for many years were quite similar, began moving in different directions in recent times, conditioning the violent (or non‐violent) nature of mobilisations, state intervention and the integration of city dwellers in political networks; or we might question why the everyday work of patrolling neighbourhoods, which appeared to be identical in Ibadan and Cape Town, has had radically different effects on the construction of community boundaries within these cities, on the use of coercion, and on what these practices tell us about the nature of a state that outsources its security functions in this way.
This book does not tell the story of how most of the population was denied political rights – the foundation of apartheid and colonial and military regimes – nor of the inequalities and the enrichment of a racial or political minority at the expense of the majority, or of repression and attempts by the police or the army to subject citizens. Instead, bearing in mind this historical matrix, it invites us to step away from the national frameworks to study the myriad of urban arrangements used to manufacture exclusion. By articulating insights across the various local, national, imperial and global levels, and the colonial, apartheid and contemporary periods, it will bring to the fore the everyday practices of power and a genealogy of different forms of classification, exclusion and policing. By focusing on power relationships in daily life and understanding objects that extend across the twentieth century into the twenty‐first, I am seeking to open up a dialogue including equal parts of history, political sociology and comparative urban studies. I am seeking to account for the chaotic historical formation of the state – which could not be reduced to its fragile or weak dimensions – and an unforeseeable changing urban social reality that cannot be adequately explained by planning nor by informality. Essential components of the repertory of public actions such as providing security, attempting to monopolising violence, and producing or reproducing social, racial or generational differences are not restricted to state agents but carried out by numerous social groups that change their concrete implementation, often in very accidental ways.
This process echoes the genealogical analysis of Foucault, whose aim is to retrace the historical conditions of emergence of specific apparatuses of power. Foucault was largely influenced by Nietzsche’s own interpretation of history, as shown in his key text published in 1971 (Foucault 1971, pp. 1004–1024). Genealogy aims to ‘detect the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1004). It requires the meticulousness of knowledge, a large number of materials piled up, details, random beginnings, accidents, small deviations or complete reversals, errors, misjudgements, miscalculations. Foucault is said to have challenged ‘traditional history’, but according to his friend, the historian and philosopher Paul Veyne, Foucault believed only in the truth of the facts, of the countless historical facts that fill all the pages of his books; he was sceptical towards any universal concepts and started from the concrete practices of the state, and ordinary places of power rather than from general and well‐known ideas (Veyne 2008, p. 9, 19, 33). Interpreting history as a series of accidents and considering ‘that the forces at stake in history do not obey a destination or a mechanism but the randomness of the struggle’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1016) was quite unusual in the 1970s. Foucault’s genealogy was opposed to meta‐historical forms of writing (Foucault 1971, p. 1005), to historians who focus excessively on causal relationships (Veyne 2008, pp. 38–39), and to a history that does not take into account ordinary mechanisms of power (Foucault 1971, p. 1019). As David Garland explains (2014, p. 372), ‘genealogical analysis traces how contemporary practices and institutions emerged out of specific struggles, conflicts, alliances, and exercises of power, many of which are nowadays forgotten’. This book is an attempt to discover exercises of power, often located outside state power, sometimes within it.
In keeping with sociological traditions from its founding fathers to Michel Foucault and Paul Veyne, this book calls into question the antinomy between past and present. In an age of fragmented, hyper‐specialised and standardised knowledge, this choice reflects a scientific conviction – a unified conception of the social sciences including history – and a taste for intellectual and methodological cross‐pollination and comparative approaches. Such an endeavour entails articulating periods, and in this case, taking stock of the legacy from the colonial era and earlier periods, some of which are present in the forms of postcolonial power (Bayart and Bertrand 2006, p. 142). It means searching for the traces of the past in the present day (including the present of the historical actors) by making intelligible how ‘the things of the past are objectivised and crystallised in mental structures, in material things, in habitus’ (Noiriel 2010). This approach is characteristic of comparative historical sociology, which calls into question the opposition between idiographic and nomothetic disciplines (Bayart 1989; Déloye 1997) and of sociohistory, which emphasises the need to historicise social relationships viewed as products of power relationships that have become solidified, objectified, and naturalised over time (Noiriel 2012, 2010).
This dialogue between history and social sciences are central in the tradition of interdisciplinary knowledge in African studies (Balandier 1985 [1955]; Coquery‐Vidrovitch 1993; Ferguson 1999; Freund 2007; Mbembe and Nuttall 2004) which in some cases have entered into a productive dialogue with urban studies of the continent (Myers 2011; Simone and Pieterse 2017; Robinson 2006; Simone 2004). These have helped to include a more diverse historical experience in understanding the urban world and possible peculiarities of urban histories of the global south. Despite this tradition, a very specific use of history needs to be interrogated within some segments of urban studies. First, the historical experience is rarely based on a dialogue with the long tradition of African history. Second, while ethnographic methods have become central in so many disciplines, historical methods, i.e. the patient time‐consuming archival work and collection of oral and material sources, often seems to be marginal, leaving urban scholars with a second‐hand approach and a relative neglect of historical everyday life. Third, many scholars have not totally avoided a form of presentism. Presentism – or the rise of the category of the present until this comes a ubiquitous evidence – partly consists of reinterpreting the past according to this present (Hartog 2003, p. 223). A genealogical analysis is suggested as a possibility to avoid that risk while questioning the often‐marginal place devoted to the historicised dimension of urban life.
Practically, this means that there is a need to take contemporary and colonial periods seriously, i.e. systematically giving priority to primary sources with the same density of information. It has been of paramount importance to constitute a body of historical and ethnographical sources around shared questions. The historical sources include colonial, national and local archives consulted since 2000 at various sites in Nigeria (Ibadan, Kaduna, Enugu), South Africa (Pretoria, Cape Town, Johannesburg) and Great Britain (London, Oxford), and the local and national press archives in both countries, along with several dozen interviews with ‘elders’ on certain topics. The ethnographic materials come from a familiarisation with the environment of the neighbourhoods investigated in Cape Town, Ibadan and Lagos, repeated interviews with dozens of police organisation members, civil servants, union members and traders, together with participatory observation whenever possible (volunteer patrols in Cape Town, local governments in Ibadan and Lagos).7 Rancière (1987) invites us to move between a word divided ‘between those who explain and those who listen’. As a French academic living and working in Nigeria and South Africa I was first and foremost educated by the many informants I had the chance to meet. Cross‐checking historical sources with ethnographical materials generated dialogue between literatures that usually do not communicate their findings and brought to light particular historical configurations that raised questions about changes in national policy (colonial/post‐colonial, military/post‐military, apartheid/post‐apartheid), which are often taken as the narrative starting point for want of longitudinal studies.
Many scholars have recommended provincialising Western urban analysis to achieve a more comprehensive view of global urbanisation, to give priority to a post‐colonial approach, and to call for a localisation of theoretical production (Robinson 2012; Roy 2011). If this book explores colonial and postcolonial history to figure out a peculiar historicity that may not fit a ready‐made definition of the urban, my aim is not to take part in developing a ‘Southern theory’ that would
