Douala: Inventing Life in an African Necropolis

Abstract

Many contemporary African urban agglomerations manifest themselves as inverted forms of the good city (Hall 2002; Lynch 1981) or the city of tomorrow, like the one Le Corbusier (1971) dreamt of in the early twentieth century, when modernist utopianism was the order of the day. Moreover, the chaotic, informal, and dreadful character of most postcolonial African cities sets them aside from the imagined city as a humanistic place (Boyer 1983; Ferguson 1999; Holston 1989), or as the embodiment of the ideal of community (Bender 2002; Donald 1999; Young 1986). This dystopian vision of a contemporary African city is informed by the observation that, as a result of the disintegration of many sub-Saharan African states because of sustained economic decline, their urban landscapes have been transformed into what I call a necropolis . By necropolis, I refer to a thespian city where insecurity, violence, and terror have become the daily experience of the vast majority of city dwellers, whose lives are permanently subjugated to the power of hazard and uncertainty, and above all to the tyranny of death. In order words, the necropolis is a place where the very fact of living is abridged to the elementary art of learning how not to be turned into a mort-vivant (living-dead). Besides being the city of tragedy, horror, and anxiety, the necropolis is also characterized by the stunning infrastructure of decay and the architecture of decline (Courade 2000; Donald 1999; Konings 2004; Mbembe 2003; Seraphin 2000), which constitute the “physical life of crisis,” as Filip de Boeck (2004: 3) observes about Kinshasa, another necropolis.

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