Genre and the African City: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Rhythms

This article engages the genre—city intertext in order to make conceptual distinctions between the “city” and the “urban” by illustrating how certain textual representations and disciplinary practices in their constitution of the African city are actively involved in the killing of the plurality of rhythms, or heterogeneity central to urban life. It illustrates how certain modes of reading and writing about the African city (colonial autobiographies, Eurocentric ethnographies) and institutionalized forms of non‐contamination or non‐contradiction (nation‐building practices, museums and colonial or post‐colonial urban planning) in their attempt to uphold a generic image of Africanness or citiness are constitutive of rhythmic urbicide — the killing of urban heterogeneity through claims to purity and partitioning of African cities, subjects and subject voices. The City is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it. (Barthes 1997 Barthes, R. 1997. “‘Semiology and the Urban’”. In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Edited by: Leach, N. 166–172. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) African writers … are [by ethnicity] Asante, Yoruba, Kikuyu, but what does this now mean? They are [by nationality] Ghanaian, Nigerian, Kenyan, but does this yet mean anything? They are [by racial identification] black, and what is the worth of the black person? … This particular constellation of problems is not often found outside Africa: a recent colonial history, a multiplicity of diverse sub national indigenous traditions, a foreign language whose metropolitan culture has traditionally defined the “natives” by race as inferior. (Appiah 1993 Appiah, K. A. 1993. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar])