Abstract
Cities in Africa challenge the imagination of their inhabitants. And they challenge the imagination of anthropologists, too. There is hardly anything as complex and difficult to conceptualise than the large, sprawling and chaotic African cities. African urban spaces host a not even remotely comprehensible abundance of colours, signs, shapes, figures, forms and icons that its inhabitants encounter day in and day out. The visual culture of African cities is so rich that it seems to confirm Georg Simmel’s classic about urban life more than most Western cities: it overwhelms the senses, distracts the attention of the townspeople and makes it difficult if not impossible to think the city as an entity, as a coherent cultural space. Individuality is, Simmel claims, a necessary produce of urban life. It produces and simultaneously echoes the excessive heterogeneity of the social in urban spaces—perhaps more in Africa than anywhere else. Nonetheless, urbanites in Africa as elsewhere develop and share largely coherent images of their cities. They are possibly the most fascinating creation of urban life as they bridge individual and collective imagination. They build on creative practices that call for a more reflected and comprehensive anthropological understanding of creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
The situation in other social sciences is barely better; for sociology, see Domingues (2000); Chan (2011), who identifies but two strands of theorising creativity: Joas (1992 [1996]) and, based on Dalton (2004); Bourdieu (1992 [1996]). Most works on creativity come, however, from the arts (in general Pope 2005), social psychology (Amabile 1983, 1996) and from philosophy (Tatarkiewicz 1980, in general Krausz et al. 2009).
- 2.
Turner developed the essential ideas of his book on a liner that took him from Britain to the USA in 1963 (Turner 1964). He explored the theme of creativity and ritual passage in a couple of publications of which many were widely read in anthropology and the humanities in general, see Turner (1967, 1974b), Turner (1982). His work stimulated one of the first general and comparative anthropological attempts to cover creativity (Lavie et al. 1993).
- 3.
Turner (1982: 32–33, 40–41) characterised this time in different ways, but always as an “independent domain of creative activity” (33).
- 4.
The failure of many social experiments at the time, for instance of youth communes, is telling.
- 5.
Hence, the irritation that such movements caused in America’s and Europe’s bourgeois middle-class societies.
- 6.
- 7.
For Africa, the canon of these styles had been identified and fixed in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the first comprehensive overviews was Kjersmeier (1935–1938).
- 8.
Abiọdun et al. (1994). Susan Vogel put some of the modernist errors right when she refuted the claim that customers in Africa would travel long distances to purchase art from a particular artist. They travelled, she wrote, “because they desired the fine objects which they were assured of getting – not because they wanted to own a work of art by a particular artist, as Western collectors might” (Vogel 1999: 40).
- 9.
A review of the literature is provided by Völlnagel and Wullen (2008). The chapter on Africa in this volume claims that a similar appreciation of artists exists in Africa but is based on two cases only.
- 10.
Kasfir and Förster (2013) provide an overview of how workshops frame the artists’ agency in Africa.
- 11.
- 12.
Unsurprisingly, modernist understandings of creativity in non-Western are most often pursued by institutions close to the art market, for instance museums. A recent example is the exhibition and catalogue “African Masters” by the Rietberg Museum in Zürich, one of the most influential institutions in the field (Homberger 2015).
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
See my critique of the assumption that creativity is a direct response to unpredictability and heterogeneity in urban life (Förster 2014).
- 16.
- 17.
On the occasion of Dresden’s city exhibition 1903, Simmel had been invited to lecture on the role of intellectual life in big cities but finally analysed the effects of the city on the mental life of its inhabitants (Simmel 1903).
- 18.
Secondary school pupils and very few former civil servants that had returned to their village were an exception.
- 19.
Senari, the language of the Senufo, does not have a noun that corresponds to “city” in English. The Senufo speak of cities as “big towns”.
- 20.
Fancy is a generic term for inexpensive printed cotton cloth that is used as wrapper, in general Bauer (2001).
- 21.
Men were mainly wearing second hand cloth important from Europe and North America.
- 22.
I vividly remember how my neighbour, a woman in her late 40s, took my two enamel plates and turned them in all directions to admire the green and red flower décor on its shiny white background.
- 23.
Based on estimations as there are no reliable recent statistics, see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korhogo, 20.03.2015.
- 24.
And because of their individuality, Simmel (1903) continues, urbanites provoke all sorts of attempts to control them, to bring them back under state domination.
- 25.
- 26.
This sense of locality is probably not as strong as in cities that nourish such feelings by actively branding themselves, for example, New York, Paris or Berlin, but it exists.
- 27.
The comparatively new academic field of visual culture studies has increasingly been defined in such a way, beginning with John Berger’s television series and publication of 1972 (see Sturken and Cartwright 2009 for a recent overview).
- 28.
In that sense, imagination is a social practice that generates ideas (i.e., mental representational images) about the life-world, including the society and its various dimensions. Political imagination is perhaps the best documented of such practices. It generates images and hence a common understanding of how a community should live together.
- 29.
I adopt Emirbayer and Mische’s conceptualisation of agency and distinguish three dimensions of agency: habits, judgements and imagination (Emirbayer and Mische 1998).
- 30.
Basically, no sense is excluded. Balance and acceleration may serve as an example. Bafoussam, Cameroon’s third largest city, was infamous for its badly pot-holed streets that shook drivers on the seats of their cars.
- 31.
Lynch’s seminal work on “The Image of the City” (Lynch 1960) is such a materialist understanding of how images of the city emerge.
- 32.
- 33.
Lefebvre (1991: 38–41) and passim. To avoid misunderstandings, I rephrase Lefebvre’s third element of space, espace vécu (“lived space” in the English translation) as “pragmatic” dimension in this context.
- 34.
- 35.
For heuristic purposes, one could construct a cross that links the two dimensions, recording the degree of individual or collective agency on the vertical axis, and the type of practice as the horizontal dimension. Such a depiction should, however, not imply that the two dimensions are necessarily correlated.
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Förster, T. (2016). Envisioning the City in Africa: Anthropology, Creativity and Urban Culture. In: Glăveanu, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_22
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