BAMAKO, Mali — In August 1936, the legendary architect Le Corbusier studied the existing maps of Addis Ababa, tore them up, and started from scratch. He had of course never visited the Ethiopian capital, which was at the time occupied by the forces of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Instead, he sketched a phantasmagoria of brutality and order, dominated by boulevards wide enough to land a squadron of Messerschmitts. It did not resemble a destination city, and nor was it meant to.
In a letter to Il Duce’s French ambassador, the architect promised “models so severe, that one might think the colony was a space without time, and therefore, without history, and without any particular geographical meaning.” Later in his mini-manifesto, he assured Mussolini that “the city is direct dominion; the city becomes the city of government, in which the Palace of the Governor must stand overall.”
Thankfully, the idea for a fascist Ethiopian Disneyworld remained a sketch on paper. But its central thesis has enjoyed remarkable durability over the years, especially among the European elite: Africa’s teeming, ungovernable cities must be remapped if the continent and its people are to have any future.
More recently, the idea has reemerged, this time not as a solution to Africa’s challenges, but to Europe’s. The goal, this time around, is not to impose a European footprint on the continent’s resource-rich soil. To the contrary, it’s to ensure Africa remains far away. Only by subjecting it to European orderliness, the thinking goes, can its teeming masses be prevented from seeking refuge on northern shores.
I write this sitting in a cafe in Bamako, Mali, which has grown more rapidly than any metropolis on the planet since 2006. (Unrest in the north of the country has only sped up this process.) Soon, half a billion sub-Saharan Africans will call themselves city slickers. The United Nations claims that by 2035 the world’s 10 fastest growing cities will be in Africa.
Monaco, Singapore and Vatican City are functional city-states, and their DNA can be traced back to classical Carthage, Rome and Athens.
These enormous urban conglomerations, we are told, are overflowing across the Mediterranean and into Europe, causing political ructions that are not so different from those of Il Duce’s era. This is the fulcrum around which African urbanism now turns: As Europe increases its focus on the political and humanitarian costs of migration, it is once again a time for a radical African architecture.
Gunter Nooke, Germany’s ranking Africa bureaucrat, apparently agrees. In a recent interview with the BBC, he proposed a scheme in which African countries would lease land to a “foreign body” in exchange for “free development for 50 years.” On this newly acquired land, highly managed cities would shimmer into being — dozens of Wakandas, riffs on the hyper-futuristic city over which Marvel’s Black Panther exercises his benevolent rule.
European technocratic rationalism would once again be imprinted on African chaos, an opt-in approach to post-colonial colonialism based not in the extraction of resources, but on the containment of the population. In Nooke’s conception, these cities would be sedate retirement homes for African dysfunction, and an end to the liberation era’s endless untidiness. The architectural plans computer-render themselves.
Nooke’s ideas are by no means new, and nor are they spectral. Monaco, Singapore and Vatican City are functional city-states, and their DNA can be traced back to classical Carthage, Rome and Athens. By the late 15th century, Germany itself was pocked with free imperial cities — statelets with a measure of autonomy, unbound by any national claims to their territory, accountable only to the Holy Roman Empire. In the present-day United States, cities governed by charter are subject not to general law, but rather to a founding document that allows them a measure of managerial freedom.
Bamako has grown more rapidly than any metropolis on the planet since 2006 | Michele Cattani/AFP via Getty Images
The idea of developing-world charter cities — African Monacos, if you will — was first promulgated by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer in the mid-2000s. In order to solve the problems of maladministration and overcrowding that he believed were endemic to poorer regions of the world, countries would cede tracts of land called “special reform zones” to third-party guarantors, most often the form of rich states like Germany.
The reform zones were distinct in conception from the special economic zones that super-charged China’s Pearl River Delta economy in the 1980s, although the idea takes much of its inspiration from Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Instead of tax havens for manufacturers, these new “Startup Cities” would be places where rules-based, self-governing cities would rise like mirages on the savannah. People could move in and out at will, so long as they signed agreements and abided by the city’s regulations, set by faceless corporate entities managed daintily from afar.
Romer’s proposal — which was embraced at the time only by Madagascar’s former president, Marc Ravalomanana, with disastrous consequences for his political career — leads to a question: What is a city?
In urban theorist Louis Mumford’s conception, cities were originally vessels for the sacred — places where the gods lived, and so too the communities that worshipped them. In Addis Ababa, legend has it that the capital was founded by Emperor Menelik II’s queen, who stared down at the expanse beneath Mount Entoto and said: “Perfecto!” Johannesburg was inaugurated on the back of South Africa’s ruling deity: gold. Lagos was born from another of the continent’s defining commodities: human chattel.
What would be the founding impetus for Nooke’s cities? On the surface, they serve the need to protect the European Union’s political culture from anything that could provoke the populist id — namely the scourge of unchecked migration. On a subconscious level, they impose order on an unruly world at the perceived source of unruliness. If the migrant “problem” is successfully curtailed, Europe can return to its modern default setting: a technocratic zone of safety and rationalism.
The United Nations claims that by 2035 the world’s 10 fastest growing cities will be in Africa | Habibou Kouyate/AFP via Getty Images
Le Corbusier, for what it’s worth, would likely be touched. “To create architecture is to put in order,” he once wrote. “Put what in order? Function and objects.” In this case, function is the end of migration, and the objects are Africans.
The stakes, we’re told, couldn’t be higher. Listen to Hillary Clinton, who recently spoke to the Guardian as part of a series that sought insight from center-left thinkers on the rise of right-wing populism. “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame [of populism],” she said. “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message — ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ — because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”
And that’s the center-left talking. Nooke’s message couldn’t be clearer: Europe must cauterize the problem at its source. If migration is the issue that most threatens the establishment’s interests, and if migration provides the right with its seemingly bottomless supply of rocket fuel, then what are the alternatives?
Rather than look for African solutions to European problems, the Continent’s politicians and bureaucrats might be better off looking closer to home.
Will this approach work? Happily — or unhappily, depending on how you view these things — we don’t have to turn to the futurists to find out. As it happens, Addis Ababa is already subject to Nookesian divisions. Like Bamako, the city seemingly grows by the second, subject not to the whims of Il Duce and his architect-fanboys, and nor to libertarian urban fantasies, but instead to Ethiopia’s own inexorable economic rise. And like many other cities in the developed world, Addis has its privatized neighborhoods, governed by their own laws, boomed off by gates and security personnel — the ubiquitous pockets of deprivation and privilege that define most of the world’s big cities.
And look at the result. Nooke’s fantasies aside, it’s unclear how corporatizing this inequity would stop African migrants from leaving for opportunities abroad — much like Europeans have done for centuries. Nor is it clear how these cities would be able to manage the population growth outside their electrified fences.
Rather than look for African solutions to European problems, the Continent’s politicians and bureaucrats might be better off looking closer to home. Combine that with the fact that it’s also delusional to blame the rise of Western populism exclusively on immigration, and we can’t avoid the conclusion that these European-conceived neo-Wakandas are just another fantasy hatched in the metropole.
After all, it bears remembering that Euroskepticism was just as much forged by the disgust for the same aloof technocracy Nooke is hoping to export to Africa.
Richard Poplak is an editor at large for the Daily Maverick in South Africa and co-author of “Continental Shift: A Journey Into Africa’s Changing Fortunes” (Granta Magazine, 2016).