Fassil Demissie

Imperial legacies and postcolonial predicaments: an introduction

The idea for a special issue of African Identities focusing on contemporary African cites caught in the contradictory logics of an imperial past and postcolonial predicaments emerged while convening a colloquium on ‘Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contest History’ which was organized by the Centre for Black Diaspora at DePaul University in 2005—2006. The colloquium was aimed at exploring the cultural role of colonial architecture and urbanism in the production of meanings, in the inscription of power and discipline, as well as in the dynamic construction of identities. Like other colonial institutions, such as the courts, police, prisons and schools that were crucial in establishing and maintaining political domination, colonial architecture and urbanism played pivotal roles in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although a number of the colloquium participants addressed the connection between colonial past and postcolonial present, the venue was not designed to explore in depth the postcolonial predicament of African cities. A separate undertaking was carried out to invite other scholars to participate in the discussion about postcolonial African cities where intense social and spatial claims to postcolonial citizenship and modernity are constantly negotiated in the context of the deepening crisis of African states to provide adequate quality of life and security to an impoverished citizenry. Increasingly, African cities and the material and social condition of their existence are further undermined by the globalization process which limits their capacity to provide even the minimal conditions of habitable living for their inhabitants. This special issue of African Identities is an attempt to forge a productive encounter between postcolonial African cities and recent scholarly intervention to problematize African cities as spaces where the urban inhabitants are reconfiguring and remaking urban worlds, deploying their own forms of urbanity born out of their historical and material circumstances. It is in these new dense urban spaces with all their contradictions that urban Africans are reworking their

Controlling and ‘Civilising Natives’ through architecture and town planning in South Africa

The discourse of ‘Native housing’ in apartheid South Africa derived its architectural language and design principles from modern architecture, which became popular in Europe and America during the inter‐war period. As a particular architectural discourse, ‘native housing’ and ‘township’ were not just simply an architectural drawing or a plan, which described the configuration of a building or a neighbourhood. Rather it was part of a web of practice embedded within the evolving apartheid spatial strategy to control the social and geographic mobility of African workers and their families.

Situated neoliberalism and urban crisis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The implosion of the socialist military government in 1991 ushered in a ‘new’ period in Ethiopia. This article examines the reincorporation of the country into the sphere of neoliberalism after a hiatus of 17 years of socialist experimentation accompanied by a social engineering project which brought unprecedented misfortune in the modern history of the country. The Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which assumed power, adopted market‐oriented structural and institutional reforms as a condition of getting an infusion of transnational capital and credit to resituate the Ethiopian economy which had been stagnant throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Two arguments are advanced is this article. First, the neoliberal project in Ethiopia which began in 1992 by privatizing the economy, devaluing the currency, reducing the fiscal deficit and abolishing state monopolies and price controls as a condition of the countrys entry to the global system has been ineffective in addressing the structural problems facing the country. Second, these neoliberal programmes are exacerbating the existing problems facing the residents of Addis Ababa.

Visual Fragments of Kinshasa

The recent transformation of the urban landscape of Kinshasa is documented by the Belgian photographer Marie‐Françoise Plissart whose images capture the palpable manifestation of a rapidly decomposing city, its urban landscape, and the lives of those whose existence has been irrevocably altered by forces outside their immediate control. The images captured by Marie‐Francoise Plissart in Kinshasa resonate with those also found in Lagos, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa and Maputo as well as many postcolonial cities of Africa.

Living across worlds and oceans – an introduction

The movement of people across national frontiers both voluntary and involuntary is reshaping societies and politics across the world and has emerged to be one of the most contentious and challenging issues in the contemporary world. Given the different projections of the number of international migrants, no one for sure knows how many international migrants are there. The United Nations Population Division estimated that for mid-year 2005, the number of international migrants stood at 191 million. By 2007, the figure approached 200 million or approximately 3 percent of the world’s population of 6.5 billion people. The number of migrants who live outside their country of birth is projected to reach 230 million by 2050 (United Nations 2006, 9). In addition, there are hundreds of million more people who been displaced within their countries of origin. According to the estimates by the United Nations, the total number of international migrants in Africa rose from 9 million in 1960 to 16 million in 2000. The largest increase occurred between 1960 and 1980, when the number of international migrants in Africa rose from 9 million to 14 million (United Nations 2003a, 2003b). Today, migration of people across borders and demographic mobility lie at the core of the ongoing process of globalization. Globalization has come to describe the trends and initiatives aimed to restructure the global economy and the free flow of capital, information and technology but not labor. Given the vast literature on the topic of globalization, one approach is to characterize the process as ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of the worldwide interconnectedness in all aspect of contemporary life’ (Held, McGrew, and Perraton 1999, 2). A fundamental component of the process of globalization is a rapid increase in cross-border flows of all sort, starting with finance and trade, but also democracy, good governance, cultural and media product, environmental pollution and – most importantly – people (Castles and Miller 2009, 5). A multitude of factors are involved that push people to move temporarily or permanently, nationally and transnationally, individually or in groups, return to their countries of origin, or migrate to another country, or move cyclically between two or more countries. Furthermore, migration is no longer limited to particular clearly identifiable human groups as in the past: the range of the types of persons who involved in those migration affects the social reproduction of their families and the development of their communities of origin is increasingly broad, and in their places of final

The new scramble over Africa's farmland: an introduction

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, more than 3 billion people, about half of the world’s population, lived in urban areas for the first time in human history, outnumbering the number of people who lived in rural areas. Indeed, by 2050, this number is expected to increase to 10 billion people (Wolfgang, Sanderson, & Scherbov, 1997). Most of the increase will take place in the impoverished cities of the Global South where many if not most people live in slums with income below the poverty line. At the height of the recent food price crisis in 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that in order to meet the world’s growing needs, food production would have to double by 2050, with the required increase mainly in developing countries, where the majority of the world’s rural poor live and where 95% of the population increase during this period is expected to occur. This major demographic transition is taking place today, characterized by global crisis where climate change, peak oil and rising food prices have made food security and energy the primary political issue of our time in which,

Global Cities of the South/Urban Subjects An Introduction

The end of the Cold War and the restructuring of the global order had refocused our attention on emerging areas of social and political confl ict. Increasingly, the Global South is alleged to have become a dangerous site for chaos, anarchy, environmental degradation, widespread crisis, and social collapse in which governments are unable to manage or contain the unprecedented crisis engulfi ng their cities and societies (Dalby, 1996). The crisis facing the global cities of the South was the subject of Robert Kaplan’s infl uential essay published in the Atlantic Monthly (1994) which provided a terrifying and depressing portrait of the last decade of the twentieth century. In his sweeping article titled, “The Coming Anarchy,” journalist Kaplan argues that much of the Global South is on a path to violence-ridden “anarchy,” where states are collapsing at an alarming rate accompanied by the rise of private armies and organized crime, establishing themselves as effective structures of local government (Kaplan, 1994, pp. 47–76).1 In order to portray the social collapse, rapidly spreading diseases and crimes in the Global South, Kaplan’s article was accompanied with selected photographs taken in various countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and in the Kurdish guerrilla control area of Turkey as evidence of how places in the Global South have become “killing zones” littered with “mass graves” where “violent retributions” are the order of the day. In addition, there were also photos showing teeming crowds at public transportation hubs in Lagos and people doing their daily washing in the lagoons of Abidjan, as well as photographs of overcrowded cities and shantytowns in the global cities of the South. The fi nal photographs accompanying the article were of looters following the trial of police offi cers in the Rodney King case in Los Angeles, suggesting that the scenes were indications of things to come in the United States (Dalby, 1996, pp. 476–477) and other “tame” zones of postmodern prosperity which require containment of these unruly masses, if necessary by military force (Tuathail & Luke, 1994).

African diaspora and the metropolis: an introduction

The publication of this special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal coincides with the 62nd anniversary of the founding of Présence Africaine a quarterly cultural, political and literary revue by Alliopnip Diop and Aimé Césaire. As Paul Gilroy has aptly suggested, the formation of the journal was ‘an important movement in the developing awareness of the African Diaspora as a transnational and intercultural multiplicity . . . to synchronize the activities of Africanists and Africans with blacks from the western hemisphere in a new and potent anti-imperialist configuration’ (1993, p. 195). Indeed, the publication of Présence Africaine was an expression of the African and Black Diaspora intellectual movement that resulted in a series of important congresses held in various European cities between 1900 and 1956 to recenter Africa in the collective imagination of its diaspora and galvanizes political support against colonial rule. Présence Africaine like many other publications established in the metropolis activated the existing social and intellectual networks among African and Black Diaspora intellectuals, artists, musicians, cultural workers and immigrants that began to gather momentum since the first Pan African Congress held in London in 1900. In his book published in the early 1993, Paul Gilroy (1993, p. 16) noted that,

Displaying Race and Exhibiting Empires in the 1930s

I must say that I was a bit disappointed to note the absence of human flesh from this colonial menu ... We may not have tasted Man today, but we have eaten animal flesh. This is a compromise solution, replacing human sacrifice, but one that will appear no less abhorrent to our descendants, who will take their nourishment in pill form. When we consume animals, the Blacks say that it is still a divinity that we eat and assimilate. We, ladies and gentlemen, today we have not only devoured Senegal and Gambia, we have not only digested Sudan; we have communed with all of Africa. [L’Afrique tout entière] in the form of a crow and a warthog. (cited in Ezra, 2000, p. 1)

Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States: an introduction

In a video shot outside by an anonymous bystander very close to the Ethiopian Consulate in Beirut, Lebanon on February 2012, a 33-year-old Ethiopian female domestic worker was savagely beaten and violently dragged by Ali Mahfouz who is the brother of a labor recruiter into the back seat of a black BMW, while a chorus of men silently watched the unfolding event and no one came to help her or stop the beating and dragging. This videotaped incident was later aired by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBIC) on 8 March 2012, and the video went viral. The same report records that, after the incident, police arrived at the scene and took Alem to a detention center ‘without arresting any of her tormentors’. Alem was transferred to Deir al Saleeb Psychiatric Hospital for medical care where she committed suicide by hanging herself using her bed sheets, early in the morning on March 14, 2012 (Beydoun Ali 2006; Human Rights Watch 2012). Five years later in a horrifying video of an Ethiopian domestic worker falling from what media reports indicated was the seventh floor of an apartment building in Dubai, Kuwait went viral instantly. The video appears to have been filmed by the worker’s employer inside the apartment with the domestic worker dangling outside the window. Rather than assist her from falling, the employer was videotaping the incident from inside while the panicked worker calls out for her to grab her. But within 12 seconds of the video recording starting, the dangling woman lost her grip and fell from the seventh floor. Considered a miracle by many in the Ethiopian domestic workers community in Dubai, the domestic worker only suffered a broken hand, bleeding nose and ear according to the Kuwait Times (2012). The authorities arrested the employer and charged her for failing to assist her worker. These two incidents separated by geography – in Lebanon and Dubai and time are part of a wide culture of systematic abuse perpetuated by families and individual employers who have hired Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States in the last two decades. Numerous other cases documented by international media and local agencies as well as the Human Rights group have reported widespread violence, rape, beating, starvation, and slavery-like practices, excessive domestic work, debt bondage, sexual slavery, and servitude of Ethiopian female domestic workers in the region. In the last two decades, the migration (both legal and clandestine) of Ethiopian female domestic workers to globalizing cities of the Middle East and Gulf States particularly, to Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, Aman, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Sana’a, and Cairo has increased dramatically because of the dynamics of globalization and neoliberal economic policies which ushered in increased free trade, deregulation,