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Urban Africa |
Lives and Projects |
In Africa and everywhere else, cities are where the action is. Cities are gateways to the global world, the prime sites for globalization’s translation into local understandings and experiences. This urban global exposure demands that scholars of urban life in Africa pay attention to people’s engagements with a diverse sweep of processes that range from the economic to the cultural. As they manifest themselves in distinct urban locations, such global exposures resonate in complicated ways with local cultural norms and practices. Focusing on a selection of themes that arise from these processes, this chapter is concerned with spatial transformations (residential space and housing; commercial space and markets), economic shifts (informalization), demographic changes (youth), and cultural issues that play out through consumption. Important themes that fall beyond this chapter’s purview revolve around the general environmental and health effects of rapid population growth on urban livelihoods, varying from people’s prospects for longevity to the places where they are buried. The chapter also does not deal with cross-border, interregional, and transnational migration processes in which cities are major conduits. The general background is sub-Saharan Africa, with many (but not all) specific examples drawn from southern and eastern Africa.
Today’s rapidly growing cities in Africa are part of a long history of distinct urban traditions that in some parts of the continent extend back for more than a thousand years (such as Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt) and in others are the products of colonial rule (such as Nairobi in Kenya and Lusaka in Zambia). There are also new cities created as capitals after independence, such as Abuja in Nigeria. Some urban settlements with precolonial origins have been abandoned or remain very small (for example, Axum in Ethiopia and Timbuktu in Mali). Regardless of these differences, rapid urban growth is a fairly recent phenomenon, largely a twentieth-century process that is obscuring many former distinctions. The period since the 1970s has been a crucial moment for significant changes in urban lives and projects. Taken together, the debt crisis of the 1970s, the International Monetary Fund–promoted economic restructuring of the 1980s, and more recent programmatic shifts revolving around poverty reduction strategies constitute a global political and economic conjuncture with far-ranging urban effects. These processes have been instrumental in transforming Africa’s urban spaces in many ways, including stimulating widespread economic informalization and the growth of informal housing. At the same time, new technologies, especially the rapid adoption of mobile phones, are transforming sociability and economic practices. All of these developments are marked by complicated changes in the political economy of sex, in which economic hardships are unsettling widespread norms of male-female relations. In combination, these processes are bringing about a degree of convergence across much of urban Africa in spite of the historical variations among Africa’s cities. In most large towns in Africa today, an obvious example of this convergence is a South African–financed supermarket or mall and one or more Chinese-owned shops.
These are new times in Africa’s cities. Scholarship since 2000 has helped to push the study of urban Africa beyond approaches that have restrained us from grappling with the dynamic unfolding of urban lives in their own right. Some of these perspectives have introduced unhelpful distinctions between “world” or “global” cities and “third world” cities. World or global cities, in the view of some scholars, serve as organizing nodes in the global financial system, forming a hierarchical core network and second tier. Privileging global finance capitalism as the engine of growth, this approach to urban dynamics excludes vast areas of the urban world from its scope. It also ignores the productive role of exchange and consumption in the urban economy and their sociocultural imprint on urban space. Recent works have taken the global city approach to task for misconstruing the dynamics of urban Africa and for viewing the continent’s cities merely as experiencing a delay in the type of development conventionally associated with the rise of industrial cities in the West. There is an assumption in much of this scholarship that the development path of third world cities will eventually follow that of cities in the West. Having not quite arrived by Western norms, African cities are seen as having “failed.”
Such formulaic approaches to world/global cities and third world cities hide Africa’s manifold urban dynamics from view. Jennifer Robinson, for one, has pointed to the wide range of contemporary cities in Africa and the very ordinariness of urban life. Rather than privileging specific kinds of cities, she approaches all cities as part of the same field of analysis. Viewing all cities as globally interconnected, she invites scholars of urban life to bring such connections to bear on their analyses.
Interconnections between urban areas across the world mean that cities play important intermediary or brokerage roles. Approaching urban Africa from an angle that encompasses both diversity and ordinariness requires a very inclusive research strategy analyzing the city as a space of interaction that brings together people, things, and ideas from around the country and the wider world. In this very inclusive sense, all cities are global, as Anthony King noted long ago when he claimed that all cities today are world cities. In effect, the overlapping themes of space, the economy, demography, and culture are embedded in locally diverse ways in this general view of an interconnected urban global world.
It is instructive to set out several terms used in the study of urban life. “Urbanization,” the process involving the move of ever larger numbers of people from rural to urban locations, should be distinguished from “urbanism,” the way of life of the people in cities. This apparently straightforward observation facilitates the exploration of grand processes such as globalization and urbanization from the point of view of the people who are living through them as well as in terms of how they are experiencing their effects and responding to them in their everyday lives. When sociologist Louis Wirth drew this distinction, he saw urbanism as a way of life, as a cultural product of industrialization, the growth of the market economy, and the routinization of modern society. This chapter suggests instead that urbanism as an African way of life today is a product of the distinctive types of economic activity that postcolonialism, and more particularly the political and economic developments of the last decades, has set into motion across Africa. Urbanism has its own spatial, economic, demographic, and cultural features, which display striking contrasts and sharp discontinuities. These do not line up neatly in dichotomous terms but rather crosscut the urban scene, contributing to its vitality and drama. Viewing urbanism in this way makes it possible to explore both the structural constraints that circumscribe people’s lives and what they do to navigate and negotiate them.
What about the term “urban”? There is no clear-cut division between cities and towns and no universally adopted definition of urban places; the differences between definitions of “urban” definitions matter mainly to smaller towns and cities that might be classified as either rural or urban (National Research Council 2003: 132–35). For comparative discussions, the United Nations’ city-level estimates and projections are useful. Extensive data are presented in the annual Demographic Yearbook; a second major source of data is the biennial World Urbanization Prospects.
How does this relate to Africa? The world’s cities are growing at a tremendous rate. Globally, the level of urbanization is expected to rise from 52 percent in 2011 to 67 percent in 2050 (United Nations 2012: 4), especially in the South, and Africa is urbanizing more rapidly than any other region of the world. According to United Nations figures, 39.6 percent of Africa’s population was urban in 2011, and this figure is expected to rise to 47.7 percent in 2030 and 57.7 percent in 2050. Africa’s urban population will undergo rapid increase, trebling over the course of the next several decades. In fact, United Nations data indicate that by the middle of the century most of the world’s urban population will be concentrated in Africa and Asia (United Nations 2012: 11, 12). This rapid growth is recent, even though Africa has long and varied urban histories that predate the colonial period and were influenced by it in complex ways. Some of this growth is a result of migration from rural areas, and some of it is due to urban population increase. Many African capitals doubled in size after independence in the mid-twentieth century, after numerous colonial constraints on urban development (for example, on migration, employment, and housing) were removed. In the 1970s and 1980s, this rapid increase gave way to somewhat slower growth rates along with population shifts from big cities to smaller towns. With the changes that have taken place in the political and economic regimes in many countries since the 1990s, Africa’s cities are experiencing massive growth as a result of major transformations on several fronts: demographic, socioeconomic, and political. Africa’s relations with the rest of the world have changed as well.
Figure 6.1. Dar es Salaam skyline.
Katherine Wiley.
Scholarship on globalization has not, with a few recent exceptions pertaining specifically to South Africa, been concerned with the effects of international development efforts on cities and urban space in the developing world, nor has urban development policy been a part of the globalization curriculum. Leading theorists on globalization have been preoccupied with finance and economic circuits, technology, and all kinds of cultural flows. They have paid little attention to international development cooperation as an important form of globalization and to how this process contributes to the reorganization of urban space in the South. In effect, globalization as mediated through international development programs has important implications for urban space. Structural adjustment programs and neoliberal reforms have been transforming urban space by reshaping the distribution and location of economic opportunities within specific cities, between cities in specific regions, and globally. Such policies have major ramifications across urban space, affecting the livelihoods of different population segments in unlike ways, sharpening social and spatial inequalities, and extending them in new ways.
Figure 6.2. Shopping in Soweto supermarket in South Africa.
Corbis.
The nature and availability of urban space in many cities in Africa is changing with regard to land, infrastructure, and markets, for example. Foreign investment has resulted in changes in urban spatial layouts and in the location of commercial activities, creating new patterns of physical and market segregation. South African retail capitalists are an important case in point. Since the mid-1990s, they have explored new possibilities for accumulation in the rest of Africa, especially (but not only) through upscale shopping mall developments. Workers at the Lusaka and Maputo locations of Shoprite, a major South African–based multinational that has expanded into Zambia and Mozambique, are implicated in a new politics of scale that asserts claims not only at the local level but also regionally, nationally, and globally, in ways that turn the Shoprite workplace into an important agent of a new regional imagination. These Zambian and Mozambican workers claim inclusion in the company on an equal basis with South African workers, in this way privileging their ties to South Africa through the company. There are other investments in malls at various scales by local firms, including by consortia of naturalized Asians in Lusaka and by Lebanese in Dakar, Senegal, and in warehouse development by businessmen of Lebanese, Portuguese, and South African Indian and Pakistani background in Oshikango, Namibia’s rapidly growing entrepot on the border with Angola.
What is perhaps more conspicuous, or at least more controversial, than the post-apartheid South African retail expansion across the continent is the growing Chinese economic involvement in Africa. At issue are not Chinese investments in primary sector commodities such as minerals and agricultural products, in infrastructure such as railways and roads, or even in construction, an area where, in South Africa for example, the Chinese outnumber South Africans. What is at stake, rather, is wholesale and retail commerce carried out both by sizable Chinese investors and by small-scale traders of Chinese background, who have become a common presence in many African cities since the late 1990s.
Because marketing and trade provide a major source of livelihood for a very large proportion of Africa’s urban residents, Chinese involvement in urban commerce is causing growing resentment. In the urban small-scale wholesale and retail sector, Chinese-owned and -managed shops that sell low-cost housewares and apparel are pushing a competitive wedge into a commercial sector that in the past was dominated by others. The fact that some Senegalese consumer groups in Dakar praise the Chinese for making affordable everyday commodities available while others criticize them for taking work away from the residents of Dakar captures the ambiguity that is at the core of reactions to the growing presence of the Chinese on Dakar’s commercial scene. At the Grand Marché in Lome, Togo, West Africa’s chief market for printed textiles, a widespread rumor held that dressing in Chinese-produced fabrics is dangerous. Indeed, when the Chinese-made wrappers of two young women caught fire in 2004, their three-piece outfits “burnt like timber.” In Benin, there is a debate about the damage that imitations of high-quality “wax” fabrics, sold cheaply by Chinese enterprises, are causing to the domestic textile sector; at the same time, China holds strong shares in the textile industry, where many domestic plants have collapsed. In northern Namibia, the pioneering Chinese businesses in Oshikango are benefiting from the town’s rapid growth as a major trading center for Angola and from customs regulations allowing them to source a variety of goods in transit from China without paying import tariffs. But while they supply affordable goods and create some employment opportunities, the Chinese traders also establish new dependencies rather than responding to local productive concerns.
A highly visible consequence of these commercial developments since the mid-1990s has been the displacement of small-scale trading and service activities from city centers to areas on the periphery in order to free up prime space for shopping malls, upscale stores, hotels, and private housing developments, including gated communities. Because recent investments tend to target upscale consumers, many new market developments charge rental fees that exclude small-scale operators, who then turn to the streets as a location for economic activity. It is not surprising that violent confrontations between urban authorities and street vendors over the use of public space for commerce continue to take place, as does the intermittent removal of these vendors. With new institutional dynamics promoting political decentralization, local authorities in many African cities are caught in a bind regarding the regulation of urban space for residential and commercial activity, including open markets. The ensuing conflicts are fueled by party politics in many cities where space is scarce and vendors are courted as voting blocs in a love-hate relationship that has proved difficult to regulate.
Political-economic reforms promoting foreign investment and privatization have not only affected the place and nature of commercial activity as the construction of malls in urban Africa and spatial marginalization of small-scale trade demonstrate. These reforms are also changing the value of urban land, with adverse effects on the housing market, especially for urban residents with limited means. The legacy of racial segregation of urban residential space persists across much of eastern and southern Africa, with income replacing race as the chief criterion of access today. In most cities, high-income gated communities now lie next to low-income residential settlements. Throughout the southern African region the term “compound” came into use to describe racially segregated housing for Africans, first implemented at the gold and diamond mines in South Africa in the late 1880s. Today more than 75 percent of Lusaka’s population, for example, lives in informal or squatter settlements, locally still called “compounds,” in the periurban areas, because housing markets have been privatized and no low-cost government-run housing has been constructed since the 1970s. The result is extreme population crowding in the existing settlements and the development of a rental housing market there, including the subletting at exorbitant rents of rooms that are often controlled by absentee landlords, a process that has been widely observed across urban Africa. Many of these residential areas do not have good prospects for the development of services and small-scale manufacturing activities because they have inadequate access to electricity, water, sanitation, and transport, or lack it entirely. For these reasons, home-based enterprises may have better potential in high-income residential areas. Possibilities for periurban expansion are constrained by large-scale business developments including, in Lusaka, the international airport, commercial farms, and cattle ranches that lie just next to low-cost housing areas.
Along with provoking extreme crowding in existing settlements, the privatization of housing markets introduces new disparities. Rental housing that formerly was strictly controlled by government and private employers has given way in many cities to privatization, with such housing units offered for sale to their current tenants. But many tenants have insufficient means to effect the purchase and instead sell their units to better-off people. As a result, midpriced housing areas have begun to be upgraded, while their former tenants have few options besides seeking shelter in already crowded squatter settlements. Because in many cases women have less access to loans than men, gender is critical to this process. So is youth in the sense that young people rarely have the means to obtain housing for themselves and thus are likely to delay establishing households of their own. Widespread youth unemployment and the drop in marriage rates are affecting male-female relations, especially insofar as they involve sex and economic support. This has ramifications for social organization, headship, and power relations on the domestic front, consequences that become evident in social relations and across space.
Economic liberalization, including the privatization of formerly state-controlled companies, has reduced employment prospects by pruning the ranks of the already employed and constraining new formal job creation in most of Africa’s urban areas. As a result, more and more people are pushed into an already crowded informal economy. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and neoliberal policies of the 1990s did not by themselves bring about this expansive process of informalization. Rather, such programs and policies added new dynamics to long-standing informal urban processes that vary across the continent but which have been more prominent in West Africa than in eastern and southern Africa. What is more, the latest crop of World Bank–recommended poverty reduction strategies are not tackling the urban challenges caused by the overwhelming lack of jobs, insufficient housing, and declining infrastructure and services. As new waves of informalization entangle urban economies in far-flung commodity circuits that expose them to global market forces, many distinctions in level and intensity of market activity, such as those between West African cities and South African ones, are disappearing. Across urban Africa today, markets and streets provide economic avenues for a growing number of residents.
Figure 6.3. A busy street corner near the Kumasi Central Market in Ghana.
Gracia Clark.
The new dynamics of the informalization are at first sight demographic, yet they have manifold social and cultural ramifications across urban space. The chief demographic observation is that young people are everywhere in Africa’s growing cities, accounting for 60 or even 70 percent of the overall urban population in some places. The next section will attend to definitional questions about youth; here it suffices to note that unlike their parents, who lived through government controls and outright scarcities of basic goods, today’s young people have grown up after the shift to liberalized regimes. The global exposure of the young to shopping malls, internet cafés, and media differs radically from that of their parents’ generation, as do their personal expectations. The effects are confounding because along with this global exposure, some young people have had limited access to education and services as a result of International Monetary Fund–imposed policies of economic pricing of basic services, changes that were central to the structural adjustment programs of the 1970s and 1980s. Even young people with advanced education cannot expect the types of jobs in government or private firms that their parents took for granted after completing secondary school.
Another important demographic observation revolves around gender and generational dynamics. When we refer to the enormous growth of the informal economy since the 1970s, we gloss over the many inequalities that are embedded within it in terms of activity, location, and organization as well as gender. In addition, age or generation plays a role, although the significance of this for future urban livelihoods has not received the attention it deserves. When the adverse effects of structural adjustment programs on formal employment began to become evident in the 1980s, it was middle-aged women in particular whose informal earnings ensured household survival as husbands and partners were laid off. The shift in the early 1990s toward economic privatization pushed even more adults of both sexes into the informal economy, thus limiting the entry of young people. In urban settings in southern Africa, where the apprenticeship practices for which West Africa is so well known are very limited, many young people ended up on the margins of the informal economy performing low-level jobs with few prospects for upward mobility and the acquisition of higher qualifications that might enable them to improve their economic prospects.
Markets and streets are among the most important sources of non-formal urban employment. Street vending entails more risks and dangers than trade in authorized markets, and it is not surprising that many street vendors are young and male. Because urban space is a scarce good, its usage is heavily politicized and filled with tensions. Small-scale entrepreneurs are criticized for transgressing into public space, the more so when they are young and male and regarded as a public health nuisance, suspected of disrupting established business, or considered to be criminals or illegal immigrants. In many of Africa’s cities and smaller towns, conflicts over the regulation of informal trade in authorized markets and public space result in intermittent removals of street vendors and clampdowns on markets, targeting non-fee-paying traders. Such clearances tend to have only temporary effects, and new wrangles and clashes continue to arise over space for trading. Vendors return to the streets in new disguises, with new sales strategies, at different times of the day, and in strategic spots. Such events are spectacular enactments of disaffection by a population segment whose livelihoods have been squeezed by the convergence of global and local processes that were highlighted at the beginning of this chapter.
Figure 6.4. Demolition of market stalls at Soweto market, Lusaka, 2004.
Post Photo Archives, National Archives of Zambia.
There is a long and well-reported history of market associational activity in West Africa, but it was not until fairly recently that urban scholarship in other parts of Africa began to pay attention to organizational efforts among informal market actors. Because of their love-hate relationship with local governments, many informal economy organizations seek to improve their situation by establishing networks or federations locally, as well as national, regional, and international alliances. Combining grassroots initiatives and NGO- and human-rights-inspired rhetoric, such emergent groups have since the 1990s begun to establish footholds, with varying degrees of success, in the urban and national arenas from which they were for so long excluded. For example, in Lusaka’s urban regulatory environment, which was generally extremely hostile toward informal activity, the Cross-Border Traders Association achieved an almost unbelievable feat by securing prime land in the heart of the city’s center for a market for its vendors.
Figure 6.5. Market stall selling chitenge (printed cloth), secondhand shoes, and sneakers at the COMESA market, Lusaka.
Karen Tranberg Hansen.
The Cross-Border Traders Association is one of thirteen informal organizations that in 2001 formed an umbrella organization, the Alliance for Zambia Informal Economy Associations (AZIEA), comprising a wide range of associations, including those for task-specific groups such as tinsmiths and carpenters as well as broader groupings such as the tuntemba (makeshift stalls) association. AZIEA seeks to bargain with the government with the goal of turning informal workers into a recognized part of the labor force that enjoys International Labor Organization (ILO) labor standards. Reaching out beyond Zambia, AZIEA is an affiliate of StreetNet International, a South African–based organization that was inspired by the 1995 formation of the Self Employed Women’s Association and was formally established in Durban, South Africa, in 2002. StreetNet has branches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Inspired by a class-based organizational model, StreetNet seeks to create alliances with labor and social movements rather than to focus on the microenterprise sector and the NGO development sector. This organizational model contrasts sharply with the network- and federation-based approaches pursued by informal sector organizations concerned with informal housing, among them the Shack Dwellers Association International.
In today’s transformed urban space, young women and men from poor backgrounds have fewer economic options than their parents’ generation enjoyed. While the meaning of “youth” depends on context, youth is everywhere defined both in subjective terms by young people themselves and relationally by adults and the surrounding society and its institutions. In a very general way, young people long to experience youth as a distinct outlook on life, a mentality, an experience in its own right, while adults and society define them as dependent and subordinate in a hierarchical and gerontocratic understanding of how society ought to work.
As we have seen, young people in Africa’s towns and cities form a large proportion of the overall population; they are everywhere and highly visible in urban public space. In these cities of youth, urban space is charged in different terms by gender. Because young women are more vulnerable than men when moving in public space, they tend to enjoy less freedom of mobility than young men. When young people turn markets and streets into economic avenues, it is young men who dominate the street vending scene, operating as independent actors, whereas young women work as hired hands at market stands and stalls or try their luck at home-based trades. Much of this activity is piecework and highly irregular, with low and uncertain earnings.
Urban-based youth are struggling to become independent in ways that differ by gender and class. Widespread norms of social adulthood attribute household headship to men, but few young men today earn enough to provide shelter and economic support for a family of their own. Young women, for their part, look for husbands who hold regular jobs, are stable (as indicated, for example, by church membership), and can provide for a wife and children. Because mutual gender expectations are not synchronous, sexuality becomes a charged practice on the urban scene. Masculinity is often construed in terms of an aggressive sexuality that is problematic for many young men to enact because they have insufficient means to provide women with material support.
The political economy of intimate relations that is emerging responds, in part, to the broader scope of consumerism and new notions of love. In daily interaction, gift giving is taken as evidence of love. But in the context of increasing urban economic hardships, the distinction between gift and exchange becomes blurred. As a result, notions about transactional sex have become frequent in research on urban sexual and reproductive behavior. Because young women may have few economic means, transactional sex becomes one route to consumption. Some young women rely on boyfriends and older male partners for basic expenses such as school fees, not to mention money for desirable consumer goods. For example, in Lusaka, young women described their ideal boyfriends as those who have the “four C’s”: a car, a crib (house), cash, and a cell phone. But there is more to this than gifts and money. While at first sight gift exchanges revolve around sex, they do not preclude affection, support, housing, and other forms of mutual assistance. In fact, in the absence of formal marriage, gifts may signal commitment, trust, and love.
Figure 6.6. Discotheque in Luanda, Angola.
Corbis.
In Africa’s rapidly growing cities, young people are everywhere highly visible. Boys and young men crowd markets and streets. They, and increasingly young women, turn vacant spaces into football (known in the United States as soccer) fields, sometimes playing with balls made from scrap. They all use mobile phones as a vehicle for claiming their place in the city. In short, young urban people pursue a greater variety of interaction than their elders ever imagined.
Taken together, the processes described in previous sections—new investments, informalization, and economic actors—have reshaped urban space in many ways, among them by creating new consumption sites where urban residents pursue their desires and new social sites where communications technology may open up new vistas. It is the simultaneity of these processes that is placing a particular imprint on contemporary urban development. In the colonial past, it was labor migration and urban living that were the key processes to turning Africans into active consumers. At stake historically were both the regulatory side and the supply side, involving markets, shops, and sales techniques, as well as the demand side and specific consumer desires for material goods. But controlled economies in many countries after independence curtailed the scope of consumerism. Yet the political transitions of the 1990s combined with market reforms have made a wide range of affordable goods available to differently positioned consumers. Targeting distinct consumer niches and different urban spaces, boutiques selling imported fashions and market stalls selling imported secondhand clothing today make the latest trends available to all. Indeed, the proliferation of shopping venues in recent years makes consumption a particularly challenging angle through which to delineate changing urban lives in Africa in relationship to globalization.
Commercial vigor, from tiny market stalls and street vendors to upscale malls, is part of the urban dynamism that is central to the productive role consumption plays in the city. This is evident in the types of transformed geographies and spaces for work, shopping, and home life discussed earlier. Shopping malls and stalls in local markets crowded with small-scale entrepreneurs offer major sites for consumption and hanging out. Young people with money to spend can afford to frequent the malls’ cinemas and fast-food outlets, whereas those with limited means window-shop and socialize. What all these venues offer is a degree of freedom to watch and interact with peers and others. Privileging actual or vicarious consumption, such sites create a dynamism that translates into freedom and leisure, as illustrated by the following two perspectives: one concerning football, the other revolving around mobile phones.
Although it is a colonial import, football has been infused with cultural notions of solidarity and nationalism that make it Africa’s sport par excellence today. With African male football players contracted to major foreign leagues, football is a truly global sport whose local pursuit has wide-open imaginaries. On the post-colonial development agenda, football is a widespread and highly popular pastime in rural and urban areas alike, engaging children and young people through informal matches in the streets and through organized play in clubs, associations, and academies. What is more, football is advocated as a means to encourage young people to focus on self-improvement, education, and physical and social empowerment as well as to promote discipline and responsibility. Young women are also getting involved, especially as international sports leagues, governments, and NGOs, in their concern to stem Zambia’s HIV/AIDS pandemic, have turned to football to help challenge inequality and sexism and effect behavioral change.
Football plays a significant role in shaping a distinct urban youth culture that is overwhelmingly male. In effect, the sport is played in deeply divided societies where resources are always insufficient. Although African women’s championships for football and other sports (netball, handball, basketball, and track and field) have grown, the immense popularity and social importance of the men’s game has made it difficult for a women’s football game to develop. In fact, the burdens of household work fall disproportionately on girls and young women, leaving them less time for play and skills development. There is the enduring assumption that women who play football place their reputations at risk by spending too much time exposed to the public gaze. Because of dress and visibility, such young women are perceived to be highly vulnerable, and their presence among men is discouraged. Some parents and guardians are suspicious of young women’s socializing and hanging out at sports grounds, readily infusing notions of sexual availability into socialization practices that take place in public space.
Across urban (and increasingly rural) Africa today, mobile phones are becoming a major means of interacting that is qualifying the long-held connection between consumption, class, and income. Unlike football, the mobile phone may be a gender-neutral tool, as there appear to be few differences between women’s and men’s practices of using mobile phones. This applies both to where and how frequently they use their phones as well as to what they use them for.
Sebastiana Etzo and Guy Collender contend that the use of mobile phones has grown remarkably fast in Africa, with a twelvefold increase in subscribers between 2000 and 2006, making Africa the fastest-growing region of the world in terms of the mobile phone market even if it still is the least penetrated. This is also corroborated by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2008: 251). Mobile phone users keep up contacts and establish a wide range of networks and connections in ways that both incorporate local practices of sociality and facilitate new networking and dreams.
The prepaid phone system that has been widely adopted by African mobile phone users suits people with insecure or irregular incomes. Social uses such as chatting and keeping in touch may be driving mobile phone usage among the less well-off, of whom many make use of mobile phones at public access points. Usage practices are influenced by local norms of mutual assistance and supportive behavior. Above all, phones are shared extensively. There is a widespread practice of “beeping,” that is, dialing a number but hanging up with the expectation that the person at the other end will phone back, paying for the call. And text messaging (SMS) is an easy and cheap means of communication. Mobile phone calls and SMS messages are important means for announcing urgent matters such as funerals and to draw attention to what is going on in the social scene. Last but not least, mobile phones keep young people, including lovers, in touch privately. Indeed, across class, young people consider mobile phones to be a required accessory for urban life.
In addition to its widespread social uses, the mobile phone has very quickly become a necessary tool in business transactions. Its flexibility and ease works very well for microenterprises and small businesses. Users obtain information concerning prices and availabilities of specific goods that has a practical effect on short-term decision making about where to source and when to supply customers. In some countries, such as Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya, credit can be accessed by using mobile phones. In short, mobile phones may help to support livelihoods. Their connectivity keeps people in touch and helps them set up new contacts. In Africa’s rapidly transitioning economies, people avidly use mobile phones to connect in ways that fit with their backgrounds and means. The contacts and spaces they create in this way enable them not only to keep in touch with family and friends but also to pursue new practices of sociability and association. The result for young urban people is a positive sense of being connected on local terms, of reaching out, and in lifestyle terms of being a part of the global world.
African cities have always been where the action is. But political and economic events of the last three decades have ushered in new times. Focusing on urban engagements across space, the economy, and culture, this chapter has delineated a story of convergence that plays itself out most visibly and dramatically in young people’s efforts to claim space and identities as autonomous actors, performing and appropriating new skills, and using new means. This generational difference characterizes their distinct outlook on urban life and may become influential in inciting change.
Africa’s cities are cities of youth where consumption and class introduce new dynamics that are complicated by gender. Exchange and consumption deserve recognition for their creative and productive functions instead of being swept aside as parasitic activities, as was the case in approaches that used wage labor as the lens for studying Africa’s urban economies. The twenty-first-century urban world is a globalized world in which shifts in the flow of capital, commodities, and labor are redefining the place and role of cities, including in Africa, where built-up land today in many places generates more revenue than agriculture. And because informal work and its organizational resourcefulness—by far the chief source of urban livelihoods across most of the continent—are insufficiently accounted for, the overall economic scope of African urban life continues to be difficult to assess. The same holds for its diversity, vitality, and dynamism because of persisting scholarly preoccupations with widespread problems of urban sustainability. Even then, as has been demonstrated, there is no doubt that these are new times in Africa’s cities, whose majority populations, the young, negotiate and navigate complicated constraints on their actions as they enable themselves with diverse means and skills to turn the ordinariness of everyday urban life into strategic resources for tomorrow.
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