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Urbanization and urban history in West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

J. D. Y. Peel
J. D. Y. Peel
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , April 1980 , pp. 269 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Hodgkin, Thus T. began his account of nationalism in Nationalism in Tropical Africa (London, 1956Google Scholar) with a chapter on ‘The New Towns’.

2 People of the Zongo, xi.Google Scholar

3 Cf. the journal African Urban Notes, begun 1964Google Scholar; also Southall, A. (ed.), Urban Anthropology (New York, 1973Google Scholar), a book of readings, many on Africa, which contains an excellent bibliography of over 100 pages by P. C. W. Gutkind. There is a further bibliography, of well over 100 pages, in W. J. and Hanna, J. L., Urban Dynamics in Black Africa: an Inter-disciplinary Approach (1971).Google Scholar

4 Urban Anthropology, 34.Google Scholar

5 ibid. 150.

6 For this formulation see Castells, M., The Urban Question: a Marxist Approach (1972, English edn. 1977), 9Google Scholar, but it is commonly made by urban sociologists and geographers.

7 Cohen, A. (ed.), Urban Ethnicity (1974)Google Scholar, which contains, in addition to Cohen's introduction, an essay by Schildkrout on her Kumasi zongo material and one by Lloyd on ethnicity and inequality in Warri (one of the few sources on this town), and several dealing with East Africa and elsewhere, but of theoretical relevance.

8 Some of the detail, too, is not reassuring: we are told T. B. Freeman was the first European to visit Kumasi (Bowdich? Dupuis?); it is both banal and inapposite to call Dahomey ‘a small black Sparta’; and a great deal is begged in the brief characterization of the effects of the slave trade (Urbanization and Social Change, 14–15).Google Scholar

9 Little, K., West African Urbanization (Cambridge, 1965).Google Scholar

10 Abrams, P. and Wrigley, E. A. (eds.), Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1978), 9–33.Google Scholar

11 Urbanization and Social Change, 108Google Scholar, introducing a section of Miner, H., The Primitive City of Timbuctoo (1953, new edn.Garden City, 1965):Google Scholar

12 The tradition runs directly from its Chicago origins in Redfield and Wirth, (‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, Amer. J. Soc. xliv, 1938)Google Scholar to Bascom, W. R. (‘Urbanization among the Yoruba’, Amer. J. Soc. lx, 1955)Google Scholar. A recent brief treatment is Lloyd, P. C., ‘The Yoruba: an Urban People?’, in Southall, A. (ed.), Urban Anthropology, 107–23.Google Scholar

13 Krapf-Askari, Eva, Yoruba Towns and Cities: an Enquiry into the Nature of Urban Social Phenomena (Oxford, 1969), 20Google Scholar. Note the urban essentialism implicit in the book's subtitle.

14 See Law, Robin, ‘Towards a history of urbanization in pre-colonial Yorubaland’, in African Historical Demography (Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1977), 260–71.Google Scholar

15 Further argued in Peel, J. D. Y., ‘Kings, titles and quarters; a conjectural history of Ilesha. Part II: Institutional Growth’, History in Africa (forthcoming, 1980).Google Scholar

16 Towns in Societies, 31.Google Scholar

17 As Gugler, and Flanagan, , Urbanization and Social Change, 21Google Scholar, recognize. The term ara oko (lit: ‘person of the farm’, village-dweller or ‘bushman’) is one vehicle of this cultural valuation.

18 For Hausa see Smith, H. F. C., ‘Some considerations relating to the formation of states in Hausaland’, J. Hist. Soc. Nig. v (1970), 329–46;Google ScholarHill, P., Rural Hausa (Cambridge, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in the glossary s. vv. birni, gari, unguwa. For Akan, see Dunn, J. and Robertson, A. F., Dependence and Opportunity: Political Change in Ahafo (Cambridge, 1973), 17ff.Google Scholar; Wilks, I., Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), 374–87;Google ScholarBrokensha, D., Social Change at Larteh (Oxford, 1966)Google Scholar, chap, v, ‘The Brongs’.

19 Busia, K. A., Report on a Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi (Accra, 1950).Google Scholar

20 Acquah, Ione, Accra Survey (London, 1958).Google Scholar

21 Brokensha, op. cit. n. 18 above. Skinner, E. P., African Urban Life: the Transformation of Ouagadougou (Princeton, 1974).Google Scholar

22 African Urban Life, 448–9.Google Scholar

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24 Lloyd, P. C., Mabogunje, A. L. and Awe, B. (eds.), The City of Ibadan (Cambridge, 1967).Google Scholar

25 Post, K. W. J. and Jenkins, G. D., The Price of Liberty (Cambridge, 1973).Google Scholar

26 Owusu, M., Use and Abuse of Political Power (Chicago, 1970).Google Scholar

27 Hopkins, N. S., Popular Government in an African Town: Kita, Mali (Chicago, 1972).Google Scholar

28 Paden, J. N., Religion and Political Culture in Kano (Berkeley, 1973).Google Scholar

29 Dahl, R. A., Who Governs? (New Haven, 1961).Google Scholar

30 Urban Politics in Nigeria, 53–4.Google Scholar

31 ibid., 139–41; also 175–6.

32 ibid. 121.

33 Peace, A. J., ‘Prestige, power and legitimacy in a modern Nigerian town’, Can. J. Afr. Stud, xiii (1979).Google Scholar

34 Urbanization and Political Change, 24, 211.Google Scholar

35 ibid. 110. Because the rise of Islam is treated as indicative of ‘the resilience of traditional norms and structures in an urban environment’ (282), the portrayal of indigenous Lagos as a kind of sociological fossil is accentuated. In fact Islam's adoption, largely during the period 1880–1910, was a major facet of Lagos's response to colonization, and led to demands for changes in ‘native law and custom’ (cf. Gbadamosi, T. G., The Growth of Islam among the Yoruba 1841–1908, 69)Google Scholar. Only if the social relations of Lagos are given proper recognition as a historical object, can this Islamization be explained. Even Gbadamosi, unfortunately, does little to satisfy us.

36 Cole, P. D., Traditional and Modern Elites in the Politics of Lagos (Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar

37 Cohen, A., Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: a Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns (Manchester, 1969).Google Scholar

38 ibid. 150–60. Cohen was well aware of the wider context of Tijaniyya's general advance in the 1950s (and of which Paden has now given a much more satisfactory account), so it was odd he still considered the Hausa in Ibadan Sabo adopted it because ‘it provided solutions to some of the political problems they faced as a result of the coming of party politics’ (152) – a rather striking instance of a perennial danger in urban history, the overdetermination of phenomena by factors specific to the urban social system.

39 The way Schildkrout has integrated this kinship analysis as an essential part of the argument stands in contrast to its more gratuitous presence in Skinner's Ouagadougou study, as noted above.

40 Dyos, H. J. (ed.), The Study of Urban History (1968).Google Scholar

41 J. Foster, in Dyos, op. cit. 281–99, also his Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: the Early Industrial Revolution in Three English Towns (1974).Google Scholar

42 For example Jeffries, R., Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana: the Railwaymen of Sekondi (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Peace, A. J., Choice, Class and Conflict: a Study of Southern Nigerian Factory Workers (Brighton, 1979).Google Scholar

43 Clark, C. G., Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Growth and Social Change 1692–1962 (Berkeley, 1975).Google Scholar

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45 It is significant that the volume of material dealing with Africa, Asia and Latin America submitted to the Town Planning Review (Liverpool), the premier journal in the field, led to the establishment in 1979 of a new, parallel journal, Third World Planning Review.

46 King, A. D., Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (1976)Google Scholar. The general point is brilliantly made by a geographer, Wheatley, P., in his essay City as Symbol (1969)Google Scholar. For a West African case study which uses the urban layout both as the representation of a political structure and as the means to a historical reconstruction, see Peel, J. D. Y., ‘Kings, titles, quarters: a conjectural history of Ilesha’, History in Africa, vi (1979), esp. 130–8.Google Scholar