Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Susann Baller
(Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH114
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores African cities as sites of different bureaucratic practices, which serve as a form of complex organisation of urban life (both governmental and non-governmental). It analyses how urban cultures shape bureaucratic practices, and how daily bureaucracies influence urban life.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the deeper meaning of the "bureaucratic city" in Africa. Recent research on African cities has often focused on urban (popular) cultures and everyday life. This panel argues that bureaucratic practices have (and have had) an important impact both upon and within urban life. Bureaucratic practices are examined as a form of complex organisation of urban life, often expressed in processes of formalisation, regulation, office place, minutes and reports. They include the "city of bureaucrats" with government offices, the municipality, paper work and files, but also concern the more informal organisation of urban life in neighbourhood or ethnic associations, commercial and religious networks etc. The panel analyses how urban cultures produce their own bureaucratic practices (for instance, in associations), and how they influence the bureaucracies of both governmental and non-governmental agencies. Moreover, the panel asks how the "city of bureaucrats" shapes the city and urban life. It is interested in papers, which examine how bureaucratic practices have changed over time (and how they changed African cities), and how different technologies (including more recent electronic tools) have affected the form of complex organisation of urban life in past and present. In addition, it considers the urban-rural encounters in African cities as well as the connections between urban Africa and the African Diaspora an interesting field for exploring the bureaucratic practices, which go along with them. The panel considers, that "living the city" in Africa also means "living the bureaucratic city" in Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kudakwashe Chitofiri (Rhodes University)
Paper short abstract:
This study explores the politics of organising urban life in the African part of the city of Salisbury in colonial Zimbabwe between the 1920s and the 1940s and how the emergence and character of a ghettoised African “Location”, was shaped and influenced by colonial bureaucratic segregatory policies.
Paper long abstract:
This study explores the politics of organising urban life in the African part of the city of Salisbury in colonial Zimbabwe between the 1920s and the 1940s. It examines how the emergence and character of a ghettoised African "Location", was shaped and influenced by colonial bureaucratic segregatory policies which viewed Africans as temporary sojourners in the city. It engages with the controlling ideologies of colonial administration of "differentiation and domination" to unpack the root cause of the rise of African urban protest. It argues that the reluctance of the colonial authorities and business to invest in basic infrastructure and social services for the Location was the core reason why Africans organised themselves for the improvement of conditions in their segregated part of the City. Seeing themselves as permanent dwellers long before this fact was acknowledged by municipal authorities, many Africans came gradually to understand their collective strength. The emergence of African urban movements was thus a result of a realisation by Africans of the strength of the collective in confronting colonial authorities. It makes the assertion that emerging labour union movements that were coming out of colonial Zimbabwe were obligated by the conditions prevailing in the African Location, reluctantly established by the colonial government, to become agents of urban Africans township grievances and concerns. The article examines the direction taken by the colonial government in "Native Administration", specifically "Location Administration" in the context of the Depression years and the Second World War in colonial urban Zimbabwe.
Lucie Revilla (Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Paper short abstract:
This comparative microanalysis between Lagos and Khartoum shows how social actors linked to the former native administration produce bureaucratic practices at the grassroots level. Far from being out of the state, they weave relations with the « formal » having ambiguous effects on urban governance
Paper long abstract:
Sudan and Nigeria share the common feature of having experienced indirect rule under colonisation. After independence, the traditional ruler system has been challenged several times. In Sudan, the Bechir regime revitalized it in the early 1990s. In Lagos, this system is still used by the Local Governments to administrate popular neighbourhoods. Our analysis compares two different neighbourhoods in Khartoum and Lagos and studies the role of traditional rulers. In Khartoum, we focus on the case of a "nazir", who is in charge of the administration of his "tribe". We show how he is a key "wasit" (intermediary) between the state and the residents, especially in the case of land issues. In Lagos mainland, we highlight the role of a "baale" who attempts to organize residents in order to provide security. Both traditional rulers have been also civil servants and deeply influenced by bureaucratic culture. Even if other grassroots state actors have challenged them, they are sometimes integrated in these formal « bottom-up » organisations, and they maintain strong links with political parties. We stress that their authority has been supported by the recognition of the state, which utilises traditional rulers in order to maintain order in urban spaces, where the state is almost absent in everyday life. This provokes two trends: the more the traditional rulers produce bureaucratic practices, making reports to the police, registering residents for land etc., the more they become « straddling » actors with ambiguous effects.
Claire Nicolas (Université de Lausanne - SciencePo Paris)
Paper short abstract:
In the 1950s, young Accra dwellers played sports within strengthening local and regional associations. The nationalisation of sports under Nkrumah’s panafrican and socialist independent regime will be rooted within their colonial bureaucratic practices and durably influence Accra sporting urban life.
Paper long abstract:
During the early days of Ghana's first republic (1957-1966), Kwame Nkrumah nationalised Ghana sport movement within the Central Organisation of Sport (COS) led by Ohene Djan (1960-1966). This nationalisation is rooted within the progressive bureaucratisation of sports in the British colony.
From the early 1920's, associations dedicated to urban leisure had grown in Ghana main towns (mainly Accra and Kumasi). Young educated men and women practiced games under the patronage of prominent African bureaucrats and colonial officers within associations such as the Achilles Club. They progressively joined together in regional associations created in the 1950s. This institutionalisation process under the umbrella of the Gold Coast Amateur Sport Council (GASC) allowed the rise of bureaucratic practices, materialised by typewritten official paperwork (minutes, correspondences with international bodies), a growing number of official positions (President, Secretaries and so on), new vocabulary and phrasing as well as links with colonial and international bodies that may be traced back at Ghana National archives.
When the First Republic came into power in 1957, the COS soon became an essential piece of Nkrumah's "African Personality" project: building a "new African man". Ohene Djan gathered sport associations under his patronage and intertwined sports, youth activities and politics, following a soviet organisational model.
Therefore, the COS stands at the crossroad between colonial associative practices and socialist choices. By doing so, this Nkrumahist administration will shape a new urban sport life in Accra and durably influence associative practices.
Susann Baller (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the history of bureaucratic practices in sport organisations and associations in urban Senegal. It argues that texts, minutes and rules of sport clubs have contributed to the organisation of urban social life.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues that sports are often not only played on the pitch, but also on paper, and that these bureaucratic practices in sport shape daily urban life. The creation of sport associations and organisations goes hand in hand with the production of texts, rules and minutes. Moreover, sport activities are quantified and translated into numbers. Games between different teams are recorded in match reports, and even the final result may be a decision on paper, based on rules and penalties. At the same time, sport associations and organisations reflect, create and/or strengthen different urban identities, from an urban village team to a neighbourhood club, or from a company's team to a national board, which has its head office in the city. This paper explores these different dimensions of the bureaucratisation of sports in a historical perspective in the urban region of Dakar. Based on archival documents, but also interviews and observations, the paper asks how sport associations and organisations have contributed to the organisation of social life in the city and how they have influenced social imaginations and practices of civic action.
Niklas Hultin (George Mason University)
Paper short abstract:
Using Gambia as a case study, this paper examines how the authorities seek to regulate traffic--focusing on insurance, vehicle safety, and accidents. It argues that in these practices, we see an argument of the role of bureaucracy in everyday life informed by general suspicion of the Gambian state.
Paper long abstract:
Traffic has emerged as a major issue in sub-Saharan Africa in the scholarly literature as well as in the reports of NGOs and IGOs. While much of these literatures focus on the social impact of traffic (e.g. noise, pollution) and the symbolism of traffic accidents, this paper takes a somewhat different approach and examines the way that traffic and its consequences are bureaucratized in the Gambia. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the greater Banjul area, supplemented with an analysis of media coverage, legal documents, and official statistics, the paper seeks to elucidate how traffic has become a subject of bureaucratic concern (as opposed to, say, general public complaining) and how bureaucratic procedures are wielded to regulate traffic. The paper focuses on a couple of distinct areas, namely motor vehicle safety, insurance, legal culpability for accidents, and noise. The paper traces how Gambian and municipal governments and private actors are addressing these issues and how drivers and the general public seek to contribute and/or circumvent these bureaucratic practices. Ultimately, the paper argues, the bureaucratization of traffic simultaneously illustrates the scepticism with which many Gambian view their state as well as 'procedural thirst' that many urban Gambians have, in which an understanding of the presumed proper ways of regulating these things serve as an aspirational index of development and modernity.