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SCHOLARLY REVIEW ESSAY
(Mis)Understanding Urban Africa:
Toward A Research Agenda on the
Political Impact of Urbanization
Daniel E. Agbiboa. They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and
Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 266
pp. List of Figures. List of Tables. Bibliography. Index. $100.00. Hardback. ISBN:
9780198861546.
Noah L. Nathan. Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and
Ethnicity in Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 344 pp. List of
Figures. List of Tables. Bibliography. Index. $34.29. Paperback. ISBN: 1108468187.
Stephanie Newell. Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and
Postcolonial Lagos. London: Duke University Press, 2019. 249 pp. Author’s note.
Bibliography. Index. $26.95. Paperback. ISBN: 9781478006435.
Jeffrey Paller. Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 313 pp. List of Figures. List of Tables.
Bibliography. Index. $105.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781316513309.
AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse. New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Disso-
nant Times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. 198 pp. Preface. Bibliography. $26.00.
Paperback. ISBN: 9780745691565.
The last decade has seen a growing consensus around two aspects of
Africa’s changing demographic and socio-economic profile and their
impact on the continent’s development. The first area of agreement is
that “Africa’s future is urban”(ISS 2016). Whereas the continent was
overwhelmingly rural in the early years of independence, a majority of
citizens will live in urban areas by 2050. The second area of convergence is
that this demographic shift will have profound political and economic
consequences (Murali et al. 2018), including kick-starting stalled processes
of democratization (Anku & Enu-Kalu 2019). It is easy to see why so many
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the
African Studies Association.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2022.83 Published online by Cambridge University Press
journalists and researchers have moved swiftly from empirical observation
to theoretical prediction. On the one hand, there are a number of coun-
tries in which opposition parties fare much better in urban areas and have
used this as a springboard to challenge the dominance of the entrenched
ruling parties, including Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zim-
babwe. On the other hand, this framing fits with existing assumptions about
spatial identities on the continent. Rural dwellers are often imagined to be
under-educated and ill-informed, stuck in a version of Mahmood Mamda-
ni’s(1996)“despotic decentralization”in which both thoughts and polit-
ical behaviors are controlled by ethnic and traditional leaders. By contrast,
urbanites are more likely to be depicted as cosmopolitan citizens inte-
grated into global information networks (Zeleza & Veney 2003); this
theoretically empowers them to break out of traditional patterns of patron-
age and clientelism, and hence to hold the government to account. Work-
ing within this set of assumptions, one might assume that urbanization will
inevitably transform African politics and development for the better, forc-
ing political parties and leaders to spend less time trying to buy and direct
rural voters, and more time trying to persuade and satisfy their more
demanding urban counterparts.
Yet even the slightest tug at the weave of this argument causes it to begin
to unravel. While it is true that urbanites report higher levels of support for
democracy and accountability, the differences are often very small. In 2019,
45 percent of urbanites surveyed by the Afrobarometer across 37 African
countries expressed support for democracy while rejecting all authoritarian
forms of government, just 5 percent more than the average for rural areas.
1
Perhaps even more strikingly, the proportion of people expressing no sup-
port for democracy at all was higher in urban areas (5 percent, as compared
to 4 percent in rural locales). These findings contradict the notion that
urbanization will drive democratization, but they should not come as a
surprise. After all, the similarity between the rural and the urban—and the
blurred lines between them—is not a new revelation. Five decades ago, Joel
Barkan’s(1976) pioneering work demonstrated that the “conventional
wisdom”that rural voters were politically ignorant and disconnected was
flawed. Turning many of the biases prevalent at the time on their head,
Barkan’s research showed that those in rural areas were politically knowl-
edgeable, in part due to the outsized role that leaders played in determining
access to resources and public services outside of capital cities. Conversely,
early sociological studies stressed the way in which competition for scarce jobs
and resources could generate an even greater focus on ethnic identity in
cosmopolitan urban areas than in more homogenous rural locations
(Mitchell 1959; Askari 1969). The problem is therefore not that we lack
research that provides a nuanced account of urban and rural political
identities, but that these subtleties have often been overlooked—including
by this author—in the rush to see urbanization as a politically transformative
process.
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Insufficient attention has also been given to the variety of impacts that
urbanization is likely to have. The categories of “urban”and “rural”are too
often depicted as binary alternatives with nothing in between, yet a majority
of the urban population growth that is projected will not occur in capital cities
but instead in much smaller towns and peri-urban areas. While it is tempting
to assume that peri-urban areas can simply be considered as “hybrid”loca-
tions that split the difference between urban and rural locales, recent
research has demonstrated that they often feature a distinctive form of
politics that echoes the politics of contestation so often seen to epitomize
the city, but in a way that is particularly vulnerable to “clientelist subjection”
(McGregor & Chatiza 2020).
2
The tendency to over-simplify the continent’s
complex urban tapestry, and to assume that urbanization will drive progres-
sive change, means that important questions remain about what it means to
be urban and what kinds of new social and individual changes urbanization—
and the emergence of peri-urban areas and vast urban corridors both within
countries and across borders—will give rise to. To be clear, the question is not
whether urban, rural, and peri-urban areas are the same; it is obvious that
towns and villages have different economies, geographies, and social lives.
The question is whether these differences amount to a fundamental shift in
the way that politics is conducted, and how the relationship between individ-
uals and the state is understood—do they, in other words, give rise to
different political subjectivities (Cheeseman et al. 2021)?
Some Latin American scholars have written of cities as crucibles for the
emergence of new forms of citizenship. For James Holston (2007), the twin
processes of democratization and urbanization in Brazil have led to produc-
tive encounters (see also Fulton 2007: 245), as citizens mobilized to assert and
defend their rights in highly unequal and predatory settings. Such clashes are
productive because they “entail conflicts of alternative formulations of
citizenship,”and so “sites of metropolitan innovation often emerge at the
very sites of metropolitan degradation”(2009:245). It is central to Holston’s
understanding of the significance of these conflicts that some of these
conceptions are progressive, in the sense that they challenge existing social
and economic inequalities (see also Earle 2012). A spate of research in Kenya
in the early 2000s hinted at a similar potential, with cross-ethnic mobilization
against land grabbing creating the potential for the transformation of “polit-
ical tribalization”into a more productive form of “moral ethnicity”(Orvis
2001; Klopp 2002). But the “ethnic clashes”that followed the disputed 2007
elections disrupted this research agenda just as they did Kenya’s democratic
progress, and there have been few attempts to systematically assess the extent
to which urbanization and (stalled) democratization are generating new
forms of citizenship.
Since then, important work has been done on the historical evolution of
African cities (Freund 2007); how urbanization has produced contestation
over land, taxes, and urban property rights (LeVan & Olubowale 2014;
Goodfellow 2017); the impact of city governance on poverty (Rakodi 2004)
and space (Guma 2016); and the way in which government policy has shifted
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to favor rural areas as governments chased votes following the reintroduction
of multiparty politics, reversing any “urban bias”of the 1980s (Harding 2020).
This work has complemented long-standing debates such as the controversy
concerning whether we are seeing urbanization as opposed to a continual
flow of people between urban and rural areas (Macmillan 1993; Ferguson
1994), and the extent to which urban-rural connectivity, facilitated by the
flow of people and ideas and the advent of new technology, has brought rural
and urban political subjectivities closer together (Gugler 2002; Potts 2010;
Mberu et al. 2013).
More recently, this melting pot of ideas has given rise to a new research
agenda that has taken a much more nuanced approach to the question of
how urbanites understand their rights and obligations, and their relationship
to the state. This has been led by pioneering work on Zimbabwe by a number
of scholars, inspired by the striking combination of a historically capable
state, a vibrant urban political scene, twenty years of economic decline and
spates of often severe government repression. Sara Rich Dorman (2016) has
asked who is considered to be urban and why. Kristina Pikovskaia (2022) has
demonstrated how “informal sector organizations”influence their members’
understanding of citizenship, facilitating political participation and shaping
their everyday politics. JoAnn McGregor and Kudzai Chatiza (2020) have
written of “partisan citizenship,”and the way in which ZANU-PF has sought to
control the politics of those living on the outskirts of Harare. Meanwhile,
Simukai Chigudu (2020) has shown how inequalities in wealth and power
shape public service delivery—and hence the contours of urban disease—but
also inspire demands for more substantive citizenship. In a similar vein,
Davison Muchadenyika (2020) argues that urban social movements based
around housing cooperatives and homeless associations galvanize demands
for social justice. Beyond Zimbabwe, scholars have also documented the
importance of “urban kinship”ties—idioms of relatedness in the city that
are often “articulated in the language of family”—for social cohesion
(Bjarnesen & Utas 2018:S5); explained how the high concentration of people
in the informal sector in urban areas can lead to “passive networking”(Bayat
2009), generating what Robert Putnam (2001) would call social capital; and
demonstrated the potential for urban areas to inspire new forms of political
mobilization (Resnick 2012,2014).
Two things unite this otherwise diverse set of publications on urban
subjectivities: first, the belief that there is something distinctive and hence
worth studying about urban Africa, and second, a rejection of teleological
theories in which urbanization is framed as an inevitable harbinger of
progress and democratization. No contribution demonstrates this better
than New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, a thought-provoking and
frequently brilliant book by AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, who has
played an important role in inspiring and highlighting African scholarship
on urban issues as the Director of the Africa Centre for Cities at the University
of Cape Town. In many ways, New Urban Worlds is a book about how not to
understand urban developments. Simone and Pieterse provide a compelling
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critique of the tendency for those working within urban studies, and on the
politics of Africa and Asia more generally, to put forward reductive narratives
that elide the complexity of urban life (89). Explicitly pitching their own
research as an antidote to overly top-down and simplistic accounts, they revel
in the messiness of urban encounters, and the way in which local specificities
challenge and undermine broad generalizations. In line with this approach,
the seven chapters that make up their volume look at the “Paradoxes of the
Urban,”“Precarious Now,”“Re-Description,”“Secretions,”“Horizons From
Within the Break,”and “Experimentations,”before the book ends with an
“Epilogue”that features “A Story About Stories.”As the short and conceptual
nature of these titles suggests, Simone and Pieterse are as interested in the
question of how urban areas should be studied and thought about as they are
about the kinds of politics that they inculcate.
Partly as a result of this approach, the book provides a smorgasbord of
innovative and thoughtful techniques with which to learn and re-learn about
urban areas. One of the most interesting of these approaches is to engage
with different kinds of storytelling to challenge official accounts and domi-
nant narratives, a process that the authors describe as “redescription.”This is
just one of three lenses that they adopt, the other two being “secretion”and
“resonance.”While secretion highlights the informal “fixes”and ad hoc
arrangements that fill in the gaps left by limited and faulty formal structures
and institutions, the idea of resonance speaks to how individual interactions
can build into broader processes and developments in ways that are fre-
quently creative and reflect organic spontaneity rather than the existence of a
grand plan.
This approach is a particularly valuable corrective to lazy predictions
about the impact of urbanization because it emphasises the lack of order,
predictability, and serendipity that can characterize urban life. By highlight-
ing complexity while simultaneously documenting the emergence of forms of
resistance and solidarity, New Urban Worlds demonstrates how we can view
cities as sites of productive encounters, à la Holston, without importing the
misleading assumption that urban life will inevitably evolve into some kind of
democratic panacea. A number of other features of the book are also
commendable, not least of which is the fact that it integrates African and
Asian examples, and in doing so goes some way to de-exoticizing both
regions. The ethnographic and bottom-up approach that the authors prior-
itize is well suited to their task, and works particularly well when they use it to
highlight the limitations of “technocratic utopias,”which imagine that urban
challenges can be resolved by introducing unaffordable and unsustainable
smart cities (59). A more productive and egalitarian approach, they argue,
would be to harness existing urban energy and innovation by investing in less
expensive ICT infrastructure in order to empower the masses rather than an
elite minority.
Although Simone and Pieterse’s“experimental”and “cryptic”(120)
approach to understanding cities is a major strength of the book when the
authors are critiquing existing theories, it can also be a weakness when it
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comes to identifying broader conclusions and lessons for future research.
New Urban Worlds mirrors its source material by being complex, uneven, and
unpredictable. In many ways this is a neat trick that helps to emphasize the
importance of avoiding teleological analysis. But while the different insights
the book offers resonate with one another—and are likely to prove powerfully
evocative for the well-traveled reader—it is not always easy to see what they
amount to. The authors do provide some pointers as to how their vision of an
“adaptive city”can be realized, most notably by harnessing the disruptive
power of technology in ways that pay careful attention to the everyday
experiences of non-elite citizens, while using experimental techniques that
ward off one-size-fits-all approaches. But little is said about how the different
ideas they propose can be integrated, and when and where adaptive cities are
most likely to emerge. In other words, despite its powerful critique, New Urban
Worlds is not immune to the siren call of utopia.
Moving forward, understanding the politics of urban Africa is likely to
require us to find a middle ground between top-down theories of the
consequences of urbanization and the radically localized approach epito-
mized by Simone and Pieterse. This kind of mid-range approach will allow us
to systematically assess the relationship between urbanization and political
life. As Edward Glaeser and Bryce Steinberg have argued, if urbanization is to
drive democratic change, this is likely to occur through one of three main
channels: cities may “coordinate public action,”enhancing the effectiveness
of protests and uprisings; they may increase “demand for democracy”by
shaping popular attitudes; and they may engender the development of “civic
capital,”enabling “citizens to improve their own institutions”(2017:58).
Understanding which of these channels is in operation in a given country
or region has historically been hampered by the fact that “The relationship
between urbanization and democratization remains under-theorized and
under-researched”(Barnett 2014: 1625). Working out which pathway
(if any) is at play in Africa will therefore require a sustained research agenda
that is likely to feature at least ten core questions:
1. To what extent do we see different forms or intensities of certain kinds of political
behavior—such as protests, uprisings, and the assertions of self-government—in
urban areas?
2. How do people think about their relationship to the state and their political rights
and obligations as citizens—that is, their political subjectivities—in urban areas,
and how does this vary across the very different people that make up urban
spaces?
3. How, if at all, do these political subjectivities differ from rural areas, and how is this
shaped by the nature and intensity of urban/rural linkages in a given country?
4. If urban attitudes and behaviors are distinctive, is this best explained by some
characteristic of the people who live in urban spaces (such as higher education or
wealth, or how recently they moved to the city), some feature of the urban
experience, (such as population density or greater access to information), or
the emergence of new societal norms and institutions (such as “civic capital”)?
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5. Does this predispose urbanites to certain kinds of beliefs about citizenship and
certain forms of political behavior—such as being more critical of the ruling party
and voting for opposition parties and leaders?
6. Are urban effects primarily rooted in capital cities, or do they extend to smaller
towns and peri-urban areas? How do urban political subjectivities vary within large
cities, between cities, and between cities and peri-urban areas within the same
country—especially when national politics features powerful regional divides, as
in Nigeria?
7. How do urban political subjectivities vary across countries (and continents) and
what factors—levels of democracy and industrialization, poverty, education,
religion, patterns of urban settlement, type of colonial rule, and so on—shape
these differences?
8. To what extent has urbanization changed the approach of political parties and
leaders, and in particular how they attempt to mobilize support?
9. To what extent has the impact of urbanization on political subjectivities been
shaped by urban planning policies and the approaches adopted by governments
to manage population flows more broadly?
10. In what ways does the paradoxical and unpredictable nature of urban living
complicate these patterns and so moderate—and perhaps even cancel out—
the transformative potential of urbanization?
Fortunately, four further contributions to the study of urban Africa by
Noah Nathan, Jeffrey Paller, Stephanie Newell, and Daniel E. Agbiboa begin
to address some of this research agenda in very different, but equally per-
suasive ways, while doing justice to Simone and Pieterse’s call to adopt diverse
and experimental approaches to the study of urban Africa. They also nicely
complement one another. While Nathan and Paller give us different takes on
Accra (Ghana), Newell and Agbiboa bring very different methodological
approaches and lenses to the study of Lagos (Nigeria).
The books by Nathan and Paller speak most consistently to the question
of political subjectivities. Indeed, both texts are very much focused on
complicating our understanding of urban Africa by demonstrating the ways
in which the interaction of class and ethnicity in the urban milieu has not
straightforwardly resulted in the emergence of the more programmatic
politics. As Nathan’sElectoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition notes in its
blurb, “Many expected that [the emergence of a large urban middle class and
high levels of ethnic diversity and inter-ethnic contact] would help spark a
transition away from ethnic competition and clientelism toward more pro-
grammatic elections,”but this has yet to happen. Instead, urban Ghana is
“caught in a trap”(5), in which clientelism and ethnic voting persist and lead
to sub-optimal political and developmental outcomes.
Nathan sets out the logic of this trap as follows: the failure of the state to
meet the service-delivery needs created by unmanaged urbanization gives
voters an incentive to demand the particular kinds of goods that can be
exchanged for political support around elections (19–20). At the same time,
limited state capacity also means that politicians have good reason to doubt
whether they really can deliver on programmatic promises. Taken together,
these urban realities sustain forms of ethnic and clientelistic mobilization and
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hence constrain political transformation. This first part of the trap is fairly
generic. Indeed, there is nothing uniquely “urban”about it; if we take out
“created by urbanization”and swap in “created by a widely dispersed rural
population,”Nathan could be describing the factors that sustain patronage
politics in rural areas.
The second part of Nathan’s story, however, is more distinctly urban.
Recognizing that they are in the minority and that politicians are unlikely to
respond to their demands, members of the middle class disengage from
political participation, and do so at higher rates than other types of voters
(24). In turn, their abstention gives political leaders even less incentive to try
and appeal to middle-class residents, and so the trap becomes self-reinfor-
cing. The net outcome of the trap is therefore to preserve the status quo by
reducing the influence of the one group that supports a transformative
agenda. We should therefore not expect to see a linear relationship between
urbanization, the rise of the middle class, and the curtailment of ethnic
politics.
The book presents this core argument admirably clearly and concisely.
Indeed, the central premise of “the trap”is succinctly summed up in the first
thirty pages. What follows is an excellent example of how to support an
argument with a number of links in the causal chain. Each chapter takes a
key part of the argument and, using a research design specially selected for
the purpose, deploys a rich array of evidence to build a persuasive picture of
how urban politics operates. This is the very best kind of mixed methods
research, blending survey analysis, interviews, focus groups, and census and
electoral data together in a way that demonstrates what can be achieved when
quantitative and qualitive methods are integrated into a cohesive and sys-
tematic approach. What elevates this discussion, and makes the book
required reading, is the inspired move to leverage intra-urban variation in
the Greater Accra area in order to build and defend the argument. Adopting
this approach kills two particularly significant birds with one stone. First, it
enables Nathan to challenge the tendency to homogenize the urban expe-
rience by demonstrating the significant differences at play within one city,
and second, it allows him to hold structural factors such as political institu-
tions constant and hence highlights the effect of more localized factors such
as the make-up of the population.
What emerges from this impressive research design is an account that is
both thought-provoking and nuanced. Nathan does not simply argue that the
growth of the middle class has had no effect, but rather demonstrates how
and why demands for more programmatic politics among this group have led
to greater changes in political dynamics in some parts of Accra than others.
What really matters, it transpires, is not just how middle-class an area is but
rather the interaction between class and the degree of ethnic diversity. Put
simply, “ethnicity is not a significant determinant of vote choice in diverse,
middle- and upper-class neighborhoods of the city, in contrast to much of the
rest of Ghana.”By contrast, “Ethnicity strongly predicts vote choice in most of
the city—including in middle and upper class neighborhoods—when they
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are ethnically segregated”(22). Ethnic diversity matters because it shapes the
incentives facing politicians; when politicians deliver club goods to neighbor-
hoods that are less homogenous, they are accessible to individuals from a
number of different communities and so “cannot be targeted selectively”
(25). In turn, this makes ethnic forms of mobilization less efficient, and hence
less attractive.
In making this argument, Nathan breaks new ground, identifying key
drivers of urban political transformation and providing us with valuable tools
for understanding why urban elections do not always look radically different
from their rural counterparts. He also demonstrates just how much the
impact of urbanization will be shaped by the extent to which urban planning
is designed to prevent the emergence of ethnic enclaves in the city. This point
could perhaps have been pushed even further—urban planning plays a
critical role in shaping the potential for effective politics because through
the design of housing estates and road systems it can increase or stem the flow
of traffic to potential spaces of protest. Closing down roads and re-directing
transport routes that connect to city centers and preventing effective trans-
port connections from being established between different parts of the city
are all ways that authoritarian governments can try and fragment communi-
ties and insulate downtown areas—and the government buildings and insti-
tutions—from expressions of mass dissent.
The overall picture that Nathan paints of the factors that shape urban
electoral politics is persuasive, but his heavy emphasis on the middle class as
agents of transformation raises two important questions. First, what aspects
of middle-class identity are most important when it comes to political
subjectivities? Chapter Two offers a sophisticated discussion of how to
conceptualize and measure class that moves beyond reductive measures
such as income in favor of an approach based on education and employ-
ment characteristics. But the book’s strong focus on neighborhood effects
at times takes Nathan away from a more bottom-up perspective on what
motivates individual voters, and the question of whether education or
employment status plays a bigger role in shaping how individuals feel about
democracy and the value of political rights and civil liberties. Second, does
the potential for urbanization to generate new forms of political account-
ability lie mainly in the fact that urban areas feature more middle-class
populations? If so, and living in diverse urban areas does not affect any
change in political subjectivities among what, for want of a better term, we
might call “lower class citizens,”is this really an “urban”effect or a more
generic economic one? After all, if the emergence of predominantly mid-
dle-class neighborhoods is a prerequisite for political transformation, we
have essentially come full circle and are once again reiterating the core
tenets of modernization theory (Chisadza & Bittencourt 2019). This would
leave Ghana a long way from Holston’s vision, in which urban political
contestation acts as a crucible for new forms of citizenship among a wider
cross-section of urbanites, eventually leading to a more radical challenge to
the status quo.
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The answers to some of these questions are provided by Paller’sEveryday
Politics in Urban Africa, which perfectly complements Electoral Politics and
Africa’s Urban Transition—indeed, one might imagine the two authors having
lengthy and productive discussions, refining and strengthening their analysis
in response to one another. As with Nathan’s research, Paller’s work is
steeped in the literature on urbanization both in Africa and beyond, and
the early chapters of both books provide excellent literature reviews that
anyone new to this topic would do well to read. But in contrast to Nathan’s
focus on electoral politics, Paller is more interested in the constant process of
negotiation, struggle, and debate that occurs in urban areas—in part because
this is what animates the people he talks to on a daily basis. As the title of his
volume suggests, Paller’s contribution is to approach urban politics from a
bottom-up perspective. Thus, while he draws on a set of sources similar to
those used by Nathan, most obviously interviews and survey analyses, his
palette is more heavily weighted toward ethnographic methods such as
participant observation.
This approach reflects the fact that Paller is less committed to testing a
particular theory, and more interested in capturing and understanding the
quotidian interactions of what we might call the urban political community—
citizens, community leaders, politicians, and so on. This approach pays
dividends, as Paller has a great eye for local dynamics, unpacking the ways
in which urbanization can give rise to complex struggles over land, rights, and
political power. One of the great strengths of this impressive and readable
book is its ability to give readers a real feel for how politics operates in urban
spaces that is both narratively and intellectually satisfying.
An important consequence of this way of working is that Paller has a great
deal to tell us about urban political subjectivities, as his very definition of
everyday politics is the “institutional context of daily decision-making in a
neighborhood—how people think, act, and feel about power on a daily basis”
(4). In addition to painting a complex and perceptive portrait of Greater
Accra, Everyday Politics in Urban Africa also puts forward a clear comparison to
rural areas, explicitly setting out what is often left implicit in scholarship in
this area. Starting from the position that “politics in African cities are con-
ceptually different from politics in rural areas”(21), Paller argues that rural
areas tend to be more ethnically homogenous, more remote, and more
dependent on the patronage of local leaders (262). This means that, on
the whole, the political outcomes are relatively predicable—at least in the
context of fairly stable and fairly democratic contexts such as Ghana. Urban
areas differ from this picture in two contrasting ways. On the one hand, cities
are highly diverse and dominated by the issue of their ever-growing popula-
tion, which forces the price of land up and means that there is growing
tension over access to water and sanitation. On the other hand, those in
urban areas have a greater choice over the provision of services such as health
and education. They are also located closer to the seat of power—the national
legislature and State House—and so may be less dependent on the direct
patronage of politicians and better placed to complain about the difficulties
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that they face. This combination makes urban politics potentially explosive;
ethnic tensions intermingle with serious needs in a context of shifting
alliances.
As with Nathan’s work, one of the great strengths of Paller’s analysis is
that he does not depict an undifferentiated city, but rather sets out a typology
that captures intra-urban variation on the basis of “the way that urban
Ghanaians understand their own claims to urban space”(64). This typology
divides urban space into three categories: indigenous settlements, stranger
settlements, and squatter settlements. Indigenous settlements are neighbor-
hoods inhabited by a majority of indigenous residents; stranger settlements
feature a majority of migrants who purchased land from the original custo-
dians; and squatter settlements feature migrant majorities who did not
purchase territory form indigenous landlords. Paller demonstrates that these
differences are important because they give rise to different forms of claims-
making and legitimate authority—a key concept in the book, which refers to
how “opinion leaders”(50) can gain respect and build support.
Because stranger communities are seen to have purchased land legiti-
mately from the original occupiers, they are considered to be permanent
residents in neighborhoods that come to be governed by “informal norms of
cooperation and public legitimacy”(48). Leaders in these areas gain respect
not from ethnic and partisan identities, but “through their service to the
community.”Squatters did not purchase their land legitimately, so they are
viewed as temporary residents, which means that “informal norms of per-
sonal empowerment and privatization of the commons”dominate in these
areas (49). Leaders in these areas face particular challenges because they are
not accepted by the host population, and this limits the extent to which they
want to invest in urban areas. Consequently, they often look to use their
urban influence to bolster their chances of running for office in their
hometowns. Things look different again in indigenous areas, where politics
is rooted in “autochthonous ownership claims to land and territory”(48–49),
and as a result authority is rooted in traditional ties, ownership over land, and
control of territory.
What does this mean for political subjectivities, and the question of where
political transformation may come from? The different forms that authority
takes in each area is significant, Paller argues, because it sets the template for
the kind of politics that is likely to be successful, and hence for the kinds of
political mobilization that come to the fore. The result is that “stranger
settlements have developed responsive and legitimate leaders to serve the
interests of the public, while indigenous and squatter settlements have not”
(30). Thus, we are presented with another nuanced account of variations in
urban politics that highlights the factors that stymie political change. While
urbanization may drive more programmatic politics where “strangers”are
seen to have purchased land legitimately, fostering norms of cooperation and
community service, politics is unlikely to become more programmatic in the
many urban neighborhoods where this does not happen. Paller’s analysis
thus coheres with Nathan’s when it addresses the significance of
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neighborhood effects and urban planning. There is less agreement, however,
when it comes to the importance of the middle class—a term that only
appears six times in Everyday Politics in Urban Africa. Indeed, many of the
opinion shapers that Paller identifies in areas that lack responsive leaders
seem to be clearly middle-class, such as NGO leaders in squatter settlements
and religious leaders in indigenous ones (60).
This brings us back to the question of exactly how class, urbanization, and
programmatic politics are related, and whether socio-economic (wealth, job
status, education) factors or situational ones (such as neighborhood compo-
sition) play a greater role in shaping the prospects of political transformation.
One issue that both Nathan and Paller could have paid greater attention to is
the significance of cross-class coalitions to effective protest and resistance.
After all, a number of studies have found that the leaders of associations of
“informal sector organizations,”street vendors associations, and social move-
ments are of a “higher”class than those who follow them (Pikovskaia 2021).
The question of class and identity also pervades the second pair of books,
which focus on Lagos, highlighting the recent boom in research on Nigeria’s
economic capital. How many other sub-national regions have their own
Studies Association?
3
The publication of these two volumes within months
of each other turns out to be a happy accident, because Newell’sHistories of
Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos and Agigboa’sThey
Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban
Nigeria provide very different lenses through which to understand urban
politics in the same location. While Agbiboa provides us with a snapshot of
corruption in the transport section based on a twelve month “mobile
ethnography”of the Oshodi and Alimosho local government areas, Newell
marshals a rich combination of newspapers, archives, interviews, and focus
groups to understand popular attitudes toward dirt—and regarding who and
what is “dirty”—in the longue durée.
Unsurprisingly, given its focus, it is Agbiboa’s volume that most clearly
follows the other texts reviewed here in challenging the idea that urbaniza-
tion will inevitably lead to productive political transformations. A central part
of the book is a study of the National Union of Road Transport Workers
(NURTW) and the way that it has evolved from a loose collection of individ-
uals seeking escape from urban poverty by working in the transport sector
into “the most politicized and violent trade union in Nigeria”(146). Formed
in 1978, when the government moved to merge various drivers and service
workers unions, the NURTW has become a byword for extortion and law-
lessness. They Eat Our Sweat charts the evolution of the NURTW through the
“changing role of Agberos”—the predominantly young men who parade and
control motor parks and enforce “discipline”on the danfo minibus taxis that
move millions of Lagosians around the city on a daily basis. Agbiboa shows
how agberos emerged “during the socio-economic flux from the mid 1970s
onward, when the material and mental insecurities of the Nigerian urban and
rural economies generated a range of everyday practices for youth to get by”
(153). One of these was to “help”manage motor parks, finding and
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organizing passengers for danfos, but over time this role was transformed due
to their “incorporation into the NURTW as tax collectors and foot soldiers for
the union’s‘dirty work’” (147).
Agbiboa exposes just how dirty this work really is by spending two months
as a danfo conductor on the Oshodi to Ikotun route. This first-hand experi-
ence provides the author with an appreciation of how hard the job can be—
calling bus stops, spotting potential passengers, and negotiating fees all at the
same time. Just as importantly, it brings the researcher, and through him the
reader, face-to-face with the tactics used by agberos to force danfo operators to
pay the bewildering array of fees that they levy. As Agbiboa writes, “In two
months, I witnessed first-hand the violent death of four conductors in the
hands of agberos due to disputes”(35). This is brave, bold, and brilliant
research, which provides insights that more conventional strategies would
simply not generate. While it raises a set of ethical and safety questions that
the book does not fully address, this approach generates fleeting glimpses of a
visceral reality that is so often missing in academic work on urban life. In turn,
the intimate portrait that Agbiboa is able to paint means that it really hits
home when he concludes that “Violence, in this case, functions as a tactical
means of re-establishing ‘order’…social control and everyday profiteering in
contested urban spaces”(168). In other words, violence is not merely an
occasional by-product of this system, but rather an integral part of it. Agberos
engage in fights not only because this is the route to becoming more powerful
and successful, but also because to not do so leaves them vulnerable to
atrophying territory and influence—and hence to attack from those who
covet their position.
The focus on agberos and the NURTW also pays dividends because it
enables Agbiboa to demonstrate a very different kind of urban “trap”to that
set out by Nathan. As the final three chapters of the book explain, the
symbiotic relationship between the union and the political leadership of
Lagos state has created a deeply problematic Nash equilibrium. On the
one hand, the NURTW requires government and police complicity for its
extortion racket to run smoothly, and so has no incentive to challenge
patrimonial processes and problematic political leaders. On the other hand,
the government of Lagos relies on the NURTW to intimidate political rivals
and demobilize potential opposition among urban youth, which “explains
the difficulty, if not impossibility, of doing away with agberos”(147). Conse-
quently, even administrations initially lauded for their reformist zeal, such as
that of Governor Babatunde Fashola, had little impact where the agberos were
concerned. In the words of a group of agberos in Oshodi: “Oga Fashola gon ko to
be”(Even Fashola cannot ban us). Consequently, although Lagos featured
relatively supportive conditions for urban innovation (Cheeseman & de
Gramont 2017), little progress was made in the area of transport.
Like the volumes by Simone and Pieterse, Nathan, and Paller, Agbiboa’s
book should be required reading for anyone who thinks that urbanization
will inevitably usher in a new wave of democratic politics. There is, however, a
question as to whether corruption represents the most useful framework
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through which to understand the processes that Agbiboa describes. The first
third of They Eat Our Sweat ably sets out why corruption is a compelling and
intractable problem, and the different conceptual and methodological ways
that it can be measured and understood. The book then sets out the “cor-
ruption trap”(104) before looking at the art of urban survival and “Nigeria’s
Transport Mafia”(146). There can be no doubt that quotidian corruption
runs through all of these stories, but the further into the book one gets, the
more graft appears as the grease that keeps the system going, rather than as
the system itself. As Agbiboa’s own titles and subtitles suggest, what he is
describing is a mafia-type operation in which criminal networks have become
so embedded in the state that it is unclear where they end and the govern-
ment begins. Corruption is one part of this story, but what really stands out in
the book is the continuous use of violence to enforce an unfair economic and
political settlement. Systematic financial exploitation on the scale perpe-
trated by the NURTW is organized criminal extortion rather than graft.
In light of these revelations, one wonders whether a more useful intel-
lectual starting point for the final part of the book would have been the
literature on how protection rackets take hold in societies in which “trust is in
short supply and democracy weak,”such as Diego Gambetta’s work on the
Sicilian mafia. Although Agbiboa consistently locates his work in a productive
dialogue with the secondary literature, there is relatively little engagement
with work on organized crime, or with the large literature on vigilantism in
Nigeria, which has ably described the co-optation of gangs of young men with
the capacity to inflict violence into government structures (Pratten 2008;
Reno 2005). Given the prominence of transport unions/cartels and groups
of okada (motobike taxi) drivers in African cities, these literatures will surely
need to be given greater attention in accounts of urban economic and
political organizations moving forward. This is a relatively minor weakness,
however, compared to the book’s many strengths; all told, The Eat Our Sweat
does a superb job of illuminating the kinds of work and politics that occupy
many liminal young men in urban spaces.
Despite their very different thematic interests, multiple threads connect
Agbiboa’s research with Stephanie Newell’s new monograph. Perhaps the
most significant of these with regard to political subjectivities is the idea of
“dirty work,”and the range of prejudices associated with this term, in urban
Nigeria. By looking at Lagos through the lens of who and what is considered
to be “dirty,”Histories of Dirt raises a series of profound questions about how
ideas of cleanliness, hygiene, and healthcare are constructed—and how this
legitimizes the production of social and physical boundaries. This is a mas-
terful study that traverses generations and multiple methodologies to provide
new insights into urban Africa through a distinctive and productive lens.
Colonial archives, Nigerian newspaper archives, and a combination of focus
groups and interviews are all used to elucidate insights into popular and elite
attitudes toward dirt at different points in time, from the 1920s through to
the “midcentury audience”(10) and on to the modern day. Every chapter of
this hugely ambitious venture is a pleasure to read due to the ability of
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Newell—and the team of researchers she worked with, who are generously
mentioned throughout—to creatively use even the most problematic and
limited sources to say something fresh about both the past and the present.
Colonial sources and those that silence the voice of the “dirty”are thus read
both conventionally and against the grain, as Newell wrings their secrets out
as if squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. In other words, this is
one of those texts that is so imaginative and distinctive that you wish you had
written it yourself.
In addition to being a constant source of insight, this research into the
way that ideas of dirt have been used and abused throughout history also
features a pleasant surprise, because it ultimately offers the most optimistic
reading of contemporary urban civic consciousness of all five books. This
appears particularly unlikely from the opening chapters, as the first part of
the book deals with colonial attitudes toward dirt and is predictably depress-
ing. Thomas Malcolm Knox, on a tour of inspection of Lever Brothers’s
trading stations in West and Central Africa in the mid-1920s, writes that Lagos
“turns out to be a town of unspeakable squalor,”with “filth everywhere”(1).
In these unabashedly racist treatments, dirt is seen as being caused by “dirty
natives”and to be the “nurse of disease”(1). As Newell elucidates, in such
accounts, dirt is not just an empirical substance but becomes an “interpretive
category”that is used to facilitate “moral, sanitary, economic and aesthetic
evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness”(3). Under-
stood in this way, the assertion that something/someone is dirty can become a
means to justify removing oneself from its/their presence. This act of naming
and shaming is, in other words, a way of setting and reasserting “social and
behavioural boundaries”(4). Most notably, flawed and prejudiced beliefs
legitimized “racial segregation in the name of public health”(7).
The final part of the book fast forwards to the present day, with chapters
on “Public Perceptions of ‘Dirty’in Multicultural Lagos,”“Remembering
Waste,”and finally “City Sexualities,”which considers the politicization of
homophobia. In a sympathetic discussion, Newell shows how leaders and
legislatures have participated in a “dirtying”(142) of minority groups such as
the LGBTIþcommunity in a way that reproduces colonial tropes. What at
first might seem like a tangential last chapter thus turns out to reinforce the
core argument of the book, namely that colonial, elite, and “to some extent,
middle-class West African”(14) definitions of dirt are productive of prejudice
and discrimination.
Newell is surely right to suggest that prejudiced attitudes toward dirt can
have both racist and classist roots. Reflecting the current focus on decoloni-
zation, however, she says more about race and colonial prejudice than about
the way that class continues to shape attitudes. This makes sense for the
book’s early chapters and is to a certain extent necessitated for the more
contemporary analysis by the fact that the vast majority of interviewees are
drawn from the lower classes. There remains a risk, however, that this
approach overlooks key dynamics and social forces when the discussion
moves into the post-colonial era. While Newell makes a number of references
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to class and status, the prevailing attitude of the political elite, and how it
shapes the city, is sometimes lacking. This is unfortunate, as many accounts of
the reforms implemented by Lagos State Governors Bola Tinubu and Baba-
tunde Fashola have noted that they were at least in part motivated by a “high
modernist”vision for Lagos (Cheeseman & de Gramont 2017). In turn, this
led them to pursue policies that reinforced the kind of tropes that stigmatize
the “poor”and the “dirty.”Thus, attempts to turn Lagos into a global leading
city often reflect the “technocratic utopias”critiqued by Simone and Pieterse,
and have gone hand-in-hand with slum clearances and efforts to push out
undesirable individuals and groups. As Agbiboa notes, “informal workers are
commonly stigmatized as illegal and undesirable occupants of urban spaces
and thus targeted by state restrictions and eviction campaigns based on
neoliberal policies aimed at modernizing and ordering the city”(17).
The centrality of class to these understandings is undeniable. Even danfo
drivers and touts who make a good living through their trade may not be
accepted as clean and respectable members of society because “the problem
is not so much about the income as it is of social status and respectability”
(103). Significantly, this is not just Agbiboa’s interpretation; it is also reflected
in the way that Nigerian political leaders frame issues of inclusion and
exclusion. When a range of wealthy politicians used dismissive language to
justify discriminating against okada drivers, the then-Governor of Edo State,
Adams Oshiomole, claimed that their mistreatment was a “class issue”and
represented discrimination against the “working class.”
The comparative lack of attention to elite attitudes in Newell’s discussion
of contemporary Lagos has significant implications for some of the core
arguments of Histories of Dirt, because it leads to interpretations of Lagosian
governance that will strike some readers as being somewhat generous. Newell
notes for example, that under Fashola’s rule the Lagos Waste Management
Authority (LAWMA) “successfully altered public opinion about the people
who work with trash and environmental dirt in Lagos”(138). There is no
doubt a great deal of truth to this, but in the absence of a more systematic
discussion of the ways in which the same Lagos State Government treats “dirty
workers”in other sectors, it creates the impression of a broader progressive
project that does not really exist.
More could perhaps also have been said about the significance of class
prejudice in the colonial era, and the way this was transferred to post-colonial
elites. After all, the British upper-class did not reserve their prejudice for
slums in Africa; they also said remarkably very similar things about areas of
endemic poverty back home. As Emma Butcher and Tim Blythe have pointed
out, “respectable, middle and upper-class Londoners”during the Victorian
era associated poverty with squalor and squalor with disease in just the same
way as Thomas Malcolm Knox did.
4
As a result, they “believed fervently that
they should be separated from the ‘great unwashed’even in death.”Provid-
ing a more systematic treatment of class would have enabled Newell to
disentangle the extent to which Knox’s views were driven purely by racism
or reflected a broader set of upper-class preoccupations in capitalist societies.
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These caveats notwithstanding, Histories of Dirt has much to teach us
about how conceptions of what is dirty and acceptable are contested. This
is particularly true of the exceptional discussion of how those “with no
influence over policy or the shaping of colonial discourse”(92) turn out to
have rather different—and potentially transformatory—relationships with
the concept of dirt. It is out of the more subtle attitudes of this
group—“African media consumers”(91)—that Newell weaves the book’s
more positive narrative about urban political subjectivities. Across numerous
focus groups and interviews, “lower class”participants are revealed to be
impressively reflective, and able to recognize that their own views as to what is
“dirty”might not be universal and hence should not be imposed on others.
This leads Newell to suggest that the testimonies of her interviewees can be
read as embodying a form of “civic consciousness,”in which “toleration of
strangers’and neighbours’domestic practices took priority over their own
individual views, and the latter, no matter how widely shared among their own
social group, and no matter how visceral the negative responses they evoked,
were bracketed off in a separate sphere from the ‘public’” (94).
Newell’s vision of a “distinctive civic consciousness that prevents the
sprawling, economically divided megalopolis from fragmenting into
violence”(113) may strike some readers as an overly optimistic reading. After
all, media headlines on Nigeria typically focus on the Boko Haram insur-
gency, banditry, and conflict between farmers and herders. Yet other sources
of data back up her argument. Survey data, for example, suggest that Niger-
ians from different communities have become more tolerant of one another
since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1999. According to the
World Values Survey, the share of Nigerians saying that they would object
to having a neighbor of a “different race or ethnicity”has declined from
32 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2020. The Afrobarometer points in a
similar direction; in 2018, only 13 percent of Nigerian respondents said they
would mind if someone of a different ethnicity were to live next to them, with
42 percent saying they would “strongly like”this.
5
This pattern is not limited
to urban areas, but studies in other countries have suggested that moving
away from an individual’s birthplace and having parents from different
ethnic groups—which is more common in towns and cities—is correlated
with a more “national”and less “ethnic”outlook (Bratton & Kimenyi 2008).
Newell clearly recognizes that the form of civic consciousness she
describes is limited and partial, at least in terms of the evidence generated
from the interviews and focus groups her team was able to conduct. Its
foundation appears to be a recognition of the value of mutual accommoda-
tion—that people from different communities have distinctive practices and
norms, and that peaceful urban living requires not imposing one’s own
prejudices on others. As Newell writes, “the sheer multiculturalism of the
city prevented individuals from extrapolating general principles from the
evidence of their eyes”(101). This form of civic consciousness does not
necessarily entail a common recognition of a shared set of interests across
ethnic lines, or a determination to mobilize across inter-communal
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boundaries to resist exploitation from a self-serving political elite. In this
sense, one might say that it is rooted more in a kind of liberal notion—live and
let live—rather than the more progressive forms of pro-active civic conscious-
ness described by Holston in Brazil.
The emerging social norms described in Histories of Dirt are also likely to
be rather more fragile and limited than a “multiculturalist”interpretation
might imply, given that many of Newell’s interlocutors stated explicitly that
they would have presented their views of the habits and behaviors of other
communities rather differently were they not in the presence of a micro-
phone (94). But while this form of civic mindedness is unlikely to represent a
challenge to the political status quo in the short-term, it is surely a necessary
prerequisite for the emergence of a more politically assertive pan-ethnic
urban identity in the long-term. It is also a process that has emerged among
the “non-elite”and therefore appears to be more inclusive and far-reaching
than the changes that Nathan describes, which seem to be dependent on the
size and influence of the middle class. In this way, Histories of Dirt suggests a
route through which urbanization may ultimately transform political sub-
jectivities, and one wonders whether we would also find evidence of this kind
of willingness to recognize and respect what is different about “others”if we
looked for it in Accra—even outside of more middle-class areas.
Where does this leave the research agenda outlined above? These five
books tell us a great deal about the ways that urbanization may transform
everyday politics. Simone and Pieterse advise us to distrust official narratives
and to avoid teleological explanations and predictions at all costs. Paying
heed to this warning, Nathan and Paller show us that social and political
change is likely to lag well behind the growth of urban areas, and that we
should expect aspects of ethnic and patrimonial politics to persist well into
the future. Meanwhile, Agbiboa ably demonstrates that even when new forms
of political organization emerge, they may be profoundly anti-democratic
and serve to perpetuate the status quo. So far, so pessimistic; political sub-
jectivities and behaviours may look different in cities because of the distinc-
tive way that competition for land, power, and transport routes plays out
compared to rural areas, but this does not mean that politics is any less
“ethnic”or clientelistic. Yet Newell reveals that even against this challenging
background, a kind of civic consciousness can emerge that respects group
differences, and may yet serve as the foundation for a more progressive form
of civic activism.
To build on this set of impressive contributions, we need a further wave of
studies to extend and deepen this work in at least two respects. Conceptually,
it is of particular importance that we develop a deeper understanding and a
more systematic empirical mapping of the civic consciousness that has
emerged in urban spaces, and of the conditions that give rise to these
variations. Empirically, developing a rounded understanding of urban iden-
tities in all their complexity requires us to take this research beyond economic
and political capitals such as Accra and Lagos and into smaller towns and
cities. Along with in-depth studies in a wider set of countries that feature
18 African Studies Review
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different levels and patterns of urbanization, this will enable the within-case
and between-case comparisons necessary to establish how far the arguments
summarized here are generalizable. Only then will we be able to tell how and
why (and if) urban political life is distinctive, and the implications of this for
the future of democracy and development in Africa.
Nic Cheeseman
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK
n.cheeseman@bham.ac.ukdoi:10.1017/asr.2022.83
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Notes
1. For the methods and data, go to www.afrobarometer.org.
2. I am grateful to Kristina Pikovskaia for bringing this point and many others to my
attention.
3. The Lagos Studies Association. For more information go to: https://lagosstudies.
wcu.edu/.
4. Emma Butcher and Tim Blythe. 2020. “Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian
London,”History Extra, December 22. https://www.historyextra.com/period/
victorian/victorian-london-dangers-what-was-life-like/.
5. Fola Aina and Nic Cheeseman. “Don’t call Nigeria a Failed State”,Foreign Affairs.
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nigeria-failed-state.
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