The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: infrastructures and spaces of belonging ed. by Mamadou Diouf and Rosalind Fredericks (review)

This twelve-chapter volume, the outcome of a 2011 conference at Columbia University, New York, on the theme of ‘The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities’, aims to reconcile the two extremities between which recent scholarship on African urbanities has been trapped. These polarities are, after a fashion, ‘fable’ and ‘romance’. If writings in the ‘fable’ category tend to see very little that is good about African cities, and in fact tend to take a dark view of African socialities generally, those under the flag of ‘romance’ succumb too easily to analytic over-determination. To pathologize or to celebrate? The chapters in this volume attempt to chart the proverbial middle path, hoping to offer ‘a more culturally informed perspective on African politics’ by exploring how, across African cities, claims to citizenship are ‘enacted and contested by a diverse array of actors, across a range of innovative institutions, discourses, and material practices’ (p. 4).

Undermined all too often by the great difficulty of orienting a gaggle of academics in a consistent intellectual direction, most endeavours of this nature are liable to founder at the stage of execution. Not this one. The overall impression one gets from this smartly edited collection is of cohesion and cogency. All the chapters are thoughtfully and brilliantly written, and most of them riff on substantial ethnographic data to explicate the various repertoires of African self-production and community-making amid the lures and draws of multiple elsewheres. Whereas the ‘African crisis of citizenship’ tends to be casually invoked in more conventional writings, the chapters in this volume clarify the subject by closely examining the various infrastructures and spaces by and in which ordinary – and not so ordinary – agents make claims to belonging, thereby turning African cities into effervescent spaces for the continued enactment of deeply political dramas.

One of the organizing motifs of this collection is that the literature on cities in Africa is guilty of taking urban spaces and urbanites as more or less self-contained and otherwise severed from social experiences outside them. To correct this mis-apprehension, several chapters in the volume pay special attention to the dynamic relation between city and village, especially the ways in which the latter continues to exert influence on many urbanites, who, willy-nilly, must contend with changing imaginings and articulations of ‘home’, ‘origin’ and ‘belonging’.

The key contribution in this regard is Peter Geschiere’s analysis of funerals as a mode of tracking urbanites’ shifting imaginations of belonging, mobility and community. The chapter draws primarily on data from the author’s research in Cameroon, but, along the way, Geschiere makes critical detours into other African settings, eventually arriving at an intellectual destination in which funeral ceremonies emerge as critical moments for the apprehension of changing forms of identification and belonging.

Of late, cities as spatio-temporal emblems of African agents’ inexhaustible capacity for improvisation have provided fodder for much ‘Southern’ theorizing. The foremost thinkers in this nascent critical tradition are, in no particular order – and to name just a few – Garth Myers, the Comaroffs, Edgar Pieterse, Martin Murray, Sarah Nuttall, Achille Mbembe, Michael Watts and AbdouMaliq Simone (who has an interesting chapter here on the social dimensions of city-making in Africa). This volume adds a much needed analytic and conceptual layer to this engaging scholarship, with the important addendum that the contributions here take as provocation the key problem of unpacking citizenship through the ‘lived and imagined practices of city dwellers’ (p. 14). In this latter aim, the volume succeeds fully.

Nevertheless, the omission of the state as an object of analysis is striking, and I cannot help but wonder if this was dictated in any way by the resolutely anti-hegemonic focus of the book. No less puzzling is the absence of the internet, as important an infrastructure and ‘space’ of belonging as...