ABSTRACT
This article engages the genre—city intertext in order to make conceptual distinctions between the “city” and the “urban” by illustrating how certain textual representations and disciplinary practices in their constitution of the African city are actively involved in the killing of the plurality of rhythms, or heterogeneity central to urban life. It illustrates how certain modes of reading and writing about the African city (colonial autobiographies, Eurocentric ethnographies) and institutionalized forms of non-contamination or non-contradiction (nation-building practices, museums and colonial or post-colonial urban planning) in their attempt to uphold a generic image of Africanness or citiness are constitutive of rhythmic urbicide — the killing of urban heterogeneity through claims to purity and partitioning of African cities, subjects and subject voices.
