, 21 (1980), 273CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 King, Anthony, ‘Colonialism, urbanism and the capitalist world economy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13 (1989), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James D. Tarver, Urbanisation in Africa: A Handbook (London, 1994); Coquery-Vidrovitch, Histoire des villes, 219–24; Freund, The African City, 62, 65.

85 Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa. The Politics of Belly (London, 1993); Achille Mbembe, De la Postcolonie. Essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine (Paris, 2000) Jean-François Médard (ed.), Etats d'Afrique noire. Formations, mécanismes et crise (Paris, 1991); Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale, 1994).

86 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa. Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, New Jersey, 2000).

87 Péclard and Hagmann, Negotiating statehood, 541.

88 Ibid.

89 See ‘Cities in fragile states’ analysis produced by the London School of Economics; Mariano Aguirre, ‘Crisis of the state, violence in the city’ and Jo Beall, ‘Urban governance and the paradox of conflict’, both in Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (eds.), Megacities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (London, New York, 2009), 107–20 and 141–52.

90 Péclard and Hagmann, Negotiating statehood, 542–3.

91 Lund, Christian, ‘Twilight institutions: public authority and local politics in Africa’, Development and Change, 37:4 (2006), 673–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Honke, Jana, ‘New political topographies. Mining companies and indirect discharge in Southern Katanga (DRC)’, Politique africaine, 120 (2010), 105–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biundo, Giorgio, ‘Dealing with the local state, the informal privatization of the street-level bureaucracies in Senegal’, Development and Change, 37:4 (2006), 799–819Google Scholar.

92 Mogens H. Hansen, ‘The concepts of city state and city state culture’, in Mogens Herman Hansen, A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (Copenhagen, 2000), 14; Jean-Chrétien, Pierre, ‘Les capitales royales de l'Afrique des Grands Lacs peuvent-elles être considérées comme des villes?’, Journal des Africanistes, 74 (2004), 282–91Google Scholar; Richard Reid and Henri Médard, ‘Merchants, missions and the remaking of the urban environment in Buganda’, in Anderson and Rathbone, Africa's Urban Past, 98–108.

93 Paul Lovejoy, Slavery, Commerce and Production in the Sokoto Caliphate of West Africa (Trenton, 2005), 152–206; Robert Griffeth, ‘The Hausa city states from 1450 to 1804’, in Hansen, A Comparative Study, 488.

94 Cleaveland, ‘Timbuktu’.

95 Griffeth, ‘The Hausa city’.

96 Graham Connah, ‘African city walls: a neglected source?’, in Anderson and Rathbone (eds. ), Africa's Urban Past, 36–51.

97 Parker, Making the Town, 46–7.

98 Akyeampong, Drink, 23, 52.

99 Ruth Watson, Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan: Chieftaincy and Civic Culture in a Yoruba City (Athens, Oxford, Ibadan, 2001), 16–28.

100 Ibid. 28.

101 John D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, 2000), 30.

102 Ibid. 31.

103 Law, Ouidah, 81.

104 Parker, Making the Town, 6.

105 Ibid. 238.

106 As suggested by Herbst, States and Power, 15.

107 Parker, Making the Town; Diouf, The French colonial policy; Watson, Civil Disorder; Fuller, Mia, ‘Preservation and self-absorption: Italian colonization and the walled city of Tripoli, Libya’, Journal of North African Studies, 5 (2000), 121–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Zenep Celik, Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Terpak (eds.), Walls of Algiers. Narratives of the City through Text and Image (Berkeley, 2009); Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili and the Making of the Mijikanda (Oxford, 1993), 3; Adeboye, Olufunke, ‘The changing conception of elderood in Ibadan, 1830–2001’, Nordic Journal of African Studies, 16:2 (2007), 261–78Google Scholar.

108 Lonsdale, Town life; P. Mutibwa,The Buganda Factor in Uganda Politics (Kampala, 2008).

109 J. Iliffe, The African Poor: A History (Cambridge, 1987), 202–7; J. Lewis, Empire State-Building. War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952 (Oxford, Nairobi, Athens, 2000), 21.

110 Myron Echenberg, Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945 (Portsmouth, Oxford, Cape Town, 2002); Christelle Taraud, La Prostitution coloniale, Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962) (Paris, 2003); Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961 (Oxford, Dar es Salaam, Athens, 2005); Fourchard, Laurent, ‘Lagos and the invention of juvenile delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–1960’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 115–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar issue in Europe, see Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999).

111 Pierre Yves Saunier, ‘Global city’, 21.

112 Bierschenk, Thomas and Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre, ‘Local powers and a distant state in rural central African Republic’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 35:3 (1997), 441–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Simon Bekker and Goran Therbon (eds.), Capital Cities of Africa (Dakar, Pretoria, 2011).

114 Bryan R. Roberts, ‘Comparative urban systems: an overview’, in Tienda, Marta, Findley Sally, Tollman Stephen, Presthon-Whyte Eleanor (eds.), African Migration and Urbanization in Comparative Perspective (Johannesburg, 2006), 71–114.

115 Péclard and Hagmann, ‘Negotiating Statehood’, 542; Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940. The Past of the Present (Cambridge, 2002), 182–3.

116 Béatrice Hibou, Privatising the State (London, 2004).

117 Lund, ‘Twilight Institutions’, 688.

118 Karen Vlassenroot and Büscher, Koen, ‘Humanitarian presence and urban development: new opportunities and contrasts in Goma, DRC’, Disasters, 34:2 (2010), 256–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Theodore Treffon, Parcours administratifs dans un Etat en faillite: récits de Lubumbashi (RDC) (Tervuren, Paris, 2007); Badiey, Nasseem, ‘The local dynamics of statebuilding in Juba, Southern Sudan (2005–2008)’, Politique africaine, 122 (forthcoming in 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

119 Cheikh Gueye, Touba, la capitale des mourides (Paris, Dakar, 2002); Schmitz, Jean ‘Le souffle de la parenté. Mariage et transmission de la baraka chez les clercs musulmans de la vallée du Sénégal’, L'Homme, 154 (2000), 241–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120 As suggested by Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996), 289–93.

121 Lonsdale, ‘Town life’, 214; Akyeampong, Drink, Power, 95–116; Jeremy Rich, A Workman is Worthy of his Meat. Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (Lincoln and London, 2007); Benjamin N. Lawrence, Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’: Periurban Colonialism in Togo's Eweland (Rochester, 2007).

122 The question is to establish whether political and social contestations will be increasingly urban-based in the near future as it was already the case in 1980s South Africa. See Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South-Africa, 1983–1991 (Cape Town, Oxford, Athens, 2000).

123 Philip H. Frankel, An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and its Massacre (Johannesburg, 2001); Anthony A. Douglas, Poison and Medicine: Ethnicity, Power and Violence in a Nigerian City, 1966–1986 (Portsmouth, Oxford, Cape Town, 2002), 86–118; Joël Glassman, ‘Les corps habillés. Genee des méties de police au Togo (1885–1963)’, Phd., University of Paris 7, 2011.

124 Janin, Pierre, ‘Faim et politique: mobilisations et instrumentations’, Politique africaine, 119 (2010), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125 Bayat, Asef, ‘From “dangerous classes” to “quiet rebels”. Politics of the urban subaltern in the global South’, International Sociology, 15:3 (2000), 533–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

126 Isaac Olabwale Albert, ‘NURTW and the politics of motor parks in Lagos and Ibadan’, in Laurent Fourchard (ed.), Gouverner les villes d'Afrique. Etat, gouvernement local et acteurs privés (Paris, 2007), 125–38; Patrick Haenni, L'Ordre des caïds. Conjurer la dissidence urbaine au Caire (Paris, Le Caire, 2005); Johan Smedt, De, ‘“No Raila, no peace!” Big man politics and election violence at the Kibera grassroots’, African Affairs, 108:433 (2009), 581–98CrossRefGoogle ScholarZaki, Lamia, ‘L’électrification temporaire des bidonvilles casablancais. Aspects et limites d'une transformation “par le bas” de l'action publique. Le cas des Carrières centrales', Politique africaine, 120 (2010), 45–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 David Anderson, ‘Corruption at City Hall: African housing and urban development in colonial Nairobi’, in Burton, The Urban Experience, 138–54; Momar Cumba Diop and Mamadou Diouf, ‘Pouvoir central et pouvoir local. La crise de l'institution municipale au Sénégal’, in Sylvy Jaglin and Alain Dubresson (eds.), Pouvoirs et cités d'Afrique noire. Décentralisations en question (Paris, 1993), 101–26; Sandra Barnes, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos (London, 1986).

128 Péclard and Hagmann, ‘Negotiating statehood’, 552.

129 D. Anderson and D Killingray, Policing the Empire. Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester and New York, 1991).

130 Jeremy Seekings, ‘Social ordering and control in the African townships of South Africa: an historical overview of extra-state initiatives from the 1940s to the 1990s’, in W. Scharf and D. Nina (eds.), The other law: non-state ordering in South Africa (Cape Town 2000); Kynoch, Gary, ‘Friend or Foe? A world view of community-police relations in Gauteng townships, 1947–1977’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 37:2/3, (2003), 298–327Google Scholar; Pratten, David, ‘The politics of protection: perspectives on vigilantism in Nigeria’, Africa, 78:1 (2008), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131 See for a general overview of this recent phenomenon, Claire Bénit-Gbaffou, Seyi Fabiyi and Elizabeth Peyroux (eds.), Sécurisation des quartiers et gouvernance locale (Paris 2010).

132 Fourchard, Laurent, ‘A new name for an old practice: vigilante in South Western Nigeria’, Africa, 78:1 (2008), 6–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meagher, Kate, ‘Hijacking civil society: the inside story of the Bakassi Boys vigilante group of South-Eastern Nigeria’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 45:1 (2007), 89–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

133 Young, Crawford, ‘The end of the post-colonial state in Africa? Reflections on changing African political dynamics’, African Affairs, 103:410 (2004), 23–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

134 Lund, ‘Twilight institutions’.

135 Ibid. 701.

136 What is referred to as ‘Le gouvernement privé indirect’ by Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie, 95–138.

137 Lund, ‘Twilight institutions’, 697.

138 Peter Clark, Jean-Luc Pinol, Lees Lynn Hollen, ‘Generalization and synthesis in European urban history’, 9th International Conference of Urban History, Comparative History of European Cities, University of Lyon, 28 Aug. 2008.

139 Well epitomized by the collective book edited by Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, 1969).