Africa Today

Introduction

The five papers in this special issue were part of two sessions on Africa’s Spaces of Exclusion at the meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2009. In many ways, Las Vegas was the perfect venue for this discussion. Exclusion is basically concerned with binaries, and Las Vegas is very much a dual city, with stark social and spatial divisions between the infamous Strip and the everyday reality of the city’s residents. One can contrast the dancing Bellagio fountains with the dead lawns necessitated by drought-induced water restrictions. Or one can contrast the high rollers arriving at casinos in limousines with the casino workforce arriving on the city’s public buses. As the editors of this special issue, we had been interested in exclusion in Africa well before the meeting in Las Vegas. At previous AAG conferences, we had found that issues of exclusion were popping up in papers, discussions, and debates, but were rarely the explicit focuses of sessions. The sessions we organized, represented here by these five papers, offer our attempt to bring exclusion back to the forefront in geography, and especially to link these discussions with Africa, a region too often excluded from debates on exclusion.

This special issue represents a broad sampling of Africa’s spaces of exclusion. It does not have a regional or methodological focus: the authors cover Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia, and they use qualitative and quantitative methodologies, in some cases in tandem. These papers use a variety of perspectives toward exclusion, from theoretical to empirical to technological. This variation in coverage helps demonstrate how important the topic of exclusion is, not only within the field of geography, but also within the field of African studies. It is a concept that should be at the forefront of discussions by politicians, policymakers, academics, and the excluded. [End Page v]

Social and Spatial Exclusion

In present-day Africa, as in the past, disenfranchised populations face social and spatial exclusion. Whether defined by income status, social class, gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, or age, these populations face differential access to particular spaces, alongside other forms of inequality and discrimination. The papers in this special issue consider many of these definitions, especially gender, race, and social class; they recognize that exclusion may be actual or perceived—but either way, it has important social and spatial implications for these groups. Spatial exclusion is very visible in landscapes, especially in terms of segregation and the increasingly common phenomenon of gated communities. Social exclusion, though less apparent, still impacts people and communities by limiting interactions. These papers also recognize that social exclusion and spatial exclusion are not mutually exclusive. For British tin workers, as Philo (1998) demonstrates, the labor had to be in remote, isolated areas, where the workers, in addition to separation from their families, acquired reputations of excessive drinking and other immoral acts. In much the same way, the papers in this special issue, especially those by Dodson and Smiley, illustrate how exclusion can take multiple forms.

This special issue builds on an interesting body of work on exclusion. It is impossible to consider exclusion without starting with David Sibley. Whether referring to his book Geographies of Exclusion (1995) or his edited issues on social exclusion in Geoforum (1998), he is central in this academic debate. Yet a major critique of these works is their inattention to Africa. Such inattention is not unique to Sibley: theoretical debates on exclusionary practices in the African continent are poorly developed, fragmented, or lacking altogether (Beal 2002; Dommen 1997; Gore 1995). Certainly, this omission does not suggest that exclusion is absent from the African continent; rather, it suggests the need to broaden the debates about this topic. The central goal of this special issue is therefore to contribute meaningfully to this debate and to further conversations about making exclusionary space more inclusionary. Carmody and Hampwaye’s paper in this issue considers the potential for economic inclusion.

In spite of underattention in the literature, examples of exclusion can be found in Africa. In regard...