Africa's Urban Past

• Urban Africa - histories in the making, David M. Anderson and Richard J.A.R. Rathbone. Part 1 Urban archaeologies: clustered cities of the Middle Niger - alternative routes to authority in prehistory, Roderick J. McIntosh; African city walls - a neglected source?, Graham Connah; Aksumite urbanism, David Phillipson. Part 2 Pre-colonial towns in transition: Mbanza Kongo/Sao Salvador - Kongo's holy city, John K. Thornton; Ouidah, 1727-1892 - a pre-colonial urban centre in coastal West Africa, Robin Law; merchants, missions and the remaking of the urban environment in Buganda, c. 1840-1890, Richard Reid and Henri Medard. Part 3 Urban economies: "A town of strangers" or "a model modern East African town"? Arusha and the Arusha, Thomas Spear; the cost of living in Lagos, 1914-1945, Ayodeji Olukoju; the city of Durban - towards a structural analysis of the economic growth and character of a South African city, Bill Freund. Part 4 Becoming Urban-towns as cultural brokers: "But I know what I shall do" - agency, belief and the social imagination in 18th-century Gold Coast towns, Ray Kea; gender in the city - women, migration and contested spaces in Tunis, c. 1830-1881, Julia Clancy-Smith; cultural politics of death and burial in early colonial Accra, John Parker; "wo pe tam won pe ba" ("you like cloth but you don't want children") - urbanization, individualism and gender relations in colonial Ghana, c.1900-1939, Emmanuel Aykeampong. Part 5 The politics of urban order: land alienation and the urban growth of Bahir Dar, 1935-74, Seltene Seyoum; conservation and the colonial past - urban planning, space and power in Zanzibar, William Bissell; the urbanism of District Six, Cape Town, Rafael Marks and Marco Bezzoli; the political shaping of sacred locality in Brazzaville, 1959-1997, Florence Bernault.

I have seldom read a book which introduced me to so many new things - to so many fresh topics and to so much new research by scholars, many of them young, as well as by established figures such as John Thornton and Robin Law... I found this book almost a course in African Studies in itself. -