Archive for the ‘Africa’ Category
by HSRC Press on Feb 22nd, 2012
Renowned scholar Mahmood Mamdani, who has been described as “perhaps the greatest living African scholar”, is to receive an honorary degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal for his outstanding contribution to academia.
In April, Mamdani will be awarded the honour alongside musician Yvonne Chaka Chaka, community worker Thudiso Gcabashe, birdman Hugh Chittenden and Zuleikha Mayat, the author of the legendary South African cookbook, Indian Delights. Mayat’s cookbook was the focus of the HSRC Press book, Gender, Modernity and Indian Delights, written by Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen.
Francis Kagolo states in New Vision that Mamdani’s 2007 book, Scholars in the Marketplace, “caused unease within Makerere University’s administration” (where Mamdani currently serves as director of MISR). This was because the book “criticized the commercialization of university education in Uganda and the lack of academic research and publications by professors”, says Kagolo.
Congratulations to Mamdani!
Renowned scholar, Prof. Mahmood Mamadani, is one of the six African personalities to receive honorary degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal for his outstanding contribution in the academia.
KwaZulu-Natal, based in South Africa, is the 8th best university in Africa, according to Webometrics rankings released last week.
Mamdani, currently the director of Makerere university institute of social research (MISR), was chosen for his “outstanding academic record as a scholar,” the university said in a statement.
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by HSRC Press on Jan 27th, 2012
The inhabitants of capital cities in Africa are increasing at spectacular rate. Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, has a current population of 10 million and a growth rate of 4.44% per year – making it the second fastest growing city in Africa. It is estimated that Lagos will have 15 million inhabitants by 2030.
Urbanisation is often positively liked to economic growth and development, but according to a Polity.org report by the Institute for Security Studies, rapid urbanisation will also result in many challenges. The report states that, “Without a clear strategy to address service delivery, employment and governance issues, African countries in transition from rural to urban population growth could experience instability in the future.”
Read the complete report:
In 2008, for the first time in human history, the number of people living in urban areas outstripped the rural population; however, the same will not occur in Africa until nearly 2050. Even so, Africa’s cities are urbanising at a profound rate, reaching 40% in 2012, up from 19% in 1960. Due to the implications of urban population growth on the economy and other social factors, it is imperative that African state leaders and policy-makers plan for these transitions adequately. The changes that will occur, and in fact have begun taking place, in terms of urbanisation, need to be factored into long term planning, as not doing so could lead to possible political and economic instability.
According to City Mayors, an organisation dedicated to the research of cities and metropolitan areas, Africa has 19 cities with a population over 1 million, and this is a conservative estimate given that most reliable city population data is 15 years old. The fastest growing city, according to Foreign Policy magazine, is Bamako, Mali, currently at 1.3 million people and growing at 4.45% a year, a result of both economic growth and desertification. Bamako, however, is dwarfed by the estimated 10 million people that live in Lagos, Nigeria, Africa’s second fastest growing city at 4.44% a year. Fifteen million people are expected to live in Lagos by 2030, overtaking Cairo, Egypt, as the continent’s largest city. The UN recently performed a study on mega-cities and concluded that an additional urban phenomenon is the growth of mega-regions, like the 600km urban stretch between Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria that now links the whole region’s economy. According to Business Day, Minister of Lands, Housing and Development in Nigeria, Amal Pepple, stated that with an urbanisation rate of five percent per annum, the West-African region is recording the fastest urban growth in history, estimating that by 2020, 52 percent of the region’s populations would reside in cities. This is sure to have a profound impact for West Africa.
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by HSRC Press on Jan 11th, 2012
In Capital Cities in Africa, edited by Simon Bekker and Goran Therborn, the authors look at the rapid process of urbanisation – more politically than economically driven – that led to the formation of Africa’s largest capital cities, and the inevitable challenges resulting from it.
It is with these challenges in mind that Stacy Passmore, urban designer with the Chife Foundation in Nigeria, has tried to move away from the idea of an African “megacity”, towards what she calls “rurban” development – a hybridisation of the best of urban and rural sectors, “using mobile technologies to bring information and traditionally ‘urban’ opportunities to remote locations”.
It is projected that by 2025, 200 million Africans will migrate to urban areas due to political neglect and changing global economic patterns. Colonial-era policies have dismantled functioning agricultural systems of access and land ownership, while rampant environmental degradation caused by erosion, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and poor water management have diminished the productivity of farming. This failing agriculture sector means that many African countries now import vast quantities of staples such as fish, rice, wheat, and corn at the detriment to local enterprise.
Scholars, most interested in the African megacity, often neglect a key feature of African societies: migration has resulted in a highly mobile rural society with increasingly urbanized relationships, rather than a strict urban/rural dichotomy. Despite an overwhelming focus on the megacity, some scholars, including Director of the African Centre for Cities Professor Edgar Pieterse, project that in the next wave of African development “relatively small settlements of less than half a million people will dominate the urban landscape.” McKinsey Global Institute also recently issued a report that promises a similar evolution in global economic growth patterns; approximately 400 mid-size cities in emerging markets – mainly sub-Saharan Africa – are posed to generate nearly 40% of global economic growth over the next 15 years.
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by HSRC Press on Dec 22nd, 2011
Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn’s Capital Cities in Africa looks at the capital cities of nine sub-Saharan African countries, examining their roles as “host centres of political power”. In Chapter 5, dedicated to Lagos, contributor Laurent Fourchard describes how the capital of Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, is the product of both its national and colonial histories:
At the end of the 18th century, Lagos became the first slavery port in West Africa. From the 19th century onwards, like many other port cities in Africa, it was increasingly involved in the circulation of people, goods, ideas and technologies. By the 20th century, Lagos had become the main port of the most populous African country and was the federal capital of Nigeria from 1914 to 1991. Today, the city of Lagos boasts a concentration of capital assets, trading companies and public investments, a large bureaucracy and a transnational political, intellectual and religious elite. Since the 19th century, in fact, Lagos has been at the forefront of new cultural and social practices in Nigeria, despite Abuja (the new federal capital since 1991) and Port Harcourt (the oil capital in the Niger Delta) having recently acquired increasing influence.
Lagos has been shaped both by its national history as the federal capital and by remaining at the centre of political opposition to colonial rule (from 1920 to 1960), to military and civilian regimes (from 1966 to 1999) and to the current ruling party (from 1999 to 2008). This history has deeply influenced the way the city is governed, in particular in an international context.
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Photo courtesy Businessweek
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by HSRC Press on Dec 13th, 2011
In an article featured on Afesis-corplan, Kwandiwe Kondlo, co-editor of Africa In Focus: Governance in the 21st century, examines what we mean when we speak of “the Youth” in political discourse, and wonders whether this force in our society deserves the “weight of our expectations”:
Let these things be examined, let them be debated not only for us but for generations to come. For despite of our sense of self-importance and pride, we are all just a passing phase. The Youth is also a passing phase and can hardly claim to represent a particular historical force. It is a lie that the Youth of today, as represented by the Youth League of the ANC represents the historical force of the Youth League of Mziwakhe Lembede, AP Mda and Nelson Mandela. Without an identifiable programme, but only snippets around controversial programmes such as the nationalisation of mines, we cannot fully count on this Youth as the seedbed of the democracy to come.
Getting back to the subject – speaking of the Youth, what does one mean? To speak of the Youth is to speak not only of the future of a people or of a nation, but it is to speak of hope; it is to speak of the very ‘soul’ of a nation. Hope, as Paulo Freire (2008) indicates, is an ‘ontological need that demands an anchoring practice’. It requires a realistic practice for it to become edifying; for it to become ‘historical concreteness’. The ‘soul’ of a nation, on the other hand, infers the very seat of power; the wholeness of essence and the propelling drive to higher levels. This underlines the weight of meaning and the depth of value the Youth carries in a nation and to its people. Soren Kierkegaard in his book, ‘Either/Or’ indicates that he prefers speaking to the Youth for with them there is hope that they grow to become rational beings. This he said in the early 1800s, which shows the great hope attached to the Youth throughout generations of scholarship and throughout generations of human existence. The theme ‘the role of the Youth in participatory democracy’ invokes both the ‘performativity’and the ‘constantive’ (Derrida,2002) attributable to that section of society seen as young, fresh, capable and full of life – the Youth. But the question is: are we betting on the right horse? Are we throwing the weight of our expectations and hope where it deserves to be thrown?
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Africa in Focus: Governance in the 21st Century
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by HSRC Press on Oct 26th, 2011
In an article for Al Jazeera, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the conditions that prompt foreign intervention in Africa are worsening. According to Mamdani, the fall of Gaddafi would not have been possible without the fire-power of Western military organisations:
“Kampala ‘mute’ as Gaddafi falls,” is how the opposition paper summed up the mood of this capital the morning after. Whether they mourn or celebrate, an unmistakable sense of trauma marks the African response to the fall of Gaddafi.
Both in the longevity of his rule and in his style of governance, Gaddafi may have been extreme. But he was not exceptional. The longer they stay in power, the more African presidents seek to personalise power. Their success erodes the institutional basis of the state. The Carribean thinker C L R James once remarked on the contrast between Nyerere and Nkrumah, analysing why the former survived until he resigned but the latter did not: “Dr Julius Nyerere in theory and practice laid the basis of an African state, which Nkrumah failed to do.”
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by HSRC Press on Oct 14th, 2011
Alan Mabin, one of the contributing authors of Capital Cities in Africa, presented a talk on the social dimension of urban development at the African Urban Futures workshop.
In this video, Mabin discusses the flaws and innovations of urban development:
More about the workshop:
An interactive workshop held under the auspices of the Alliance of Global Sustainability and hosted by Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Cities, properly managed, can be transformative arenas in which natural resources are used efficiently and economically to provide a high quality of life for everyone. And by doing so, cities offer our best hope of reducing human impacts upon the environment and achieving global sustainability. It can be argued that there is no one model for urban futures because of the underlying history and cultural diversity of our urban areas. However, the challenge of urban futures is clear – we have exceeded 50% by 2030. The resultant pressure on infrastructure, services, safety and security, political stability and social services is immense.
Selected experts have been invited to present and discuss their views on African Urban Futures, thereby raising regional-level awareness and providing an important contribution to the global research agenda
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by HSRC Press on Oct 6th, 2011
Alan Mabin wrote the contributing chapter “South African Capital Cities” in the book, Capital Cities in Africa: Power and Powerlessness, edited by Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn.
Recently, Mabin presented a lecture titled “Scope and Dimensions of African Suburbanism” as part of a Suburbs Talks series that took place at the City Institute at New York University. Mabin talks about the meaning of “urban” and “suburban” as applied to the African continent. Listen to the podcast of the talk:
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by HSRC Press on Sep 29th, 2011
Following eight months in East Africa, Mahmood Mamdani joined Democracy Now in New York for a video interview in which he outlines what he argues are the implications of NATO’s intervention in Libya and why there is “a real sense of danger around the corner”:
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by HSRC Press on Aug 24th, 2011
This September from HSRC Press: Capital Cities in Africa by Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn.
Capital cities today remain central to both nations and states. They host centres of political power, not only national, but in some cases regional and global as well, thus offering major avenues to success, wealth and privilege. For these reasons capitals simultaneously become centres of “counter-power”, locations of high-stakes struggles between the government and the opposition.
This volume focuses on capital cities in nine sub-Saharan African countries, and traces how the power vested in them has evolved through different colonial backgrounds, radically different kinds of regimes after independence, waves of popular protest, explosive population growth and in most cases stunted economic development. Starting at the point of national political emancipation, each case study explores the complicated processes of nation-state building through its manifestation in the “urban geology” of the city – its architecture, iconography, layout and political use of urban space.
Although the evolution of each of these cities is different, they share a critical demographic feature: an extraordinarily rapid process of urbanisation that is more politically than economically driven. Overwhelmed by the inevitable challenges resulting from this urban sprawl, the governments seated in most of these capital cities are in effect both powerful – wielding power over their populace – and powerless, lacking power to implement their plans and to provide for their inhabitants.
In its concentration on urban forms of multi-layered power, symbolic as well as material, Capital Cities in Africa cuts a new path in the rich field of studies related to African cities and politics. It will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, from political history, to sociology, to geography, architecture and urban planning.
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