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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].
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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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87 Péclard and Hagmann, Negotiating statehood, 541.

88 Ibid.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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).