AFRICAN CITIES READER III Land, Property and Value A creation of Chimurenga and the African Centre for Cities African Cities Reader III: Land Property and Value Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse (editors) Published by Chimurenga and the African Centre for Cities P.O. Box 15117 Vlaeberg, 8018 South Africa Tel: +27 (21) 422 4168 Email: [email protected] Chimurenga, African Centre for Cities and contributors © 2015 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. We are grateful that the contributors kept the faith, as did our generous supporters: the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mistra Urban Futures and the National Research Foundation. ISBN: 978-0-9870295-7-7 Print design and layout: Chimurenga LAB Editorial Assistant: Copy Editing: Andrea Meeson www.africancitiesreader.org.za Contents Preface 5 Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse IRM de la ville de Douala 6 (Douala, Cameroon) Maud de la Chapelle Urban Sahara from the Sky: 19 How Global Capitalism Fixes the Dunes (Nouakchott, Muaritania) Marion Broquère, Armelle Choplin, Simon Nancy & En Haut! High Class Shanty Towns 22 (Dakar, Senegal) Jean Christophe Lanquetin This Sea Shall Be Uprooted 27 (Lagos, Nigeria) Jumoke Verissimo, Adolphus Opara Visions for the National Tear-ter of Nigeria: Four conversations and Seven performative pamphlets 36 (Lagos Nigeria) Seven Performative Pamphlets 37 Ayodele Arigbabu, Hunter and Gatherer Collective The Death Metaphor 47 Jahman Anikulapo A conversation between Jelili Atiku and Ahmed Yerima 49 A conversation between Jude Anogwih and Ayodele Arigbabu 52 A conversation between Professor Muyiwa Falaiye and Mudi Yahaya 59 Reluctantly Loud Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation 64 (Cape Town, South Africa) Koni Benson, Faeza Meyer Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard 96 A Story About Cape Town’s Tanzanian Stowaways (Cape Town, South Africa) Sean Christie, David Southwood Living Dangerously in Petroluanda 111 (Luanda, Angola) António Andrade Tomás, Rui Carlos Afonso City Building in Post-Conflict, Post-Socialist Luanda: 121 Burying the past with phantasmagorias of the future (Luanda, Angola) Anne Pitcher, Marissa Moorman Dispossessed Vigils 134 Mourning and Regeneration in Inner-City Johannesburg (Johannesburg, South Africa) Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon An Etymology of Slum Names 148 Göran Dahlberg Not Only Our Land but Also Our Souls 152 (South Africa) Andile Mngxitama The Way Back Home 157 (South Africa) Niq Mhlongo Remapping Buru Buru 160 (Nairobi, Kenya) Billy Kahora, Boniface Mwangi Contributors 167 Preface The third African Cities Reader explores the unholy trinity of land, property and value – the life force of cities everywhere. In an era of late modernity marked by a speculative compulsion that takes on a spectral character as it instigates adventures of city imagineering, deal-making and symbolic reinvestment, the material effects are often displacement, violence, daylight robbery and yet another round of elite seduction. The incessant (re) making of the African city is a game that leaves few untouched or unmoved and literally prepares the ground for the inhabitation of another 400 million urban dwellers over the next two decades. Land, property and value can only be understood through the passageway of colonial violence and its manifold psychic, cultural, political, economic and spiritual legacies. The very basis of land ownership, property ascription and concomitant valuations remain trapped in an unspoken, and in some ways, unspeakable cultural erasure. Racking through these ruins is essential to break through the normalisation work of contemporary policies, legal frameworks and de facto orders of rule. That said, the sheer force of necessity of urban majorities across the continent has also produced a wide- ranging set of “anarchic” and unruly practices that may not add up to a grand alternative, but certainly offer intelligence about other imaginaries and the potential of destabilisation and hybridisation. (After all, only 3 per cent of urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa earn enough to qualify for a mortgage). The Reader offers a few examples of performative strategies, which seek to tap these energies as a way of gesturing beyond our truncated horizons. It is essential to pay close attention to these efforts because they offer a vantage point from which to take in all the dramatic enterprise afoot to establish “urban fantasies”, tenure security, predictable real estate markets and propertied classes. Almost every large African city boasts at least one “new town” development ambition, whereby governments are joined by various new world investors to establish alternative urban worlds, typically unmoored from the real city. These “cities” (such as the one in Luanda discussed in the Reader) are the soft landing beacons for international capital. They are endowed with the symbolic capital to prove the efficiency, aspiration, modernity, connectivity and digital smarts of the current crop of African leaders, who are championing Afro-optimism. Of course, as many contributors in the volume intimate, this wave of city-building is simply an exercise in futility, with profoundly violent consequences for the families and businesses that are removed to make room for the smart city. It is not only those who are directly impacted upon, but also entire cultural systems are put out of joint by the rapacious effects of narrow private property dogmas. One of the surprising themes in this edition is the close and complicated connection between land and death. The dead continue to be haunted by historical land-based displacement because the ancestors do not necessarily partake in urban-based land- use and burial practices, setting off profound familial and communal conflicts; dramas that underscore how important it is to not simply approach land through a futurial lens – potential value that can be realised through appreciation – but rather to understand that past mendacities are running wild to catch up with the future. It took us much longer than planned to bring this issue into the world. A variety of allied publications (The Chronic, Cityscapes, Rogue Urbanism and Africa’s Urban Revolution) and cultural interventions ate time and attention. Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse Editors 5 AFRICAN CITIES READER IRM de la ville de Douala MAUD DE LA CHAPELLE To Didier * Les cartes ont été réalisées à partir de la carte de Douala disponible sur le site cartographique collaboratif Open Street Map (http://www.openstreetmap.org) À Douala, on nomme les carrefours, places, rond-points, rues, de manière improvisoire1 – improvisée et provisoire – au gré des anecdotes du quartier, des lieux de vies importants ou du type d’activité qui s’y pratique. Ces noms apparaissent, suivant le même processus un peu mystérieux que celui qui forme les rumeurs, pour se repérer et se déplacer dans une ville dont les noms de rue officiels, pour les rares qui existent, ne sont pas signalés et demeurent inconnus des habitants. La perception de Douala par ceux qui la vivent se fait donc à travers un nuage de noms évocateurs, mémoire orale de la ville, traces vivantes et quotidiennes de son histoire, qui participent d’un imaginaire collectif... 1. Mot valise inventé par un habitant de Maputo (Mozambique), et relevé par l’écrivain Mia Couto dans une de ses chroniques pour le journal mozambicain O País. 6 AFRICAN CITIES READER IRM de la ville de Douala MAUD DE LA CHAPELLE Désiré Je m’appelle Désiré et ma ville est cosmopolite. Je suis né à la fois à Madagascar et à Dakar, juste à côté de Brazzaville. De ce côté de la ville, nous sommes très africains : nous habitons Lagos, Congo, Sénégalais ou Camp Tchadien. On a bien les originaux de Barcelone, qui ont cherché à se démarquer. Mais à part la passion du football, il faut bien avouer que le quartier n’a pas grand-chose à voir avec la métropole européenne où Eto’o s’est illustré pendant des années ! On a aussi quelques pauvres âmes qui se sont égarées du côté de Babylone… Mais ceux là ne l’emporteront pas au paradis ! Plus loin, là où vivent les riches, c’est Denvers, Santa Barbara ou Doubaï, Venise, Saint Tropez, Orly, Johannesburg ou Mbengue City2; on danse à l’Élysée ou au Sénat. On est tous citoyens du monde, hein, comme on dit On ne vient juste pas tous du même monde ! Depuis quelques années, les derniers arrivés chez nous, ce sont les Chinois. Dans l’Est de la ville, ils ont déjà leur hôpital, et à la Douche, leur quartier : toutes les enseignes y sont dans leur langue. Il y a quelques années, on avait même un original, Liu du Kamer, qui chantait du Makossa3 comme un vrai d’ici ! Ils n’ont quand même peur de rien, les Chinois : les gars là sont venus jusque sur le Marché Central, pour vendre eux-mêmes les soutiens4 qu’ils fabriquent dans leur pays ! 300 Francs seulement ! La concurrence, là, a ruiné les affaires de mes compatriotes… Jusqu’ici, à New Bell, où se trouve le marché, c’étaient surtout les peuples de mon pays qui étaient représentés : Haoussas, Bassas et Bamilékés. Mais attention, chacun sa zone ! À Nyalla, tout au bout de la ville, là où il n’y a encore pas longtemps, c’était la forêt, ça brasse encore plus large : en plus des Bassas et des Haoussas, on peut croiser une terre d’Étrangers ! Ça donne envie de voir du pays, tout ça. Un jour, moi aussi, je veux être étranger quelque part… 2.