One of Kigali’s most pleasant features puzzled me. The city’s most prominent charm was the abundant greenery, and not just from the prominent tropical flowers that lined the streets, but also the frequent swathes of grass and trees dotted around its hills. These weren’t parks, they were simply patches of land without buildings. Gaping holes in the city. I had seen this kind of thing before, when I decided to explore without the faff of actual travel, and wandered through the streets of cities in Ghana and Botswana on Google Maps. There were the same empty patches. It seems that cities south of the Sahara are inherently different to the packed streets of Europe, but why?
How and when cities formed in Sub-Saharan Africa varied. Some, like Kano in Nigeria or Kumasi in Ghana, were formed centuries ago as parts of native states. Others were established more recently by western European powers as administration centres for their colonies. Kigali, founded by Germans in 1907, falls into the latter category. But irrespective of their origins as native or colonial, all these cities are subject to the same pressure: a massive increase in population across the continent, leading to the cities rapidly expanding. Between 2000 and 2023, the population of Nigeria grew from 126 million to 227 million, Zambia from 10 million to 20.7 million, and Rwanda from 8 million to 14 million. It is now a country that is roughly the same size as Wales, but with over four times the population.
The haphazard expansion of the cities is not helped by the state of the property market in African cities. There are official channels for buying and developing land, but a study in Uganda, which borders Rwanda to the north, discovered that these official channels were a mess, made up of a tangle of multiple organisations and departments with overlapping and conflicting roles and responsibilities. Rather than be subjected to this, and the expensive fees that come with them, people frequently resort to straightforward, unofficial methods of buying land directly from the sellers. In any case, across Africa, the wealth gap between the urban elite and the rest of the population is immense, so much of the property market in cities would be inaccessible to most.
Rwanda, on the other hand, has a relatively efficient government, and big plans for its capital. In the “Kigali Master Plan” that was released in 2013, a vision was set out of a city free of the slums that have accompanied the explosion of urban growth elsewhere on the continent. With that in mind, the Rwandan government set to work clearing the slums from the centre of the city, and relocating the inhabitants to specially-built housing. Part of this was because the land the slums were on is vulnerable to floods and landslides, but it was also in order to free up land for development.
It’s possible that these empty spaces are the gaps left behind in a race to develop a rapidly growing city. Maybe waiting for a shiny new building as the developers navigated the labyrinth of bureaucracy to build on land that was priced well out of the reach of the average citizen. But it’s also possible that the patches of tranquil greenery that I was looking at in Kigali were the places where entire communities had been uprooted. The drive to modernise can be harsh.
Sources: The State of Planning in Africa: An Overview by UN Habitat (2013) / Rwanda with Eastern Congo by Philip Briggs (2018) / World Bank Group / Urban land markets, housing development, and spatial planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: a case of Uganda by Lwasa Shuaib (2010) / Livelihood impacts of displacement and resettlement on informal households – A case study from Kigali, Rwanda by Alice Nikuze et al (2019)
Wandering/Wondering 