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Reviewed by:
  • Urbanization and African Cultures
  • Kathryn Barrett-Gaines
Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm , eds. Urbanization and African Cultures. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2005. xv + 464 pp. Photographs. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliographies. Index. No price reported. Paper.

This book argues that cities in Africa are not simply colonial crossroads, but rather are quintessentially African; in them and because of them, Africans create new things. It does this on a grand scale: twenty-seven chapters by twenty-seven diverse contributors in fields ranging across music, literature, history, and sociology. The authors are, in addition to the usual suspects, independent scholars, graduate students, and emeriti. They are African and American, women and men, and their topics cover the gamut, from the Thron Church in Cotonou to a new form of Wolof in urban Senegal. However, the book's apparent comprehensiveness is undermined by the disproportionate focus on West Africa and Nigeria, in particular. The entire seven-chapter fiction section is devoted to Nigerian authors and works, leaving the reader with the impression that only Nigerians write about cities. West Africa is also over-represented in the popular culture section, which is led off by four chapters on Nigeria and three on Senegal; in this nineteen-essay section, only two essays look at East Africa and four at South Africa.

Despite the overwhelming focus on West Africa, valuable attention is paid to cities and urban phenomena off the paths beaten by most Western-trained scholars. There is a chapter about Kutigi in Nigeria, as well as a look at Mindelo on Cape Verde, for two centuries a crossroads of the Atlantic world. The fact that the author calls Mindelo the crossroads of the world is perhaps an unconscious reflection of the volume's Atlantic bias. Another chapter focuses on the Tuareg, a marginalized minority in the five West and North African nations where they now live, while chapter 14 is a particularly refreshing and detailed study of an idiosyncratic musical product of Cameroonian urban media, Les Têtes Brulées, complete with song lyrics.

Nevertheless, the book sometimes has the feel of a conference panel constructed late at night by fatigued conference organizers stacking together leftover papers that must be stretched to fit a catch-all theme. Chapter 4, for instance, does not address urbanization directly, although urban spaces are present in its focus on a play by Zulu Sofola. Another [End Page 167] instance of the book's following the authors rather than the authors' collaborating on the book is that chapters 6 and 7 are not only about the same Nigerian author, but the same novel as well!

Some contributions are highly theoretical. Susan Rasmussen, for example, takes on the ever-fascinating topic of history and memory in how images of the rural nomadic Tuareg appear and are used in urban popular culture in Saharan Africa. Gregory Maddox touches on the same topic in his very brief look at the Village Museum of Tanzania. There are two finely detailed studies in colonial history: one on residential segregation in colonial cities, the other on a twentieth-century influenza that was truly pandemic, from Freetown to Cape Town, from Zanzibar to Somaliland and Brazzaville. For some bewildering reason, books on Africa, it seems, must contain a chapter on customary law in South Africa, and this volume has two such chapters! These are at the end of a very long book, so perhaps fatigue or impatience clouded my ability to see how they fit into the theme of urbanization.

Those wondering if this book would be a useful addition to their library would find that some cities and urban cultural forms are highlighted in worthwhile detail: Nigerian fiction and drama; youth culture in Senegal and Nairobi; Bikutsi music in Yaoundé; commemoration of Mano Dayak in Saharan and Sahelian Africa; recent literature on Durban; the Thron Church in Cotonou; representations of Gogo culture in Tanzania; Phaswane Mpe's novel on Johannesburg; urban Wolof; Nigerian Pidgin English; Ojuelegba in Lagos; and the Gani Festival in Nigeria. Particular cities given detailed attention are Dakar, Nairobi, Yaoundé, Mindelo, Durban, Cotonou, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Kutigi.

Kathryn Barrett-Gaines
University of Maryland Eastern Shore
Princess Anne, Maryland...

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