On the Growth of African Cities

Abstract

An impressive feature of modern Africa is the rise of many new towns. The problems of urban unemployment, education, planning, development, and social welfare hold the attention of many Africans and Africanists; there is a wide range of urban topics worthy of study. My purpose here, however, is to speculate on the location, the growth, and the modernization of new African cities. To be brief, and to exclude cities like Cairo and Cape Town which have existed for centuries, I shall deal only with middle Africa. It is well known that there were only a few urban centers in middle Africa in pre-colonial times: Ibadan and other Yoruba towns in Nigeria, Sudanic centers such as Kano and Timbuktu, Aksum and later Ethiopian towns, East Coast trade centers like Mombasa, and vanished cities like Zimbabwe are examples (Steel 1961). One result of European contact and colonialism was the establishment of small coastal trading centers. Some were temporary trading posts, others surf ports that flourished for decades or centuries before declining. And a few persisted and grew into modern cities. Often a decision as to which would be an administrative center, a starting point for a railway, or the site for an improved harbor started a process of rapid growth for the favored centers and of eventual decline for the others.

Quenching the thirst of rapidly growing and water-insecure cities in sub-Saharan Africa

“…As colonial cities, they were created to serve as military barracks and economic entrepôts for trade (imports and exports). Often located along a coast and/or major rivers, many colonial capitals flourished as trading centres when they were administrative headquarters and hosted harbours linked to the countryside by railways (Horvath, 1969;Thomas, 1970;Coquery-Vodrovitch, 1991). As they became capitals of newly independent states, they consolidated their political, administrative, intellectual and economic roles.…”