The current global green mineral boom is driving increased mining exploration in Africa. The African Union has outlined shared visions to leverage the continent’s mineral reserves and youth boom in pursuit of sustainable development and socio-economic transformation. Achieving these goals requires mineral-rich African economies to transition from commodity export to manufacture of higher value-added products. To do so, they need to invest in their youthful population, and in research and innovation.
For years, low-income city residents have dealt creatively with the global reduction of state services. The Covid-19 pandemic requires a different scale of response.
Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas.
DIY Urbanism in Africa investigates these practices. It develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze them, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems.
This book offers a timely critical intervention into literatures on urban development and politics in Africa. It is valuable to students, policymakers, and urban practitioners keen to understand the mechanisms and political implications of widespread dynamics now shaping Africa's expanding urban environments.
In many African countries, citizenship offers civil rights to those who are included. At the same time, many – especially youth, migrants and other marginalised groups – often do not receive equal recognition in the social contract between state and citizen. They do not have the same access to justice, social protection and welfare services. This policy note addresses the challenges facing inclusive citizenship.
Citizenship is a universal legal concept and norm. But its meaning and impact differ. Its codification and implementation are shaped by historical trajectories, political systems and state/government relations with members of society. State policy affects perceptions of citizenship and civic behaviour by those governed. This paper engages with current challenges relating to citizenship in Africa South of the Sahara. It centres on academic and policy discussions on citizenship but also draws on media reports and secondary literature to explore whether promoting and embracing a positive notion of citizenship can be an opportunity for states and governments as well as citizens. Could civic education be considered a worthwhile investment in social stability and a shared identification with the common good? We conclude by making a case for a social contract, which reconciles particularistic identities (such as ethnicity) with citizenship and governance under the rule of law as an investment into enhanced trust in a citizen-state relationship.
Mit dem Ende des Kalten Krieges 1989, der Unabhängigkeit Namibias 1990 und dem Sturz des Apartheidregimes in Südafrika 1994 begann für viele Länder des südlichen Afrikas eine Zeit relativer Stabilität und des politischen Pluralismus. Die Friedensdividende erfüllte jedoch nicht die in sie gesetzten Erwartungen. Der Demokratisierungsprozess der Southern-African-Development-Community-Staaten (SADC) verläuft unübersichtlich; eine Wende hin zu autoritären Tendenzen zeichnet sich bei einigen Mitgliedstaaten ab.
With the end of the cold war, the independence of Namibia in 1990 and the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, the Southern African region entered an era of relative political stability and competitive multi-party politics. But the peace dividend proved unable to finance the hopes and promises, and more and more political analysts point to the “mixed bag” of democratisation processes.
The towns on the Zambian Copperbelt, in what is described as the golden era of the 1950s to the 1970s, had much to offer in terms of the residential lifestyle of the employees working for the region's mining companies. Supported by revenues from copper and a paternalistic welfare system, mine employees and their families had the option of sports clubs, libraries and theatres for their leisure. This period also consolidated the spatial order of modernism. Economic decline from the 1980’s spelt the end of the welfare orientation of the Copperbelt mines. As social realities changed, so too, did Copperbelt resident’s recreational activities. The chapter describes the reshaping of the recreational landscape.
In There Used to Be Order, Patience Mususa considers social change in the Copperbelt region of Zambia following the re-privatization of the large state mining conglomerate, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), in the mid-1990s. As the copper mines were Zambia’s most important economic asset, the sale of ZCCM was considered a major loss to the country. More crucially, privatization marked the end of a way of life for mine employees and mining communities. Based on three years of ethnographic field research, this book examines life for those living in difficult economic circumstances, and considers the tension between the life they live and the nature of an “extractive area.” This account, unusual in its examination of middle-income decline in Africa, directs us to think of the Copperbelt not only as an extractive locale for copper whose activities are affected by the market, but also as a place where the residents’ engagement with the harsh reality of losing jobs and struggling to earn a living after the withdrawal of welfare is simultaneously changing both the material and social character of the place. Drawing on phenomenological approaches, the book develops a theoretical model of “trying,” which accounts for both Copperbelt residents’ aspirations and efforts.
African scholars argue that Africa’s intellectual agenda has largely been set by Euro-American interests and that this reflects former colonial relationships and geopolitical power. They worry that they are being crowded out of setting their own intellectual agenda.
Concerns over Zambia’s public debt, in particular from China have attracted debate on debt sustainability, Chinese loans and the role of the International Monetary Fund.
Residents of African municipalities exhibit a lengthy and varied history of coping with conditions of pervasive precarity and uncertainty in the context of an unevenly present state. The climate crisis compounds these challenges. Based on case studies from across the continent, this introduction to a Special Issue on the Politics of Climate Action in Africa’s Cities presents research oriented around questions of “do-it-yourself” urbanism, sustainable development, and climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts undertaken by socio-economically vulnerable citizens. It offers insight into how the urban poor respond to ongoing urban climate crises, the variable roles of an absent, ineffectual, or inattentive state, and the unequal power relations undergirding sustainability discourse and practice. It draws on a cross- regional comparative perspective that centres conversations about urban theory and development in a (urban) world succumbing to mounting pressures from climate change, environmental precarity, and pervasive inequities.
The collection addresses how across Africa’s cities urban dwellers are preparing and planning for a variety of climate and environmental shocks and stresses within situations of infrastructural deficiencies and socio-economic distress.
The development of Zambia’s copper mines since the 1930s has spurred extensive regional migration and mobility. This chapter investigates the complex relationship between mining and mobility in Zambia, by focusing on the case studies of Luanshya, Mufulira, and Kalumbila. It brings together survey results, life histories, and the rich scholarship on regional mining localities. By doing so, the chapter demonstrates that mobility has been informed by multiple factors, including socio-economic conditions in rural localities; opportunities in agricultural production, forestry, and trade in mining areas; as well as the connections created through social ties and networks. Underlining the need to understand mining-induced mobility beyond frameworks of push-and-pull migration, the chapter highlights the multiple linkages that mining hubs forge and maintain with their expansive hinterlands. Through a focus on both older and more recently established mining localities, the chapter advances a new understanding of the patterns of mobility through which Zambian mining localities are made.
Starting from temporary settlements turning into permanent urban centers, this paper discusses the transformations taking place through the process of so-called ‘boomtown’ urbanization in Central and Southern Africa. Based on data collected in Angola, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the paper identifies the different conditions for migration and settlement and the complex socio-economic, spatial, as well as political transformations produced by the fast growth and expansion of boomtowns. Different historical and contemporary processes shape boomtown urbanization in Africa, from colonial territorial governance to large- and small-scale mining or dynamics of violence and forced displacement. As centers of attraction, opportunities, diversified livelihoods and cultures for aspiring urbanities, boomtowns represent an interesting site from which to investigate rural-urban transformation in a context of resource extraction and conflict/post conflict governance. They equally represent potential catalyzing sites for growth, development and stability, hence deserving not only more academic but also policy attention. Based on the authors’ long-term field experience in the countries under study, the analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork data collected through observations as well as interviews and focus group discussions with key actors involved in the everyday shaping of boomtown urbanism. The findings point to discernible patterns of boomtown consolidation across these adjacent countries, which are a result of combinations of types of migration, migrants’ agency and the governance structures, with clear implications for urban policy for both makeshift and consolidating towns.