The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa C. 1750-2000

Abstract

The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750-2000. Edited by Andrew Burton. Azania, special volume xxxvi-xxxvii. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2002. Pp. ix, 264; 48 illustrations. $24.00/ £15.00 / Kenyan Shs.1,600 paper. In recent years Africanist literature has seen a surge in work on urban history. Arising out of broader trends in social and cultural history, this work has returned to and reinvigorated a terrain explored primarily by economic historians, geographers, and sociologists in the decades prior to the 1980s. The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750-2000, edited by Andrew Burton and emerging out of an international conference held in Nairobi in 2000, not only exemplifies this new wave of urban history but also extends it in a number of topically unique and analytically productive directions. In addition to strong essays exploring colonial cities, the volume devotes considerable attention to precolonial urban forms and the social landscapes of small towns. Its geographical coverage is impressive (Eastern Africa being broadly interpreted here to encompass countries stretching from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe). Not least of its virtues, it brings together scholars based in Africa with colleagues working in North America, the United Kingdom, and Japan to showcase a breadth of methodologies and theoretical concerns. The collection is organized both thematically and broadly chronologically. Following Burton's well-written and comprehensive introduction tracing urban history in the region from the late eighteenth century onwards, the book is divided into four sections: precolonial urban centers, colonial order in urban East Africa, rural-urban interactions, and town life in colonial Nairobi and beyond. In extensively exploring topics that are too often given short shrift in African urban studies, the first and third sections -on precolonial urban formations and the importance to the urban experience of a rural and small-town scene-exhibit what are thematically the volume's most unique contributions. Giacomo Macola's examination of the royal capitals of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern Lunda polities southwest of Lake Tanganyika is notable for his focus on the centrality of these capitals for the construction of a "Lunda imperial mystique" that was critical to maintaining royal power. Macola's paper nicely complements Richard Reid's comparative investigation of the relationship between warfare and towns in the Ethiopian highlands and Buganda in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with both contributions making interesting arguments about the place of the urban, both physically and ideologically, in precolonial power. And underlining the importance of the precolonial urban past to the histories of colonial town planning that followed, Abdul Sheriff traces a history of Zanzibar town's precolonial development, one that compellingly situates the notion of a strictly segregated town as a colonial fantasy at odds with precolonial spatial politics. The section on small-town urbanism further enhances the unique character of the volume's thematic concerns. With a comparative focus on colonial Salisbury and Bulawayo, Tsuneo Yoshikuni convincingly analyzes ways in which both precolonial and agrarian histories shaped the development of these two urban centers -a dynamic that is more widely acknowledged than actually put into practice in work on twentieth-century African cities. …