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8. Precolonial African Cities: Size and Density
- The University of Alabama Press
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African population and demography may be the least understood of any region in the world (Caldwell 1997). Nevertheless, numerous scholars have argued that patterns of population and urbanism in Africa are distinctive. In this chapter, we propose to explore the demography of African cities by ¤rst reviewing questions on African urbanization in general, including a review of the problems in estimating the population of African cities that are relevant to other regions. We will then examine the documentary and archaeological records that help elucidate the nature of African urban centers, noting their unusual dispersed settlement con¤gurations . We will close with a case study of Yoruba urban centers to illustrate the unique challenges facing the study of urban populations in Africa. African Urban Populations in Perspective In a recent synthesis of African history, Reader (1997:254) argued that Africa’s harsh environment, especially its endemic diseases, discouraged population growth and urbanism: While the out-of-Africa population soared from just hundreds (around 100,000 years ago) to 200 million (by 0 A.D.), and rose to just over 300 million in the next 1500 years, the African population increased from 1 million to no more than 20 million 100,000 years later (by 0 A.D.), and to only 47 million in A.D. 1500. . . . By leaving the tropical environments of the cradle-land in which humanity had evolved . . . [human groups who moved to Eurasia] also left behind the many parasites and disease organisms that had evolved in parallel with the human species. . . . Out of Africa, beyond the reach of the insects and organisms which had reinfected generation after generation, the multiplication of human numbers quickly assumed 8 Precolonial African Cities Size and Density Chapurukha Kusimba, Sibel Barut Kusimba, and Babatunde Agbaje-Williams a hitherto unprecedented scale. . . . Meanwhile, contemporary populations in the tropical African cradle-land remained constrained by debility and disease. . . . It explains why the rise of indigenous cities and civilizations in Africa had hardly begun when the migrants returned with foreign ideas of how it should be done. Reader’s estimates compare African and non-African population at three times (Table 8-1). Storey (1992) has highlighted the unreliable nature of most population statistics from the ancient world on which Reader’s ¤gures are based. Furthermore , much of Reader’s claim that European population in fact grows faster than African population is based on the ¤rst 100,000 years of his three-part comparison and on the questionable claim that the few hundred or so “modern humans ” who supposedly left Africa 100,000 years ago did not encounter and interact with populations of more archaic humans, as accepted by many paleoanthropologists (Foley and Lahr 1992). In fact, by Reader’s own estimates, African population grew relative to that of Eurasia from AD 1 to AD 1500. A close corollary of Reader’s argument is that the harsh environment, endemic diseases, and consequently small and slow-growing populations of Africa are a major reason why complex societies in Africa are rare and evolved later than in the rest of the world. He quotes Ki-Zerbo as saying: The very vastness of the African continent, with a diluted and therefore readily itinerant population living in a nature at once generous with its fruits and minerals, but cruel with its endemic and epidemic diseases, prevented it from reaching the threshold of demographic concentration which has almost always been one of the preconditions of major qualitative changes in the social, political, and economic spheres (Ki-Zerbo, quoted in Reader 1997:266). 146 kusimba, kusimba, and agbaje-williams [18.207.163.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:53 GMT) The idea that something intrinsic to Africa retarded the development of population and urbanism is a long-seated one in Western historiography, closely tied to the idea that Africa lacks history in general (Hegel 1965). Numerous factors have been isolated as the cause of Africa’s lack of cities, including climate, soil, diet, and isolation: The African continent suffers, and has suffered in the past, from many privations and serious general weaknesses. It would be impossible to list them all or to describe how at different times they have been better or worse. . . . One was the shallowness of the red lateritic soil[;] . . . another was the climatic limit on the number of days when the land could be worked; a third was the regular shortage of meat in most people’s diet (Braudel 1993[1963]: 124–125). Rather than attributing a tendency against urbanism...