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Three

The Treason of the State

If unmitigated capitalism has a mainly unacceptable face, a corrupt state acting on behalf of the rich is still worse. In such circumstances, little is to be gained by even trying to improve the system.

Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward ¹

“Astonishingly,” two geographers recently complained, “no writer has traced the changing geography of low-income settlement in any third-world city over the whole postwar period.”² Nor, of course, has anyone yet attempted a modern historical overview of the global pattern of informal settlement. So many national histories and urban specificities make such a synthesis a daunting task; nonetheless, it is possible to venture a rough periodization that emphasizes principal trends and watersheds in the urbanization of world poverty.

But before considering why Third World cities and their slums grew so fast in the second half of the twentieth century, it is first necessary to understand why they grew so slowly in the first half. Although there are some exceptions, most of today’s megacities of the South share a common trajectory: a regime of relatively slow, even retarded growth, then abrupt acceleration to fast growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with rural in-migrants increasingly sheltered in peripheral slums. Earlier in the twentieth century, the massive transfer of rural poverty to cities was prevented by the economic and political equivalents of city walls – both urban entry and, even more importantly, substantive urban citizenship were systematically withheld from large parts of the agrarian population.

Keeping the Peasants Out

A principal barrier, of course, was European colonialism which, in its most extreme form in the British colonial cities of eastern and southern Africa, denied native populations the rights of urban land ownership and permanent residence. The British, always the ideologues of divide and rule, feared that city life would “detribalize” Africans and foster anticolonial solidarities.³ Urban migration was controlled by pass laws, while vagrancy ordinances penalized informal labor. Until 1954, for instance, Africans were considered only temporary sojourners in racially zoned Nairobi and were unable to own leasehold property.⁴ Likewise Africans in Dar es Salaam, according to researcher Karin Nuru, “were only tolerated as a temporary labour force and had to return to the countryside.”⁵ In Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Africans had to wait until the eve of independence to acquire the legal right to own urban homes, while in Lusaka – designed as “a highly ordered city segmented by race, class and gender” – African residents were considered to be “more or less temporary urbanites whose only purpose in town was service to the administration’s personnel.”⁶

Apartheid, of course, took this system to its dystopian extreme. Building on a foundation of colonial racism, postwar South African legislation not only criminalized urban migration, but also provided for the uprooting, with enormous brutality, of historical inner-city communities of color. Almost one million people of color were evicted from supposed “white” areas, and as a result, net urbanization hardly increased between 1950 (43 percent) and 1990 (48 percent); indeed, in the 1960s there was a net outflow of Africans from urban areas.⁷ Ultimately, however, this ideal of “white cities, black home-lands” collided with the labor-market needs of big capital as well as the heroic resistance of its victims.

In the subcontinent, the British also segregated and policed the influx from the countryside. In her brilliant study of the cities of Uttar Pradesh during the interwar years, Nandini Gooptu chronicles the unceasing efforts of colonial officials and newly enfranchised native elites to push the poor to the cities’ edges and beyond. The new-fangled Town Improvement Trusts, in particular, were highly effective in clearing slums and removing so-called “plague spots” from the interstices of better residential and commercial areas, and preserving spatial zoning around colonial and native middle-class areas. Vigorously enforced “encroachment laws,” meanwhile, outlawed both squatting and street vending.⁸ At the same time, urban economic growth under the prewar Raj was fitful at best – even Bombay, with its famed entrepreneurial elites and textile factories, grew slowly, not even doubling its population in the half-century from 1891 to 1941.

Despite their antipathy to large native urban settlements, the British were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time. Their policies in Africa forced the local labor force to live in precarious shantytowns on the fringes of segregated and restricted cities. In India, Burma and Ceylon, their refusal to improve sanitation or provide even the most minimal infrastructure to native neighborhoods ensured huge death tolls from early-twentieth-century epidemics (plague, cholera, influenza) and created immense problems of urban squalor that were inherited by national elites after independence.

The other empires, with greater or lesser success, also attempted to restrict and discipline rural migration. With few exceptions, very little manufacturing or processing value-added was left in colonial ports or transport hubs to generate formal employment and urban growth. Everywhere native labor was consigned to slums and shantytowns. In Congolese cities, according to a recent history, the colonial state “maintained relatively effective urban influx controls and a tentacular regulatory net around the towns, choking off both petty trade outside prescribed channels and ‘anarchic’ housing construction.”⁹

Historian Jean Suret-Canale, meanwhile, reminds us that in tropical Africa, the French tightly regulated the movements of rural labor while consigning African town-dwellers to grim peripheries. In colonial slums like Medina (Dakar), Treichville (Abidjan) and Poto-poto (Brazzaville), streets “were nothing but sand or mud alleyways .… instead of drainage there were only a few sewers, usually open or crudely covered with flag-stones; there was little or no water, with a few public pumps where queues waited from early in the morning. Public lighting was reserved for the European quarters. Overcrowding created a great hazard to health.”¹⁰ Indeed, this almost universal refusal to provide even minimal sanitary infrastructures for the “native quarters” until the 1950s was more than stinginess: it pointedly symbolized the lack of any native “right to the city.”

But European colonialism was not the only international system of urban growth control. Although raised to power by peasant revolt, Asian Stalinism also tried to staunch the influx from the countryside. Initially the 1949 Chinese Revolution opened city gates to returning refugees and job-hungry peasant ex-soldiers. The result was an uncontrolled inundation of the cities: some 14 million people arrived in just four years.¹¹