African Cities in Crisis: Managing Rapid Urban Growth by Richard E. Stren; Rodney R. WhiteReview by: Karol J. KrotkiCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 26, No. 1(1992), pp. 185-187Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485432 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 05:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Canadian Association of African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.62 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:58:32 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

185 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

practice and develops a method to expose ideological barriers in the construction of knowledge about Africa. It is particularly timely in the context of deepening crisis in Africa.

Fiona Mackenzie Carleton University

Stren, Richard E. and Rodney R. White, eds. African Cities in Crisis:

Managing Rapid Urban Growth. Boulder, San Francisco, and London: Westview Press, 1989. 335 PP.

The core of this book consists of seven geographically-oriented chapters (on Nigeria, C6te d'Ivoire, Kinshasa, Dakar, Tanzania, Greater Khartoum and Nairobi), framed by three chapters at the beginning and one at the end by the co-editors. On putting down the book, I feel that the subtitle "Managing Rapid Urban Growth" is something of a misnomer; "mismanaging" would be equally appropriate. But an even stronger impression is that the volume and force of the torrent overwhelming African cities is of such magnitude that most managers stand helplessly on the crumbling banks while they and their cities are inundated.

The four general chapters at the beginning and end are well constructed and well written. They provide a good theoretical framework and useful summaries on the influence of environmental and economic factors, the urban local government, and the administration of urban services. There are several important and obvious conclu- sions (easier said than done): (i) urban management should be adaptive and integrated ("first the engineers paved the road, then the water people dug it up and laid pipes, then the telephone company, etc., etc."); (2) urban administration should be decentralized in an effective way; (3) the use and ownership of urban land must be modernized to suit the realities of urban life; and (4) there is no easy formula for "good government."

This study fills needed information gaps for some cities for which basic informa- tion was lacking on inventories, maps, and the like. But it does not appear that more sophisticated and modern techniques of aerial and satellite measurement were used. Interesting comparisons are suggested; for example, between the system of "cohabita- tion" in Kinshasa and the "monopoly" in Brazzaville (5 i).

The seven geographic chapters are extremely uneven. The chapter on Nigeria uses twenty tables, and those on Tanzania and C6te d'Ivoire nine and none respectively. The chapter on Greater Khartoum includes one incomprehensible table. One would expect the seven chapters to make sound contributions on a comparative basis. This is not the case, because the chapter authors ignore each other and follow their own approaches. Still, the common problems are so apparent that they flow out of the chap- ters into the conclusions. Refreshingly, the book does not fall back for its explanations on the colonial experience. If anything, the imperial past is mentioned with nostalgia as a time when things were not yet completely out of hand. In this respect the book is very different from the 1988 collection Le processus d'urbanisation en Afrique edited by Coquery-Vidrovitch.

The chapter on Nigeria suffers from the well-known and continuing dearth of pop- ulation data: political manipulations of census data have made Nigeria, probably the most populous country of Africa, the largest white area on the demographic map.

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.62 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:58:32 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

186 CJAS / RCEA 26:I 1992

Three cities were chosen as Nigerian case studies: Ibadan, Enugu, and Kaduna. The stories of woe are similar in each, but some positive conclusions can be drawn from differences. The author shows his economic bias by talking "about the unpatriotic practices ... of hoarding" (84). The cities are described variously as "islands of poverty in seas of relative affluence" (71) or as "urban islands of relative affluence in seas of misery" (III).

The C6te d'Ivoire chapter is written by a lawyer and high-level administration expert and contains excessive descriptions of organigrams (ii8, 130, 135). The one

departure from the lawyer's brief describes how female hawkers physically attack municipal tax collectors (136). The Kinshasa chapter reads somewhat more cheerfully than the others, but it is marred by reliance on the measurements of food intakes into the town which cannot possibly be correct. Dakar, the much researched city, seems to have fewer problems than the others, but the story is not convincing, because of the lack of data and their uncertain use by the author (for example, he does not seem to dif- ferentiate between school enrolment and school attendance [1 891, or does the fault lie in the translation?).

The history of Tanzania provides one of the few recorded examples of a rural devel- opment bias (220), the more usual being that in favour of towns (going back as far as Stalin's priorities). The chapter does not make use of the minor classic on city bias by Todaro. Whatever the bias, changeable from time to time, it did not much help Tan- zania as a whole, possibly because ideology interfered with the natural play of societal forces.

The chapter on Greater Khartoum broke my heart completely. I was director of the first population census in 1956 and remember that during a nine-year stay each of the three component parts of Greater Khartoum was more sleepy and more peaceful than the other. It is difficult to accept what has happened. Why focus on improving sewer- age, if it benefits only five per cent of the population? Think rather about the other ninety-five percent. The Nairobi chapter is based on the matatu bus service - a useful field for the exercise of local initiatives, but one which required the protection of the presidency itself from time to time.

Some of common themes in the experiences of the seven geographic areas are: uncontrolled population growth, much in excess of natural increase (the cumulative percentage growths read like veritable explosions, and family planning is mentioned once in relationship to Khartoum [270]); inadequate or no water supply (dry pipes and water polluted by feces are a frequent refrain); no waste disposal for most households; municipal transport systems which barely function; institutionalization of theft and corruption; overcrowded housing of subhuman standards; squatters without land reg- istration rights; health services unable to meet minimum needs (privatization of ser- vices is the obvious solution for those who can afford it); unemployment emerging out of the breakdown of social institutions, though that is not how the authors formulate it; schools which do not educate large enough proportions of the school-age population for long enough. The list is long and repetitive.

There is one striking lacuna: the absence of the realization, or at least the articula- tion of the realization, that urban problems arise from economies. The latter do not produce enough to meet needs. There are frequent remarks about budgetary alloca- tions having been cut or budgetary chapters not being large enough to pay for

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.62 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:58:32 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

187 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

something or other - as if hidden forces of nature were there operating wickedly. Surely, it is implied, with some good will the difficulties identified could be reversed.

The editorial blue pencil has not been exercised with great attention to detail. Only a few examples can be given. The introductory map of Africa (xiv) makes one country out of Tunisia and Libya; the Egyptian-Sudanese boundary is different from one map to another (xiv, 246); two countries have been absorbed by South Africa. In some tables, columns are numbered, in others, they are unnumbered. Some tables can only be described as a complete mess (for example, 4.18); in others no units are given and can- not even be guessed. How can C6te d'Ivoire, with a total population of 8 million increase its urban population to Io.5 million (i 13)?

Karol J. Krotki University of Alberta

David Ward. Chronicles of Darkness. London: Routledge, 1989. 191 pp.

This book has no subtitle. Its introduction, however, sets up a perspective, if not a problematic, for the book focuses on fourteen writers of European descent who have all written novels, short stories and / or memoirs set in Africa. The author's theme, symbolized by the metaphor of "darkness," is the limitation, distortion, or confronta- tion experienced by non-Black African writers who write about Africa:

I am a white myself - a white Briton - and many of the attitudes towards Africa with which I grew up were distorted. However much I wanted to write about black African writers, I had to negotiate my way through these distortions. And the more I read of the white writers, the more I realized that they, too, were either accepting a passive and distorted view, or confronting it (I).

That this subject "was worth writing about" (I) is apparent given longstanding schol- arly traditions concerned with culturally-conditioned perceptions in art and litera- ture. Understandably, the ground-breaking work of Bill Ashcroft and his colleagues, The Empire Writes Back, which considers the full range of post-colonial literatures and their questioning of cultural imperialism, was not available to David Ward. (Ironi- cally, the two books share the same publisher and year of publication.) A similar case cannot be made for the total absence of reference to E. D. Jones (Othello's Country- men: The African In English Renaissance Drama [I 965]), M. J. C. Echeruo (The Condi- tioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad [1978]), D. Dabydeen (The Black Presence in English Literature [1985]) and others who analyze the representation of Africa and Africans in the English literary canon. Such omissions undermine the vol- ume in important ways.

Even when accepted on its own terms, the book's intentions are not equalled by the choice of texts for actual analysis whose range and diversity are tailored to fit a reduc- tive and contradictory approach. The book is split into two parts which dichotomize writers as non-African and African whites. Race is predominant as a structuring device, but its limited value as a unifying critical concept undermines the argument.

Chronicles of Darkness is divided into fourteen chapters, exclusive of the introduc- tion, which sequentially consider the relevant works of Joseph Conrad, Olive Schreiner, William Plomer, Laurens van der Post, Karen Blixen, Evelyn Waugh and

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.62 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:58:32 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions