ABSTRACT
Towns will certainly be the crux of the native problem in the tropics,” wrote Julian Huxley in Africa View, his record of a journey in East Africa in 1929 and 1930. The emergence of the town as a form of settlement pattern is something new over much of tropical Africa, and towns have of recent years received considerable attention not only from political leaders and government departments but also from sociologists, economists, geographers, statisticians and others. The distinction between town and village, in the Western sense, depends largely upon difference in economic organization and administrative functions, and some of these considerations apply, though often with significant modifications, to town and country in tropical Africa. Nowhere are the essential contrasts between urban development in tropical Africa and that of Western Europe better shown than by a consideration of the African towns of the past.
