ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on developing a deeper understanding of the relationships between the urban question, African cities and vernacular vocabulary about cities. It seeks to show the relationship between African cities and the urban question-as-a-question. In short, in the scholarly literature, there is not much of a relationship. African cities have been especially under-attended as reference points within the wider field of urban studies, but the lacuna is particularly significant when it comes to the literature on the urban question. The urban anthropologists reviewed above largely deployed northern scholarly ideas of the city, but it is impossible to separate these ideas from the colonial modern context in which they were developed. Robinson, in her foundational text in the southern urban critique, argues that scholars of African urbanism have at times challenged urban theory's universalizing tendencies.
