This paper is in essence the final chapter of a forthcoming book. It is preceded by a chapter more generally covering the post-colonial city in Africa. I take the view that the real historic break in urban development in Africa took place with the breakdown of modernist planning from the 1970s. Although there are some important exceptions (Algeria, Nasser's Egypt, the ex-Belgian Congo from 1960 and the ex-Portuguese colonies from 1975), there is a lot of continuity between late colonial urban development and that in the early independence …