Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how ethnic contestations and urban political arrangements dynamically influence each other by taking Dire Dawa city of Ethiopia as a showcase. To this end, we look into the local, national and regional significance of this peripheral secondary city.

Paper long abstract:

Secondary cities exhibit an urbanity that diverges (politically, economically, and socially) from the capital cities. To this end, they require and (are the result of) distinct forms of governance. One such example is Dire Dawa, a secondary peripheral/border city 515 km away from the capital of Ethiopia. The city is located on the Ethio-Djibouti main road between Oromia and Somali regional states. By examining the political trajectory of this city, this article shows how ethnic contestations (claims of ownership between the Oromo and Somali ethnic groups), questions of autochthony, and fluidity/instrumentality of identities shape (and are shaped by) the current urban political arrangements. This is manifested through the material cityscape as a means of demonstrating and consolidating power. Moreover, this research looks into the political importance of secondary cities by placing Dire Dawa in the larger context of historical political dynamics in the horn of Africa. In general, an attempt will be made to unravel the multi-layered contestations/conflicts around control over secondary cities and their local, national, and regional political significance by taking Dire Dawa as a showcase.

Paper short abstract:

Manantali, Mali, a vibrant urban service center, grew after dam construction and national development led to changes attracting people from throughout Mali. Yet, political development remains problematic, as the commune government struggles to represent the disparate interests of town and villages.

Paper long abstract:

Manantali grew from a village of 7 households in the mid-1980s to a town of some 10,000 after the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS) built a dam on the Bafing River in western Mali to regularize the river’s flow and provide electricity to its member states. Since its initial boom due to dam and power plant construction, Manantali has transformed into an urban service center, benefitting from the roads, stable electricity and piped water provided by the dam. In the mid-1990s, national development initiatives that followed democratization and decentralization encouraged private entrepreneurship and the growth of social programs in education and health. The new economic and social infrastructure has drawn people from throughout Mali, creating a diverse and cosmopolitan urban population. Politically, Manantali remains one village of the 22 in Bamafele commune, even though it alone provides more than 40% of the commune’s population. Moreover, the OMVS retains a large informal role in governance as it has significant resources and owns the land on which Manantali town stands. In this context, Manantali remains structurally a “village” and does not have the political prominence that might be expected. The elected commune government of Bamafele, which includes both Manantali residents and villagers, struggles to find resources to integrate new people and activities from Manantali town without losing its responsibility to represent the indigenous people of the Bafing. At the same time, the boundary between village and town has blurred as people move freely between areas.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from oral history interviews and ethnographic research conducted in Kikwit, a rarely discussed secondary city in Western DRC. It explores how civilians and diverse state actors have negotiated and navigated power through language amid elections, rebellions, dictatorship, and ebola.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws from fifty oral history interviews and ethnographic research conducted in Lingala, Kikongo, and French in DRC from 2019 to 2021. It combines methods and literature from political science, history, and sociolinguistics to explores how civilians and diverse state actors have used language to negotiate and navigated power in Kikwit, a rarely analyzed secondary city in Western DRC. Beginning Congolese independence in 1960, this paper shows how Kikwitois(e)s have navigated state power and violence first through Kikongo ya Leta, the city’s main lingua franca, but also with Lingala, the language of Congo’s capital and army, and later, with Swahili, the language of the AFDL rebellion which swept through Kikwit in 1997 on their path to power. When Kikwit suffered Lingala-enforced military occupation in the 1960s during the Mulele rebellion, many locals came to reject Lingala as a symbol of violence and oppression. But through the 1970s, Mobutu’s dictatorship, economic integration, and rumba music pushed the city’s inhabitants to embrace Lingala for survival, socioeconomic mobility, and political advancement. Later in the 1990s, a devastating Ebola outbreak, worsened by government neglect contributed to a new wave of opposition against Lingala, and an uneasy relationship with Swahili, Congo’s new language of power under Laurent Desire Kabila.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the politics of secondary cities through the infrastructural interdependencies that formed in Dire Dawa around the Addis Djibouti Railway. Infrastructural (dis)connections, nodes where multiple jurisdictions coexist, render visible political tensions & bureaucratic fault lines.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Dire Dawa was built around the railway terminal constructed in 1902 connecting Emperor Menelik’s new capital Addis Ababa to the coast of French Somaliland (Djibouti). For the central government, Dire Dawa has served as a gateway to Eastern Ethiopia. For the communities living in the East, Dire Dawa has been the federal government’s urban consulate - an ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, and ever-expanding eastern outpost. The construction of the new Addis-Djibouti Railway in 2011 was thus seen as reinvigorating the city's lost glory. The federal railway's successful integration, however, depended on local transport systems, logistics centres, and industrial parks. When infrastructures meet, not only are these complex systems physically integrated (or not), but administrative and political boundaries are crossed. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Ethiopia, I explore what these infrastructural nodes can tell us about the mechanisms of contesting central authority in and from 'secondary cities'. By zooming into specific instances of infrastructural (dis)connection, this paper examines the tensions between key political brokers, engineers and bureaucrats across administrative scales. It is at these infrastructural junctures where multiple jurisdictions (federal, regional, and municipal) co-exist that de facto political power is negotiated and rendered visible through infrastructural decisions. Moving beyond the primacy of Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa is poised to not only host a 4200-hectare industrial zone (including Chinese & Turkish industrial parks), but also the wider region's rural youth and pastoral communities that increasingly seek urban refuge in face of repeated droughts and ecological crises.

Paper short abstract:

Beneath Somaliland's centralised formal politics is an informal horizontal, multi-clan compact which ensures national peace. This essay traces this centralising/multipolar dynamic by way of Borama, a secondary city, whose fight for equality vis-à-vis the centre embodies the politics of the compact.

Paper long abstract:

Borama, a secondary city in terms of population and official status, lays claim to a special significance in Somaliland’s state-building story as a result of its primary role in founding the country’s peace. As a city predominately populated by one of the country’s largest minority clans, Borama in 1993 played host to the defining conference in Somaliland’s lengthy, bottom-up inter-clan reconciliation process, through channelling forgiveness and a pluralist ethos into horizontal, multi-clan compact for peaceful coexistence. Over time, and into the present, this founding compact has become overshadowed by the consolidation of a formal, centralised State, emanating from the national capital of Hargeisa, with the accompanying rise of a national elite, oligopolistic economy and majoritarian electoral supremacy (with the numerically largest clan dominating formal offices and sources of economic rent). Within this new political climate, the people of Borama have found themselves increasingly marginalised. However, in this paper, I seek to trace the ways in which communities in Borama have sought to counteract this formally peripheral status through instrumentalising their role in holding Somaliland’s peace and plurality together, resurrecting their long history as mediator and legitimiser of collective coexistence to extract concessions from the centre. Through documenting specific episodes where this dynamic played out, this essay hopes to touch upon deeper lessons regarding the ways in which alternative centres of power, and alternative (i.e., non-hegemonic) identities, do not merely challenge or resist domination, but promote pluralism and inter-group equality through decentring sites of authority and agency.

Paper short abstract:

The paper engages with the governance of Nakuru, Kenya. Nakuru was upgraded to a city in 2021 and seeks to become a role model for transformative change and participation. Based on interviews, the paper examines the continuities and disruptions in governance and its impacts on citizen participation.

Paper long abstract:

While the concept of “secondary cities” is fuzzy, it is consensus that secondary cities in Africa are yet to face their biggest growth. Hence, it is assumed that secondary cities are still in the position to develop governance structures that can better absorb incoming populations. The paper engages with this idea by studying Nakuru’s city governance. Nakuru (Kenya) was upgraded from a municipality to a town in 2021 and presents itself as a role model for transformative change and participatory governance. City officials argue that due to Nakuru’s status as an emerging city, its structures are not yet fully formed or established, evoking the image of a blank slate.

The paper critically engages with the idea of a blank slate and examines both the continuities and disruptions in governance that happened alongside the transition to a city. Based on interviews with government officials, civil society and city planners, the paper teases out how the specific conditions, processes and practices interact in shaping Nakuru’s governance. The paper also asks how these conditions enable and support the participation of citizens in decision-making processes. Not only Nakuru’s upgrading and its progressive politicians, but also the changes in Kenya’s constitution in 2010 provide a favourable environment for more participatory governance. However, city officials do not only have to meet accountability demands of the citizenry, but also the county government, leading to trade-offs. The paper seeks to contribute to scholarship on governance innovations in secondary cities and generates policy recommendations for other secondary cities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explore how ‘hidden towns’ in conflict settings (Minova and Rubaya in the Democratic republic of Congo) are both political arenas in their own right and constitute vital nodes in much broader political-economic networks that reach far beyond the geographical confines of eastern DRC.

Paper long abstract:

This article seeks to provide a clearer empirical and conceptual understanding of the profoundly political character of rapid urbanization in Central Africa. Here, the paper focuses on two ‘hidden (secondary) towns’ in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo – Rubaya and Minova – that have recently emerged as unplanned urban settlements in the Congolese rural hinterlands as an outcome of the country’s rural-urban reconfigurations in a context of mineral exploitation, war, and forced displacement. These ‘booming’ cities have no official administrative status, and are at the centre of fierce competition over resources, people and control. Based on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in both cities and the provincial capital-cities they are formally attached to, we study the political dimensions of urbanity from an interdisciplinary and bottom-up perspective. More specifically, we argue that these ‘hidden towns’ are both political arenas in their own right and constitute vital nodes in much broader political-economic networks that reach far beyond the geographical confines of eastern DRC.

Paper short abstract:

How do the different levels of government interact in a city described as an opposition stronghold? Based on the internal debates around the opening of a reformist mosque, this paper discusses the daily negotiations between administrative, religious and partisan authorities in authoritarian context.

Paper long abstract:

With nearly 200,000 inhabitants, Labé is one of the largest cities in Guinea and the administrative capital of “Moyenne-Guinée” also called Fuuta-Jallo. It is the stronghold of the main opposition party, the UFDG, which is mainly supported by Fulani, living in the region since the 18th century, after a jihad that gave rise to a theocratic State. From Conakry, Labé is often described as a “rebel city” driven by Fulbe ethnocentrism. Beyond the political myth, what is the degree of autonomy for local authorities vis-à-vis the central power?

I will answer this question by studying a controversy that erupted in the 2010s around the opening of a Wahhabi mosque in a city historically devoted to Sufism. Sufi Islam is central for Fulbe identity, and strengthens the social prestige of the local “grandes familles” since pre-colonial times. Conversely, the "Wahhabi" movement is mainly carried by subaltern groups, who represent potential voters for the ruling party in Conakry. The controversial opening of the “Tata” mosque thus confronts the different scales of the Guinean State. Through ethnographic interviews and administrative documents, I will present some daily and concrete cases: a Regional Secretary for Religious Affairs, refusing to issue the administrative approval for the mosque, supported by his brother, “Préfet” of the Labé district; a Governor, appointed by Conakry, encouraging the Wahhabi followers to settle the case directly in the capital… all different faces of public authority’s negotiation in a regional city.