Monday 28 of March 2011
African cities are ‘psychic spaces of existential melancholy and desire’
My column last week on a British documentary shot in Kibera generated a lot of debate, especially on the role of the government and charities in improving services in the slum. (READ: fesmedia.org/african-media-news/detail/datum/2011/03/28/-2e1189e9b8/). The general consensus, it seems to me, was that while it is easy to be defensive about Kenya’s image abroad, the fact remains that slums like Kibera do exist – whether we like it or not – and that charities and NGOs are only stepping in to help because the government couldn’t be bothered.
There was also another school of thought that argued that by focusing on the negative, the foreign media fail to look at all the positive stories coming out of Africa, and that even when such a story is published, it is peppered with pessimism.
Afro-pessimism is pervasive, particularly in the development community, whose survival depends on telling the darkest tales about Africa to attract donors.
Hence, it is more common to hear urban African stories about slums like Kibera than about Nairobi’s booming stock exchange.
However, this doom-and-gloom depiction of urban Africa fails to capture the vibrancy, intensity, diversity and sheer optimism of African city life. Nairobi is more than Kibera, just like London is more than the East End, home of the city’s marginalised poor.
To address this shortcoming, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town published the first edition of The African Cities Reader last year.
The Reader aims at circumventing the “caricature, hyperbole, stereotypes and moralistic hogwash” about urban Africa by bringing together a range of essayists who write about the “other African city” – the one with “vibrant markets, streets, pavements, taxi ranks, hotel lobbies, drinking halls, clubs, bedrooms, rooftops, gardens, dumpsites, beach fronts, river edges, cemeteries, garages, basements, and other liminal spaces of daily life and the imaginary”.
The Reader brings together authors and urbanists from all over the continent who capture slices of urban life that are rarely written about.
Nuruddin Farah, a Somali novelist currently based in South Africa, talks of the Tamarind Market, a vibrant and highly cosmopolitan shopping complex in his native Mogadishu, where shoppers came from as far as the Arabian Gulf to buy custom-made gold and silver jewellery and where entire families shopped for clothes at bargain prices.
The fortunes of Somalia’s capital city, he says, fell with the destruction of this important landmark in the early 1990s. The warlords who tore down the Tamarind Market, he says, not only destroyed its spirit, but destroyed “the idea of cosmopolitanism” that it encapsulated.
The Parisian artist, Jean-Christophe Lanquetin, explores Kinshasa’s flamboyant sape or “dressing to kill” culture, which manages to effortlessly combine street fashion and haute couture.
When he first came across it, he was stumped: “Why was it, I asked myself, that people who have exceedingly little choose to forego food in order to acquire and appear in public in costly designer clothes? Wherefore this fascination – this obsession, it seemed to me – with elegance?”
He concluded that the Congolese were not making so much a fashion statement as a political one that said: “My body is my country”.
As he sits in a Lagos cafe listening to Fela Kuti on his iPod and drinking a soothing latte, the Nigerian author Chris Abani tries to listen to the city with his eyes closed. He writes about the contradictions of Lagos, where “life goes on . . . in spite of the government”.
And “underneath the government-sponsored billboard that says ‘Keep Lagos Clean’, a city of trash, like the work of a crazy artist, grows exponentially.”
“In Victoria Island, he writes, “there are houses that even the richest people in the USA cannot imagine owning . . . the poor go out of their way to drive past them.”
But there are also essays on the painful contradictions of urban Africa. Art historian Ashraf Jamal talks of the violent intimacy of South African cities, where women are abused, raped and murdered every day and where “one does not have to stand at a street corner to bargain with hate; hate is everywhere.”
This highly-literary and engaging anthology shows, as Abani underscores, that African cities “are not just geographical locations but psychic spaces of existential melancholy and desire.”
-March 27, 2011 by Rasna Warah
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Source: www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/African +cities+are+psychic+spaces/-/440808/1134064/-/je3vt9z/-/index.html (accessed on 28.03.11)