For the City Yet to Come

Remaking African CitiesAfrican cities don't work, or at least their characterizations are conventionally replete with depictions ranging from the valiant, if mostly misguided, struggles of the poor to eke out some minimal livelihood to the more insidious descriptions of bodies engaged in near-constant liminality, decadence, or religious and ethnic conflict.A more generous point of view concedes that African cities are works in progress, at the same time exceedingly creative and extremely stalled.In city after city, one can witness an incessant throbbing produced by the intense proximity of hundreds of activities: cooking, reciting, selling, loading and unloading, fighting, praying, relaxing, pounding, and buying, all side by side on stages too cramped, too deteriorated, too clogged with waste, history, and disparate energy, and sweat to sustain all of them.And yet they persist.Sony Labou Tansi, the Congolese writer and one of the continent's renowned observers of urban life, talks about the African love affair with the ''hodgepodge''-the tugs and pulls of life in all directions from which provisional orders are hastily assembled and demolished, which in turn attempt to ''borrow'' all that is in sight.It may be that such a making use of whatever comes along as well as keeping hundreds of diversities in some kind of close attachment give many African cities their appearance of vitality.But as Tansi also implies in his novel The Antipeople, as well as in much of his theater, the very sense of throwing things together does not necessarily make a society more flexible or productive.∞ Sometimes the hodgepodge freezes the elements in place and makes cultures static and slow to