favorable agricultural conditions or where opportunities for
exploiting local, regional, and international trade networks
existed at the crossroads of traditional overland routes or
along major river networks or coastlines. Cities also tended
to be located in zones with high levels of rainfall and fertile
soils and sometimes close to abundant deposits of precious
and semiprecious minerals.
Despite some notable instances of the early formation
of cities, relatively few important African cities arose before
approximately the 10th and 11th centuries c.e. At about that
time, as highly centralized states with advanced degrees of
economic specialization began to take root, many cities
were established. Yet most African cities that are occupied
today were established only in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, during the period of European colonial conquest.
As the overwhelming majority of Africans retained their
ties to the land, cultivating crops, fi shing, hunting, and
raising domesticated animals, urban populations remained
low well into the 20th century. Africa’s relatively poor soils,
harsh climates, and lethal disease environments meant that
most of the continent’s inhabitants historically dedicated
the greater share of their energies to subsistence in the con-
text of a rural setting.
CONCEPTUALIZING CITIES AND
URBANIZATION IN AFRICA
Th e study of cities and the process of urbanization in Africa
has long been complicated by a lack of agreement about defi -
nitions. Specifi cally there is no universally accepted set of cri-
teria for what constitutes a city proper, as opposed to a town,
village, kingdom, or other type of political and social entity.
In part, consensus has proved elusive owing to the misappli-
cation of a Western model of what warrants the designation
of city. Scholars of many diff erent disciplines have oft en been
guilty of seeking out those characteristics that commonly ap-
peared among cities in the West or among the great metrop-
olises of the ancient world outside Africa. However, many
indigenous African cities developed diff erently and displayed
features unlike those found elsewhere in the world, owing to
the contingencies of culture, social organization, systems of
livelihood, ecology, and climate.
Th e lively debate about African urbanization has been
fraught with a strong European ethnocentric bias. Owing to
the close association that is oft en made linking cities to high
civilizations and vice versa, many Western scholars, believing
that Africans were backward peoples incapable of high civili-
zation without the benefi t of outside infl uence, have been re-
luctant to confer the status of civilization upon early African
societies, even those boasting complex and highly urbanized
structures. Since many scholars have approached the study
of Africans and their societies with preconceived, stereotypi-
cal, and possibly racist views, they assumed a skeptical posi-
tion in crediting the creation of cities, most notably those of
pharaonic Egypt and the medieval site of Great Zimbabwe, to
Africans. Typically, they attributed the construction of cities
and massive engineering feats to the contributions of Arabs,
Asians, and Europeans.
Overall, Western scholars have underestimated the
degree of urbanism present in ancient Africa. Th e limited
number of ancient cities that archaeologists have uncovered
may partly refl ect the general failure to unearth African cit-
ies of the distant past in areas outside archaeological zones
of high visibility and where the building materials were pri-
marily mud and thatch. Th e siting of archaeological research
in Africa, which has concentrated mainly in the Nile Valley,
the Ethiopian plateau, the Swahili coast, the West African
savanna, and Great Zimbabwe, has been unevenly applied.
Many cities and states remained undisturbed, most notably
in Central Africa.
Th e Western conceptualization of what cities are and
what they are not has typically hinged upon certain criteria,
foremost among them the development of a system of writ-
ing and the erection of monumental architecture. Monu-
mental structures might include stone or mud walls, timber
stockades, palace complexes, burial mounds, or obelisks
(an extremely large tapering pillar that ends in a pyramid).
Seemingly, the study of ancient cities in Mesopotamia and
Mesoamerica validated this approach. Although there were
cities in the Nile River valley that fulfi lled these criteria, great
cities of venerable origins in other regions of Africa, where
knowledge was retained and transferred to successive genera-
tions through oral, not written, methods, would be unfairly
disqualifi ed, as would cities that erected impermanent struc-
tures owing to the unavailability of or lack of necessity for
permanent materials. Clearly, defi nitions of the kind widely
accepted by Western archaeologists, geographers, political
scientists, and historians did more to obscure than to eluci-
date the nature and dynamics of African cities.
Despite the problematical nature of employing broad
universal criteria in discerning which population centers
are cities and which towns, several useful markers and fea-
tures were generally present in African cities. Most basi-
cally, African cities were the loci of dense concentrations
of population, with a large percentage of residents relying
upon an economic pursuit other than farming as their prin-
cipal means of livelihood. Normally, political, commercial,
and religious elites were centered in cities and constituted a
centralized authority that exerted adequate power to control
the community’s agricultural surplus and to command la-
bor for public works projects. As elsewhere in the world, Af-
rican cities ser ved as centers of far-fl ung trade networks and
as political capitals (of provinces, kingdoms, and empires)
and oft en evolved into centers of learning, scholarship, and
religious worship. Additionally, they were characterized by
social stratifi cation and craft specialization. In Africa cities
did not exist in isolation; they were intimately tied into their
immediate hinterlands, in large part through their markets,
which provided opportunities for farmers, pastoralists, ar-
tisans, and market traders and stimulated agricultural pro-
duction in the surrounding countryside.cities: Africa 203