This essay seeks to historicize shifting views of colonial urbanism since the 1960s. Dualistic oppositions once dominated scholarly understandings of colonial cities, but more recently postcolonial visions of hybridity and indeterminacy have come to the fore. More than shifts in academic paradigms are at stake; indeed, such divergent discourses raise critical questions as to how we should interpret urban forms and processes more generally. Instead of championing either side, the author seeks to bring these ostensibly divergent perspectives together, arguing for a more integrated historical and analytic approach to urban landscapes. Rather than opposing colonial accounts and postcolonial narratives, materialism and discourse, social sciences and humanities, the real and the ideal, we need to articulate these frameworks in order to grasp the actual complexities of colonial urban dynamics. Analyzing flawed urban interventions in East Africa, the author shows how colonial dualities were often asserted but rarely imposed, simultaneously informed by fantasies and yet all too real.
Anthony D. King, "Writing Colonial Space,"Comparative Studies in Society and History37 (1995): 541-54.
2.
For some of the most important comparative accounts, see Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy (London: Routledge, 1990); Robert K. Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London: E & FN Spon, 1997); and Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991).
3.
Over a decade earlier, Redfield and Singer’s discussion of "heterogenetic" cities had obvious implications for colonial urbanism, but Abu-Lughod seems to have been the first to take up the topic in a sustained way. See Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, "The Cultural Role of Cities," Economic Development and Cultural Change 3 (1954): 53-73. R. V. Horvath followed up with an early piece in 1969 ("In Search of a Theory of Urbanization: Notes on the Colonial City," East Lakes Geographer 5 [1969]: 68-82), but the field really began to gain focus with Anthony King’s work in the mid-1970s, especially his Colonial Urban Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
4.
Janet Abu-Lughod, "Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo," Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (1965): 429-30. What is especially interesting in Abu-Lughod’s account is the way she quickly jumps from material or architectural circumstances to draw sweeping cultural conclusions. Despite physical proximity, the two cities, she asserts, "were miles apart socially and centuries apart technologically" (p. 431).
5.
For more on French urban policy in the North African context, see Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, 79-88; and Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 144-45.
6.
Raymond F. Betts, "The Problem of the Medina in the Urban Planning of Dakar, Senegal,"African Urban Notes4 (1969): 13.
7.
"Another striking feature [of Léopoldville] is the pre-Independence layout into two distinct parts: European and Congolese," writes La Fontaine. "The original European quarter of Kalina was separated from the African town, or the Cité Africaine, as it is called, by a cordon sanitaire of uninhabited ground, consisting of the golf course, the botanical gardens, and the zoo." J. S. La Fontaine, City Politics: A Study of Léopoldville, 1962-63 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 19. See also Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 70.
8.
See, among others, Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76-82; Garth Andrew Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 5; and Luise White, The Comforts of Home (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 46.
9.
Odile Goerg, "From Hill Station (Freetown) to Downtown Conakry (First Ward): Comparing French and British Approaches to Segregation in Colonial Cities at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,"Canadian Journal of African Studies32 (1998): 25-6.
10.
Goerg, for example, emphasizes the visual obviousness of dualism. In Conakry, she writes, the French "established a clear visual division in the city, obvious to any visitor. This form of social segregation . . . typified all French colonial cities." See Goerg, "From Hill Station."
11.
Maynard W. Swanson , "The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909,"Journal of African History18 (1977): 388.
12.
Achille Mbembe, "Aesthetics of Superfluity," Public Culture 16 (2004): 384. For a more extensive discussion of the history of state policies and "native locations" in South Africa, see Jennifer Robinson, "‘A Perfect System of Control’? State Power and ‘Native Locations’ in South Africa," Society and Space 8 (1990): 135-62.
13.
David Simon, "Third World Colonial Cities in Context: Conceptual and Theoretical Approaches with Particular Reference to Africa,"Progress in Human Geography8 (1984): 501.
14.
Home, Of Planting and Planning, 123ff.
15.
Rebecca M. Brown, "The Cemeteries and the Suburbs: Patna’s Challenges to the Colonial City in South Asia,"Journal of Urban History29 (2003): 151.
16.
Miriam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845-1875 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16-17. For other accounts of the black town/fort paradigm, see P. J. Marshall, "The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company," Modern Asian Studies 34 (2000): 307-31; Norma Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Towards the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Susan M. Neild, "Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Modern Asian Studies 13 (1979): 217-46.
17.
John L. Comaroff, "Reflections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere: Factions, Figments, Facts and Fictions,"Social Identities4 (1998): 321.
18.
For a selection of work developing these themes, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
19.
Ira Bashkow , The Meaning of Whitemen ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.
20.
Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. This tendency to overemphasize European dominance was a marked feature of some of the earliest colonial city studies. For a classic example, see R. V. Horvath’s "In Search of a Theory of Urbanization," East Lakes Geographer 5 (1969): 68-82.
21.
Zeynep Çelik , Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5-6.
22.
Brown, "The Cemeteries and the Suburbs,"158.
23.
Swati Chattopadhyay , "Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of ‘White Town’ in Colonial Calcutta," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 154, 157.
24.
Chattopadhyay, "Blurring Boundaries,"154.
25.
Brown, "The Cemeteries and the Suburbs,"157.
26.
Anthony D. King, "(Post)colonial Geographies: Material and Symbolic,"Historical Geography27 (1999): 100.
27.
King, "(Post)colonial Geographies,"108.
28.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 38-9.
29.
Garth A. Myers, "Narrative Representations of Revolutionary Zanzibar,"Journal of Historical Geography26 (2000): 435.
30.
John Middleton and Jane Campbell, Zanzibar: Its Society and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 37.
31.
As one European scholar in the 1960s stereotypically formulated the spatial and racial distinction between Stone Town and Ng’ambo: "Rather than calling it [urban Zanzibar] an oriental town, one should speak of an ‘Afro-Arabian’ town in the sense of a side-by-side existence of districts that are inspired by the ‘Orient’ and districts that qua housing hardly differ from African villages." Roelof Cornelis Harkema, "The Town of Zanzibar in the Later Half of the 19th Century" (University of Groningen: Ph.D. thesis, 1967), 54.
32.
Zanzibar Protectorate, Report on the Progress of the Development Programme for the Years 1946-1951 (Zanzibar: Government Printer, 1951), 30.
33.
A Guide to Zanzibar, 4th ed. (Zanzibar: Government Printer, 1952), 30-1. The guide, intended to stimulate tourism, was first compiled by an administrative officer, G. H. Shelswell-White, in 1932, and then revised numerous times in the 1940s and 1950s.
Michael Lofchie , Background to Revolution ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 8.
36.
For a fuller treatment of discursive representations and the politics of the revolution, see Garth Myers, "Narrative Representations."
37.
Ramachandran Menon, "Zanzibar in the Nineteenth Century: Aspects of Urban Development in an East African Coastal Town" ( UCLA: M.A. thesis, 1978), 41.
38.
For other works of the period, see Esmond Bradley Martin, Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978); Abdulaziz Lodhi et al., A Small Book on Zanzibar (Stockholm: Författares Bokmaskin, 1979); and Anthony Clayton, The Zanzibari Revolution and Its Aftermath (London: Archon, 1981). These external treatments need to be seen in tandem with Swahili novels of the period, especially those of Shafi Adam Shafi and Said Ahmed Mohamed. For an English-language analysis of these texts, see Myers, "Narrative Representations," 436-39.
39.
Abdul Sheriff , "The Spatial Dichotomy of Swahili Towns: The Case of Zanzibar in the Nineteenth Century," in Andrew Burton, ed., The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa, c. 1750-2000 (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2002), 77, 78.
40.
James de Vere Allen and Thomas H. Wilson, Swahili Houses and Tombs of the Coast of Kenya (London: Art and Archaeology Research Papers, 1979).
41.
For more on the shifting and contested nature of social identities on the coast, and especially the struggles of slaves and plebians to be culturally recognized and respected, see Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot (London: Heineman, 1995); Laura J. Fair, Pastimes and Politics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); and Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
42.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 25.
43.
Quoted in Betts, "The Problem of the Medina in the Urban Planning of Dakar, Senegal,"9.
44.
King, Urbanism , Colonialism, and the World Economy, 42.
45.
For more on the sociocultural dynamics of failed bureaucratic schemes, see my "From Iraq to Katrina and Back: Bureaucratic Planning as Strategic Failure, Fiction, and Fantasy,"Sociology Compass2 (2008): 1431-461.
46.
Sheriff, "The Spatial Dichotomy of Swahili Towns,"80.
47.
Dudley Sheridan Skelton, "Public Health Department Report for 1913,"Zanzibar National Archives (ZNA): BA7/1, 24.
48.
Skelton, "Public Health Department Report for 1913,"24.
49.
"Report on Sanitary Matters in the East Africa Protectorate, Uganda, and Zanzibar by Professor W. J. Simpson , C.M.G., M.D, F.R.C.P," ZNA: AB2/264, 9-10.
50.
Simpson, "Report on Sanitary Matters," 73.
51.
Simpson, "Report on Sanitary Matters," 73.
52.
Major Francis BarrowPearce, Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa ( London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), 211-12.
53.
Resident Pearce to Secretary of State for the Colonies A. Bonar Law, July 15, 1915, ZNA: AB2/264.
54.
Secretary of State for the Colonies to Resident Pearce, June 16, 1916, quoted in Chief Secretary R. H. Crofton, "Secret Memorandum on Town Planning," August 30, 1923, ZNA: AB 39/203.
55.
Dr. Henry Curwen , "Annual Report of the Public Health Department,"1916, ZNA: BA7/40, 2.
56.
Curwen, "Annual Report of the Public Health Department," 18.
57.
"Annual Report of the Medical Division,"1919 , ZNA: BA7/42, 1.
58.
"Annual Report of the Public Health Division,"1919, ZNA: BA7/42, 21.
59.
R.H. Crofton, Zanzibar Affairs, 1914-1933 (London: Francis Edwards, 1953), 158.
60.
H.V. Lanchester , Zanzibar: A Study in Tropical Town Planning (Cheltenham: Burrow, 1923), 57.
61.
Lanchester, Zanzibar: A Study in Tropical Town Planning, 67.
62.
Lanchester, Zanzibar: A Study in Tropical Town Planning, 11.
63.
Garth A. Myers, "From ‘Stinkibar’ to the ‘Island Metropolis’: The Geography of British Hegemony in Zanzibar," in Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 220. Myers later notes that "a number" of Lanchester’s housing proposals "were not fully enacted" but the substantial failures of the plan and its ambiguous status are never fully addressed.
64.
Sheriff, "The Spatial Dichotomy of Swahili Towns,"81.
65.
Chief Secretary Crofton, "Secret Memorandum on Town Planning, ZNA: AB 39/203, 23.
66.
J.H. Thomas to High Commissioner R.T. Coryndon, July 10, 1924, ZNA: AB39/203.
67.
Secretary of State for the Colonies to High Commissioner, Zanzibar, January 14, 1925, ZNA: AB39/203.
68.
Secretary of State for the Colonies to Acting British Resident, Zanzibar, September 26, 1931, ZNA: AB39/203.
