Rural connectivity in Africa: motorcycle track construction

Motorcycle transportation has burgeoned in war-affected West Africa over the past decade. The penetration ofmotorcycle taxis deep into isolated rural communities has spread spontaneously and created direct and indirectemployment opportunities for low-skilled youth, a category most susceptible to militia recruitment. Equallyimportant, it has significantly contributed to lifting smallholder farmers out of poverty by reducing the costs ofmoving produce to markets, with motorcycles able to visit villages connected to feeder roads solely by footpaths.Nevertheless, state actors and international donors remain reluctant to allocate funds to rural track building/upgrading, preferring to stick to more conventional, but expensive, construction/rehabilitation of rural roadsaccessible to four-wheeled vehicles. Through a case study of Liberia – still recovering from two civil wars and an Ebolahealth crisis – this paper argues that the impact of bringing community access through track construction/footpathupgrading is significant, particularly because track construction lends itself par excellence to the involvement of therural communities themselves

Elite compacts in Africa: the role of area-based management in the new governmentality of the Durban city-region

Through reflection on the practical post-apartheid (re)alignment of competing rationalities across the Greater Durban urban region, this essay teases out the interface between traditional and modern settlement management systems, and explores how governance cleavages are being renegotiated and mediated. It is suggested that, in building an integrated method of operating across the fragmented city-regional scale and navigating the competing interests involved, the practice of African urbanism is being defined. Without making any claims for what may or may not be uniquely African city-regional dynamics at the boundaries of tradition and modernity, what is clear from the Durban case is that both conventional city-regional literature and new city-regional ideas have glossed over the complexity of finding solutions to tensions between poor communities, urban managers, elected local authorities and the traditional rural elites of the functional city-regions of Africa