Introduction

This issue starts with a special section on Representing Urban Lives in Africa. The urban theme is continued with the next two papers that shift the disciplinary lens to history and sociology to examine aspects of every-day life in African cities. In combination, these papers provide an insight into the critical interdisciplinary contribution that African Studies is currently making to the study of the urban. The last two papers explore the power of humour to address some of the large-scale social, political and personal issues playing out on and beyond the African continent.

Special section: representing Urban lives in Africa

It is now widely acknowledged that cities are growing faster in Africa than in almost any other world region. As our urban populations are burgeoning, so urban art of all kinds is also flourishing on the continent, as well as in African diasporas in the global North and South. From novels to film noir, and graffiti to ‘ruin porn’, African cultural texts are generating our cities as meaningful entities, with material effects and visceral affects.

The idea that art and cities are intertwined is relatively well-established in the context of the global North, thanks to books, films and series that have established New York, London, Paris or Tokyo as ‘the’ city. We know Dickens’ London, Carrie Bradshaw’s New York, and every other blockbuster’s Los Angeles, very well. These cities, appearing as ordered, systematic organisms that sit securely with the boundaries of the nation, yet enable unplanned and serendipitous encounters, shape the global imaginary of what cities are and can be.

City branding and tourism marketing exercises play a role here too, presenting cities of the global North as modern spaces of wealth, leisure and consumption, and cities in the South as exotic and ‘colourful’, characterised by tradition and their poor-but-smiling inhabitants. Cities of the global South thus tend to be over-determined by poverty. If Hollywood visits Lagos, Makoko is likely to be the backdrop; if it is showcasing Bombay, we see Dharavi; if Kenya, Kibera. Cities in Africa and the global South more generally, are too often envisioned as chaotic, where the chaos becomes a thing in itself, concealing the complexity. In academic discourse too, they are all too often cast either as elusive and unknowable, or as consisting of the kind of ‘on the ground’ reality that lends itself only to non-fiction.

In recent years, films such as District 9, Nairobi Half Life, Bamako, Jerusalema, and African Metropolis; novels such as Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), Zoo City (Lauren Beukes), The Hairdresser of Harare (Tendai Huchu), and Blackass (A. Igoni Barrett); and festivals such as Dakar 66, Infecting the City (Cape Town) and Chale Wote (Accra), have all challenged established notions of what constitutes the African urban experience. Despite the rich and varied storying that is flourishing in these spaces of experience and representation, Urban Studies rarely considers creative texts other than as illustrations of already-determined theories.

Analysed predominantly through developmentalist lenses, then, African cities are seldom explored as spaces that may be creative, imaginative, metaphorical, and interrogative of urban issues that are global rather than ‘local’ or parochial. Without either over-simplifying the distinction between South and North, or implying a homogenous African urban experience, there is clearly a need to document, critically reflect on, and (crucially) to theorise out of, the African images and stories that are integral to our rapidly changing streets, malls, markets, homes, and green spaces.

In this special section of Critical African Studies, comprising the first four papers in this issue, we seek to balance the prevailing problem/ solution-oriented academic discourse on African cities, by asking how they generate, are represented in, and are shaped by, creative work. We start from the premise that Urban Studies needs art and cultural texts, not only illustratively, but as critical and theoretical works in themselves. They are not just data to be mined for evidence or texture to add to dry theory. Visual, literary, and acoustic art create the city. In other words, urban centres and urban spaces are generated from stories, images and songs as much as from glass, cement, and plastic. They are always-already figural.

‘To privilege the metaphorics of the city is not to leave the real city behind. It is … to insist that our real experiences of cities are ‘caught’ in networks of dense metaphorical meanings’ (Highmore 2005, 5). Urban experiences are therefore not separate from stories of the city; they are better understood as ‘lived figuration’ – thick, dense, meaningful life through which metaphor and imagination are constantly being threaded. As Sharpe and Wallock (1987, 1) put it: ‘our perceptions of the urban landscape are inseparable from the words we use to describe them and from the activities of reading, naming and metaphorizing that make all our formulations possible.’

Viewing African cities through the lenses of creative work from and about them expands the critical urban gaze beyond narratives of deficiency, towards readings of everyday lives – towards the plurality of ‘what is really going on’ (Edjabe and Pieterse 2005, 1) in these spaces, and what this means for urban enquiry. Such a shift in empirical perspective begins to address the need within African Studies and Urban Studies to ‘take cognisance of the insights that emerge when people are not perceived as simply calculative beings who operate primarily on the basis of cognitive modes of consciousness’ (Sitas and Pieterse 2013, 330) but as embodied, feeling, connected humans.

This special section, then, is an attempt to point to the importance of the artistic urban archive in the global South, asking: what are the metaphors that shape cities in Africa, and can they help us both to see the many dimensions of African cities and to break down simplistic North–South binaries? Following Pinder’s (2008, 732) lead, we take as our point of departure the idea that ‘attending more closely to existing and potential cross currents and collaborative ventures between urban theory, empirical research and artistic and creative practice [could] deepen and widen the analytical and political edge of these interventions’.

We are cognisant of the Southern African dominance in the voices represented here, and the relatively limited geographical coverage of the content in this special section. It is our hope that this is just the start of a broader and longer conversation, and we are confident that the authors here would join us in active support of a wider engagement with African urban lives through creative registers, across and beyond the continent. The richly diverse ways in which urban African lives are represented in the visual, literary and performing arts certainly merit ongoing critical examination. That said, we are excited to showcase the four papers here, each of which attends in different ways to the nexus of Urban Studies, creative practice, and African experiences.

This special section on representing urban lives in Africa starts in Durban, South Africa, where Kira Erwin explores how public storytelling can use ‘counter-hegemonic narratives to disrupt, disarticulate and expand dominant storylines, so that we may reimagine anew alternative ways of seeing and being in the city’. Erwin’s article, Storytelling as a political act: towards a politics of complexity and counterhegemonic narratives, reflects on a research project collaboration where Empatheatre makers drew on oral histories of migrant women’s experiences to develop an interactive performance. The article argues for the political possibilities of public storytelling and scholarship.

In the second article, Jonathan Cane actively resists what he terms ‘a strain of persistent horizontality’ to explore instead the politics of verticality in African cities. In a study of three artworks, Filip de Boeck and Sammy Baloji’s film The Tower: A Concrete Utopia, Bodys Isek Kingelez’ sculpture Kimbembele Ihunga and Ondjaki’s novel Transparent City, Cane argues that the politics of verticality can be expanded to include the poetics and promises of three-dimensional urbanism. He draws on these representations of African cities to interrogate assumptions and ideals about the future, and to expand thinking within and beyond African Studies about where modernity lies.

The third article in the collection asks us to shift our perspective from urban dilemmas to art, to make sense of African cities. Focusing on public spaces in Johannesburg through a 2011 performative artwork entitled Inhabitant, by Sello Pesa and Vaughan Sadie, Pauline Guinard examines the power of performance both to re-envision the city and to engage audiences in that new way of seeing. The article argues that contrary to dominant narratives, Johannesburg does in fact have public spaces, but recognising them and their potential demands a willingness to re-think our ideas of what public spaces are and could be.

The fourth and final article in this special section is by Fiona Siegenthaler, who explores pluriversal conceptions of the city through three artists: David Koloane, Jo Ractliffe and Anthea Moys. Using a heuristic distinction between images, imageries and imaginaries, Siegenthaler argues that de-centered and de-colonial perspectives require plural modes of representation to do justice to the plethora of urban experiences. Through the artists’ work, the article shows how creative work may be more adept at revealing cityness than other forms of urban scholarship.

The history and political economy of urban lives

Continuing the urban theme, but moving from questions of artistic representation to the politics of economic development, Graeme Young explores the recent history of Kisekka Market in Kampala, Uganda. He argues that even when seemingly benign or pro-poor, urban development in informal spaces all too often consolidates existing relations of political and economic power. The article demonstrates the importance of actively interrogating the political economy of informal spaces as part of the project of theorising and building more inclusive, just and sustainable African cities.

Innocent Dande’s paper makes an important contribution to urban working-class dog histories in Africa. The article examines informal dog breeding practices of the working class and informal workers in Zimbabwe’s high-density suburbs from 1990 to 2019. Dog breeding in this context was not overly shaped by standards established by Western kennel clubs, but instead responded to changing urban sub-cultures and demands for urban security during the Zimbabwean crisis. The political economy of informal dog breeding The emergence of informal dog breeding businesses also provided an avenue for wealth creation by the successful breeders. The article ends by arguing that human-dog relations changed the Zimbabwean crisis in Harare’s high-density urban suburbs.

Stand-up comedy as political resistance

The last two papers in this issue present important arguments about the role of comedy as a powerful form of politics. Amanda Källstig and Carl Death examine Trevor Noah’s stand-up comedy performances and interpret them as a form of political resistance. The authors draw on critical theories of comedy that have interpreted stand-up as a form of political counter-discourse to show how Noah effectively challenges racist and racialized assumptions, drawing on ‘ambivalent mockery’. Their article traces how his material provides a powerful challenge to dominant white, western and Eurocentric discourses on race, disease and poverty.

Finally, Martin et al. explore the ways in which humour can open up conversations about sexual and gender-based violence, with a specific focus on interviews and focus groups conducted in Sierra Leone. Without dismissing the fact that humour itself can be violent in certain contexts, the authors examine productive linkages between comedy and laughter on the one hand, and space, memory, and lived experiences on the other. They argue that humour is complex and intimately related to violence in multiple ways. Harnessed effectively, humour can help to generate deeper reflection and social cohesion even in spaces of pain and hardship.

In total, the papers in this final issue of the year demonstrate the vibrancy of African Studies as a source of creative, critical and diverse interdisciplinary research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).