You have full access to this open access chapter. These cities have always been places of intense circulation and mass settlement both from within the continent and from outside, may it be from Asia, Europe and the Middle East in colonial contexts notably but also more recently Latin America. However, African urban diversity and the recent changes it underwent has received little academic attention. This chapter describes cosmopolitan practices and representations in Antananarivo Madagascar and Maputo Mozambique , mainly but not only focusing on Chinese diasporas and communities sharing Chinese origins through observation and interviews.
Residents of African cities display features of cosmopolitan urbanites with intense variation across contexts and communities. You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. But especially since the s, African cities have taken in many foreigners from all over the world, including people from China, India, Brazil, and Arab and European countries, not to mention elsewhere in Africa. The high number of migrants from countries of the Global South is a new phenomenon, and they will be the focus of this chapter, approached from the perspective of urban society as a whole.
This is one of the major rapid changes experienced in African urban societies, but thus far it has received much less academic attention than similar issues in Europe and North America Cohen and Vertovec In this context, I will analyze the southern African metropolises and capital cities of Maputo in Mozambique and Antananarivo in Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean.
Footnote 1. Although the metropolitan areas of Maputo and Antananarivo have populations of two to three million, they rarely figure in studies of Africa or among cities thought to incarnate modernity and globalization. Although national statistical data is lacking and often unreliable, researchers agree that the number of non-African people living in Africa in the s adds up to several million Flahaux and de Haas and that the figure is rising, a fact highlighted in a report from CNUCED estimating that there were 5.
To give but one example, estimates of the presence of people from China living in Africa vary from several hundred thousand to over a million. Moreover, comparisons between cities of the Global North and South are now widespread, leading to a renewal of analytical paradigms of the urban Edensor and Jayne ; Myers ; Robinson and the inclusion of everyday life in many analyses of cities in particular beginning with Appadurai Since the early s, a large and flourishing body of work has also developed in another thematic field, that of the little-known cosmopolitan character of African cities Brachet ; Boesen and Marfaing ; Malaquais These two fields have very little overlap, however, or at least in Africa: few studies are devoted to cosmopolitanism from a very local, micro, and everyday perspective, based on the experience of residents and the frequentation of certain places.
