Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
African cities
Chair: tbc
Although there have been numerous impressive monographs and edited collections, there is little doubt that African urban history is underdeveloped and uninstitutionalised compared to its European or American counterparts. There are still very few national or continental comparative studies. There has also been a tendency in much African historiography to essentialise cities as (for instance) 'the colonial city', 'the apartheid city, or 'the Islamic city'. This may have reduced the likelihood of urban historians of the 'north' drawing on African comparisons, or indeed occasionally learning from theoretical insights achieved by Africanists. Or indeed of Africanists drawing fruitfully on some of the very rich variety of urban historiography - and its theoretical and methodological underpinnings - that clearly exists for Europe and North America. The first paper in this panel raises such questions explicitly, while two case studies - of citizenship and respectability in a colonial West African city and utopias and dystopias in South African 'apartheid' cities - do so implicitly.
Abstracts
Historiographical trends and comparative urban history in Africa
Laurent Fourchard (Insititute d’etudes politique de Bordeaux)
For some time now European and American urban historians have been writing both comparative continental research and increasingly global urban comparative analysis from a European perspective. In the absence of a similar comparative approach of Africa’s urban past, however, it may be very difficult to identify specificities of the continent’s cities without avoiding the risk of orientalising and essentialising the African city. In a recent past, some important debates on Africa have effectively been driven by a few essentialist paradigms (the Islamic city, the colonial city, the apartheid city) which have however been challenged by many historians. With the rise of African urban history since the late 1970s, monographs and edited collections have all led to a better understanding of Africa’s urban past. Despite this, it is still uncertain whether urban history has become a distinct subfield of research with its own particular concerns, agenda, methodology and theoretical background. The academic literature is extremely scattered, there is not one uniform way of writing the history of urban Africa while the numerous contributions of non-urban historians and of other disciplines (anthropology, geography, sociology, planning) represent an un-unified body of research which has to date challenged the few attempts to write a comprehensive and comparative history of urban Africa. This panel would like to address the trends and limits of urban historiography in Africa as well as to discuss the attempt of writing comparative history within the continent or between some African cities and cities of other continents.
Urban citizenship and respectability in interwar Yourubaland
Ruth Watson (University of Cambridge)
The interwar period in colonial Yorubaland is notable for the development of new forms of political association, at both the regional and local levels. At the regional level, the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) emerged in 1920, predominantly to give a voice to the ‘Black British’ gentlemen of colonial Accra, Lagos and Freetown. The Nigerian branch was riven by infighting and competition and never really succeeded in offering a coherent political forum to its constituent members. For this reason it has generally been dismissed as a political failure by nationalist historians. This paper will argue that such a view obscures an understanding of how the rise of this form of politics was rooted in the development of new forms of urban citizenship that were fundamentally parochial, yet sought to draw upon wider notions of ‘respectability’ and ‘Englishness’, in addition to ideas of Garveyism, as part of a broad cultural repertoire. In this sense, the Nigerian branch of the NCBWA ironically had more in common with the local ‘Progressive Unions’ established in many Yoruba towns and cities during the 1930s, than with the Nigerian nationalist movement. This paper aims to develop an analysis of the cultural content of these regional and local political movements by taking a view from the Yoruba city of Ibadan. It will draw upon the personal archive of a Yoruba gentleman, Akinpelu Obisesan, who was closely involved with Ibadan politics at this time.
Utopia and dystopia in South African cities of the imagination, 1940s–1970s
Vivian Bickford-Smith (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR/University of Cape Town),
International debate about the problems and prospects of South Africa grew apace after the Second World War. The advent of an Afrikaner Nationalist government advocating apartheid coincided with the slow movement of much of the rest of the world away from legislated racism and segregation. Central to criticisms and defences of post-war South Africa in a range of media was how to interpret developments in the cities where wartime import-substitution and rural impoverishment had led to the rapid acceleration of rural-urban migration and industrialisation. Interpretations and debate, in both ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ accounts of the South African city, were accompanied by utopian and dystopian imagery that dramatised or ‘proved’ particular arguments. This paper explores the evolution of the debate and the connections between such imagery in literature and film. Alan Paton’s best-selling novel Cry the Beloved Country, and its screen adaptation, provided a pessimistic and enduringly influential interpretation of South African urbanisation. The ‘discovery’ of the black slum by the Reverend Kumalo was a key feature of Paton’s urban dystopia. The title of Paton’s novel echoed Andrew Mearns’ Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and drew international attention to a new ‘dark region of poverty, misery, squalor and immorality’ in the world: shanties and slums that blighted the great metropolis of Johannesburg. Numerous subsequent depictions of South African cities in a variety of media drew on Paton’s bitter ‘Cry’ and the dystopian urban imagery of the African slum that accompanied it, even if their (white or black) authors could come to sometimes dramatically different conclusions as to causes or cures. And utopian imagery, most obviously in depictions of the great modern metropolis in city histories and films, explicitly or implicitly imagined cities without slums. How cities were imagined had consequences of course: not least for urban policies and urban identities.
