The Communion Quotient of Cities

Abstract

I read Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth when I was 18 and in my first year in college (University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria). One of my teachers, Professor Claude Ake, who interpreted the book to undergraduate students in one of his classes and also in his books, always pointed to the spatial arrangements of colonial cities in Africa. The structure of African cities, according to him, reveals the structure of brutal exploitation and oppression of the natives by European colonial masters.¹ The spatial arrangements also symbolize and at the same time make physical the separation between whites and blacks in African cities and the development-negating dependence of African economies on Western countries. These deplorable and discriminatory spatial and economic arrangements were carried over by the bourgeoisie who took over powers from the departing colonial rulers. Ake, in his interpretation of the Wretched of the Earth, drew students’ attention to how exploitation and oppression are splayed out on the African ground. The colonial rulers claimed and consumed the wealth of the land in the exclusive plush part of the colonial town and the natives in another part of the town handled the waste from their consumption, showing stark separation between the haves and have-nots.