SITTING in an old planters house high up on the Usambara mountains in Tanzania the air is chill, the cows have Swabian cowbells from the German colonial period, and Catholic nuns compete with the Lutherans in production of jams, cheeses, yoghurts, and sides of gammon. It is not an idyll. On the contrary, life here is for many closer to purgatory, the trees hacked down, the soil ravaged, and the spirit of many of the young men broken. That story is coming, but for me, mzungu, visitor, it is quiet, pastoral, a place to read and think bigger Baobab thoughts.
In this regard, I was recently sent the latest edition of the remarkably nourishing Lapham's Quarterly. This one is all about the city, with essays, thoughts, and illustrations on the city over the ages. It gets me thinking about a favourite subject of mine: African cities. There is not much written on the tropical black cities that lie between South Africa and Egypt. They are painfully hard, shiny, to me sometimes like bubonic swellings about to burst, yet at the same time post-modern, vital—cities of gold, of new ideas.
One exception to the general dearth of thinking on the African city which I read recently is Cities of Change. This is a masterful architectural study of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, with wider application. The book was authored by Marc Angelil and Dirk Hebel, two professors at ETH in Zurich. As a technical university ETH is these days almost on a par with MIT and deserves be singled out for the intelligence and generosity with which it is approaching the question of future cities in poor countries.
Still, no matter that I am taken with architecture, civic space, proportions, and so on, my interest is in the political risk presented by malfunctioning cities. Here Lapham's Quarterly gives reasons to be depressed. Africa is historically ill-equipped to build great cities—there are no reference points. The African city is simply happening, a causality without thought, without planning, without ambition. Consider, those of us who live in Africa, this entry from Sir Christopher Wren, the English architect, in 1708 . Wren is arguing for burial grounds to be removed from the city to the outskirts:
"It will be inquired, Where then shall be the burials? I answer, in cemeteries seated in the outskirts of the town. A piece of ground of two acres in the fields will be purchased for much less than two roads among the buildings; this being enclosed with a strong brick wall and having a walk round and two crosswalks decently planted with yew trees... In these places beautiful monuments may be erected, but yet the dimensions should regulated by an architect and not left to the fancy of every mason—for thus the rich, with large marble tombs would shoulder out the poor."
Wren goes on to argue that such cemeteries would have the purpose not just of the repose of the dead, but also bounding "the excessive growth of the city with a graceful border, which is now encircled with scavenger's dung stalls."
Three centuries on, the appalling truth is that the aid industry, as well as the Washington and Brussels masters of benevolences, and not least African governments themselves, have focused on what is static, and ignored that which is shifting and dynamic. The countryside dominates, and the city is an afterthought. But this is not what economic history tells us. Give voice to a Wren, and the African city will lift up the villages. Remain heedless, and the failing cities will wreck everything else.
This evening, under my mosquito net, I am struck by the writing of Oswald Spengler, a German, who in 1917 wrote "The Decline of the West": "I see, long after the year 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of countryside, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of today's and notions of traffic and communications that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness."
That holds true for Tokyo, not Kinshasa. The African city would be all too recognisable to Spengler, to Dickens and Balzac for that matter, as earthen streets of hope, workhouses, and detritus. According to Spengler, the city marks the end of "organic growth" and the beginning of "an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of agglomerations."
That makes me think of Lagos, which may be the third largest city on the planet by the end of the decade. By 2020 there will be thirty or forty or more African cities larger than Rome or Berlin. Many of them will be highly unstable. Will they have cemeteries with crosswalks decently planted with trees? I hope so. But equally they may not have public transport, security, or water. What is clearer to me is that African history will be the history of its cities, not its villages or wild areas.
