DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2018.v06i12.009

Pages: 2226-2234

To a large extent, the question of urbanization gained prominence in Africa immediately when there was a big shift from Africans way of life of being a nomadic to Africans that have permanent settlements. Basic necessities of life change the course of history of Africans. With the passage of time, Africans were stable and remain focus by raising their own food, provided material surplus that caters for the feeding of some people with food production. They constructed shelters, weave clothes, and make tools amongst others. The paper through a historical analytical methodology, interrogates major secondary documents to examine how urbanization is not only an evolutionary process of redistributing human population within a given society, but also a way of transforming many patterns of social, economic and political life towards satisfying the development of needs of man. The paper argued that urbanization in Africa brought about emergence of cities which invariably led to both specialization and higher living standards before the arrival of colonial masters. Ironically, the first set of urban revolutionary processes and patterns of African cities development were disrupted during the scramble and partitioning of Africa by the European powers. The paper submits that with the creation of new cities or urban centers by the colonial powers, emerging challenges that arose was that labour was pulled away from the country side to the new urban centers making Africans to live in unsatisfactory conditions prone to illnesses amongst other challenges.