Southern theory as cultural intermediaries who have raised these issues precisely because they have knowledge in different fields and different academic institutions (northern and southern). James Ferguson reminds us that ‘Thinking does not mean thinking from a single point of view, but thinking from more than one point of view at the same time’ (Ferguson 2012), a comment made in reference to Jean and Jane Comaroff who, like many ‘intellectuals of the South’, have positioned themselves in the space between them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).
I have adopted a similar approach in exploring this space between different academic traditions. For historical reasons, African universities are too often in a subaltern position in the production of knowledge that has received worldwide audience in the social sciences. A first step towards rebalancing this unequal production is to use the considerable and often neglected research produced in African universities. There is a long tradition of research in South African and Nigerian universities not always exposed in urban studies journals but which constitute the fundamental basis of this book. To produce new knowledge and new facts on urban Africa is another necessary step, not a technical point but a need for an exhaustive empirical research for which not abundant available data pre‐existed for a number of issues (Pieterse and Parnell 2016). This is also an epistemological choice situated in a grounded theory that provides theoretical insights based on empirical data (Glaser and Strauss 1967) that are necessarily provisional and revisable (Robinson and Roy 2016) and only possible through a constant process of exploring the tiny minutiae of urban life (Simone and Pieterse 2017).
I have often been asked what is the point in drawing parallels between countries as different as South Africa and Nigeria, or cities like Cape Town and Ibadan that have nothing in common. This work is part of this renewal of the comparison in urban studies. Jennifer Robinson invites us to think of a global comparative urbanism and to shift the research produced within the Western European world and the United States to take into account different urban experiences in the South and to produce South/South and South/North comparisons (Robinson 2016; Robinson and Roy 2016). She calls for thinking together scales, flows and peculiar histories and to compare iconic cities with more ordinary ones and thus to move out of any exceptional visions of cities (Robinson 2006). In the African continent especially, there is a need to rethink hasty classifications. African cities are often qualified as ‘colonial’, ‘post‐colonial, ‘informal, ‘in crisis’ and ‘neoliberal’ as if they were only laboratories or testing grounds for broader international dynamics over which local or national actors seem to have little influence (Fourchard 2011a). Comparative methods also limit the use of superlatives and distance ourselves from national debates (McFarlane 2010; Simone 2010). They are a way to move outside methodological nationalism, which, until recently, was common in urban sociology that carries the risk of reifying national experiences (Le Galès 2019, p. 34). South Africa and Nigeria are no exception, their historiographies are often nationally oriented, and have sometimes lent credence to the idea of incommensurable trajectories. The wish to move beyond an assumption of incommensurability follows some previous collective efforts to compare politics and policies in different cities of the continent (Bekker and Fourchard 2013). Comparing simultaneously avoids the pitfall of a ‘new localism’ commonly found in urban studies, which investigates local strategies, the capabilities of local actors, and local regulations, while overlooking more comprehensive national, regional or global transformations (Le Galès 2003, p. 27). There is a long tradition in sociology, geography and history informing the particularity of only one metropolis without using comparative tool; this work is also sensitive to a recent call for using more history and political sociology in comparative urban studies (Le Galès 2019).
Comparison is used here as a way to identify singularities: it means highlighting differences rather than dissolving them, sharing questions instead of answers. I do not intend to ‘compare one to the other’ but rather ‘one and the other’, to foreground particularities and contingencies rather than misleading likenesses (Bayart 2008a). It does not emphasise connections or flows between cities of the continent or elsewhere nor does it try to find variables of relatively similar cases. It wishes instead to allow each case to inform assessments of the other while pointing out particularities through a thorough description of practices and discourses in historically situated contexts. A creative attempt of post‐colonial approach opts for a view on fragmented urban lifestyles and worlding experiences that give preference to unstable practices, fluidity, informal relations and transnational connections (De Boeck and Plissart 2004; Fouquet 2014; Malaquais 2006; Nuttall and Mbembe 2005; Roy 2016; Simone 2001). While sharing a rejection of any linear or teleological vision of history I think that this ethnography of fragments does not always help to explore what Foucault calls historical discontinuities and events (Foucault 1971, pp. 1015–1017, 1972, p. 1141). ‘Event means not a decision, a treaty, a reign or a battle but a balance of forces that is reversed, a power confiscated, a vocabulary taken up and turned against its users, a domination that weakens, relaxes, poisons itself, another that makes its entrance, masked’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1016).8 How might the change of power relationships in its tiny details reflect specific configurations of institutions, transgression of established discourses and naturalised practices?
In other words, comparing a genealogy of classification, exclusion and police will bring to the fore the everyday practices of power in past and present urban lives. Three scales are privileged. While blatantly racial in South Africa, the administrative and legal apparatus of exclusion, implemented by the colonial and apartheid states, was, in urban areas, simultaneously based on residence, age and gender, and in both countries, re‐appropriated and subverted by the population (Part I). Similarly, over the long twentieth century, order was maintained in low‐income neighbourhoods more often by local organisations using coercion against those who appeared to threaten the cohesion of the ‘community’ than by the state security apparatus imposing us to rethink the very act of policing in low‐income neighbourhoods (Part II). Eventually, what may be striking to the observer of the contemporary precarious urban life in Africa is their uneven ability to join clientelistic networks and negotiate the terms of their economic life with local political patrons and street‐level bureaucrats (Part III). Each of the book’s three parts focuses on a common scale of analysis and temporal period: the metropolis during the colonial period in Part I; the neighbourhood from the 1930s until today in Part II; and central sites of the urban economy (the street, motor parks) and of bureaucratic and political power (a local government office, the residence of a political boss) since 2000 in Nigeria.
In Part I, I suggest that the genealogy of exclusion takes root in the classifying obsession of colonial and apartheid governments. Racial discrimination, city planning and segregation schemes designed to keep black native populations at a distance from white European populations have played a pioneering role in developing the concept of a segregated city (Home 1997; Nightingale 2012; Swanson 1977). For American historian Carl Nightingale, it is impossible to wish away the power of race in the history of colonial cities, whether it was during moments when planners did draw colour lines clearly on their maps or moments where they sought to hide race away (Nightingale 2012). He rightly insists, ‘the biggest problem with urban racial separation is the maldistribution of resources that disproportionally disfavours those racial groups that the colour line also helps to subordinate politically’. Actually, the construction of the modern networked city in the Western world from a fragmented provision of water, sanitation, electricity or transport in the mid‐nineteenth century to a standardised system in the mid‐twentieth century – or what is referred to as a ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ by Graham and Marvin (2001) – never happened in the colonies. Network of infrastructures has ‘always been fragmented’ in colonial Bombay (McFarlane 2008; Zerah 2008), it was a truncated modernity in colonial Lagos (Gandy 2006, p. 377) and even considered as a system of urban apartheid in the earlier literature (Abu‐Lughod 1980; Balbo 1993). An approach on colonial surveillance and control of conducts has simultaneously become an important reinterpretation of the colonial city inspired by a Foucauldian analysis. Some have suggested that disciplinary colonial power and the racist narrative behind the civilising mission were penetrating the smallest details of everyday life that could only be resisted by colonised social and political practices (Celik 1997; de Boeck and Plissart 2004;
