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African Reverberations of
the Mumbai Attacks

Edgar Pieterse

Abstract
In the wake of Mumbai terror attacks one is forced to reflect on the nature
and representation of urban violence across the global South. It is clear that
only certain kinds of violence and upheaval warrant attention in the public
domain as reflected in the worlds globalized media. This observation
immediately forces one to consider the deafening silence about the pervasive execution and symbolic order of terror in much of Africa. Indeed, 88
percent of conflict deaths between 1990 and 2007 in Africa received hardly
any media coverage let alone analysis. Given that one is talking about 5.4
million deaths in Congo (DRC) alone, it is very difficult to fully comprehend
the differential treatment of conflict, violence and death. Drawing on the
rich perspective in postcolonial urban studies that cities can be read as
targets, I seek to extend that work by bringing routinized violence, focused
on social infrastructures and relations, into the analytical frame. Hopefully,
the Mumbai attacks can at least open up fresh and more urgent avenues of
theoretical work on the painful and extreme constitution of urban
modernities in the global South.
Key words
African urbanism
violence

everyday practices

social infrastructures

urban

HE REAL-TIME coverage of the choreographed attacks on various

facilities and spaces of Mumbai on 2629 November 2008 made for
riveting and annoying viewing. Riveting because the global media
machines did their usual dramatic accounts from the latest frontline of
the ever-shifting war on terror to bring to the world the latest audacity of
the terrorists. Annoying because the initial footage was incredibly

Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 26(78): 289300
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290 Theory, Culture & Society 26(78)

uninformative, because almost every news service offered up the same

formulaic account that terrorism has finally reached India without any
analytical insight into what was actually happening or where the unfolding
drama could have its roots. Despite all the drama that flowed from the verbal
incantation of the phrase Indias 9/11, it was really difficult to get a
purchase on what exactly was going on and what the scale of the event was.
Nonetheless, given that this was presented as the latest example in a string
of attacks on the visible manifestations of globalization and global cityness
a status Mumbai immediately achieved by virtue of the attack it deserved
relentless coverage. When the final siege of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel was
finally neutralized by 29 November, the debris was cleaned away, and the
attention of the global media turned back to the usual headline set-pieces,
it became apparent that at least 173 people were killed and another 308
were wounded (Wikipedia, n.d.).
It is very difficult to fully comprehend the differential treatment of
conflict, violence and death. Media observers point out that Africa accounts
for 88 percent of conflict deaths between 1990 and 2007, but hardly receives
any media coverage at all (Shah, 2009). In fact, one of the larger American
television news programmes, CBS Evening News, covered the Congo (DRC:
Democratic Republic of Congo) only once in five years between 2004 and
2009. The others do a little better, but then coverage is about other attentiongrabbers in the Congo: Indeed, from 2004 through 2008, of Anderson Coopers
44 shows that covered the Congo, only 16 didnt include the plight of the
countrys gorillas or the perspective of Angelina Jolie (Hollar, 2009). In Congo
alone, it is estimated that as many as 5.4 million have been killed in conflictrelated deaths that exclude battle deaths between 1998 and 2008 (ADB, 2008:
13). Congo may be the most extreme recent example, but it is certainly not an
isolated case. In 2006 conflict was reported in 30 African countries and
some of the obvious examples that come to mind are: Zimbabwe, Sudan and
especially the Darfur region, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sierra Leone,
Guinea-Bissau, etc. The more significant issue to consider is that in situations of conflict far more people die from disease, starvation, malnutrition,
breakdown of health services than from battle. Thus, war deaths which
capture these indirect causes of death and from battle tend to be much
higher (ADB, 2008: xi). What this descriptive approach obscures are the
social dynamics that accompany these pathways to death and, more
importantly for my purposes here, the spatial and territorial dynamics.
Some years ago Bishop and Clancey (2003) provided a compelling
argument about how the city-as-target represents one of the starkest
lacunas in the urban studies literature, despite the fact that it is arguably a
constitutive dynamic of modernism. In that intervention they put forward
the challenging argument that an unspoken dimension of being a global city
is being a target city, i.e. vulnerable to large-scale disasters of both a natural
and human-made kind. Moreover, looking back over the last 150 years, they
point to the large-scale destruction of cities on an unprecedented scale
(through, among other means, aerial, nuclear and fire-bombing). Yet,
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Pieterse African Reverberations of the Mumbai Attacks 291

curiously, hardly any account of urbanism in both the North and South is
sketched with the stink of decaying bodies and charred ruins. The paradigmatic examples they cite include the flattened fates of Hiroshima, Hanoi,
Phnom Penh, amongst other cities. For them this silence stems from an
account of Modernity that avoided the confluence of urbanism and catastrophe (Bishop and Clancey, 2003: 64). At the heart of understanding cities
as targets is a recognition that urban infrastructures and the dependencies
that they generate make for incredibly convenient and compelling targets
to achieve annihilation, destruction, sabotage, delays, inconveniences,
bottlenecks, reversals, intensified vulnerabilities and so on; opportunities
that have tended to be too good to pass up on as recent wars in the Gulf
region and Asia have demonstrated. Interestingly, contemporary cities are
not merely military targets but also economic targets because of the ways
in which cities can be rendered sites of investment repulsion on the back
of (engineered) rumours and perceptions in our electronically mediated and
financially driven globalized economy. It is this dual and intertwined vulnerability to attack and incapacitation that marks cities as global in a perverse
way according to Bishop and Clancey (2003).
It is difficult to argue with this persuasive and historically detailed
perspective, but it does raise questions if one resides in a part of the world
that is marked by the extreme absence of networked urban infrastructures
and effective insertion into the electronically mediated global economy. So,
in the interest of advancing the intellectual project of Bishop and Clancey,
I want to use this short article to draw attention to the constitutive nature
of routine violence and terror in African urbanisms to contribute to the
larger project of rethinking the city-as-target. Thus, the next section paints
a picture from different African urban contexts about the pervasive and
insidious nature of everyday violence. Thereafter I draw attention to how
African urbanists are thinking about the significance of this in terms of the
nature of the social, and by extension, the urban.
Routinized Violence and Terror
A recent report by Human Rights Watch (2007) catalogues how local politics
in Nigerian cities have become hostage to an ostensible electoral system
whereby each political party, and especially their leaders, exercise their
political agency through the brutal force of local gangs. It is estimated that
around 11,000 Nigerians lost their lives in politically related violence
between the 1999 and 2007 elections and during the same period 3 million
were displaced (Human Rights Watch, 2007: 19). Practically, local political parties and politicians who establish and sponsor gangs that intimidate,
abuse and attack political opponents and ordinary people orchestrate this
violence. The same gangs also commit electoral fraud during elections by
stealing ballot boxes or loading them with fraudulent ballot papers. The
various electoral commission reports suggest that the practice is endemic
for both federal and local elections. The Human Rights Watch report sums
it up in these terms:
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292 Theory, Culture & Society 26(78)

Political violence has become a central part of political competition across
much of Nigeria and it takes many forms from assassinations to armed
clashes between gangs employed by rival politicians. This violence is most
often carried out by gangs whose members are openly recruited and paid by
politicians and party leaders to attack their sponsors rivals, intimidate
members of the public, rig elections, and protect their patrons from similar
attacks. Alongside the gangs themselves, the individuals most responsible for
the abuses they commit are politicians and party officials from all parties
who sponsor and at times openly participate in acts of violence. The architects, sponsors, and perpetrators of this violence generally enjoy complete
impunity because of both the powers of intimidation they wield and the tacit
acceptance of their conduct by police and government officials. (Human
Rights Watch, 2007: 17)

This condition of orchestrated violence as an integral part of the

contemporary political culture in Nigeria the largest African democracy
must be considered against the backdrop of even more insidious terror
that marks everyday life for the urban poor. George Packer provides a
powerful journalistic account of such terror in Lagos in the New Yorker. What
emerges from Packers insight into the micro-functioning of the city for the
urban poor is a narrative of utter inconvenience, arbitrary violation of
personal space and body, a world profoundly truncated around micro negotiations to access extremely minimal spaces and opportunities in the city,
but invariably always at a price. A price that is always gender coded, which
ensures that sexual abuse and predation is built into the fabric of everyday
negotiations at the core of social and economic reproduction. In this account
one is confronted by the torturous drudgery of daily life without functioning basic services but rather regulated drips of access that are only accessible in small rations mediated by extortionists. This organization of daily
reproductive functions is framed by a deeply embedded patronage system
which has some elements of mutuality but is by and large oppressive and
exploitative, but actively reproduced through very deeply embedded beliefs
that such is the fate of life at the bottom of the pile in Lagos. In Lagos this
fate has a name: oga, as powerfully captured here by George Packer:
What looks like anarchic activity in Lagos is actually governed by a set of
informal but ironclad rules. Although the vast majority of people in the city
are small-time entrepreneurs, almost no one works for himself. Everyone
occupies a place in an economic hierarchy and owes fealty, as well as cash,
to the person above him known as an oga, or master who, in turn, provides
help or protection. Every group of workers even at the stolen-goods market
in the Ijora district has a union that amounts to an extortion racket. The
teenager hawking sunglasses in traffic receives the merchandise from a
wholesaler, to whom he turns over ninety per cent of his earnings; if he tries
to cheat or cut out, his guarantor an authority figure such as a relative or a
man from his home town, known to the vendor and the wholesaler alike has
to make up the loss, then hunt down his wayward charge. The patronage
system helps the megacity absorb the continual influx of newcomers for whom
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Pieterse African Reverberations of the Mumbai Attacks 293

the formal economy has no use. Wealth accrues not to the most imaginative
or industrious but to those who rise up through the chain of patronage. It
amounts to a predatory system of obligation, set down in no laws, enforced
by implied threat. (Packer, 2006: 70)

A very similar narrative of desperate survival comes through the more

personal account of Yohannes Edemariam as he travels back to Addis Ababa
(from Toronto) to rediscover the city of his childhood memory in its contemporary incarnation. In this affective account, we learn about how daily
survival is practically achieved or attempted in a context where the overwhelming majority of the urban population is by and large left to their own
devices and the exploitative systems of daily rule that govern every facet of
life in the slums of Addis. One of the themes that emerges very strongly in
this piece is the degree to which sex-work by girls and women has become
one of the primary livelihood practices, and how seemingly unavoidable and
psychically corrosive this is. One of the characters we meet in Edemariams
essay is a young woman called Mekdes. She had fled to Addis when her
relationship with her boyfriend turned violent and in the process left her
newborn with her grandmother. In Addis, she knew no-one and ended up
being inducted into the ways of the city by two newly acquired friends, who
had also ended up in Addis on the back of fleeing from violent domestic
relationships. Both of her new friends were sex workers and inducted
Mekdes into the trade. At some point in the conversation as she laments her
fate and especially her lack of options, she reflects:
Nobody can really deal with this kind of life. . . . Without knowing it, you
start off at a certain okay place and slide downward, and when you find
yourself in this place, where you are amazes you; it scares you. But youve
reached the place, touched your feet to it, and so, because you have no choice,
you just live. (Edemariam, 2007: 72)

For most poor youth in many cities of Africa, the city is a highly
circumscribed funnel that delivers them to contexts within which they have
very little choice but to opt for a life of violence, excess and terror because
of the profound deprivation that characterizes their households and neighbourhoods, which coincides with the crumbling of earlier socialization
frameworks. Ailsa Winton (2004) reminds us that John Galtungs seminal
work on structural violence captures how deprivation is itself a form of
violence. In this reading:
understandings of violence include psychological hurt and, in turn, alienation, repression and deprivation. . . . In urban contexts, it is deprivation as
inequality that is the most important form of structural violence, and also that
which relates most significantly to the emergence of everyday reactionary
violence. Deprivation in this sense includes not only differences in income
but also the lack of access to basic social services, the lack of universal state
security protection, along with the severe corruption, inefficiency and
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294 Theory, Culture & Society 26(78)

brutality that generally hit the poor hardest, and the lack of social
cohesion. . . . In situations of widespread and severe inequality, the urban
poor are undervalued and marginalized, and their daily living conditions
heighten the potential for the emergence of conflict, crime or violence.
(Winton, 2004: 1667)

If we accept this understanding, and consider the available data on

urban poverty and multiple dimensions of deprivation and insecurity
(Kessides, 2006; Moreno and Warah, 2006; Satterthwaite, 2007; UNHabitat, 2006), we must come to the inescapable conclusion that the
everyday, i.e. mundane ordinariness, is profoundly saturated by structural
and symbolic violence, which in turn reproduces an acute level of social
violence that overdetermines familial and domestic relations. This predominant condition suggests to me that even in the absence of pervasive
networked infrastructures that make cities ideal targets, and where most
urbanites rely on inventive survivalist practices, the foremost dynamic in
African urbanism is terror; a narrative about multiple forms and patterns of
abuse; a rebus of pain and bodily dismemberment (Mbembe, 2003).
African Urbanism and Terror
In his essay, Terror and the City (2009), Ashraf Jamal provides one of the
most provocative and troubling accounts on the condition of the South
African city, soaked as it is in routinized violence not too dissimilar to the
cases in Addis and Lagos referred to earlier. He begins with an extract from
a short story of his published in 2002, which details at considerable length
the gang rape of a street worker and which leaves little (and too much) to
the imagination. Instead, the narrator painstakingly retells every second of
cruelty and violation, to the point where the pain and narcissistic implications of the act overwhelm the sensibility of the reader. The reader is overwhelmed precisely because the detailed explication of the acts of violation
is much more than one would normally allow oneself to think about or that
would be reported in a newspaper account. It is also unnerving because one
is forced to accept that the imponderable level of brutalization is indeed
well within the capacity of many people: a fact of (bare) life, and therefore
suggestive of a broad-based debasement that is so cancerous as to be beyond
the point of treatment or reversal. This moment of confrontation and
acknowledgement is overwhelming because it forces one to admit that there
is very little in our archive of knowledge, politics, institutional capability
and, most importantly, collective sociality, that can stop, mitigate or eradicate this insidious force. Then, all that remains is the question: what does
it mean for our sense of self, our sense of a future, if all that we have is the
poisonous outgrowth of unchecked and cumulative terror?
Jamal suggests that our epistemic challenge is continuously to arrive
at this question and, through that painful recursive movement, learn to
disabuse ourselves of a quite simply inappropriate and exhausted humanist
morality. Jamal underscores this imperative vividly:
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Terror, understood here, is not merely the sum of empirical acts of violence
but a pervasive and variegated psychic seam. It is this seam that must be
tapped if we are to understand why the city works yet does not work. (Jamal,
2009: 121)

Thus, for Jamal, the issue is not a choice between hope and despair, but
rather nurturing an epistemic capacity to engage with the indeterminate
zone of becoming that falls between these polarities. For, it:
. . . is terror that challenges all claims to the substantive at the precise
moment that it despairingly invokes the non-substantive. By insisting upon
the prevailing despair that has gripped the South African imaginary a
despair that is flanked today by an unparalleled hope I would not want to
consecrate that despair in and for itself. Rather within and between despair
and hope I would suggest that another way of living becomes possible. This
other way is only possible once one accepts that the styling of self is coterminous with the styling of terror. For it is the epistemic and psychic reconfiguration of terror that will best enable us to embrace the barbarism of the
present moment. This embrace at once intimate and violent allows for
both an implacable acceptance of a brute fate that emerges without pretext
and reason as it allows for a limited conversion and transformation. This view
lays no claim upon the future and neither does it measure itself against a
preordained past. Rather it is a view that accepts the unresolved nature of
the present moment as one that must be negatively questioned and apprehended. Only thereby will we free ourselves from the captivity of despair and
hope. (Jamal, 2009: 135)

Thus, our task in re-describing the city, in the first instance, is not to look
for an end to the horror, or to reach out for the moment of redemption; no,
our most important imperative is to simply stare terror in the face without
any anticipation that it will come to an emancipatory end. This is a tall order
but one, I agree, we cannot afford to elide, because the violence that
animates the spaces of daily survival and adaptation has a deep and expansive root network that it feeds off as the work of Mahmood Mamdani (2007)
suggests.
Mamdani provides a useful argument to explain the constitutive nature
of political violence in most parts of the African continent as religious and
ethnic identities become mobilized in a process he defines as the politicization of culture. This argument is of relevance to our concern here
because it suggests that armed conflict will remain a constitutive dimension
of contemporary political life, especially as economic growth becomes ever
more tied to extractive industries that feed the global commodities boom.
The crux of Mamdanis historically rich argument is that modern power in
contemporary Africa is almost without exception premised on a distinction
between civil and customary identities and the institutional implications
that go along with such a distinction. This premise is a direct outgrowth of
the colonial regime of governmentality, which was essentially kept in play
in the postcolonial era because the differential, customary regime which
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296 Theory, Culture & Society 26(78)

subjugates in terms of a static notion of tradition has been deeply embedded

in most contemporary political systems. He then traces how these distinctions create a fertile environment for new forms of inclusion and exclusion
within national and sub-national territories; conditions that lead back to
almost all of the current and recent armed conflicts across the continent.
This system of rule is particularly dangerous in a context where very large
numbers of Africans are continuously on the move in search of better
opportunities and to maintain their de-territorialized livelihood strategies.
In other words, because of the inherited and maintained legacy of distinguishing between the indigenous and non-indigenous groups, lines of
distinction are drawn that facilitate patron-based political cultures in which
violent means of control and regulation are extensively routinized. This
exposition points to the larger structural factors that shape the polities of
African countries and cities, but they also reinforce and animate localized
cultures of strong men and ogas who rely on violence to regulate and
reproduce their patches in the city.
If we acknowledge these deep structural drivers of quotidian violence,
it suggests we need to heed Jamals challenge and forge a different set of
registers and frameworks to work through the implications of what cityness
really means in all of its contradictory fullness. At this sobering point it is
instructive to turn to the work of Mamadou Diouf (2003), who has been at
the forefront of a new scholarship that seeks to confront and theorize these
violent tendencies, particularly in West Africa. Diouf proposes that the
contemporary generation of youth in (West) Africa is socialized in a fundamentally different manner than before and at a time when youth are
becoming the demographic majority in most countries (UNFPA, 2007; World
Bank, 2007). Contemporary socialization occurs among the ruins of a
nationalist project; a project that held onto a particular conception of young
people and their proper role in the post-independence project of autonomy
and development. Diouf argues:
In its cultural and political versions, the nationalist project sought to do two
things: to maintain the frontier between elders and juniors that characterized
traditional African values, and to put young people at the center of its plans
for economic development and national liberation. (2003: 34)

However, with the sustained economic crisis across much of Africa since
the 1970s; the systematic drift towards a narrow agenda of resource plundering by national elites, buffeted in turn by heightened geopolitical
dynamics as a function of the Cold War; the devastating effects of structural
adjustment programmes; and ever deepening economic marginalization in
a more and more integrative global economy, this nave vision for young
people turned sour. Dioufs project is to come to terms with the culturally
inflected consequences of this ruined vision. The argument he mounts, I
believe, provides us with some clues about how to fully acknowledge and
move through the prevalence of urban terror as a generative current in the
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Pieterse African Reverberations of the Mumbai Attacks 297

constitution of the everyday in many African cities. Dioufs core themes

shine through in the following abstract:
Excluded from the arenas of power, work, education, and leisure, young
Africans construct places of socialization and new sociabilities whose
function is to show their difference, either on the margins of society or at its
heart, simultaneously as victims and active agents, and circulating in a geography that escapes the limits of the national territory. These transformations,
which have been taking place for several years, affect both geography and
history especially history conceived as a chronology embracing age groups
that are connected by obligations, rights, and duties. The ideological and
cultural reorganization that flows from this posture of defiance takes place in
the spaces deserted by political power and outside the communities and their
dominant cultures, to the advantage of the margins and the unoccupied areas
in which emptiness and indetermination are dominant: places that are ready
to be filled, conquered, and named, and which favor the expression of rites
and rituals intended to produce signs of identity. The function of these spaces,
which escape the logics of public and administrative control, communitarian
prescriptions, and state surveillance, is to serve as supports for acts that
express within the public sphere, in a violent, artistic, or spiritual way, a
desire for recognition and a presence. (Diouf, 2003: 5)

Key themes that arise from the excerpt include exclusion, which
denotes the profound scale at which most African societies and cities simply
fail the majority of urban inhabitants with formal opportunities that one
comes to expect with the consolidation of modernity; yet, despite this
unimaginable scale of social failure, youth display phenomenal agency by
actively constructing their own places and social territories within which to
forge different, morally ambiguous, bases for identity construction. Furthermore, there is the evocative suggestion of alternative itineraries of bodily
and imaginary circulation, which firmly place the subjectivities of youth in
the de-territorialized domain of the translocal (Smith, 2001), a theme that
has of course been carefully mapped out in the rich and occult-realist ethnographic elaborations of de Boeck (2005) and Simone (2004, 2006). Then
there is that arresting image of postures of defiance, which intimate the
confrontational and often deliberately offensive behaviours and tactics of
youth as they put their bodies, sexual desires and offensive cultural proclivities on display, effectively daring mainstream society to respond, attempt
an intervention or even feign concern. Indeed, Diouf is probably right that
the continuously reinvented rituals of transgression are about announcing
presence and claiming symbolic space in a society and system that can do
little but announce its impotence to deliver any semblance of a viable future.
In the remainder of his article, Diouf (2003: 5) explores the new forms
of association and sociality that young people enter into as they make their
way into the worlds market economy of desire and consumption. In particular he focuses, somewhat counter-intuitively given the primary thrust of his
argument, on religious associations, sport and cultural organizations, which
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298 Theory, Culture & Society 26(78)

in turn often lead to community-based cleansing campaigns and often also

various forms of micro-enterprise. It is beyond the scope of my current
discussion to rehearse Dioufs exploration of these practices as evidence of
new bases of subjectivity, unmoored from the nation and patrimonial forms
of community. (For a riveting account of the role new religious movements
play in mediating urban terror in Kinshasa, Congo, see de Boeck and
Plissart, 2004.) The implication is that, by getting a more in-depth understanding of these new forms of sociality, which operate on very different
moral registers and imaginaries than is often assumed in uncritical livelihood policy models, we can perhaps get some purchase on aspects of
African urbanism.
In Conclusion
This is an urbanism in which we turn to people as infrastructure, which
denotes the ways in which most people in African cities must position and
deploy themselves in highly mobile and flexible ways in order to see and
seize minute opportunities for economic and social advancement; opportunities that more often than not turn out to be blind alleys and dead ends,
which only serves to further accentuate the imperative for nimble positioning. The incessantly mobile contortions implied intimates that people must
regard their bodies, practices and networks as a kind of scaffolding to effect
agency. Simone puts it in the following terms:
African cities are characterized by incessant flexibility, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated
notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used. These intersections,
particularly in the last two decades, have depended on the ability of residents
to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices.
These conjunctions become an infrastructure a platform providing for and
reproducing life in the city. (2004: 4078)

It is on this note that we can circle back to the broader theme of the
city-as-target. If African cities are singular in their profound lack of
networked infrastructures that engender the status of being a target, then it
is clear that the social relations that serve as compensatory infrastructures
are also targeted for routinized abuse as demonstrated in this article. In fact,
it could be argued that cities, and even mobile urban conurbations that arise
from territorially driven low-intensity conflicts, are equally targets, but in a
more insidious form because the violence spills over into daily life and
transactions and becomes dyed into the fibre of the socialities that prop up
African cities and sensibilities.
Tellingly, a similar silence about routinized daily violence marks the
public discourses that conjure Indian cities and villages. It is striking that
the Mumbai attacks attracted such pervasive coverage when the large-scale
but utterly normalized abuse of Dalits (approximately 192 million of Indias
population), tribal groups and religious minorities hardly feature in the
globalized narratives about social violence (Human Rights Watch, 2008). It
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confirms the basic argument of Bishop and Clancey (2003) about the pervasive proportions of the violence embedded in modernity. However, what I
have tried to do in this short intervention is to suggest that we can usefully
extend their perspective on city-as-target by highlighting how physical,
economic and social infrastructures can be read through their vulnerability
to violent attacks. In this sense, the Mumbai attacks confirm the constitutive dynamic of spectacular attacks in the making of cityness in our
mediated era, but it also reveals the deafening silence about other kinds of
normalized violence that are in fact much more extreme in scale and scope
and equally find their roots in the mangled origins and consolidations of
modernity.
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Bishop, R. and G. Clancey (2003) The City-as-Target, or Perpetuation and Death,
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De Boeck, F. (2005) The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa,
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De Boeck, P. and M. Plissart (2004) Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Brussels:
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Edgar Pieterse is holder of the NRF Research Chair in Urban Policy. He

directs the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. He
most recent publications are: The African Cities Reader (Chimurenga, 2009),
City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development (Zed Books,
2008) and Consolidating Developmental Local Government (UCT Press,
2008). [email: edgar.pieterse@uct.ac.za]

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