Ife is an exception in the historiography of Medieval West Africa, with an extensive literature about this city during the first half of the second millennium CE. This rich historiography is based on three categories of sources: the archaeological record, an outstanding selection of the material record of ancient Ife usually referred to as 'art' and a large corpus of oral traditions. After about 100 years of research on Ife, the city has taken its place on our shelves and in our imagination, as a walled urban centre of a medieval polity occupying a strategic location on the northern edge of the guinea forest and as an island of scholarship in an otherwise little known medieval world in the Guinea belt. In this paper, I critically reflect on the part of this scholarship that deals with the urban nature, characteristics and chronology of medieval Ife. What do we think we know about Ife as a settlement, and how did such knowledge become part of our shared scientific consciousness? How much of this knowledge is anchored in a reasonable interpretation of the archaeological record? How much of it may, however, be no more than an analogical projection of elements of the early modern and 19th century Yoruba urban landscape onto a medieval context? Such a reflection is, in part, emerging from new archaeological work conducted in 2015, 2016 and 2017 at Ita Yemoo and other sites at the cradle of the Yoruba world.

Starting in the 15th century, the emergence of intercontinental economic exchanges between European companies and African elites as well as the consolidation of the continent's coastal regions as contact zones impacted on the material cultures and the patterns of elite consumption of Atlantic Africa. As in other parts of the world, royal courts were laboratories of the entangled process of aesthetic change brought about by the intensification of global trade: as physically circumscribed spaces where political power is staged through formalised ceremonial codes and is associated with the display of artefacts embodying wealth and distinction, they constitute significant objects to study cross-cultural exchanges.

My paper will explore this field by focussing on the trade of red coral beads to Atlantic Africa and on the transformative appropriation of these objects at the court of Benin. In the Euro-Mediterranean space, coral had been used for centuries to make protective amulets, devotional objects (Christian rosaries, Jewish Torah pointers, Islamic misbaha), artistic artefacts and even medicines. And - since antiquity - it had been exported to various Asian regions. In many aspects, coral was already a multi-layered thing when Portuguese vessels started trading it to Atlantic Africa, where (other kinds of) beads often already held important symbolic functions and where the imported red beads were charged with new meanings. Mediterranean coral acquired a particularly prominent position in the Kingdom of Benin, where it was associated with the monarch (Oba) and his dignitaries and where it became an object of sumptuary norms, mythological traditions, ritual practices and art.

The Yoruba have a strong preference for city life; it is an integral part of their myths and religion. Cities were the location for periodic and annual traditional religious observances and, subsequently, the zone of activities for the spread of Islam and Christianity. In the 19th century, however, Yoruba civil wars put this system under pressure. With the outbreak and spread of wars, refugees and brigands fell on existing villages and towns, inaugurating a chain reaction. While the Yoruba civil wars have received scholarly attention, the changes wrought on cityscapes and city-life have not. Several cities (Owu, Old Oyo, Iwere, etc.) were razed by war. New cities (New Oyo, Ibadan, Abeokuta) emerged and thrived but some, like Ijaye, collapsed shortly after founding. Warlords and brigands, fleeing from their own towns, seized other towns and forced reigning monarchs to make far-reaching administrative and economic concessions. Thus, cities like Ilorin, Iwo, Ile-Ife, Ogbomosho, Ede, and Osogbo, made adjustments to accommodate the influx of refugees and migrants. Towns located along the trade routes, such as Lagos, Ijebu-Ode, and Ondo, also experienced changes. This paper examines political, economic, social, and other changes experienced by these Yoruba towns. It discusses the impact on safety and security, land tenure and use, settlement patterns, architecture, town planning, intergroup relations, indigene-migrant dichotomies, and chieftaincy disputes. Since the city was the center of a kingdom over which a crowned monarch (oba alade) reigned, the paper examines how the wars impacted kingship traditions, legitimacy, power, and seniority among Yoruba obas.

In 1818, the Muslim reformer Aḥmad Lobbo defeated a coalition of Bambara and Fulani soldiers and established a new West African caliphate, in today's Republic of Mali. Among the first decisions he took was the foundation of a new capital city: Ḥamdallāhi - from the Arabic "Praise be to God." The establishment of Ḥamdallāhi reflects the need of the new ruler to settle in a city that had no ties with previous political powers of the region, but also set the norm for a large-scale operation of sedentarization of Fulani nomads, who composed the largest part of Aḥmad Lobbo's supporters. The creation of new urban spaces is peculiar of many of the so-called 19th-century African jihads, such as Sokoto (founded by 'Uthmān b. Fūdī) and Omdurman (founded by the Sudanese Mahdi) among others. However, scholars have so-far neglected such cities, except for Omdurman that is the subject of a monographic study by Robert Kramer (Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman during the Mahdiyya, 1885-1898. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner, 2010). This paper aims at analyzing Ḥamdallāhi from both a symbolic as well as a pragmatic point of view. Symbolic as the city was built to embody the ideal Islamic city, where the tenets of the religion could be performed at their best. At the same time, Ḥamdallāhi was built for pragmatic reasons, i.e. the need to control the nomadic life of the Fulani and put them under the centralized control of the newly emerged caliphate.

City-states emerged early on the East African (or Swahili) littoral. Acting as an interface between the sea and the mainland, the cities' elites managed to channel the sources of power and prestige connected to trade, Islam and urban life. Archaeological remains of palaces, mosques and patrician stone houses built along the coast - from Kilwa in the south to Pate in the north - provide impressive evidence on this behalf. During the nineteenth century, the cities of the Lamu archipelago on the northern Swahili coast witnessed important political conflicts. In their attempt to gain control over the littoral, the Omanis forced a part of the dynastic clan of Pate to leave their city. Fleeing to the adjacent mainland, in 1862 the former rulers of Pate founded a new city: Witu. In a very short time, a few stone buildings - such as a patrician house (the "palace" of the sultan) and a mosque - were erected in the town and the latter was encircled by a stockade. By examining the case of Witu, I analyse how the urban legacies of a city were used in order to re-constitute political power and, more generally, how authority was staged in Swahili urban spaces.

During the 19th century, Antananarivo was the capital of the main Malagasy kingdom, recognized by Western powers. In a few decades, the urban landscape translated deep political changes, becoming more and more distinct from the surrounding rural space. At the core of this cultural and spatial invention, local elites both linked to international trade networks and Christian missions, gradually adopted new ways of inhabiting and living the city from Mascarenes and Europe models. In this communication, I would like to address this material and social turning point, prior to the French colonization, discussing political, architectural and sensorial aspects of the issue.