Colonial cities

Colonization is a centuries-old phenomenon, as the spread of Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean demonstrates. The modern period of European colonization from the 1500s onward was global in scale, affecting European cities like Dublin and Prague, as well as cities on other continents. Overseas colonization has always produced very distinctive cities, as it has also transformed imperial metropoles through migration and trade. The distinctiveness of colonial cities persisted through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the strangeness of earlier colonial cities (e.g., Goa, Mexico City, New York, or Salvador da Bahia) has merely worn off with the passage of time. French and British imperial colonialisms, which reached their apex at the turn of the twentieth century, tended to emphasize separation of ethnic and racial communities, often with consequences still visible today. While generalizations are thus possible across centuries, continents, and colonial administrations, the literature of colonial cities is deeply textured by differences of local culture and history that surpass the expertise of any single scholar and the scope of a single essay. This chapter will focus on cities in the literature of authors living in North and West Africa, mostly writing in French, during the periods of colonization and struggle for independence. It concentrates on passages that actually describe urban settings or institutions, even though one might focus on such phenomena as modern trade, crowds, or anonymity. Attention to descriptions of the physical environment has the advantage of allowing readers to make connections with the other phenomena of urban life, all of which are influenced by the nature of the urban built environment. Much of the African literary canon might not strike casual readers as primarily concerned with, or situated in, cities - a notion reinforced by the litany of painful news from Africa in the world’s media, which often focuses on rural tragedies. It therefore bears repeating that despite a relatively small population for its size (just more than a billion people living in 30 million square kilometers, an area bigger than China, India, Europe, and the continental United States combined), Africa has had cities for centuries, even if they have not always figured in literature in the way that the European example would lead one to expect.