The African City: A History

The African City: A History. By Bill Freund. New Approaches to African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 214; 27 illustrations. $55.00 cloth, $19.99 paper. Urban formations are indigenous to and characteristic of the African continent, and have long been sites of dynamic innovation and interaction with foreign populations. This is the underlying premise of Bill Freund's sophisticated yet accessible book. It adds to the recent growth of interest in urbanism in its multiple forms in Africa. It is alone, however, in discussing cities across the continent, rather than separating sub-Saharan and North Africa, and in including everything from the Bronze Age through modern case studies. In tone the author blends research from the social sciences and history with a frank humanism about changing quality of life. Freund is not quick to generalize, but rather steadily underscores the diversity of origins, organizing principles, and trajectories in numerous, well-integrated examples. Each chapter ends with a generous annotated bibliography. The first chapters, "Urban Life Emerges in Africa and African Cities" and "The Emergence of a World Trading Economy," focus on spatially and culturally disparate, yet sometimes surprisingly similar, urban forms that are found in places such as ancient Egypt and Aksum, Roman North Africa, the early West African savannah, Mbanza Kongo, the Zimbabwe Plateau, and the East, North, and West African regions influenced by conversion to Islam in the late first millennium. Freund handles questions of indigenous and foreign contributions to the emergence of urbanism in such regions, sifting through debates in the literature with an even hand. As regional populations enter into increasingly larger world systems in the first and early second millennia A.D., older African cities grew and new ones were founded in the context of trade and foreign immigration. In Chapter 3, "Colonialism and Urbanisation," Freund discusses older cities that were transformed through colonialism, and those newly founded to serve colonial exploits. He discusses how cities and rural areas were linked together through the traditional model of the urban-rural continuum, but also illuminates the ways in which individuals defied expectations, moving between life in cities and far-flung villages with rapidity and ease, and between the colony and metropole as well. Also explored here are the social strategies people used in the unevenly gendered colonial cities, including the re-formation of ethnic allegiances, the creation of voluntary associations, and the forms of resistance developed in the tension between colonial authorities and the vast urban populations. …