Paper short abstract:

This paper reviews the work of key postcolonial authors on urban Africa, highlighting the problems with its move away from materialist explanations of urban realities. In such scholarship African urban inhabitants tend, like ghosts, to float mid-air, unhinged from the material and the economic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically reviews the work of key postcolonial authors on urban Africa, and argues that while avoiding Eurocentrism and teleologies is key to the study of urban life in Africa, as predicated by postcolonial authors, there are serious analytical shortcomings in the move away from materialist explanations of urban realities that this work typically brings about. Much of post-colonial scholarship on African cities falls short of adequate analytical attention to the role of structural forces in understand how African cities work, or do not work and it often fails to pin down the materiality of urban life. African urban inhabitants, the amorphous "urban poor", or "people at the grassroots", tend, like ghosts, to float mid-air, unhinged from the material and the economic. A close engagement with such literature reveals that the celebration of individuals' agency, of the functionality of African cities, and of new socialities in them, rests on vague - and misleading - analytical foundations. Its claims to an alternative political agenda are equally hopeless.