Preface, 1. Introduction, 2. Moving, 3. Connecting, 4. Governing, 5. Working, 6. Dwelling, 7. Wayfinding, 8. Discussion and outlook, Bibliography
Biography
Katja Werthmann is an anthropologist and a full professor at the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University, Germany.
"City Life in Africa is a book I wish I read before embarking on my own journey into ethnographic studies of popular music in the East African urban space. Katja Werthmann carefully puts together a compelling analysis of studies from different disciplinary areas to unearth some hidden studies of urban Africa that inadvertently revises the history of anthropology of cities in Africa. Through City Life in Africa Katja Werthmann challenges received histories of studies of African urban centers by showing how unacknowledged scholars in Africa were studying the city before the famed so-called founders of urban anthropology."
Mwenda Ntarangwi, author of East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization and Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology, co-editor of African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice.
"Katja Werthmann’s City Life in Africa connects theory firmly to ethnographic practice and shows us how to attend to the subtle turns that culture takes within the urban sphere. It will prove to be a major contribution to African urban studies and all related areas."
Ato Quayson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University.
"This book provides an outstanding synthesis of ethnographies of urban Africa from the 1930s through the early 2000s. [...] Even though I have worked many years in urban Africa, this book broadened my understanding and offered me new insights."
Dolores Koenig, American University, Washington, DC, writing in Urbanities 13:1, 2023, p. 111-113.
"Werthmann does a tremendous job in concisely summarizing complex empirical studies in a few sentences and in ordering this vast and complex body of literature. [The book] serves as an invaluable resource for anyone keen on getting to know the multifaceted realm of anthropological studies on urban spaces and their inhabitants and on exploring lesser-known studies of crucial importance to the development of this sub-discipline."
Joh Sarre, writing in Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie/Journal of Social Anthrology 148, 2023, 348-350.
"Werthmann offers insightful and vivic accounts of everyday realities – with a critical assessment when the conclusions or methods of the authors she reviews appear problematic in light of our knowledge today, but always with a genuine appreciation and respect for the insights they may have to offer."
Samuli Schielke, Head of Research Unit "Lives and Ecologies", Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, writing in Sociologus 73:1, 2023, p. 93-102.
"The book represents an ambitious effort to restore and revitalize a field that has long been marginalized in the discipline’s dominant narratives. Drawing on a vast body of literature in English, French, and German, Werthmann sets out to demonstrate that anthropologists have never ignored African urban realities – quite the contrary: they have described and analyzed them, though their work has often not been recognized as laying the foundation for urban anthropology as such."
Sylvie Ayimpam, Lecturer, Aix Marseille University and Researcher at the Institute of African Worlds (IMAF), writing in Relire l’anthropologie urbaine depuis l’Afrique. Lectures anthropologiques 12-13, 2025-26. http://journals.openedition.org/lecturesanthropo/1651
