The African city in European eyes

‘… the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of ‘human nature.’ Or, when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance, and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind.’ – Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony

I chaired a small conference two weeks ago broadly on the theme of ‘Nairobi’. Without prejudice to the people who presented at the conference – and I mentioned this while in the room – I left thinking more about the people who study Africa than Africa itself. You see, in a panel of seven academic papers – six of which were written by Europeans or North Americans – five were on Kibera or informal settlements in general, and only one did not deal explicitly with a development style topic. An entire city of almost 4 million inhabitants with a rich and complex history; a microcosm of the entire region that combines all that is good and terrible about the place and takes it to the next level – but all that researchers seem to see when they look at Nairobi is the slums. What does that say about the people who study African cities?

For some time now academics, including V.Y. Mudimbe and Mahmood Mamdani have wondered in their writings what the way we think about Africa says about us – usually European trained – academics. It has been rightfully argued that the conception of Africa that dominates academia is nothing more than a projection of the image that Europeans have of themselves, continuing a colonial legacy of dichotomising and atomising the African experience through the lens of European institutions. We study that which is alien or ‘wrong’ when compared to that which we think is ‘normal’ or ‘right’ – the perceived poverty of the African urban experience relative to the humdrum of suburban living in Europe and North America. The obsession with failed formality in particular seems indicative of academia’s own obsession with studying that which can be studied, resulting in the regurgitation of meaningless tropes in the name of inter-disciplinarity. Instead of complex analyses of the relationships between power and people, we end up with rehashed conjectures on ‘ethnicity’ or ‘gender’ that are neither informative, nor in many cases, that interesting. Instead of considering what possibility lies in the African city as a site of contestation but also conciliation and social change, we end up with fixations on rather essentialist assessments of poverty that imply that nothing else of significance happens in these cities.

Middle class and urban Africa in particular has only recently merited the attention of the World Bank, and continues to be treated as anomalous to the national character of African countries by the people who research and therefore determine the agenda on Africa. The stories that are told about places like Nairobi or Johannesburg intentionally overlook the contributions of the small middle class, instead focusing on the tension between the very rich and the very poor. While this may have the ‘advantage’ of isolating sources of conflict – arguing for more equitable distribution of services, for instance – it also polarises the discourse on development in these cities, and in fact in the country in general, because the focus of development shifts to helping the very poor ‘struggle’ against the ‘exploitative’ very rich. Meanwhile those in the middle, who pay taxes on their meagre wages and have to walk when fuel prices rise are viewed as exceptions that do not merit any further engagement.

Anyone who has observed an election in Nairobi will tell you that politicos have co-opted this narrative and turned into a political goldmine. The curious case of Lang’ata constituency is a good example of this. The constituency comprises Karen, perhaps the most affluent suburb in East Africa; Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Africa south of Cairo (this is up for debate but that’s another subject for another day); and Lang’ata ‘proper’, a substantial middle-class community of terraced houses and apartment blocks. This is Prime Minister Odinga’s electoral base but whenever he comes campaigning, he never goes to Karen (even though he lives there) or Lang’ata proper. Instead, he spends the bulk of his time making unsustainable promises of ‘development’ to the people of Kibera, as he has been for almost two decades. It may just be a numbers game, as inhabitants of Kibera do outnumber those of the other two quarters significantly, but in the process it delegitimises the concerns of the residents of the other two quarters – Lang’ata proper went without running water for nearly a decade, but this was never discussed in parliament. Kibera is still trotted out at international donor meetings as an argument for continued intervention in Kenya even though the impact of such interventions is highly questionable.

The focus on Kibera has serious consequences for those who study Nairobi as well. It is an extremely over-researched community – as a teacher there I always marvelled at how many white people there were walking around in small groups – usually headed up by a black man – and how my students who struggled with high school English could drop social science terminology casually into conversation. Many of the young people of Kibera have mastered the art of selling their stories to those who pay a good price for them, and who can blame them when they are simply supplying what the market demands? Young, relatively educated men especially seem to find this a viable alternative to crime. But it also compels them to ‘otherise’ their own communities, to pathologise their existence and to dislocate themselves from their day-to-day reality in order to sell convincing stories. We can only wait and see what the impact of this will be on the communities over time.

My experience with the Nairobi conference may well have been a curious coincidence. University departments are, after all, often ideological ghettoes where people with similar ideas on the manner in which the world works seek each other out and reinforce their pre-existing notions. Similarly, my own deep personal connection to the subject matter is perhaps the antithesis of what social scientists have in mind when they preach ‘objectivity’. Still would it be too much to ask for people to look at the African city and see more than just poverty?

Happy Africa Day.

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