The General Image of African Cities and Africa in General
Africa is always looked at negatively. In this article I talk about why this is so and also other examples of development in Africa and how the continent works, related to movement and culture.
African cities are in general always looked at with a negative perspective. Sunglasses ‘turn’ your vision to the color of the glass, African cities have a ‘bad,’ ‘negative’ side they appear with. There a variety of these images and many of them are because of a stereotypical thinking people often have. One thing to note is that there are definitely also good images, but these are few and rare. Many of the negative images are linked, but how they are portrayed makes it seem like there are a million different bad images of African cities. This is similar to the Maasai ethnic group in Kenya. I quote, “…the Maasai, are exhibited for tourists at three different sites in Kenya. Although all three sites present a gendered image of the Maasai warrior (the personification of masculinity), a controlled comparison enables me to describe three ways of producing this image.”[1] Similar to how Edward M. Bruner explains the different ways in which one tribe is explained, there are a few ideas about African cities that are spread in a million different ways.
“There is general consensus in the scholarly literature concerned with African citites that the accumulation of such distressing features as unregulated growth, limited opportunities for gainful employment in the formal economy, severe environmental degradation, lack of decent and affordable housing, failing and neglected infrastructure, absence of basic social services, pauperization, criminality, negligent city-management, and increasing inequalitites amount to a more or less permanent condition of urban crisis of monumental proportion (Rakodi 1997; Tostensen et al. 2001).” [2] This quote embodies the general opinions people have when African cities are referred to. They think of it as a place where people are poor, live in shacks, have no electricity, water and sanitary resources and are unsafe due to robbers and other kinds of crime. A lot of these ideas come up mainly because of the limited research conducted on African cities. Furthermore, most of the research that is conducted on African cities and on Africa in general is concentrated on the poverty and depressing side of Africa. In general, “… talk of African cities is invariably turned into a dire litany of the seemingly boundless chaos, anarchy, and disorder of everyday life (Kurtz 1998; Lewis 2005).[3]
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