By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

This blog considers what we know about Africa’s 100 largest cities – responding to the third blog in this series, which looked at what we don’t know. This is with a particular focus on the drivers and other influences that shape contemporary urban change.

The next blog in this series looks at how the lack of data on cities is invisibilising them and their populations’ needs.

Africa’s 100 largest cities

The distribution of the 100 largest cities in 2020 across countries is set out in Table 1. Forty-one countries have one or more of the 100 largest cities; 22 countries have one, and all but one of these are national capitals.

The concentration of the 100 largest cities in South Africa and Nigeria is not surprising, as they have the largest national economies. Egypt and Morocco are among the next largest; between them, these four nations have 40 of the 100 largest cities.

Capitals

Thirty-nine of the 100 cities are national capitals, while 43 are state or regional capitals, which means more than four-fifths of the 100 cities are national or regional capitals. The biggest cities that are not national capitals are: Dar es Salaam, Durban, Lagos, Johannesburg, Alexandria, Abidjan and Kano. But several of these are former capitals (Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Alexandria) or, in the case of Abidjan, a de facto capital.

Capitals are relocated when it suits those in power to do so – as discussed in the second blog in this series – usually for political or military reasons. The French created Niamey as the capital of Niger in 1905, then shifted the capital to Zinder in 1912. In 1926, prompted by Zinder’s proximity to the Nigerian border and its distance from French-controlled ports, they moved the capital back to Niamey.

Box 1: Basic data on the 100 cities

Range in population size

From the three most populous:

• Al-Qahirah (Cairo, Egypt) with 20. 9 million inhabitants;
• Lagos (Nigeria) with 14.4 million;
• Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) with 14.3 million

To the three least populous:

• Benguela (Angola) with 0.72 million;
• Oshogbo (Nigeria) with 0.71 million;
• East London/Buffalo City (South Africa) with 0.71 million.

Share of Africa’s urban population

The 100 cities had a total population of 242.5 million in 2020, out of a total urban population for Africa of 587.7 million. There are thousands of urban centres not in the top 100, whose combined population was 345.2 million in 2020.

Range of ages

From the three oldest: Tunis (Tunisia), Tripoli (Libya) and Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria, Egypt), founded centuries BCE.

To the three newest: Abuja (Nigeria), Nouakchott (Mauritania) and Enugu (Nigeria), founded since 1950.

When cities were founded

Of the 71 cities for which we have dates:

• 14 were founded during the 20th century (all but three between 1900 and 1950);
• 26 were founded during the 19th century (14 of these between 1880 and 1900);
• Two were founded in the 18th century, five in the 17th century, four in the 16th century;
• 20 were founded before the 16th century.

Economy

We assume that these 100 cities have a large share of Africa’s economy, although there is no data on this. But we can see a diverse range of economic changes. Many of the 100 cities have undergone rapid economic growth, driven by oil and gas production, extraction of precious metals, jewels and other valuable mineral resources, and by the local demands these create for producer and consumer goods and services.

The inhabitants of these resource-rich regions usually derive little benefit, however. This underlies political tensions that fuel conflict and often generate large numbers of refugees and internally displaced populations.

Many large cities have ports that are (or were) important parts of the economy. Some served as provisioning centres – for instance, large fleets would routinely stop at Dakar on their outward and return journeys from India, to repair, collect fresh water and trade for provisions with the local people.

Cape Town was developed by the Dutch East India Company to play a comparable role for Dutch ships sailing to East Africa, India and the Far East. Today, most of the largest ports are within the 100 cities: Durban, Mombasa, Lagos, Abidjan and Tangier.

Tourism is important in many coastal cities and historic cities, especially in northern Africa and also, among the 100 cities, Cape Town, Mombasa and Zanzibar. Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia have the highest international tourist arrivals in Africa. Eight of our 100 cities feature in a list of top 100 cities ranked by international visitor numbers (including for tourism and business): Cairo, Johannesburg, Marrakech, Cape Town, Casablanca, Durban, Accra and Lagos.

Some cities, such as Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Abidjan, have become concentrations of international agencies. This gives rise to a concentration of highly paid international agency staff, whose demand for goods and services can intensify a city’s population growth. Ironically, most of these agencies do not fund initiatives in their city where most of the population lives in informal settlements with very inadequate service provision.

Aerial view of Dar es Salaam. Photo credit: Moiz Husein / iStock

Many cities lost out to colonial rule, but some grew rapidly as centres of administration and control. Dar es Salaam’s size and status were reinforced by its role as the administrative and commercial centre of German and then British colonial rule. After the French took Algiers in 1830, they made it their military and administrative headquarters. The Belgian government established Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) as its capital. Lilongwe and Kaduna were founded by the British and became important colonial administrative centres. Maiduguri was founded in 1907 as a military outpost by the British. 

Transport

New technologies transformed transport for people and goods – providing higher speeds and carrying capacities, better access to those wanting to travel or to send or receive goods, and lower costs. The development of transport infrastructure provided the means to extract valuable resources from the locality. But local populations often derive little or no benefit from this process.

At different times and places, camels, boats, ships, railways, roads, highways, bridges, pipes and air travel served the movement of people and/or goods and supported cities. Sometimes they competed (for example, road versus rail), and sometimes they complemented each other (such as roads serving railways, railways serving ports, and ports as provisioning centres for ships). Telecommunications systems have become essential for all cities to serve the movement of data and internet access.

Generally, transport costs became lower as new modes of transport were introduced. Demand for goods and for travel interacted with changing transport modes and costs. Camels across the Sahara could only take high-value, non-perishable goods, due to the time needed and the limits of camels’ physical capacity. So trade using camels would specialise in high-value, mostly light goods – spices, kola nuts, salt.

As described in an earlier blog, many cities grew as centres supporting camel caravans. But to note the obvious, camels were not used to transport coal, as it is too heavy and low value – railways were much faster and able to deal with large volumes and heavy weights of low-cost goods. Enugu could only exploit its coal when the railway arrived.

Some cities drove these changes, others were founded to serve them. And politics along with (external and internal) demand for resources shaped everything. Half of the 100 cities have ports, most have airports. 

Heavy investments in railways in much of colonial Africa brought new economic activities to cities that were on the railway system. Many of these railways were built to exploit and export valuable resources, and were also important for both colonial administrations and the quick movement of troops. National armed forces were concentrated in many cities, swelling local populations and economies.

Agriculture

Many cities’ economies grew from supporting high-value agricultural exports and the range of enterprises that support their growth, processing, packaging and transport. There is surprisingly little documentation on food and agriculture in regard to the 100 cities, except in cases where the city served a region producing crops or other agricultural products for national and international markets (such as Port Harcourt for palm oil during colonial rule). Apart from some city case studies, we know little about the agriculture feeding the 243 million residents of the 100 cities. Umuahia, Kaduna, Aba, Osogbo, Onitsha and Bobo-Dioulasso are among the 100 cities with important agricultural markets and associated agricultural services.

Other drivers of change

Contemporary urban change has many other significant influences and drivers. Extreme weather events, disasters and water shortages – to which climate change has contributed – are likely to become more extreme and more frequent.

For many cities, change is brought about by conflict and/or people displaced by conflict. Covid-19 and risks of other pandemics and the many life-threatening diseases – whose impacts get forgotten in the fight against the current pandemic – are having a profound impact.

One positive outcome of the pandemic could be a much wider recognition of the importance of well governed and adequately resourced local government and local civil society, including grassroots organisations and federations.

Sources: The text in this blog draws heavily on the profiles of the 100 cities in Wikipedia.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

Most large African cities today were already well-established when colonial rule began to expand dramatically in the late 19th century. Most preceded the slave trade era too. This blog outlines the history of cities in Africa from 500 AD up to the late 19th century.

From existing sources, we glean evidence of a rich and varied urban history, even as we acknowledge that this history is incomplete. Kingdoms, empires and caliphates had capitals (and often regional capitals) going back more than 1,000 years (and longer if we were to go back to the Roman Empire). Some cities were also local or international religious or trade centres. Many cities combined these roles. And some, such as Tunis/Carthage, were even used for tourism by Romans who had holiday villas in and around the city, after Rome finally defeated Carthage.

Africa’s rich urban history

There are some striking similarities between Europe and much of Africa over the centuries, as empires, kingdoms and city states rose and fell – with obvious consequences for their capital cities and the cities that served them. There were cities that grew to serve prosperous agriculture, and cities greatly influenced by religious conflicts and wars (for Africa, especially the Muslim conquest of Northern Africa in the 8th century).

But cities were also centres of administration, scholarship, schools, trade, magnificent religious buildings (mostly mosques in Africa, mostly great cathedrals in Europe) and large flows of pilgrims. There are also vast differences – and great diversity among African cities.

Large cities in the past

We have population estimates for many African cities, showing so many substantial cities with long histories (see Table 1 for examples). Some were among the world’s largest cities of their time. But there are many large cities that have lost importance or have been abandoned. Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria) was the capital of Egypt from its founding by Alexander the Great to AD 642 and became a centre of commerce and great intellectual activity. But, by 1777, it had become an insignificant fishing town of 6,000 inhabitants before later returning to be a large and important city. Perhaps there are many more cities still waiting to be discovered and acknowledged.

Table 1: Examples of large cities over time

The city of Fès in Morocco, for example, was founded in AD 786 and at its peak in 1200, it had 250,000 inhabitants. It was the national capital for long periods and a centre of religion and scholarship. The University of Al Quaraouiyine was founded in Fès in AD 859.

Cairo, founded in AD 641, has been Africa’s largest city for almost all of the last 15 centuries. Around 1340, almost 500,000 people lived there. It was the principal seat of Islamic learning and central to the profitable East-West spice trade.

Cairo has within its boundaries more ancient cities, including al-Fustat (city of tents) that became the first capital of Islamic Egypt in 641, al-Askar (the city of sections, or cantonments) and al-Qatta’i (“the Quarters”). Al-Fustat remained Egypt’s administrative centre until 1168, when it was burnt to prevent its capture by a Crusader army, and Egypt’s capital moved permanently to Cairo.

Western Africa

One key influence on cities in Western Africa was the empires that came to control large areas. Cities were their centres of government, trade and military power.

The Ghana Empire (c. 300 to 1100) grew rich from increased trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt, allowing larger urban centres to develop. Bamako became a major market town, and a centre for Islamic scholars, with the establishment of two universities and numerous mosques in medieval times.

The Mali Empire spanned the 13th to 17th centuries and ruled over 400 cities, towns and villages of various religions. Niani was the capital for 300 years; it reached its zenith as Mali’s political, commercial and caravan centre (gold, salt, kola nuts, slaves) in the early 14th century.

The Songhai Empire dominated the western Sahel in the 15th and 16th centuries. The city of Gao became its capital. Other important cities in the empire were Timbuktu and Djenné.

Among the best known of the sub-Saharan African urban cultures is the Yoruba culture. This included many large cities in what is today southwest Nigeria. Major cities include Ile-Ife, Oyo, Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode, Akure and Ibadan. Ibadan was founded in 1829 and had a population of around 100,000 by the mid-19th century.

The documented history of the Yoruba people begins with the Oyo Empire, which became dominant in the early 17th century. It was preceded by Ile-Ife; between 700 and 900 AD the city began to develop as a major artistic centre. The nearby Benin Empire was also a powerful force between 1300 and 1850. A number of other cities, though non-Yoruba, were influenced by the Yoruba, including Warri, Benin City, Olene and Auchi.

Eastern Africa

Traditions of urbanism are most in evidence in Sudan (and Khartoum and Sennar), Ethiopia (and Aksum and Gondor) and cities along what came to be called the Swahili coast (including Mombasa). There were also ancient cities such as Kerma (in Sudan, which flourished as the first great urban centre of tropical Africa and was estimated to have 10,000 inhabitants in 1700 BC), Meroe, Suakin, Shendi, Sennar (‎on the Blue Nile in Sudan, described by a European visitor, as “one of the most important trading centres in Africa… regularly visited by caravans from Nubia, Darfur, Cairo, Fezzan, Bornu and Ethiopia”). Further east, former Swahili towns on the Benadir Coast, such as Mogadishu, Barawa and Marka, Lamu and Zanzibar, had by the 18th century become trade centres. 

Final note

This blog provides an introduction to the scale and nature of cities in Africa – but only up to the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th century, as different European nations expanded their empires. It does not cover the large and profound changes brought by colonial rule from the 1880s onwards (acknowledging too that colonial rule stretches back much earlier than this for some cities).

It has not dealt in any detail with the trade in slaves that had existed for thousands of years, but whose scale and impact increased so much through the development of the Atlantic slave trade. It is difficult to be dispassionate about the slave trade’s impact on cities. Certain ports became important when the slave trade to the Americas expanded dramatically and came to use ports in Western Africa (what was called the Slave Coast), rather than the long-established trans-Saharan trade routes (which were better suited to trade with Northern Africa, Europe and Asia). Some cities in west Africa fortified to protect themselves from capture. Ports that exported slaves from Africa include Ouida, Lagos, Aného (Little Popo), Grand-Popo, Agoué, Jakin, Porto-Novo and Badagry.

Most ports that served the slave trade are still urban centres but with small populations (under 100,000). Lagos and Badagry (in Nigeria), Porto Novo and Cotonou (Benin’s two largest cities), and Luanda (Angola) and Dakar (Senegal) were among the exceptions. Badagry, just down the coast from Lagos, was for a while larger and more important than Lagos. On Africa’s east coast, Bagamoyo (Tanzania) was founded at the end of the 18th century and became one of the most important trading ports along the East African coast, including trade in slaves.

Sources: This blog draws on the UN Population Division’s 2018 World Urbanization Prospects; Chandler, Tertius (1987), Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 656 pages; Bairoch, Paul (1988), Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, Mansell, London, 574 pages; and Freund, Bill (2007), The African City: A History, Cambridge University Press, 214 pages; Burton, A. (2001) ‘Urbanisation in Eastern Africa: An historical overview, c.1750–2000’, AZANIA: Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 36-37(1): 1-28. But its main source is Wikipedia, which has profiles of almost all the cities mentioned; most are long and detailed, including details of their foundation and development.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

We know relatively little about most of Africa’s pre-colonial urban history and the role of its cities. This is something especially pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet we can get a sense of urban history from diverse sources, including tales from travellers and explorers, material evidence of large cities, and import and export records. There are also dozens of cities with buildings and districts built centuries ago that still exist – especially mosques and medinas.

There is more written on social, economic and political issues on the continent or in countries within it, but less on what this meant on the ground for cities and their populations – and in turn, what city development meant for these issues.

Evolving city systems

Africa has a rich and varied urban history going back centuries, or more than 2,000 years for some countries and cities. Indeed, many of today’s large African cities were already well-established before colonial rule. Table 1 below lists the largest cities in Africa in 1800, including the population at that time, the year the city was founded and the rank among all cities in Africa in 2020.

It is worth highlighting that all cities for which we have the year they were founded pre-date European colonial rule. Only eight of these 34 largest cities are among 2020’s 100 largest cities, and five of these are in Northern Africa.

Additionally, while none of the African Cities Research Consortium’s 13 focus cities feature in the list of the largest cities in 1800, all are within the largest 100 for 2020. Five (Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Nairobi) are in the top 11 largest African cities.

The fundamental reshaping of the urban system and the location of the largest cities in all nations reflects the economic and political changes brought about by colonial rule – whereby colonial powers tended to avoid the largest cities – and post-colonial developments. City systems came to reflect more closely the government hierarchy, as the importance of state and provincial capitals grew in many nations, along with access to agricultural and mineral resources for export.

Hence, the political and economic changes imparted by colonial rule and post-colonial development created a new urban geography. Almost all the great historic cities described in the next blog still exist as cities, but with much less economic or political importance.

Africa’s largest cities in 1800 and 2020

One striking feature outlined below is how old most of Africa’s cities are. Table 1 lists the largest cities in Africa in 1800, their population at the time and the date they were founded – referring to the foundation date of a settlement that was not a city, or when an already existing city was classified as a city. Table 1 also gives the rank of these cities in 2020, allowing us to see how the 34 largest cities in 1800 fare in 2020.

Table 1: The largest cities in Africa in 1800

Table 2 shows the 34 largest African cities in 2020 – to compare with the 34-city 1800 list (in Table 1). As noted earlier, the 2020 list has few of the same cities as the 1800 list, and has far more cities founded in the late 19th and early 20th century by European powers or commercial interests. Table 2 also shows how the largest cities in Africa in 2020 rank in the 1800 list.

Table 2: The largest cities in Africa in 2020

Out of the 34 African cities that were recorded or estimated to have 20,000+ inhabitants in 1800, eight were in Mediterranean countries, although not all on the Mediterranean – much of the international trade was by overland routes, not by sea. Most of these urban centres had very long histories as prominent cities.

Of the 34 largest cities in 2020:

• Five were in Northern Africa (compared with 11 in 1800)
• 11 were in Western Africa (compared with 20 in 1800, and including five in Nigeria, compared with 13 in 1800)
• Six were in Eastern Africa (compared with two in 1800)
• Five were in Southern Africa (all in South Africa, compared with none in 1800)
• Seven were in Middle Africa (compared with one in 1800)

Distribution of the largest cities across nations

Figure 1: The countries with the highest percentages of Africa’s largest cities 

Figure 1 shows the countries with the highest percentages of Africa’s largest cities over the last 220 years. Given the scale and nature of economic, political and urban changes in Africa since 1800, there is perhaps a surprising extent of continuity.

Notably, Nigeria had the most cities for all years, although faced changes as some new cities became more prominent and some older cities – previously capitals of kingdoms and empires, and cities in the north, including those involved in the trans-Sahara trade, – lost importance.

Morocco and Egypt were also among those with the most cities for each year, but this has declined over 220 years.

Surprisingly, Congo PDR had none of Africa’s 100 largest cities up to 1950, and then seven of them by 2020. All seven cities were colonial foundations, with many established around mining for diamonds, gold and uranium. Consequently, it is often remarked upon as a country with vast wealth but very high levels of poverty.

Continuity and change

Of the 34 largest cities in Africa in 1800, eight were still in the 100 largest cities in Africa list in 2020, but with a lower rank, except for Cairo and Kano. Nine of the 34 cities were not in the 2020 cities list, but have more than 300,000 inhabitants today. So while cities can go up or down in the rankings, it is rare for them to lose significance altogether.

For instance, Sokoto may have fallen from the second largest city in Africa in 1800 to outside the top 100 in 2020, but it is still a substantial city with more than half a million inhabitants. Similarly, Meknes – Morocco’s capital before it moved to Rabat – fell from third to outside the top 100, but remains significant.

This is also the case for Oyo, Ife and Katsina in Nigeria. Cities that were to become Nigeria’s four largest cities in 2020 – Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt and Abuja – had not even been founded in 1800. Meanwhile, many cities in Northern Africa, including Sokoto and Katsina along with those involved with the trans-Sahara trade, slipped down the rankings as using ships for trade became cheaper and quicker.

Only Cairo had no movement down the rankings, while five cities had drops of 0-50: Kumasi, El Djazaïr (Algiers), Rabat, Tunis and Abomay. Eight fell out of the top 100 cities in 2020, six of which were in Nigeria.

Urban population growth over time

In 1800, Cairo was the largest city in Africa, with 260,000 inhabitants. In 2020, Cairo remained the continent’s largest city but with more than 20 million inhabitants. The 34th largest city in 1800, Kairouan, had 20,000 inhabitants, while the 34th largest city in 2020, Brazzaville, had 2.4 million inhabitants.

Figure 2 shows not only how the average size of Africa’s largest cities changed dramatically from 1800 to 2020, but also how this average size – 2.77 million in 2020 – is relatively small in comparison to the global average of 9.5 million.

Figure 2: Average population of Africa’s largest cities (1800 to 2020)

In 2020, the collective population of Africa’s 100 largest cities was 244 million – comprising just over two-fifths of the continent’s total urban population of 588 million – with cities from 39 different African countries featured in the top 100 list.

Although cities with more than a million inhabitants existed before 1800, they were very rare and none were in Africa. But, by 2020, there were 68 of them, with Cairo becoming the first African “million city” in the 1920s. So, from being very uncommon worldwide, most African countries now have one or more “million cities”.

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Sources: Almost all city and urban population statistics from 1950 onwards come from the UN Population Division’s 2018 World Urbanization Prospects. Almost all city population statistics prior to 1950 come from Chandler, Tertius (1987), Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 656 pages. This blog also draws on Bairoch, Paul (1988), Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, Mansell, London, 574 pages and Freund, Bill (2007), The African City:  A History, Cambridge University Press, 214 pages.

Notes: One limitation in international comparisons of city populations is that definitions of cities vary in how their boundaries are defined. A city’s population can be defined by the historic city boundaries, or boundaries based on the built-up area, or based on a political/administrative boundary, including the boundary of a much larger metropolitan area and perhaps a metropolitan planning region that is even larger. Of course, there are very large differences in city populations and rates of change, depending on which boundaries are used.

The UN Population Division makes a heroic effort to make city population figures more comparable by seeking to get figures for urban agglomerations. Their boundaries are defined as the extent of the contiguous urban area or built-up area. This definition could be applied to 55% of the 1,860 cities in the UN’s most recent World Urbanization Prospects, with the rest being on the city proper (35%) or the metropolitan area (10%).

Ultimately, the UN Population Division is dependent on data provided by UN member states and whatever definitions they use, meaning it is also hampered by the lack of censuses in many nations. Of course, for discussions of historic city populations, there were no censuses to draw on.

For Table 2 and Figures 1 and 2, the figures for 1950 onwards are UN statistics and there were more than 100 African cities. This was not the case for 1800, 1850 and 1900, so all cities with populations estimated to be at least 20,000 inhabitants were included.

Figure 2 overstates the average population of cities in 1950, 2000 and 2020, as it is the average size of cities that had reached 300,000 inhabitants by 2018. Many cities are smaller than this and if included would bring down average populations.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.