African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective

TOYIN FALOLA is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History and Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas, Austin, TX. He is the series editor of the University of Rochester Press' series Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora. Falola is a recipient of many distinguished lifetime awards, including 28 honorary doctorates. Eric Ross is professor of geography at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. JEREMY RICH is Associate Professor of History, Marywood University. His books include A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (2007).

• Moving East, Facing West: Islam as an Intercultural Mediator in Urban Planning in the Sokoto EmpireOppressive Impressioins, Architectural Expressioins: The Poetics of French Colonial (Ad)vantage, Regarding Africa"Just Build it Modern": Post-Apartheid Spaces on Namibia's Urban FrontierColonial Urbanization and Urban Management in Kenya"Inherently Unhygienic Races": Plague and the Origins of Settler Dominance in Nairobi, 1899-1907Urbanization and Afrikaner Class Formation: The Mine Workers' Union and the Search for a Cultural IdentityThe Importance of Being Educated: Strategies of an Urban Petit- Bourgeois Elite, South Africa 1935-50Where Every Language Is Heard: Atlantic Commerce, West African and Asian Migrants, and Town Society in Libreville, ca. 1860-1914Captured and Steeped in Colonial Dynamics and Legacy: The Case of Isiolo Town in KenyaFrom Marabout Republics to Autonomous Rural Communities: Autonomous Muslim Towns in SenegalAfricanite and Urbanite: The Place of the Urban in Imaginings of African Identity during the Late Colonial Period in French West AfricaUrban Poverty, Urban Crime, and Crime Control: The Lagos and Ibadan Cases 1929-45The Fluctuating Fortunes of Anglophone Cameroon Towns: The Case of Victoria, 1858-1982Urban Planning and Development in Zimbabwe: A Historical PerspectiveSomalia's City of the Jackals: Politics, Economy, and Society in Mogadishu (1991-2001)

Today half of all Africans live in urban areas. Villages are growing into towns, and towns are rapidly becoming cities. This project offers broad and varied analyses of the history of African cities in the last 150 years, and is key to understanding the urban present. Introduced by the doyenne of African urban history, the chapters in this innovative volume deal with multiple dimensions of African city life from Morocco to Zimbabwe and from Somalia to Namibia.