Garth Myers

The inscription of difference: news coverage of the conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia

Abstract There are many parallels between the current civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia. Similarities can be found in military tactics and in how external imperialism, ethnicity, rural underdevelopment and even topography shape various parameters of the conflicts. Despite the comparable message potential inherent in these parallels, the US news media have elected to cast their coverage of the two wars in two different frameworks of understanding. Through content and intertextual analysis of six major US newspapers, and through juxtaposition of news coverage of Bosnia, we reveal how the press distorts Rwanda coverage to fit a frame. This frame relies almost entirely on non-African sources, depicting Africa as a timeless and placeless realm of “tribal” conflict, the repository of deep-seated US fears of African “others”. This inscription of difference implicates the news media as a central player in the social construction, categorization and defamation of peoples and places in the emerging post-Cold-War geopolitical (dis)order.

Cities in contemporary Africa

Introduction: Situating Contemporary Cities in Africa G.Myers & M.Murray PART I:Culture, Imagination, Place, and Space Douala/Johannesburg/New York: Cityscapes Imagined D.Malaquais Internal Migration and the Escalation of Ethnic and Religious Violence in Urban Nigeria D.J.Smith Re(figuring) the City: The Mapping of Places and People in Contemporary Kenyan Popular Song Texts J.Nyairo Photographic Essay: Johannesburg Fortified M.J.Murray & J.Malan (photography) Douala: Inventing Life in an African Necropolis B.Ndjio PART II: Political Economy, Work, and Livelihoods Economic Globalization from Below: Transnational Refugee Trade Networks in Nairobi E.Campbell Changing African Cityscapes: Regional Claims of African Labor at South African-owned Shopping Malls D.Miller Cars Are Killing Luanda: Cronyism, Consumerism, and Other Assaults on Angolas Post-War Captial City. M.A.Pitcher (with A.Graham) Photographic Essay II:Luanda, Angola A.Graham Human Capital, Embedded Resources and Employment for Youth in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe M.Grant Gender Relations, Bread Winning and Family Life in Kinshasa G.Iyenda & D.Simon PART III: Urban Planning, Administration and Governance South African Urbanism: Between the Modern and the Refugee Camp A.Simone Planning, Anti-Planning and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos M.Gandy City Life in Zimbabwe at a Time of Fear and Loathing: Urban Planning, Urban Poverty, and Operation Murambatsvina D.Potts Social Control and Social Welfare under Neoliberalism in South African Cities: Contradictions in Free Basic Water Services G.Ruiters

Introductory Human Geography Textbook Representations of Africa

This article analyzes representations of Africa found in ten introductory human geography textbooks. Recent research in communications studies cites the common tendencies of the U.S. media to represent Africa in rhetorical tropes of disaster that are ahistorical and rife with geographical abstraction and misrepresentation. The main textbooks in geography tend to avoid ahistorical and geographical simplification, yet they often repeat stereotypes and misleading media imagery concerning Africa. A broad body of works by geographers in the last decade that offers critical scholarly analysis of both African crises and African everyday life is generally underrepresented in the disciplines introductory textbooks, although some encouraging exceptions do exist to that generalization. It is suggested that geographers need to critically re-examine the ways in which African examples are utilized to teach fundamentals of human geography.

Designing power: forms and purposes of colonial model neighborhoods in British Africa

Abstract This paper examines two model neighborhood programs in different British colonies in Africa, during two different time periods: Pumwani, Nairobis first planned “Native Location” from the 1920s, and the model neighborhoods developed in Zanzibar between 1945 and 1958. I employ research findings from the last decade to assess the attempts by these two colonial states to use urban planning to shape the physical spaces of city life as a way to create consent as well as domination—or, in the words of the career colonialist who had a hand in designing both, Eric Dutton, Goodwill and Rule. What we see by this comparison is how the physical forms and the forms of goodwill and rule changed, but also how many elements of the workings of colonial power remained the same. Ultimately, the comparison shows how intrinsic residential spatiality was to the designs of colonial power, and how unsuccessful these colonial designs were, literally and figuratively.

Peri-Urban Land Reform, Political-Economic Reform, and Urban Political Ecology in Zanzibar

The rapid urbanization of land in the peri-urban West District surrounding Zanzibar city in Tanzania has occurred during a 20-year period of political and economic reform, with related reforms in the land sector. Utilizing 2006 and 2007 interviews with officials and residents alongside document and archival research, this study examines two themes in relation to Zanzibars most prominent program of contemporary land reform, a Finnish-funded project for the Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (SMOLE). These themes entail: (1) the importance of the historical-cultural geography of peri-urban land dynamics for dual reform (simultaneous political and economic reform) processes in Africa; and (2) the critique of pro-poor, neoliberal land reform for the disjunctures between its rhetoric, actual planning practice, and the beliefs and practices of the peri-urban poor, wherein we discover a lack of participation, transparency, or democracy in the land sector. The articles broader aim is to contribute a detailed African case study to urban political ecologys efforts to argue for democratization of the construction of social environments.

Introduction: Situating Contemporary Cities in Africa

The process of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa has elicited a variety of different reactions and interpretations amongst researchers and casual observers alike. There is general consensus in the scholarly literature concerned with African cities that the accumulation of such distressing features as unregulated growth, limited opportunities for gainful employment in the formal economy, severe environmental degradation, lack of decent and affordable housing, failing and neglected infrastructure, absence of basic social services, pauperization, criminality, negligent city-management, and increasing inequalities amount to a more or less permanent condition of urban crisis of monumental proportions (Rakodi 1997; Tostensen et al. 2001). Nevertheless, there is little agreement over the root causes for the ongoing urban crisis, or what to do to reverse the situation. Whereas some attribute the urban crisis largely to explosive population growth and to adverse economic circumstances, others place the blame on corruption, or mismanagement, or the failures of municipalities to provide proper institutional and legal frameworks necessary for triggering entrepreneurial growth and development (Tostensen et al. 2001: 7, 10–11).

A World-Class City-Region? Envisioning the Nairobi of 2030

A jaundiced optimism has surfaced in the past few years for a number of cities across the African continent. There is optimism for the moment in cities from Dakar to Nairobi, Cairo to Cape Town, Marrakesh to Maputo, and many urban spaces in between, due to positive economic growth and emergence of relative political stability. The optimism is jaundiced from decades of experience with previous moments of optimism overrun by economic crises and political upheaval. This article will examine this mixed outlook on the future for cities in Africa through a case study of Nairobi, and in particular its Nairobi Metro 2030 vision plan for the city and its surrounding counties. Kenya’s efforts to reimagine Nairobi as a “world-class city-region” by 2030 include ambitious yet tangible outcomes that are beginning to come to fruition—massive improvements to infrastructure, total transformation of the governance structure, and significant and substantive investments in commercial, industrial, and residential real estate. At the same time, the vision has a wandering eye, which keeps drifting back to the caution palpable among Nairobi residents stemming from severe inequalities, criminal violence, and political rivalries. Based on fieldwork and interviews from 2012 and policy analysis from 2012 to 2014, I argue that the Nairobi case is emblematic of the ambivalent era for urban visions blossoming across urban Africa as we move toward 2030.

Intellectual of Empire: Eric Dutton and Hegemony in British Africa

This essay examines the career of Eric Dutton in five British African colonies from 1919 to 1952, with case studies of his work in Lusaka and Zanzibar. In analyzing Duttons career, I use a Gramscian conception of the role of intellectuals in creating colonial hegemony, against the backdrop of recent research on the relationship of geography to colonial discourse. Dutton worked and corresponded with key players in Britains African empire. He was a major force behind early urban-planning programs in East and Central Africa and author of four geographical books. Permanently disabled by war wounds, he was also permanently infatuated with the moral rightness of British imperial culture. A concern for geographys professional relationship with, and the geographical legacy of, colonialism has emerged in recent scholarship on Africa, largely through studies of travel writing, fiction, and nineteenth- or early twentieth-century exploration geography. Later scholar-officials like Dutton sought to apply their know...

The discursive tactics of neoliberal development in small Third World countries

Abstract This paper draws from the regulation approach and from discourse analysis to contextualize and evaluate current trends in the industrial development policies of small Third World countries. The investment promotion guidebooks of eight economically-weak states of the Caribbean Basin and littoral Africa provide evidence for the construction of Third World mediascapes. Through promises of a pro-investor climate, images of scientific production, and avoidance of the reality of social discontent, the guidebooks signal that the country is a signatory to the neoliberal world order and is ripe for investment in export-oriented manufacturing. The guidebooks demonstrate considerable homogeneity regarding discursive tactics, messages, and promises to capital. The typical advertising package combines three themes: neoliberal and contextual depiction (pledges of subsidies, an open economy, and cheap and unorganized labour; tropical paradise and friendly natives), science fiction (dreams of high technology, telecommunications, and informatics), and strategic omission (exclusion of strife, resistance, hardship, and societal degradation). The homogeneity of incentives causes the generous incentive packages across the Third World to cancel each other out, thereby raising the stakes necessary to lure fastidious investors. Homogenization through mediascapes is not total, however. The invitations to international capital are trapped by local context. Investors discover either through the guidebooks or on site that local history and struggle preclude an unproblematic absorption and implementation of the neoliberal hegemonic project.

Colonial and Postcolonial Modernities in Two African Cities

ResumeLa majorite des paysages urbains d’Afrique de l’Est et du Centre-Sud ont des origines relativement recentes et l’heritage du colonialisme britannique y est encore tres evident. Pourtant, les strategies coloniale et postcoloniale du modernisme urbain n’ont rencontre que des echecs. Cet article examine deux projets gouvernementaux de modernite urbaine: la construction de Lusaka dans les annees 1930; et la construction de Lilongwe au Malawi dans les annees 1960 et 1970. Le concept d’encadrement de Timothy Mitchell est applique pour permettre de comprendre comment et pourquoi ces etats ont impose des organisations physiques de l’espace susceptibles de leur permettre d’exercer leur pouvoir sans difficulte. Les etudes de cas illustrent aussi la maniere dont les citadins africains ordinaires ont reorganise leur espace, a l’interieur meme des contraintes imposees par les gouvernements d’oppression. Ces reactions offrent en exemple les solutions urbaines africaines offertes aux defis des modernites, solution...