According to the Financial Times and the Economist Intelligence Unit, are:
Abidjan, Abuja, Accra, Addis Ababa, Alexandria, Algiers, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Douala, Durban, Johannesburg, Kampala, Khartoum, Kumasi, Lagos, Luanda, Lusaka, Maputo, Mombasa, Nairobi, Tripoli and Tunis.
The data are based on economic strength, rather than population size: if population were the criterion, Kinshasa in the DRC would probably come third after Lagos and Cairo. (A similar list is found in the excellent McKinsey report on cities.
The breakdown of the EIU’s top 25 is interesting. 17 are coastal and only eight are landlocked. Most of the 17 coastal cities have been cities for several hundred years, and some (like Alexandria) go back thousands of years. Of the eight landlocked cities, on the other hand, most have grown up in the last 100 years. Only Kampala, Khartoum and Kumasi predate the colonial era. This is a little surprising, given that the long-term trend in African population is to move from the interior to the coast – initially because of the slave trade, more recently because job opportunities and improving public health (e.g., the control of malaria) make the coastal cities better places to live. Liberia is an extreme case: Monrovia now accounts for between 30 and 35% of Liberia’s population of 4 million, up from maybe 20% in 1990.
Meanwhile this ‘moral and political chart of the inhabited world reveals the ignorance that Europeans had of the African interior less than 200 years. It groups countries into five categories from ‘savage’ to ‘enlightened’. Predictably, Europe is defined as ‘enlightened’ even though in 1820 Europe had just come out of two decades of vicious wars, was only beginning to curtail slavery and was about to embark on colonising Asia and Africa. If we suspend judgement for a moment though, though, the 5-point scale of modern ‘governance indicators’ is not so different: all countries in the world lined up in a trajectory that leads to Sweden.
