ABSTRACT
Cities are often associated with cultures of modernity. Urban theorist Jennifer Robinson points out that “accounts of modernity have commonly described the modern era or modern people as having a sense of historical time and space, and as drawing on a rationalist understanding of events to inform inventiveness and progress” (13). Yet the experience of modernity and, by extension, urbanization in Africa, is often understood to have been deeply marked by ambivalence, as signalled by the “resistance to [and] selective appropriation of, modernity” (Macamo, “Negotiating Modernity” 3). Following Jean and John Comaroff, and Luise White (“Tsetse Visions”), Macamo sees this as one of the ways in which Africans continue to resist the conditions and terms of their integration into the wider world. He situates this ambivalence in the colonial experience. For him,
Colonialism was the historical form through which modernity became a real social project on the African continent [yet] colonialism was premised on the denial of the same modernity to Africans [including] human dignity, emancipation and progress. [Thus] African social experience has been structured by the ambivalence of promise and denial that was constitutive of colonialism and, indeed, as we move into what some call a global era, of globalization. (“Negotiating Modernity” 8)
Simon Gikandi shares this view, in his argument that “colonial modernity dislocated the African subject by propagating its tenets as a universal model, while at the same time denying Africans, on political and social grounds, the possibility of its realization” (qtd in Deutsch, Probst, and Schmidt 13).