When a theme succeeds in summoning scholars to workshops and leads to the production of multiple published volumes, one knows it is achieving a strong position within a field of knowledge. In exactly this way, African Studies is embracing the urban. This collection succeeds a number of others published during this decade; the trend is a strong one (see Jane Guyer's review article in Africa 81 (3)).
This collection is varied and the quality of contributions good. One could describe it as a kind of advertisement for the work in progress of a range of interesting scholars. Locatelli demonstrates the way colonialism tried to order cities in a way that served the state's purposes. Her focus is Asmara, perhaps the most striking Italian colonial urban model, and her work shows us where to look for resistance to the imposition of this model, a familiar theme. By contrast, late colonialism saw the contradictions in rapidly expanding cities extend themselves. After independence, a new order was for long contested. In an important essay focused on Maputo, Paul Jenkins suggests that such an order is now gradually taking shape on the basis of class; his account is paralleled by the assessment offered by Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues of urban conditions in contemporary Angola under spectacular boom conditions. This is a very suggestive way of approaching urban change under relatively stable situations in contemporary Africa. The outcome of such a shift is perhaps less clear thus far in post-apartheid South Africa, where raw struggles over space are not hard to find, as Claire Bénit-Gbaffou indicates in looking at aspects of life in Johannesburg.
In some African cities, legitimacy and power still derive from the survival of even older structures, pre-colonial in origin. These play a role precisely because of the way they were successfully embedded in colonial times. Rufus Akinyele disrespectfully unclothes the activities of the so-called omo onile of Lagos and their purportedly ancient land claims. He highlights the contested nature of urban land ownership in cities and the barriers that still exist in many places to real accumulation through property speculation and sales in a conventional capitalist mode. Two rather different essays highlight one of the problematic aspects of African urban life – water supply – and conflicts over it. Tom McCaskie reveals through this the difficulties in the transformation of an old African town, Kumase, into a very large provincial city, complementing Akinyele while exploring the urban history of the colonial town. Muchaparara Musemwa shows the water problems created by urban growth in an arid environment and how they are resolved in tandem with the social structure. Bulawayo's experience so far may indicate the fate of other towns if predictions of global warming hold true. Théodore Trefon, who has done so much to develop our understanding of contemporary Congolese life, takes the peri-urban as a topic in itself and considers what it seems to mean in several central African settings. This is a very creative and important question that would repay far more research.
Finally, several essays reflect on the colonial heritage. Maria Suriano, whose research is centred on the provincial town of Mwanza in Tanzania, argues that cultural trends there reveal the extent to which the nationalist movement reached down to the mass of the urban population in late colonial times. The conditions of that period laid the stage for the urban culture to come. Two other essays are comparative and both suggest that the shadow of colonial ideas about urban dwellers may be long. Deborah Bryceson looks at Kampala and Dar es Salaam and rehearses why the former experiences ethnic tension so much more acutely than the latter. Her understanding of Dar es Salaam as a distinctive locale thus diverges from the way Suriano approaches Mwanza with an emphasis on the form of nationalism in Tanganyika. Elsewhere, the difference between colonial powers is stressed: Laurent Fourchard compares the presence and absence of distinct segregated neighbourhoods for ‘native strangers’ in colonial British and French West Africa; this is a far less frequently noted point and it is suggestive too in pointing to colonial times as a source of the existence or absence of later urban tensions.
We can only get so far by considering African cities generically. Social dynamics covering larger territorial spaces need to be integrated with the urban in sharpening our grasp of what is happening in answering some questions and, as several of these essays demonstrate, a long tranche of the city's history often needs to be assembled to make sense of developments. Yet there is also the necessity of recalling that understanding the distinctive nature of particular cities becomes critical, and this too needs publishing focus. There are questions to be asked of almost any city but the answers can be surprising; urban history is a history of individual cities as much or more than generic cities, in Africa as elsewhere.
