Contenu du sommaire : Villes d'Afrique : circulations et expressions culturelles

Many African as well as European sources describe how King Muteesa of Buganda opened on February 2nd 1882 the first market place in his capital. This paper deals with the role of markets in the Great Lakes region of East Africa and why a kingdom which had deliberately contained this institution to borderlands suddently adopted it in its center and how for different reasons markets multiplied across Uganda during the first decades of coloniale rule.

The early human settlement of the Inner Congo Basin is a historical puzzle to which may contribute scholars of different sciences. The present paper approaches the problem from a linguistic point of view. It presents the results of a comparative study of the pottery vocabulary of the local Bantu languages. Being an artefact that unites an archaeological visibility and an ethnographical prominence with a fairly well documented technical vocabulary, pottery forms a privileged domain of interdisciplinary research. With respect to the Inner Congo Basin, both linguistic and archaeological data point towards a long isolated development of languages and communities. From a more general point of view, this paper proposes an alternative way of using lexical data for historical reconstruction. Within the realm of African studies, not linguists, but historians were the first to rely on the historical-comparative study of cultural vocabularies and to develop the so-called “Words-and-Things”-method. However, certain inconsistencies in their linguistic method may put in danger the soundness of the historical hypotheses they have worked out. The introduction of this article offers a methodological critique of the way some historians deal with lexical data.

In 1996, modern art suddenly irrupted in Douala, the largest city of Cameroun. This town which had never been exposed to public modern artistic expressions was confronted to a huge 10 m high statue made of rubbish and built on one of its main roundabouts. This paper deals with the meaning of art for contemporary Cameroonian artists and NGO activists who expose and finance these artists. But it also shows how the inhabitants of Douala understand, reject or accept this artistic project, and how its meaning is quickly politicized and understood in ethnic terms.

The article deals with cinematographic exhibition in Zanzibar from its beginnings in the late 1910s and looks at evolving programme patterns and changing audience preference trends during the colonial period and the initial transition years to post-colonial rule. Cinema-going developed during the course of the 20th century to a popular urban resident pastime, all social classes and “ethnic” groups considered. Notwithstanding preponderant market shares of influential North American or British production-cum-distribution companies, the cinematographic landscape in Zanzibar was characterised from the late 1920s by a considerable influx of films from studios in Bombay and Cairo as a result of the translocal film marketing network between Western India and the East African coast, from which Indian expatriates emerged as a driving force.The question will first of all be explored as to how audiences in search of pleasure interfered with or simply bypassed the colonial project of socio-spatial engineering of post-abolitionist Zanzibari society, thus making cinema a social space where members of society could express their own perception of what it meant to be a modern cosmopolitan urbanite. It will then be discussed how audiences, despite censorship and the prevention of “African” access to commercial cinema, and to the dismay of both colonial and later post-colonial state representatives, persevered with their pleasure in moving pictures. The findings presented here contribute to a better assessment of the variant reading of Zanzibar's urban landscape by those involved in the distribution and appropriation of cinematographic productions circulating in the Indian Ocean region and beyond its confines.

This paper aims at analysing the terminology used during colonial times by the French to differentiate the city and its various componants. Beyond words, this is the very idea of belonging to urban culture which is at stake. While refusing to consider the Africans as urban people, the colonizers expressed, through the vocabulary, the dualism of their urban policies both in terms of urbanism (morphology, segregative measures) and of administration (municipality versus headmanship).The article suggests that one should go beyond the discourse dualism and points to the complexity of urban situations which incorporate, especially from the 1950s, the evidence of a more diversified and nuanced division within the urban area. This also makes more visible the divorce between the discourse and the policies, between the colonial agenda and its subversion or reappropriation by the urban dwellers.

In the xixth century, Antananarivo people clearly managed to invent an urban lifestyle of their own. While still deeply anchored in its rural culture, the rural elite (that of an expanding kingdom) succeeded in opening up the capital by absorbing elements of material culture from Mauritius, La Réunion and Europe. This study focuses on the circulation of architectural models and the use of places to assess the interrelation between the social and physical spaces.

This article examines the history of the cinema house in British colonial Africa. Cinema houses were novel venues that had not existed in pre-colonial Africa. They became sites of social contestation, where patronage became a marker of social status, and new forms of urban identities were explored and re-formulated. Their popularity during the 1940s and 1950s alarmed European and African elites, who came to see the cinema houses as dens of vice and social impropriety. The popularity of cinema houses declined after the 1960s, due to economic crises and competition from new media.