Global Urban History

Liora Bigon, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Reflecting on Africa’s urban past in the context of African history and as part of a global phenomenon is a challenging mission situated at the intersection of three subfields of research: African history, urban history, and global history. The complexity of this task is further intensified since each of these subfields is framed by its own “psyche” of historiographic mentality, which is sometimes surprisingly positional. An eighteenth-century missionary report from the capital city of M’banza-Kongo could be considered as symptomatic:  In this report, the missionary complained about being able to cross the entire capital city without seeing a single house in the surrounding greenery of the equatorial. [[i]] In other words, urbanity in Africa is disavowed while Africa’s bucolic image is strengthened. The depiction of towns in sub-Saharan Africa as “villages” is persistent throughout the ages from Rousseau’s “noble savage” to nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonial accounts. This perspective has been carried directly into some recent urban-studies textbooks. Thus, Peter Hall writes in the introduction of his book Cities of Tomorrow:

“This is supposed to be a global history, yet – given the all-too-evident confines of space and of the author’s competence – it must fail in the endeavor. The resulting account is glaringly Anglo-Americocentric. That can be justified, or at least excused: as will soon be seen, so many of the key ideas of twentieth-century western planning were conceived and nurtured in a remarkably small and cosy club based in London and New York. But this emphasis means that the book deals all too shortly with other important planning traditions, in Spain and Latin America, in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, in China. Those must provide matter for other books by other hands.” (p. 6)

Pre-colonial house on Gorée Island, Senegal. While this permanent architecture and imported materials are identified with the upper métis classes, the labor force was African. As a product of the transatlantic slave trade among other exchanges, it stands as a vociferous visual evidence of African slaves who are muted in the archival records. Photo by Liora Bigon.

Continue reading →