Urbanization and

African Cultures

Urbanization and

African Cultures

Edited by

Toyin Falolaand

Steven J. Salm

Carolina Academic PressDurham, North Carolina

Copyright © 2005Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Urbanization and African cultures / edited by Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm.p. cm.

“Chapters presented here were originally presented at an international confer-ence on ‘African Urban Spaces: History and Culture’ held at the University ofTexas at Austin from March 28 to April 30, 2003”—Ack.

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 0-89089-558-9

1. Urbanization—Social aspects—Africa—Congresses. 2. City and town life—Africa—Congresses. 3. Popular culture—Africa—Congresses. 4. Urban geogra-phy—Africa—Congresses. 5. City and town life in literature—Congresses.I. Falola, Toyin. II. Salm, Steven J., 1966- III. Title.

HT384.A35 U729 2004307.76'096—dc22 2004020241

Carolina Academic Press700 Kent St.

Durham, NC 27701Telephone (919) 489-7486

Fax (919) 493-5668www.cap-press.com

Printed in the United States of America

For Michel Doortmont and Axel Harneit-Sievers, two great friends

Contents

Acknowledgments x

Contributors xi

Part AMaking Sense of African Cities

Chapter 1 Urban Cultures: The Setting and the Situational 3Toyin Falola

Chapter 2 Urban Cultures: Relevance and Context 17Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

Part BFictions

Chapter 3 Ambivalent Spaces and the Carnivalesque in Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard 25Tera Maxwell

Chapter 4 Spaces and Boundaries in Zula Sofola’s Song of a Maiden 41Daintee Glover Jones

Chapter 5 The Urban Heroine in Nigerian Female Fiction 51Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku

Chapter 6 The Plight of Poor Women in Modernity and Tradition in Tess Onwueme’s Tell It To Women and Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen 63Juluette F. Bartlett-Pack

Chapter 7 Urban Spaces and Lost Voices in Tess Onwueme’s Tell It to Women 81Elizabeth Brown-Guillory

Chapter 8 The African City and Heteroglossia in the Works ofBuchi Emecheta 89Dennis M. Lensing

Chapter 9 Soyinka’s First Fieldtrip 107Bernth Lindfors

vii

Part CPopular Cultures

Chapter 10 The Decolonization of Ghanaian Popular Entertainment 119E. John Collins

Chapter 11 Creating the Postcolonial City: Urban Youth Clubs in Senegal 139Susann Baller

Chapter 12 Meanings and Challenges of Modern Urban Music in Senegal 155Ndiouga Benga

Chapter 13 Popular Music, Identity, and the Lumpen Youth of Nairobi 167Steven J. Salm

Chapter 14 Strategic Minstrelsy: Les Têtes Brulées and the Claim for Black Modernism 185Dennis M. Rathnaw

Chapter 15 From Coal Depot to Cesária’s Home: Mindelo at theCrossroads of the World 201João M. Monteiro

Chapter 16 Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations PublicEvents in a Tuareg Setting 211Susan Rasmussen

Chapter 17 Durban Works 235Barbara Harlow

Chapter 18 Thron Church: An Urban Religion in Cotonou 247L. Djisovi Ikukomi Eason

Chapter 19 Wagogo Leo! The Production of Rural Culture in UrbanDar es Salaam 259Gregory H. Maddox

Chapter 20 Welcome to Our Hillbrow: An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism 267Neville Hoad

Chapter 21 Linguistic and Sociocultural Hybridization in Senegalese Urban Spaces 279Fallou Ngom

Chapter 22 Nigerian Pidgin English, Urban Spaces and the Constructionof Social Identity 295Attah Anthony Agbali

Chapter 23 Ojuelegba: The Sacred Profanities of a West African Crossroad 323Bibi Bakare-Yusuf and Jeremy Weate

Part DHistories and Complexities

Chapter 24 Residential Segregation in African Cities 343Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

viii Contents

Chapter 25 Celebrating the Hybridity of Cultures: History, Power, and Identity in Kutigi since 1770 357Constanze Weise

Chapter 26 The Influence of the Family on the Rise of Igbo State Unionism in Urban Colonial Nigeria 1916–1966 385Raphael Chijioke Njoku

Chapter 27 Law, Change, Human Rights, and Development in South Africa 405C.M. van der Bank

Chapter 28 Where There Is a Way There Is a Will:How Traditional African Homesteads Reflect the Legal Consequences of Succession 417David Taylor

Chapter 29 African Cities and the Globalization of Disease:The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 433Matthew M. Heaton

Index 451

Contents ix

Acknowledgments

The chapters presented here were originally presented at an international confer-ence on African Urban Spaces: History and Culture held at the University of Texas atAustin from March 28 to April 30, 2003. The conference brought together scholars ofAfrican urban studies from different parts of the world to discuss important issues inthe field. We want to thank all the contributors who, despite security and financial con-cerns, traveled long distances to be with us in Texas. Presenters and participants en-gaged in lively discussion throughout the three-day period and spent time revising theirpapers for publications in the subsequent months.

Such an undertaking does not come without copious debts. We are grateful to a hostof graduate students (Kirsten Walles, Tyler Fleming, Ann Genova, Matthew Heaton,and Christian Jennings); the technical personnel (Sam Saverance and Peter Sieges-mund); and many staff of the University of Texas (Laura Flack and Martha GailMoore). The organizations and departments that supported us financially include theDepartments of History and English, the Center for African and African AmericanStudies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Office of the Vice President, the LBJSchool of Public Affairs, the University Co-Op, and the Urban Issues Program. The es-says by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch were translated by Ann Cooper, to whom weexpress our gratitude. Sam Saverance worked with the illustrations.

x

xi

Contributors

Anthony Attah Agbali is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Anthropology atWayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. An ordained Catholic Priest, he has stud-ied Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies and Communications (Radio and Televi-sion), with degrees from the University of Ibadan, and Pontifical Urban University,Rome, Italy. His far ranging research interests relates to the themes of Religion andSpirituality, Social Movements, Human Rights, Development, International Migrationand social structures and systems. His personal interests and hobbies include music,writing and avid reading, photography, and composing poetry.

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf is an independent scholar. Her research interests focus on feministtheory and politics, cultural studies and phenomenology. She graduated with a PhD inInterdisciplinary Women and Gender Studies from the University of Warwick. She iscurrently working on issues of love, intimacy and sexuality amongst Yoruba women.

Susann Baller studied African Studies, Political Science and Musicology at Humboldt-Uni-versity of Berlin. She has just started writing her doctoral thesis in African History. Herspecific area of research are urban youth clubs and soccer in a suburban area of Dakar.Currently she is a recipient of a study fellowship of the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin andassisting Professor Abdul Sheriff in his research about dhows in the Indian Ocean.

Ndiouga Benga is a senior lecturer with the Department of History, University CheikhAnta Diop, Dakar, Senegal. He has taught courses and researched into urban contem-porary processes in a long perspective. His present work is on urban violence, streetsarts and the individualization process. He was a recipient of Social Science ResearchCouncil, Africa Program Fellowships in 2002.

Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Ph.D., is a playwright, performing artist, and professor of Eng-lish at the University of Houston. She has written twelve plays, published three books,and dozens of essays on black women’s theater and has given more than one hundredlectures and creative presentations nationally and internationally. Her most recent playWhen the Ancestors Call was performed May 1-June 15, 2003, at Eta Creative Arts Foun-dation in Chicago. She is at work on Hoodoo Blues: Conjuring in Alice Childrens’ Plays.

John Collins has been active in the Ghanaian/West African music scene since 1969 asa band leader, music union activist, journalist and film/radio consultant. He has pub-

xii Contributors

lished six books on African popular music. Collins obtained his first degree (sociologyand archaeology) from the University of Ghana in 1972 and his doctorate in ethno-musicology at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994. In 1987 made anhonorary life-member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music(IASPM). During the 1990s, Collins was technical director of the three-year joint Uni-versities of Ghana/Mainz African Music Redocumentation Project, and for seven yearswas with the Ghana National Folklore Board of Trustees/Copyright Administration.He is currently an associate professor in Department of Music at the University ofGhana at Legon where he has been teaching since 1995. He is also manager of BokoorRecording Studio, acting chairman of the BAPMAF African Popular Music ArchivesNGO, and leader of the Local Dimension, a highlife band.

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch is professor emeritus of modern African history at theUniversity Paris-7-Denis-Diderot, and adjunct professor at State University of NewYork at Binghamton, Department of Sociology. She trained numerous French speak-ing African historians in Paris and in African universities. She has published manybooks, two of which have been translated into English: Africa South of the Sahara, En-durance and Change, the University of California Press (1987), and African Women, aModern History, Westview Press (1998). A third one is forthcoming: African Urbaniza-tion from the Beginnings to Colonialism, Markus Wiener, Princeton. She has edited morethan twenty books on African studies and the third world and received the 1999 ASA(African Studies Association) Distinguished Africanist Award in Philadelphia. She hasbeen a member (2000-2005) of the ICHS (International Conference of Historical Sci-ences) international Bureau since August 2000.

Louis Djisovi Eason received the Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from BowlingGreen State University, where he is a faculty member, Director of Education Transfor-mations through Cultural Arts, and Coordinator of the Drum Circle for World Peace.His specialized area of research is Ifa/Fa traditions among the Yoruba and the Fon andamong African Americans in the United States.

Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Lit-erature at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Resistance Literature(1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies ofRevolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Ori-entalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999). She is currently working on an intellec-tual biography of the South African activist, Ruth First.

Matthew M. Heaton is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. His re-search focuses on the history of medicine and witchcraft in Nigeria.

Neville Hoad is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University in 1998 and from1998 to 2001 was a Harper/Schmidt postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.He has published articles on questions of sexuality in colonial and contemporary Africain GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Development Updateand in several anthologies.

Contributors xiii

Daintee Glover Jones is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University ofHouston. Her research focuses on contemporary dramatic literature written by womenof the African diaspora. Her published works include biographical entries for BlackDrama Biographies (Myrtle Smith Livingston) and An Ann Poetry Encyclopedia (Hi-lary Holladay). Her essay, “Zulu Sofola and Feminist Consciousness,” appeared in Nige-ria in the Twentieth Century.

Dennis Lensing is adjunct professor in the Liberal Studies Division of Huston-Tillot-son College, a historically black college in Austin, TX. He is presently a Ph.D. candi-date in English literature at the University of New Mexico, researching and writing hisdissertation on postwar American fiction and the construction of a new consumeristethic. His essay “Pariah among Pariahs: Images of the IV Drug User in the Context ofAIDS” appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of Americana: The Journal of American Popu-lar Culture, 1900-Present, and he won the South Central Modern Language Associa-tion’s 2001 Gender Studies Award for his essay “Hymen as Hydra in Fanny Hill.”

Bernth Lindfors, a Professor of English and African literatures at the University ofTexas at Austin, has written and edited a number of books on African literature andperformance, including Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (1999),Black African Literature in English, 1992-1996 (2000), and Africa Talks Back: Interviewswith Anglophone African Writers (2002).

Gregory H. Maddox is an associate professor of history at Texas Southern Universityin Houston. He is the author of several pieces on the environmental history of Tanza-nia and on the production of historical knowledge among the Gogo people of centralTanzania. His book, Writing the Gogo: An Intellectual History, is forthcoming.

Tera Maxwell is a Ph.D. student of English literature at the University of Texas at Austinwith a concentration in ethnic and third world literature. Her research in FilipinoAmerican literature focuses on the Filipina domestic worker and the trauma of glob-alization. Her interests range from trauma and memory, to the novel as a genre.

Joao M. Monteiro is an assistant professor of sociology at Salve Regina University inNewport, Rhode Island. He has a Ph.D. from Drew University, and has lectured at sev-eral colleges and universities in the New England region. From 1997 to 2000, he wasfield director for the summer program in Cape Verde at the University of Rhode Island/ Rhode Island College. His article “Heroes, Ghosts and Politicians: Amilcar Cabral andthe Democratic Transition in Cape Verde” will appear in Liberation Philosophy: The Lifeand Thoughts of Amilcar Cabral, edited by John Fobanjong and Thomas Ranuga, cur-rently under review. His areas of interest include Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean di-aspora, religion, immigration, and development issues.

Fallou Ngom, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of French & Linguistics in the Depart-ment of Modern and Classical Languages at Western Washington University. His re-search focuses primarily on the interaction between African languages and non-Africanlanguages in Senegal, West Africa. His scholarly works have appeared in The Interna-tional Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural De-velopment, Encyclopedia of the World’s Major Languages, The Studies in the LinguisticSciences, and The French Review. He is the author of two books on linguistics.

xiv Contributors

Raphael Chijioke Njoku, Ph.D., was a lecturer in the Department of History/PoliticalScience, Alvan Ikoku College of Education, Owerri, Nigeria. His publications have ap-peared in several books and journals.

Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku who holds a B.A. and an M.A in English from the University ofIbadan, Nigeria, is presently teaching in the Department of Languages at the FederalPolytechnic Oko, Anambra State, Nigeria. She has published in journals and books, in-cluding Nigeria in the Twentieth Century edited by Toyin Falola.

Juluette Bartlett Pack, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English at Texas Southern Uni-versity where she teaches Africana literature, and the University of Phoenix at Hous-ton, Texas. She completed her graduate study at the University of Houston focusing onliterature of diverse cultures. Her dissertation is titled Promoting Empowerment ForWomen: Women Between Modernity and Tradition in The Works of Tess Onwueme. Dr.Bartlett Pack’s research focuses on literature including drama and fiction of women ofcolor in the African diaspora. Her essay, “Modernity and Tradition in the plays of TessOnwueme,” appeared in Nigeria in the Twentieth Century.

Susan Rasmussen is professor of anthropology at the University of Houston, Texas. Sheis author of three books: Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg(Cambridge 1995), The Poetics and Politics of Tuareg Aging: Life Course and PersonalDestiny in Niger (Northern Illinois University Press 1997); and Healing in Community:Medicine, Contested Terrains, and Cultural Encounters among the Tuareg (Bergin & Gar-vey 2001). Her articles on religion, gender, aging, ethnographic analysis, and issues ofrepresentation and artisan roles appear in such journals as American Anthropologist,American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Anthropological Research,Africa, and Journal of American Folklore. She is currently writing a book on Tuaregherbalism and issues of religion, science, and gender.

Dennis M. Rathnaw holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an M.M, fromthe University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicol-ogy at Texas, focusing on Central African popular music. His research includes the in-teraction between media and politics in the production of bikutsi in Cameroon, whilehe is specifically interested in people’s creative response to, and use of, global media.Rathnaw founded, and for five years has directed Easy Motion Tourist, an Afro-popband.

David Taylor is an associate professor at the University of South Africa. He is also anattorney and provides consultancy services specializing in IT law. David also has pub-lished in the field of IT and IT law, language and law and indigenous law. He wasawarded the principal’s prize for the most promising young legal researcher for2001–2002.

C.M. van der Bank, raised on a farm in the South African Bushveld, obtained a BA(Cum Laude) at Pretoria University, B Proc, LL B and LLM at Unisa, and an LL.D atPU for CHE during 2002. Dr. Bank is currently employed by the Vaal Triangle Tech-nikon as a principal lecturer and has published three books on Human Rights.

Jeremy Weate is a philosopher and independent scholar. His research focuses on threemain areas: existential phenomenology, race theory and architectural theory. He grad-

Contributors xv

uated with a Ph.D. in European philosophy from the University of Warwick in 1998.He has taught at the University of Warwick, the Architectural Association, the BartlettSchool of Architecture, The University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art. He iscurrently working on a book on invisibility.

Constanze Weise has conducted extensive fieldwork in Nigeria and archival researchin Nigeria, United Kingdom, and the U.S. on the cultural history of the pre-colonialNupe kingdom and its successor states with special focus on kingship rituals, festivalsand ceremonies. She is presently completing a doctoral thesis on history and memoryamong the Nupe in the field of historical anthropology in the Department of Anthro-pology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.