African societies

Opportunities, risks and problems in the urban sphere

Rethinking the sustainability of the African city in an era characterised by uncertainty

by Abdou Maliq Simone

(Second Part)

Sustainability through innovative governance

Using virtuous informalities

How can an urban political culture be constructed which is capable of leading the heterogeneous groups making up the city toward a sense of shared interest? Can mobilising informal networks and processes within African cities serve as a platform for more proficient engagements of global urbanisation processes and for building a more equitable and sustainable city?

Bamako, the Capital of Mali (1960s) Source: Brown William, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Africa Focus. 2000

It is one thing to talk about informality
when it concerns the day to day livelihood of ordinary
urban residents. It is another
thing to talk about informal processes which concern accumulation of some scale which falls outside not only the
regulatory apparatuses
of the state but also its logic of regulation. Macro-economic constraints on functional and sustainable urban growth have prompted renewed interest in the possible ways economies
of some scale are being generated through more informal mechanisms
(Brenner, 1998).

Religious brotherhoods and fraternities, ethnically-based trading regimes, syndicates, and even community-based and multi-association operations are functioning with increasing scope. Urban quarters not only serve as platforms for popular initiatives, e.g. waste management, micro-enterprise development and shelter provision but readapt local modalities of cohesion and sociality to more regional and global frameworks. Some localities, such as Nima (Accra), Obalende (Lagos), Texas-Adjame (Abidjan), and Grand Yoff (Dakar) reflect a strong relationship between the elaboration of local associations and the generation of new economic activities and resources.

Here, associations become important in configuring new divisions of labour. They help coordinate the cross-border, small and medium-scale trade of individual entrepreneurs and work ways of pooling and reinvesting the proceeds of this trade to access larger quantities of tradable goods, diversify collective holdings and reach new markets. The mechanisms through which local economies expand in scale are often murky and problematic. They can entail highly tenuous and frequently clandestine articulations among, for example, religious and fraternal networks (particularly, Masonic lodges or Islamic Sufi brotherhoods, like the Mouriddiyah and Tijaniyyah), public officials operating in private capacities, clientelist networks mobilising very cheap labour, foreign political parties, and large transnational corporations operating outside of conventional procedures (Herbst, 1996).

Castells refers to these latter operations as "perverse connections" to the global economy (Castells, 1996). Globalisation entails speed, unimpeded capital flows, the hyperreality of credit and fiscality, and the amplification of micro-dynamics and characteristics as key elements to profit-making. Accordingly, globalisation provides new opportunities for economic and political actors to operate outside increasingly outmoded laws and regulatory systems. African cities are especially available to these opportunities precisely because they appear to be outside effective control, and thus anything could happen (Duffield, 1998). While the actual number of urban residents involved in these economies may be quite small, their importance grows in the popular urban imagination. These ventures are constantly being talked about, and throughout neighbourhoods, people speculate on how to participate in them or spawn new ones.
Not all informalities are virtuous.

Increasingly, new modalities of association and economic accumulation operate in-between the conventional survival strategies which urban quarters have pursued for some time and the growth of more renegade or frontier economic practices. These latter practices, integrating various scales, are in many ways are a direct outgrowth of the strains placed on African societies by globalisation. These strains manifest themselves in the intensification of civil conflict, the break-down of public economic governance despite substantial public sector reform, and the shift of critical economic activities to border and frontier territories (Lock, 1999).

The organisers and manipulators of violence are important mediators of economic activity in many African countries. The consolidation of rule and the mobilisation of popular support can no longer rely on allocating public sector jobs, awarding special exemptions or advantages such as access to foreign exchange or import licenses. The combined trajectories of crisis and reform have largely eliminated these instruments. They are replaced by the increasing use of tax and fiscal manipulation, trickery, protection from and access to informal trade, through games of chance, coercion and violence (Hibou, 1999).

"Car Rapide", a popular form of public transportation", Dakar, Senegal Source: Klebba, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Africa Focus. 2000.

Thus, informalisation has been a condition for the reproduction of political power. It is the means for mediating pressures exerted from external institutions and forces and those coming from inside societies. In particularly weak states, the privatisation of violence as a way to secure new political alliances means that the regime claiming state power has less need to secure uniform control over the territory of the state. The control of key resources, usually highly sectorised and geographically specific (like diamonds, gold, etc.) , becomes more important than uniform administrative control. Thus, the conventional bureaucratic instruments of control, i.e. armies, public policies, regulatory systems, social welfare, are less reliable as instruments of regime control. This is especially the case in conditions where debt conditionality is enormous, nationally-based patronage networks are fractured and the public sector has been drastically reduced (Reno, 1998).

Given how extensive informalisation is at various scales throughout African societies, what can be done to enrich peoples commitment to urban place? What can be done to ensure some path towards sustainability? Recent trends emphasise partnership and corporatism. As I indicated at the beginning of this article, different actors and sectors are identifying opportunities which allow them to operate in concert. Many of these partnerships look for consensus, however, on the basis of facilitating community participation, agreed-upon terms of reference, and divisions of labour around global tasks. Such an approach often works well in African urban neighbourhoods whose cultural histories have made inclusiveness priority.

This is a task where the primary responsibility of governance is to set-up ways in which different associations, organisations and institutions can respond to each other and work together. But it is a collaboration not based on putting differences "aside" or subsuming the collaboration to some common objective or task. Rather, the challenge is how different tasks, using different methods employed by different organisations can work with substantial autonomy, but at the same time, responding to, addressing, building upon and using what each organisation does.

The first task of municipal governance is to ensure that spaces are maintained for diverse formations and initiatives to take place and to constantly search for arenas in which they pay attention to each other. The point here is not for actors to defend, mask or hide from each other, but to see each other as sharing potentially uncharted, unclaimed and un-dominated spheres of activity and maneuver. This is a relational approach to urban management and governance. It mobilises the way people-in-relations realise procedures and activities. In this activating work, an organisation is connected to, and embedded in, the web of relations, a social ecology, which forms the social environment of the various participants (Healey et al., 1995).

The notion of well-bounded communities of affection and cooperation, where local citizens all participate collectively in processes of governance capable of ensuring democracy and better livelihoods, may still resonate with the aspirations of the "grassroots". The conventional idea remains that African cities are largely made up of such well-bounded communities and that their strengthening is the key to development. But these communities also represent ways of living and producing which become tenuous and ineffective within a globalised urban world. Therefore, the enclosure and sustenance of coherent local spaces increasingly depend on the capacity to secure effective individual and corporate engagements with the wide range of networks and flows which make up translocal domains.

Durban, South Africa Source: Hari P. Garbharran, Middle Tennessee State University.

Local communities either of affection or administration - cannot serve as places of self-containment or resistance without finding avenues to cross and interact with various scales and other spaces. But this is not just a matter of following new international norms, or of copying what other communities are doing. For in adhering to a normative series of "best practices", localities also "announce" the irrelevance of their local histories. Yes, it is important for communities to signal that they can be trustworthy "partners" or that they are a safe bet for investment. But to a large degree, communities can usually only come to this larger stage by using terms and practices that emerge from their own aspirations and logic (Rancière, 1998).

A new urbanised domain in Africa is taking tentative shape based on the entrenchment of specific circuits of migration, resource evacuation and commodity exchange. Specific urban places, separated by marked physical and cultural distance, are being interpenetrated, in large part by the actions of African actors themselves. For example, cities as diverse as Mbuji-Mayi, Port Gentile, Addis Ababa, Bo, and Nouadibhou are being tied together through the participation of those who make them their base in an increasingly articulated system of counter-trades involving mutual connections to Bombay, Dubai, Bangkok, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur and Djeddah. These circuits in turn "spin out" and link themselves to the more conventional migratory paths of West and Central Africans to Europe, and increasingly the U.S., and East Africans to North America and the United Kingdom. (Constantin, 1996). While these circuits are organised around different commodities, a common profile has taken hold where valuable primary commodities, such as minerals in particular, are diverted from "official" national export structures into intricate networks. Here, large volumes of under-priced electronics, weapons, counterfeit currencies, bonds, narcotics, laundered money, and real estate circulate through various "hands" (Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, 1999; Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou, 1999). The diversion can also include oil, agricultural products and timber.

The organisation of these circuits around extraction raises issues about belonging, i.e. who are the original inhabitants of specific regions, to whom does the site of oil, gold, timber, diamond and emerald extraction belong. Diverse groups who have lived together for decades, if not longer, are treating each other as strangers. There are pressures on people to acquire land and assets, not in the areas in which they may have lived all of their lives, but in their area of family origin. Disputes are breaking out across the continent as to who is a citizen; who has the right to vote where (Geschiere, 1999).

But these conflicts cannot be reduced to fights over the disposition of particular places for their own sake. They are not about what can be drawn to and developed with a specific place on the basis of controlling key natural resources. Rather, fights about belonging and the rights incumbent to belonging for access to resources are more about what the control of these resources means to enhancing the possibilities for actors to operate on the level of the larger world (Richards, 1996; Neumann, 1997; Fisiy, 1999). The attempt is not to bring territory under the singular control of a particular force, but to create as many possibilities of linking that territory to a plurality of allegiances and opportunities which enable local actors to feel that their operations in localised spaces are also conduits to or extensions of a much larger world (Lock, 1999). The fight is not so much over the terms of territorial encompassment or closure, but rather maintaining a sense of "open-endedness". Narrow, seemingly parochial factions and groupings predominate in these conflicts. But the specific configuration of "sides" is not so much directed toward defending specific turf. Rather, social units are honed to better manage shifting allegiances and participation in multiple exterior networks. Disruption and local conflict is a way of coming to the "stage", i.e. of making a particular group visible and known (Lemarchand, 1997).

Rooftop Nairobi, Kenya Source: psheldon.rmwc.edu/pcv/

The elaboration of this "worlded" domain is more than a matter of migrants seeking economic opportunity in the expanding service economies of the North and Southeast Asia or the purchase of cheap goods from urban markets in these regions. It is more than a dependence on remittances. Rather an intricate framework for operating at a "world level" is being created. It is being created through individual travel, the cultivation of permeable boundaries through which goods and money can pass with minimal regulation, the incorporation of formal financial and political institutions within informal mechanisms of disposing goods and accessing markets, practices of dissimulation and a willingness to take substantial risks.

There are actors and domains within almost all African cities which increasingly operate with substantial capacity, capitalisation and international scope. They do so in the contexts of a "real power" constituted by imbricating multiple spaces of legality and illegality, formality and informality constantly pieced together and pulled apart. Even for those involved in illegalities, there is a move to now engage "legal" or "normative" transnational arenas of economic transaction and control. Capital, largely derived from various smuggling activities, has become key financing in the acquisition of many formerly state-owned assets that have been privatised over the past years. However small or limited these formal domains may be, they increasingly take on a public presence, even if the details of their operations may remain largely invisible.

The trade is not only in oil and minerals. There is also an emerging trade in innovative financial instruments which are often linked to concessions in large tracks of forests and off-shore areas (Hardin, 1998). Money is being invested in the under-utilised and under-regulated spaces of European cities, for workshops and warehouses specialising in production for upwardly mobile urban professionals (Cross et al, 2000). Engineering and construction firms are acquired through renovations in the institutions of Islamic brotherhoods. Across the world, Mourides are working as traders, money-changers, laborers, hawkers, and professionals. A significant part of their time is spent in solidifying Mouride communities in the cities where migrants find themselves. Each Mouride community contributes a significant share of their earnings to Khalifa, the presiding religious authority, in Senegal. This Mouride circuit operates as a coherent social world no matter where Mouride migrants may find themselves. Sufi brotherhoods were once held together by virtue of the charisma of the leading shaykh, who acted as a intermediary between the collective aspirations of a community and divine power. Now the cohesion of such sociality is based on mobilising religious sentiment and order as a means of circulating wealth. The circulation of wealth, in turn, signifies the fecundity of the Mouride community (Buggehagen, 1999).

Though limited, the sheer existence of these emerging "formal" activities points the way to possibilities where a substantial history of informalisation from below has helped shaped an informalisation capable of operating at larger scales. These operations at larger scales, in turn, point the way to sectors and activities which might constitute the basis for new "formal" economies.

Suburb of Salisbury (Harare) looking from Livingston House, Zimbabwe Source: Crofts Marylee, Wiley David, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Africa Focus. 2000

Formalised urban reform, the spread of informal survival strategies, the reassertion of apparently "traditional" modalities of social organisation, and the diversification of urban economic and support networks enter into relationships which are simultaneously reciprocal and conflicting. Each of these elements can be potentially used to support the other; each also represents the limit of each other's efficacy. What this says is that they are not alternatives to each other. Nor are they essential or easily linked ingredients of some larger development plan for African cities. Each must be given sufficient space to re-calibrate the operations of each other element. At the same time, each element does imply different assumptions and logic, and the difference must be maintained. As such, specifying who has the "right" to do what, and even considerations about what it is that is "right" to do, are difficult to determine. Clear and determined urban policies are necessary. But it must be kept in mind that such clarity and determination is experimental. There must also be flexibility, the willingness and ability to shift gears if such clarity only seems to confuse matters for the residents who must live them.


Bibliography

The Geographical Information System (GIS) programmes devised for modern mapping techniques make it possible to integrate numerically, a series of data regarding various problems, that can then be filed, modified,and rapidly analyzed under a new format, ready for viewing directly or the printing of maps. Sustainable development in Africa requires access to data banks, information, knowledge and the understanding of environmnetal factors, as well as knowledge of the natural resources and the socio-economic infrastructures locally present. Therefore GIS are extremely important in helping to decide how to enhance productivity in order to get better results in rural areas. Following are some examples of the application of GIS in rural areas of some African countries.

Mapping the occupation of Farm Land

Tele-surveys and imaging are two of the best techniques used to map out the exploitation of the land for farming. High-resolution satellite images can provide fundamental information as to quality, quantity and space/time. In Ivory Coast, the CNITG (Centre National Ivoiren de Télédetection Geographique) has studied the Bouna region, putting together maps showing the utilization of the land, hydrogeological information and climate data, so as to map out the areas suitable for cultivation of the soybean and adding demographic and administrative data.

In Rwanda, a group of experts in the Kigali region used a GIS programme to study potentially suitable areas for the cultivation of manioc (cassava). The use of geographical data banks that combine information as to the soil, topography and rains has made it possible to determine the biologically suitable areas for planting. The GIS has been set up to cross-check further information regarding ownership of the land, transport and distribution of the product so as to have an indication of what profit margins to expect. The data examined regarding characteristics of typical situations can be modified rapidly taking into account new vaiables, such as draught periods, the ups and downs of local and international prices and the development of new infrastructures in the region.

Studies, carried out by the Centre de Cartographie Numérique in the province of Koudougou, Burkina Faso, within the framework of research activities to evaluate the performance of irrigation systems, show that extremely precise maps of how the area is exploited can be made from satellite images. This makes it possible to determine what measures can be taken and to identify the most suitable crops.

Tele-surveys in fishing

The Department of Bamako together with several cooperatives for the management of the Niger River banks, is using a tele-survey programme in the fishing sector that will enable them to foresee where stocks will gather. This is a way to help surveillance of the movement of stocks so that fishing activities can be enhanced and subsequent selling better organized.

Management of Food Emergencies in Rural Areas

The GIS can also be used in emergency situations that are hard to handle. For example, in Burkina Faso, some experts in geo-information technology using, climate, farm and demographic data banks, have created an early-warning system to prevent crisis situations in farming. As a result exact real-time projections of harvests can be made and where necessary corrective measures worked out accordingly.

Environmental Protection

The government in Gabon, one of the main producers of wood in central Africa, is using the GIS to monitor deforestation and optimize the cutting down of trees. Within this same project, a group of environmentalists in the region of Port Gentil, has devised a GIS programme to determine, among other things, the areas that offer the best conditions (habitat, food) for particular animal species.

Management of the Health of Sheep

In Ivory Coast, the SUAIA (Service d'Utilité Agricole Interchambres d'Agriculture) and the CAI (Concept Africa Ingénierie) together with ADMA (Association de Défense des Animaux du Département de Bondoukou) have offered the health service of the Department of Bondoukou a GIS instrument (SANISIG) to help monitor the health of transhumant flocks. This instrument makes it possible to determine eventual contact with other flocks and where that may have happened and to take measures to isolate flocks that may have contracted a contagious disease