manner that empowers time to annihilate the previously known barrier of space. The
empowerment is evident in how the economic and the technological have translated into
the fusion and collapse of both spatial and temporal domains (8). For Giddens, however,
the emphasis is on “time-space distanciation”, an idea which takes account of the
complementarity of face-to-face-interaction among people and the remote interaction
among people which are made possible through communication, transportation and other
means that testify to the advancement of technology as it is today (10).
So far, the discussion of globalization has been engaged in terms that point to the
contested views it inspires. However, one thing that is not in contention, especially based
on the insights of Harvey and Giddens, is the centrality of space to the agenda of
globalization. The knowledge of this centrality then should illuminate the discussion of
African cityscapes as contextualized in the collections under study in this chapter. On the
one hand, the privileging of the African cityscapes also makes possible the engagement
with how the compression and distanciation of time and space opens up a migration
discussion on the connectivity between the African cities and western cities. In this
regard, the exploration of the conditions of African cities has implications which verge on
exile for a number of the cities in them. The accelerated interaction between different
parts of the world then compels us to observe the events in African cities and the links
they have with events in cities in the West. In other words, the index of flow both of
human and non-human resources in time and space has served, more than any time
before, to stress the connectivity between cities in the globe. Nevertheless, the factor of
location and the designation of each city have their way of drawing up differences
between world cities, which is why for all the virtues of connectivity, the disequilibrium
in the activity configuration of individual cities goes a long way in determining what
becomes of them in the present age.
This is not to say however that the determining factors in the place and placement of
individual cities as global or non-global, aligned with the North or South, are a function
of recent history. Indeed, the initial history of “trade colonialism and nation state”
remains a crucial factor in determining the roles that cities assume in the present global