Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
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7 Cohen, A. (ed.), Urban Ethnicity (1974)Google Scholar, which contains, in addition to Cohen's introduction, an essay by Schildkrout on her Kumasi zongo material and one by Lloyd on ethnicity and inequality in Warri (one of the few sources on this town), and several dealing with East Africa and elsewhere, but of theoretical relevance.
8 Some of the detail, too, is not reassuring: we are told T. B. Freeman was the first European to visit Kumasi (Bowdich? Dupuis?); it is both banal and inapposite to call Dahomey ‘a small black Sparta’; and a great deal is begged in the brief characterization of the effects of the slave trade (Urbanization and Social Change, 14–15).Google Scholar
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38 ibid. 150–60. Cohen was well aware of the wider context of Tijaniyya's general advance in the 1950s (and of which Paden has now given a much more satisfactory account), so it was odd he still considered the Hausa in Ibadan Sabo adopted it because ‘it provided solutions to some of the political problems they faced as a result of the coming of party politics’ (152) – a rather striking instance of a perennial danger in urban history, the overdetermination of phenomena by factors specific to the urban social system.
39 The way Schildkrout has integrated this kinship analysis as an essential part of the argument stands in contrast to its more gratuitous presence in Skinner's Ouagadougou study, as noted above.
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45 It is significant that the volume of material dealing with Africa, Asia and Latin America submitted to the Town Planning Review (Liverpool), the premier journal in the field, led to the establishment in 1979 of a new, parallel journal, Third World Planning Review.
46 King, A. D., Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (1976)Google Scholar. The general point is brilliantly made by a geographer, Wheatley, P., in his essay City as Symbol (1969)Google Scholar. For a West African case study which uses the urban layout both as the representation of a political structure and as the means to a historical reconstruction, see Peel, J. D. Y., ‘Kings, titles, quarters: a conjectural history of Ilesha’, History in Africa, vi (1979), esp. 130–8.Google Scholar