Africa’s Urban Future
The Future of Cities Africa
This Article co-authored with Bheki Mahlobo as part of the American Entreprise Institute’s Future of Cities initiative, for full link to the text go here.
South Africa, like other countries throughout the continent, faces a considerable number of obstacles to overcome. But the situation is far from hopeless. In sharp contrast to the aging populations in cities throughout the West and East Asia, the population is relatively young, and opinion polls constantly show a decline in support for overreaching governments. The first large wave of urbanization could also forge a new generation that has come of age without the tribal, racial, and linguistic loyalties that divided the previous generations. Political heterodoxy is on the rise. In the 2021 municipal elections, the ANC government dropped below 50 percent for the first time, indicating that revolutionary ideology is taking second place over the need for good governance and pragmatism. South Africa’s challenges remain modernizing its infrastructure, overcoming its unique geographic obstacles, addressing the elevated levels of crime, integrating the influx of migrants from other African countries, and offering most of its poor the opportunity to enter the middle class.
How South Africa’s cities fare is important for not just our country but all of Africa. If the Rainbow Nation, with its considerable head start, cannot build a successful pluralistic urban future, then the chance for the rest of the continent to overcome the architecture of poverty remains a poor one.
Africa’s Urban Future
The urban future in the coming decades will be largely an African one. The continent is now home to 12 of the world’s largest cities and four megacities—and more importantly, Africa has the world’s fastest-growing urban population. By 2100, Africa will be home to a third of the world’s largest cities and 40 percent of the world’s population. As cities in the West and China age, Africa will remain young. The average ages of European, North American, and Asian citizens today are 40, 38, and 33, respectively; in contrast, the African population is young, with an average age of 24. The signs of Africa’s urban growth are already clear: In 2016, Kinshasa overtook Paris as the world’s most populous Francophone city and by 2050, Nigeria is set to bypass the United States as the world’s third-most populated country.
As seen elsewhere in the developing world, Africa’s urbanization has accompanied both economic development and growing poverty, disease, and social disorder. This is true as well of our home country, South Africa, which is home to four cities collectively containing more than 2.4 million inhabitants and the megacity Johannesburg in the Gauteng province, where a quarter of the country’s population resides. South Africa’s cities had something of a head start over the rest of the continent. The apartheid government left South Africa with the most advanced urban infrastructure on the continent, but its legacy of separate development entrenched the spatial patterns of poverty throughout the country through the execution of the colonial ideology. Given their somewhat advanced position, how South Africa’s cities fare in the 21st century is important for not just our country but all of Africa.
Southern Africa was settled in migration waves that stretched over centuries. With the passage of time, the hunter-gatherers and Bantu tribes expanded and established chiefdoms—around 1,000, in a line traveling south from northern Mozambique to the Transkei River. Southern Africa’s urban heritage, starting around the ninth century, predates the arrival of the West by several centuries. This is evidenced by the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, a civilization that included complex polities with knowledge of markets, ivory trade, pottery, and goldsmithing. While speculation of the reasons for Great Zimbabwe’s demise have pointed to warfare, a change in trade routes, or climate change, for mostly unknown reasons its inhabitants disappeared by the time colonial powers arrived on Africa’s shore.
Southern Africa’s large metropolises today, though, trace their roots to the European Age of Exploration. With Bartolomeu Dias’s discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, European sailors started to establish trade routes to India. Portuguese imperialists arrived first. The explorers in search of the last kingdom of Prester John settled the coastal cities of Angola and Mozambique. The Portuguese never delved deep into the interior, as they only interested themselves with collecting slaves and later bargaining with the same chieftains to gain access to gold, ivory, pepper, cotton, and sugar. In the late 17th century, the Dutch—in search of alternative trade routes and markets—followed as the main European interlopers, creating the basis for South African urbanism today. At the Cape of Good Hope, the Dutch East India Company founded a refreshment station at modern-day Cape Town to serve the needs of the slave and spice traders who traveled among the European, Indian, and Dutch colonies in Batavia. The Dutch immediately came into conflict and ultimately subdued the Khoisan’s hunter-gatherer political structures. The hunter-gatherers’ descendants were integrated into the Dutch society as cheap laborers who could participate in only menial jobs such as kitchen girls and gardeners with a de facto second-class-citizen rank. After generations of intermarriage, the slave descendants of the Cape colored community were left to live on the outskirts of the cities and towns of the expanding Cape Colony, while the European population resided as masters of the farms or suburban homes.
After Napoleon Bonaparte conquered the Netherlands at the end of the 18th century, Britain quickly captured the Cape Colony to prevent France from controlling the strategic sea routes. With British rule came the eventual abolition of slavery in 1834 and the imposition of the English language, developments that upset the Dutch settlers, who increasingly referred to themselves as Trekboers and later Afrikaners. As the Cape frontier expanded east toward the Kei River, a series of skirmishes broke out between the Dutch settlers and the Xhosa tribes, with back-and-forth wars continuing for almost 100 years. As the Xhosas lost ground, the frontier towns such as Grahamstown (modern-day Makhanda) and Graaff-Reinet became permanent settlements of the Cape Colony, forcing many Xhosa families out of their traditional homes and leading them to seek employment in the Cape Colony as low-wage workers.
Protesting British rule, the Boers left the Cape Colony and moved into the interior. Later the British chased after the Dutch, occupied the harbor of Port Natal (modern-day Durban), and expanded into KwaZulu-Natal. The British brought in low-wage laborers from India’s Gujarat region to work on the sugarcane farms. The legacy is that today by concentration Durban is the city with the highest Indian population outside of India, and it was in Durban that Mahatma Gandhi started the first peaceful protest campaign against colonialism and racial classification at the beginning of the 20th century.
Ethnic politics worked to strengthen the British hold. With the rise in the 17th century of the Zulu Empire and the increasingly expansionist Boers, King Ngwane V and King Moshoeshoe I offered the mountain kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho, respectively, as British protectorates. A similar phenomenon took place in Bechuanaland when the Tshwane tribes, under petitions of the British missionaries, asked for London’s protection from the expanding Boer forces. With the discovery of diamonds and gold, South Africa attracted ambitious entrepreneurs such as Cecil John Rhodes, who invested heavily in the mining towns of Johannesburg and Kimberley. Rhodes and his fellow Randlords realized that the mines required cheap labor, primarily from the native African population that resided overwhelmingly in the area the colonial authorities designated as reservations. To maintain control of the cities, Rhodes as prime minister of the Cape Colony modernized the segregation laws by introducing the Glen Grey Act, which limited the amount of land that Africans could hold while tripling the property qualification needed to vote. Rhodes’s actions politically and economically disenfranchised the nonwhite populace in the land of their birth.
As the British Empire developed cities in South Africa, they became built on principles known as the vision of Grand Apartheid. In Johannesburg and Kimberley, for example, the empire reserved certain parts of the cities for the migrating cheap black labor. These townships had substandard infrastructure, and the black population could only rent but never own property. Their only claim to citizenship was restricted to the areas the colonial authorities designated as homelands, forcing constant migration by workers and laying the seeds for the spread of disease, alcoholism, and the breakdown of family structures.
Even before apartheid became the official law of the land in 1948, South Africa’s cities developed a pattern of oppression and separation that would last from the beginning of the colonial period to 1994, almost 340 years. Even though the separation and racial laws differed in their severity in various epochs, Africans could work in the cities, but the black population had to show their papers and respect the night-watch rule and could only work in the jobs reserved for them. They were condemned to serfdom, as they could not own land in the areas that were reserved for the European population. The master-servant model shaped these emerging cities with ethnic conflicts and the deep patterns of poverty unresolved to this day.
Afrikaners, after a conflict with the British, gained limited self-government and guaranteed equality between England and Afrikaans in courts and administration. In 1913, three years after the formation of the Union of South Africa, the South African parliament passed the infamous Native Lands Act with support from London, further relegating the black population to the homelands with only the right to trade their cheap labor in the economically vibrant areas. To further export their linguistic model, the apartheid government insisted Africans master both English and Afrikaans—an action that would spark the 1976 Soweto uprising.
Things were even nastier in other parts of southern Africa, particularly those parts controlled by the new German empire. Unlike British and Afrikaner rule, which was incremental and full of inherent contradictions, German rule was outright brutal. Gov. Heinrich Ernst Göring, guided by the pseudoscience of eugenics, oversaw the first genocide of the 20th century. Eugen Fischer, the mentor of Josef Mengele, was allowed to perform human experiments at Shark Island—just off the shore of modern-day Lüderitz. With the Herero and Namaqua genocide, the intellectual foundations of the Holocaust were put in practice three decades before the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. With the end of World War I, the League of Nations handed Germany’s colonies of Southwest Africa to South Africa as a protectorate. The region was administered as a de facto fifth province, and the same policy of apartheid used in South Africa was imposed on its cities. Namibia is marked as the only country to experience three distinct forms of European colonialism—Afrikaner nationalism, German rule, and British imperialism—until it achieved independence in 1990.
Unlike in North America or Oceania, the Europeans in Africa never had “safety in numbers.” The South African cities developed along distinctly separate lines between the colonialists, who dominated, and the tribal authorities, who through their hereditary chieftains provided the necessary cheap labor. But as South Africa started to industrialize, the white populations became increasingly dependent on the cheap labor of Africans to maintain their standard of living. With the influx of migrants came resistance between the white and black working classes and the government’s enactment of the Colour Bar, a series of laws that kept jobs “reserved” for whites and for blacks.
Nevertheless, the rise of missionary schools cultivated a new incipient African intellectual and political leadership that would eventually gain control of the country and its cities. As migration to the cities accelerated, these emerging revolutionary leaders protested the segregation policies. Initially the protests were peaceful, but later they would evolve into guerrilla movements and civil wars that lasted for more than a generation. The battleground often took place in areas known today as townships, located on the fringes of the large urban agglomerations.
After apartheid collapsed in 1994 with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, South Africa was the last African country to gain its full independence. Migration to the cities accelerated during this period as Africans could now move around freely, own their own property, and find a path to upward mobility. The great growth of cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town took place in this period. Johannesburg in 1994, for example, had 2.29 million people, but today that population has grown to 7.4 million. Cape Town, with 1.9 million people in 1994, has ballooned into a mega-region with 4.6 million people. This growth was encouraged by South Africa’s “honeymoon” decade, during which growth was between around 3 to 5 percent per year. By 2006, the black middle class was estimated to be as large as the white middle class.