Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

52 PLANET OF SLUMS
commumtles of color. Almost one million people of color were
evicted from supposed "white" areas, and as a result, net urbanization
hardly increased between 1950 (43 percent) and 1990 (48 percent);
indeed, in the 1960s there was a net outflow of Africans from urban
areas.7 Ultimately, however, this ideal of "white cities, black homelands"
collided with the labor-market needs of big capital as well as the
heroic resistance of its victims.
In the subcontinent, the British also segregated and policed the
influx from the countryside. In her brilliant study of the cities of Uttar
Pradesh during the interwar years, Nandini Gooptu chronicles the
unceasing efforts of colonial officials and newly enfranchised native
elites to push the poor to the ities' edges and . beyond. The newfangled
Town Improvement Trusts, in particular, were highly effective
in clearing slums and removing so-called "plague spots" from the interstices
of better residential and commercial areas, and preserving spatial
zoning around colonial and native middle-class areas. Vigorously
enforced "encroachment laws," meanwhile, outlawed both squatting
and street vending.s At the same time, urban economic growth under
the prewar Raj was fitful at best - even Bombay, with its famed entrepreneurial
elites and textile factories, grew slowly, not even doubling its
population in the half-century from 1891 to 1941.
Despite their antipathy to large native urban settlements, the British
were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time. Their policies in
Africa forced the local labor force to live in precarious shantytowns on
the fringes of segregated and restricted cities. In India, Burma, and
Ceylon, their refusal to improve sanitation or provide even the most
minimal infrastructure - to n.ti';e -nighbh;ds sufd hug-death
tolls from early-twentieth-century epidemics (plague, cholera, influenza)
a;;-dcreai:ed llnmenseprobTems-'of-urb-in'squalor that were inherited by
national elites after independence.
The other empires, w th greater or lesser success, also attempted to
restrict and discipline rural migration. With few exceptions, very little
manufacturing or processing value-added was left in colonial ports or
7 Michel Garenne, Urbanization, Poverry and Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa,
Paris 2003, table 1, p. 22.
8 See chapter 3, Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century
India.
THE TREASON OF THE STATE 53
transport hubs to generate formal employment and urban growth.
Ever)7where native labor was consigned to slums and shantytowns. In
-C;;gcleseities, according t;''m his;;, he coi;-ci;l;t ;;aintained
relatively effective urban influx controls and a tentacular
regulatory net around the towns, choking off both petty trade outside
prescribed channels and 'anarchic' housing construction."9
Historian Jean Suret-Canale, meanwhile, reminds us that in tropical
Africa, the French tightly regulated the movements of rural labor while
consigning African town-dwellers to grim peripheries. In colonial
slums like Medina (Dakar), Treichville (Abidjan) and Poto-Poto
(Brazzaville), streets "were nothing but sand or mud alleyways ....
instead of drainage there were only a few sewers, usually open or
crudely covered with flag-stones; there was little or no water, with a
few public pumps where queues waited from early in the morning.
Public lighting was reserved for the European quarters. Overcrowding
created a great hazard to health."lo Indeed, this almost universal refusal
to provide even minimal _ sanitary infrastructures for the "native
quarters" until te 1950. was mQre than stinginess: itpointedly symbolized
the Tack of any native "tight to the city."
--·ButEuropn.-Tciili;·;; -t ili -iy international system of
urban growth control. Although raised to power by peasant revolt,
Asian Stalinism also tried to staunch the influx from the countryside.
Initially the 1949 Chinese Revolution opened city gates to returning
refugees and job-hungry peasant ex-soldiers. The result was an uncontrolled
inundation of the cities: some 14 million people arrived in just
four years.ll Finally, in 1953 the new regime dammed the rural flood
with stringent controls over internal migration. Maoism simultaneously
privileged the urban proletariat - beneficiaries of the " iron rice bowl"
and cradle-to-grave welfare - and tightly constrained urban population
growth through the adoption of a household registration system (hukou)
that tied social citizenship to sedentary membership in a work unit.
9 Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the ZaintJn State,
Madison (WI) 1985, p. 87.
10 Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900-1945, New York
1971, p. 417.
11 On-Kwok Lai, "The Logic of Urban Development and Slum Settlements," in
Aldrich and Sandhu, Housing the Urban Poor, p. 284.