ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the concept of political identity within the context of the changing social space of the African city. It considers the location of identity within a broader framework of political and economic change and explores the rise of a kind of ‘identity politics’ in contemporary African cities by relating the political phenomenon of ethnicity to identity. The chapter examines identity politics in urban Africa. It understands identity as a social construct: a result of the shared social environment in which a group of people identifies itself as a form of commonality. Youth has always been at the forefront of violent anti-state protest in Africa, and indeed elsewhere. The main application of ethnicity during the late 1960s and 1970s was used to reveal various forms of ‘false consciousness’. People’s ethnic identity was an expression of other more important social forces.
