Rethinking the Colonial City: A Spatial History of Freetown, Sierra Leone c.1850-1910

Modernist narratives of the colonial city in Africa have emphasised the division of urban space between coloniser and colonised. Echoing Fanon’s Manichean vision of the ‘settler’s town’ and the ‘native town’, the developed European city of the colonisers has been positioned as existing alongside, but not quite touching, the underdeveloped town of the colonised population. Influenced by contemporary urban theory and thinking from the global South, this thesis will find analytical spaces in which to begin to collapse the grand division of the dual city of colonialism. The subject of my research is the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At this site of early British imperialism in West Africa the power of the colonial state was limited. Between the infrastructures of colonial extraction and control, this thesis identifies an expanded cast of agents in the production of urban space: the West African photographer-entrepreneurs who documented the city in flux; the hawkers who daily occupied the city streets; the babalawos who led Yoruba-derived religious rituals; the Krio newspaper men who lashed out in their columns at the influx of Temne and Mende migrants; the mosquitoes that spread malaria throughout the sodden city of the rainy season. At the turn of the twentieth century the colonial state built Hill Station, a whites-only settlement in the mountains behind Freetown, and a railway running between Freetown and its hinterland. Colonial power to form the morphology of the city was real. Here, however, these interventions will be not understood as a turning point towards Fanon’s Manichean city. By dwelling in this transitional period in the history of Freetown, straddling the eras of early and high colonialism in West Africa, this thesis describes the continuities of the decentred and emergent processes of a city becoming.