The 1960 street map of Lagos, Nigeria, shows a small coastal city surrounded by a few semi-rural African villages. Paved roads quickly turn to dirt, and fields to forest. There are few buildings over six floors high and not many cars.
It’s likely no one foresaw what would happen between 1960 and today. In just two generations Lagos grew 100-fold, from fewer than 200,000 people to nearly 20 million. Today it is one of the world’s largest cities, sprawling over nearly 1,000 square kilometers (400 square miles). Vastly wealthy in parts, it is largely chaotic and impoverished. Most residents live in informal settlements, or slums. The great majority of them are not connected to piped water or sanitation. The city’s streets are choked with traffic, its air is full of fumes and it produces more than 10,000 metric tons (11,000 tons) of waste a day.
But new research from Canadian academics, though replete with caveats, suggests that the changes Lagos has seen in the last 60 years may be nothing to what may take place in the next 60 years. If Nigeria’s population continues to grow and people move to cities at the same rate as they are moving today, Lagos could be the largest metropolis the world has ever known, home to up to 100 million people. By 2100 it is projected to have more people than California or Britain today, and to stretch hundreds of miles with enormous environmental effects.
In the 1960s, the Nigerian city of Lagos was home to a few hundred thousand people, many living in modest circumstances. Today gleaming skyscrapers dominate the view, and the population has soared to nearly 20 million. Photos courtesy of The National Archives UK (left) and © iStockphoto.com | peeterv (right)
Hundreds of far smaller cities across Asia and Africa could also grow exponentially, say the Canadian demographers Daniel Hoornweg and Kevin Pope at the Ontario Institute of Technology. They suggest that Niamey, the barely known capital of Niger — a west African country with the highest birth rate in the world — could explode from a city of around 1 million people today to be the world’s seventh largest city with 56 million people in 2100. Sleepy Blantyre in southern Malawi could mushroom to the size of New York City today.
Under the researchers’ extreme scenario, where fertility rates remain high and urbanization continues apace, within 35 years over 100 world cities will have populations larger than 5.5 million people. By 2100, say the authors, the world’s population centers will have shifted to Asia and Africa with only 14 of the 101 largest cities then in Europe or the Americas.
Cities in the Global South are growing much faster than they did in industrialized countries 100 or more years ago for several reasons. Fewer children now die young. Migration from rural areas is speeding up because there’s less new farmland to be opened up. Many countries encourage urbanization to grow their economies. As a result, cities today are being challenged to keep pace with the largest wave of urban growth in history and the need to provide water, sanitation and power to all those people.
It’s impossible to know how cities will grow, but the stark fact, according to the United Nations, is that humanity is young, fertile and increasingly urban. The median age of Nigeria is just 18, and of all Africa’s 54 countries is under 20. The fertility rate of the continent’s 500 million women is 4.4 births; meanwhile, 50 percent of India’s population is under age 25, and Latin America’s average age is just 29.
Recent U.N. projections expect the world’s population to grow by 2.9 billion — nearly that of China and India today — in the next 33 years and possibly by a further 3 billion by the end of the century. By then, says the U.N., humanity is expected to have developed into an almost exclusively urban species with 80 to 90 percent of people living in urban areas.
The Canadian researchers observe that urbanization can have environmental benefits in the form of economies of scale; that it is associated with better access to education and health care; and that it can boost the economy. But they also note that cities can become more vulnerable as they grow. And, says Robert Muggah, research director of the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, a global think tank, urbanization can rapidly outpace society’s capacity to accommodate it.
“Cities are generating a challenge on a level never seen before.” — Robert Muggah
“Many fast-growing cities urbanize before they industrialize,” Muggah says. “It took centuries for cities in the Global North to do this. In the south we are seeing a doubling of population in 25 years. Most cities [today] don’t have the infrastructure, employment base or productivity to manage this growth. You see a maze of informal settlements, completely overloaded infrastructure. Cities are generating a challenge on a resource level never seen before. The fastest growing cities may be hit the hardest.”
Whether the world’s major cities develop into endless, chaotic slums, with unbreathable air, uncontrolled emissions, and impoverished populations starved of food and water, or become truly sustainable depends on economies, technology and how they respond to population growth and environmental risk.
Click on year to see the predicted populations. Source: Hoornweg, D., and Pope, K. 2016. Population predictions for the world’s largest cities in the 21st century. Environment and Urbanization 29(1):195–216.
While many economists argue that population growth is needed to create wealth and that urbanization reduces environmental impact, others fear cities are becoming ungovernable and too unwieldy to adapt fast enough to rising temperatures and sea levels, pollution, water shortages, and ill health of inhabitants.
Will mega-cities be part of the problem — or the solution? What can they do to maximize the benefits of urbanization while minimizing the downsides? This look at seven cities on five continents, each at a different stage of development, can shed valuable light on what it might take to do it right.
“This city was renowned for its trees, lakes and pleasant air only 25 years ago. Now it’s a dead city that has sacrificed its environment for some of the fastest economic growth seen anywhere in the world,” says T.V. Ramachandra, head of the Energy and Wetlands Research Group at the Indian Institute of Science.
Ramachandra and colleague Bharath H. Aithal have documented the environmental effects of breakneck urban growth. “Temperature in the city has increased by 2 to 2.5 °C [3.6 to 4.5 °F] and now reaches 38 to 40 °C [100 to 104 °F]. The water table has declined from 28 meters [92 feet] to 300 meters [984 feet] deep in places; there has been an 88 percent decline in vegetation, a 79 percent decline in wetlands. There is now frequent flooding, even during normal rainfall.”
Ramachandra fears that what has happened to Bangalore will happen to all Indian cities.
Satellite photos taken 15 years apart show how houses and businesses have replaced wetlands and other open spaces in Bangalore. Images created from Google Earth Historical Imagery.
“Air pollution is at dangerous levels, the water is polluted, there is nowhere for the waste to go, and the lakes have been killed,” he says. “The situation is very worrying. People are moving out. Illnesses are increasing. At this rate every house will need a dialysis machine. Bangalore cannot continue like this. It is becoming an unlivable city. This is the worst city in the world for unchecked urbanization.”
India, which is widely expected to be the most populous country in the world with over 1.5 billion people by 2050, is projected by government to see its urban population double to nearly 600 million in 30 years. Its megacities, like Mumbai and Delhi, are not expected to grow much more; instead, smaller cities are rapidly expanding.
The environmental cost is huge. India’s air pollution is now as bad as China’s, with 1.1 million people dying prematurely in 2015 alone from poor air quality linked to the hyperdevelopment taking place in many cities. And the “frenzy of unplanned urbanization has divided people and wrecked nature,” says Prerna Bindra, author of The Vanishing: India’s Wildlife Crisis, a new analysis of the effect of urbanization and economic growth on India’s rich wildlife.
“In 20 years the area covered by Indian cities has expanded by a whopping 250 percent … and in the next 15, over 300 million people will be crowding urban India,” Bindra says. “Wetlands, lakes, green spaces are giving way to glass and concrete. The retreat of natural habitats has meant the rapid decline of urban wildlife, even the once ubiquitous: house sparrows or bullfrogs and common toads that serenaded the monsoons; or jackals, once not a very uncommon sight on urban fringes.” Wildlife sanctuaries and national parks are being decimated to make way for roads, housing and industry.
As Bangalore expands into natural spaces, wild animals are increasingly injured, killed or crowded out. Photo courtesy of People for Animals Bangalore | YouTube
In the past 30 years numerous citizen groups and nongovernmental organizations have been established to promote more sustainable development, including improving solid waste management policy, advancing mass transit and promoting urban green spaces. India’s dash for urbanization is lifting people from poverty, but the toll on forests, wetlands and the natural world is vast.
Pierre Sass moved to Kinshasa in the 1990s. Like thousands of young men, he came looking for work, rented an overcrowded room on the edge of the city and, four years later, bought his own plot of land. Today, the edge of the city is 3 miles (5 kilometers) away and he has built his own two-room house for himself, his wife and three children. He has electricity but no water or sewerage.
Kinshasa had around 20,000 people in 1920. By 1940 it was home to about 450,000 people. Today it has possibly 12 million and is predicted to be in the neighborhood of 50 million by 2075. A sprawling megalopolis, it’s ringed by vast shantytowns of informal settlements.
Already expanding rapidly into fertile agricultural land on its outskirts, Kinshasa is expected to be the world’s largest city in 2075. Photo courtesy of FredR (Flickr | Creative Commons)
“When you go to there today you see disarray and congestion,” says Somik Lall, the World Bank’s lead economist for urban development in Africa. “Yes, it will be one of the biggest cities in Africa by 2050 but I do not think it is the model for future Africa, nor do I think it will have a population of 70 million.”
Predicted Population 2050
Societies change and develop, Lall says, and Africa is urbanizing fast, offering huge economic opportunities as well as new risks for political instability and extreme poverty. “The big question is the economic growth not keeping up with population growth in cities as it did in Asia, Europe and the U.S. when they industrialized. What seems to be happening in Africa is that it is triggering only small-scale informal trading [as opposed to global commerce]. People coming to cities like Kinshasa are not adding economic benefit. The problem is not enough investment is being made in the infrastructure of African cities. It’s only about 10 percent of GDP, whereas in East Asia it is 40 to 50 percent.”
By 2100, about 40 percent of all humans and nearly half of all children in the world will be African, heralding one of the fastest and most radical demographic changes in history. The continent’s population is now roughly 1.2 billion but will soar to more than 4 billion by 2100.
It is bound to be a messy transition, Lall says. “But I am not worried about the grime and dirt so much. That comes later. We mix up wanting a city to be productive and be pretty. I want to make sure people get a good job.”
In Kinshasa, as in other booming African cities, the number of people is increasing faster than the economic growth required to feed and house them all. © iStockphoto.com | guenterguni
But Kinshasa’s current condition is not necessarily indicative of its future status, Lall points out. “There’s no way to say what cities will look like in 2100. Seoul in 1980 could never have predicted how it is today. It was a grimy, dirty industrial city. Africa has a young labor force. Places like Kinshasa are some of the most dynamic places in the world.”
Tan Huang is 24 years old and bewildered. After years living away from Guiyang, she returned last year from Germany to the formerly small provincial capital to find it had become China’s fastest-growing city and completely unrecognizable.
The fields her grandparents worked, once over 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the small city center, are now covered with closely packed high-rise housing estates and office towers. Her family members live on the eighth floor of a block of apartments in a new zone. They look over shopping malls and ring roads. Former slums have been razed, farmland converted, rivers diverted and forests felled.
“Even the hills look different. I was really shocked. The city stretches so far. It is like a new world where I know no one and nothing,” she says.
China’s fastest-growing city, Guiyang is working hard to rectify the legacy of air and water pollution past urbanization has created. Photo courtesy of tak.wing (Flickr | Creative Commons)
The scale and speed of China’s shift to cities is shocking — possibly the fastest and largest migration of a human population in history. In just 30 years, nearly 500 million people have moved from rural areas into China’s 622 main cities, and a predominantly rural country has become nearly 60 percent urban. By 2030, over 1 billion Chinese — two in three people — will live in cities.
Guiyang has few slums and little sprawl, and its growth has been ordered. But urbanization has been an ecological disaster that will take generations to rectify. In the early days, pollution turned the Nanming River black and stinking. Air pollution was allowed to continue unchecked, carbon dioxide emissions rocketed from coal-fired industry, forests were felled and soil was contaminated on a massive scale.
Today the city is still growing at breakneck speed, but authorities are trying to rectify mistakes. It has worked to clean up the Nanming River and has implemented numerous measures to reduce air pollution.
The environmental impact of China’s breakneck urbanization extends beyond the country’s borders, devastating vast areas of Africa and Latin America.
“Rapid urbanization was encouraged. It was the way China grew its economy,” says Gordon McGranahan, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the U.K., who specializes in urbanization in China, India, Brazil and South Africa. “China used cities to generate growth and land to generate investment. It had to bring people to the cities, it experimented with converting land to urban areas. Its cities were critical to its growth. No one paid much attention to the environment until it hit them in the face.”
The environmental impact of China’s breakneck urbanization extends beyond the country’s borders, devastating vast areas of Africa and Latin America where China turned for the raw materials for its industrial revolution. China is now by far the world’s largest consumer of cement, metal ores, industrial minerals, fossil fuels and biomass. It consumes nearly half the world’s coal and a third of its oil and minerals. The result has been severe forest loss and pollution in countries from Gabon to Tanzania and Ecuador.
Click on year to see migration flows. Adapted from Chan, K.W. 2008. Internal labor migration in China: trends, geographical distribution and policies (unpublished presentation) and Chan, K.W. 2012. Migration and development in China: trends, geography and current issues, Migration and Development 1(2): 187–205.
By 2025 China expects to have over 220 cities with a population of at least 1 million. Small cities are merging and megacities like Shanghai and Beijing, which have exploded to over 20 million people each in a few decades, will not be allowed to grow further. Both have plans to cap their size by 2020.
Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping intends to build one of the largest new cities on Earth. Xiongan New Area, 60 miles south of Beijing, is expected to eventually house many millions of people and be roughly three times the size of New York City. According to the Chinese government it will “curb urban sprawl and protect ecology” as China’s population grows. It is, say the authorities, going to be a “smart city,” run entirely on renewable energy with its people connected, its air relatively free from industrial pollution and its transport close to all-electric.
Priscilla Connolly, professor of urban sociology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, has lived in Mexico City since the 1970s. In that time, she has seen it triple in size into one of the world’s five largest cities.
“No one expected Mexico City to grow so much,” she says. “But for years it was thought that the more people who lived there the better. There was a pro-population policy. Now the city has stopped growing and medium size cities are growing fastest.”
The city is still vastly overcrowded, massively polluted and predominantly poor. That said, it shows that rapid change can be controlled, and that urbanization has its benefits.
“There has been progress in so many ways,” Connolly says. “Most people can read and are housed. They don’t expect to die at 5. All in all it’s been a successful transition, though fraught with future environmental risk.”
Fast-growing cities in Africa and Asia could learn from Mexico City’s mistakes. They cannot just be designed around the car but must take account of a changing climate, flooding and air pollution, Connolly says.
“Water will be the crunch issue in Mexico City. Will there be enough water? Probably not,” Connolly says. “People will have to reduce consumption. Cities must think about the whole water cycle. In 50 years’ time wastewater will be like gold.”
The shantytowns and informal settlements that ringed Mexico City in the 1970s are now being upgraded. However, environmental issues are still not high on the agenda, and the city has a semipermanent water crisis as a growing population depletes aquifers, a sinking surface alters the city’s capacity to move water, and climate change drives freshwater supply down and demand up.
Poor El Alto is a satellite city overlooking rich La Paz from the high altiplano. In 1952 it was little more than a village. In 1960 it had fewer than 30,000 people. Now it has exploded into a metropolis with close to 1 million or more people living in the rarified air 4,100 meters (13,600 feet) above sea level.
High in the mountains of Bolivia, El Alto offers a hopeful model for coupling growth in both population and prosperity. Photo © Alamy.com | Ashley Cooper pics
Hundreds of thousands of people, including Mario Mamani, have flooded in over the last decade. Mamani and his family came from Pinaya village high in the Andes, below the great snowcapped Illimani mountain nearly 10 years ago. He wanted work, and frequent droughts, erratic rainfall, heat waves, unseasonal frosts and floods had made conditions too hard to grow crops.
Predicted Population 2050
El Alto is a city in progress, he says, starting to prosper as industry and its economy develop. It is also a model of how to build from scratch in a bleak environment with few resources. Latin America is now the world’s most urbanized continent with 80 percent of people living in towns and cities. And El Alto has already outgrown La Paz itself.
“Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay led the urbanization of Latin America. But we are still trying to understand the implications of its effect on the environment,” says urban researcher Fernando Aragón -Durand, a lead author for the IPCC special report on meeting the United Nations’ 1.5°C temperature target.
Showing both community pride and panache on a city cleanup day, these youths portend a promising future for El Alto. Photo © Alamy.com | Westend61 GmbH
According to Aragón-Durand, cities not only bring people face to face with the brunt of the impacts of climate change, they also contribute to it.
“Urbanization creates the conditions for vulnerable people to be exposed to floods, droughts, hurricanes,” he says. “Cities create climate change. The more people live in a city, the more pollutants are emitted. The relationship between climate change and urbanization is misunderstood. Climate change is seen only as an environmental and energy issue, not related to urbanization.”
But, Aragón-Durand adds, cities are also an important part of the solution. “It is from them that the solutions will emerge — mitigation and adaptation,” he says. “Cities are the key players in tackling good practice.”
European cities are some of the world’s richest, and most are expected to barely grow or even shrink over the next 50 years. Declining birth rates, aging populations and good infrastructure allow many to now focus on the environment.
But they are some of the world’s biggest consumers of energy and resources and producers of emissions. This, says Copenhagen lord mayor Frank Jensen, imposes on them an ethical duty to change.
A swimmable harbor rimmed by wind turbines and bicycle-friendly streets epitomizes Copenhagen’s aspiration to be a global leader in sustainability. Photo courtesy of CucombreLibre (Flickr | Creative Commons)
“Today our harbor is so clean we can swim in the water, and 62 percent of Copenhageners ride their bike to work or school every day,” he says. “I want Copenhagen to maintain and further develop this position as a green and livable city. We have set the very ambitious goal of becoming the world’s first carbon neutral capital by 2025. We are already well on our way; CO2 emissions are down by 50 percent since 1995. We will become carbon neutral with a green transition of our energy production, energy consumption and mobility.”
Jensen’s plan is to make Copenhagen even greener, more livable and more bicycle-friendly. “This would mean building even more bicycle lanes and new bridges to make even more Copenhageners choose the bike over the car,” he says.
Jensen thinks city governments are more adaptable and quicker to act than higher levels of government. He envisages them exchanging ideas and initiatives with clusters like C40 Cities, an international forum for mayors to meet and develop new ideas to solve environmental problems.
In Europe, where one in four people is age 60 or older — a figure expected to rise to 35 percent by 2050 and to 36 percent in 2100 — the city is the future for both individual and the planet, he suggests. “By sharing our best ideas and solutions, we can go from great solutions locally to brilliant advances globally. Cities therefore play a key role in ensuring a more sustainable future, and we can and will lead the way for national governments to push forward the green agenda.”
The danger is inequality, he says. “I fear that Copenhagen can end up like London or Paris, which now are cities almost exclusively for wealthy people. For me, it is vital to make sure that Copenhagen remains a city for all. I don’t want a segregated city divided into wealthy and poor neighborhoods. Therefore, my main priorities are affordable housing, high-quality public schools, clean air and a high-quality everyday life for all Copenhageners.”
What happens in cities, says Mark Watts, executive director of C40, will determine the world’s environment in the coming century. “Together they consume close to two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. As cities develop, their exposure to climate and disaster risk also increases. Almost half a billion urban residents live in coastal areas, increasing their vulnerability to storm surges and sea level rise. With more than 80 percent of global GDP generated in cities, urbanization can contribute to sustainable growth if managed well by increasing productivity, allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge.”
Believe the graphics and the spreadsheets, and Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, will by 2040 be a cross between Singapore and Dallas. The city master plan, drawn up by Asian and Australian architects in 2013, suggests its many slums will be cleared, new financial and university districts will be built and there will be a new airport, ring roads, gleaming high-rise towers, urban farms, pleasant parks and good housing for hundreds of thousands of people.
Four years on, the plan is still a fantasy. The international investors have failed largely to come to the world’s 20th poorest country. The roads and public transport are not built. There are persistent water shortages, power cuts and gridlock. People are being evicted from city center markets and slums to make room for development, but Kigali is still a desperately poor capital city.
Though a 2013 master makeover plan envisions gleaming high-rises and pleasant parks for Kigali, many residents of Rwanda’s capital city remain desperately poor. Photo courtesy of Francisco Anzola (Flickr | Creative Commons)
The idea of investing heavily in ambitious makeovers has attracted many African governments. Accra, Lagos, Kinshasa, Entebbe, Nairobi and a dozen other sub-Saharan African cities all have plans to attract their rich and middle classes to shiny new satellite cities and districts.
“Sub-Saharan Africa’s population could well double in 50 years,” says Vanessa Watson, professor of city and regional planning at the University of Cape Town University in South Africa and a lead consultant for U.N. Habitat’s Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009. It’s the smaller cities rather than the biggest which are growing fastest.”
Watson fears that state spending on infrastructure for African cities is being skewed toward ambitious new developments and satellite cities for the middle class.
“Many African cities are coming together, spreading outwards. There’s nothing to stop them growing. People who want a foothold in the city just come to the peripheries,” she says.
Watson fears that state spending on infrastructure for African cities is being skewed toward ambitious new developments and satellite cities for the middle class as proposed by international developers rather than going to poorer areas where people are being evicted from well-located inner city areas.
This is leading to environmental devastation and inequality, she says. “Cities in Africa have been deprived of state investment. The wealth of many countries has been directed abroad. Many governments, like in Kenya and Zimbabwe, have been anti-urban for political reasons because their political parties have rural bases. Rwanda and Ethiopia alone are controlling urban populations, by destroying slums and moving people to smaller towns.”
HelpAge International. Global AgeWatch Index 2015
Projections for African cities suggest they will explode. Sixty percent of Africans are under age 24, and hundreds of smaller cities are seeing population growth of 3.5 percent a year or more, doubling in size about every 20 years.
Her recommendation: “African cities must learn that they cannot become sustainable by building roads. They must embrace public transport and not cars. They must find their own model and not try to reproduce what European cities [did], which were built on vast capital and centuries of slow growth. If not, there is a bleak future of growing inequality, and massive environmental damage.”
Humanity is now an urban species. The slow drift from rural areas to U.S. and European cities in the 18th and 19th century has become an unprecedented worldwide tsunami. Western cities took the world to the brink of ecological disaster as they grew by paying little heed to pollution, waste and climate emissions. Now, developing countries must avoid their mistakes and find better ways to make the urban transition.
It will be the biggest task they may ever face.
Indeed, what happens to them will ultimately determine the global environment and the quality of life of most of the world’s projected 11 billion people. Many are already investing in clean transport and water, sewage, renewable energy, planning, well-being and good housing for all. Others face what seem like insurmountable problems and will need help and leadership.
In closing their report, the Canadian researchers issue a call to begin planning and developing skills to manage megacities. “Efforts to improve city governance and urban management are urgently needed, especially in regions where current levels of service provision are already poor, yet cities are expected to grow markedly,” they write.
Get urbanization right, and there is real hope that climate change can be controlled and people’s health improved. But get future cities wrong, and the consequences will be a diminished, polluted world for everyone. The choices made today will determine whether cities are ultimately the problem — or the solution.
UPDATED 03.22.18: The doubling rate for some smaller African cities was updated to about every 20 years.
Edge is the multimedia storytelling platform of Ensia, an independent, nonprofit magazine presenting new perspectives on environmental challenges and solutions to a global audience.
Story – John Vidal
John Vidal was environment editor of the Guardian for 27 years. Based mainly in London, he has reported on climate change and international environmental issues from over 100 countries. He is the author of McDonald’s, Burger Culture on Trial.
Opening Spread Photo Credits
Introduction: © iStockphoto.com | martinhosmart • Bangalore: © iStockphoto.com | Rklfoto • Kinshasa: © iStockphoto.com | violettenlandungoy • Guiyang: Photo courtesy of Andreas Weigend • Mexico City: © iStockphoto.com | Alija • El Alto: Photo courtesy of The World Bank Photo Collection • Copenhagen: Photo courtesy of Tony Webster • Kigali: Photo courtesy of Brian Harries • Conclusion: © iStockphoto.com | GoodLifeStudio
Mexico City Aerial Footage
Web Development – Dustin Carlson
Dustin Carlson is Ensia’s lead web developer.
Photo Research & Graphic Design – Sean Quinn
Sean Quinn is Ensia’s graphic designer.
Editing and Project Management – Mary Hoff
Mary Hoff is Ensia’s editor in chief.
Project Oversight – Todd Reubold
Todd Reubold is Ensia’s publisher, director and co-founder.
Proofreading – David Doody
David Doody is Ensia’s senior editor.
Fact Checking – Andrew Urevig
Andrew Urevig is Ensia’s communications assistant.
Published January 19, 2018
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IN LATE AUGUST 1619, a year and a few days before the arrival of the Mayflower, around 20 Africans from the ship White Lion were sold in Jamestown colony; their arrival was duly recorded by John Rolfe (of Pocahontas fame), the colony’s registrar. They were not the first Africans in what would become the United States, but they (and the hundreds of thousands of Africans who followed) brought with them, in their heads and hands, knowledge and skills that transformed the food of the nascent nation. Their position, and that of their descendants, at the bottom of the established pecking order placed them at the working epicenter of nation-building—and meant that, over the intervening four centuries, their influence in culinary life, agriculture, animal husbandry, brewing, and distilling would create a lasting culinary legacy that is often overlooked.
Establishing a chronology of labor is difficult, but the first work that was done was probably agricultural and domestic, with the newly arrived working in the fields alongside indentured whites. Angolan-born Antonio, one of the original group of Africans, served a term of indenture and became a farmer and a sizeable landowner. Through the work of Antonio and those like him, farming would be transformed by ideas, such as the careful planting of crops, that were a part of African and Native peoples’ traditions. The crops produced from their methods yielded almost five times as much as the scattered-seed method that was common in Europe.
Agricultural practices from the African continent prevailed in many areas, but in none as much as in the cultivation of rice in the Carolina Low Country. From early years, the expertise of enslaved Africans who were from the rice-growing regions of West Africa—Senegambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—created extraordinary wealth for the Carolina colony. The Carolina Gold seed itself may have arrived from Madagascar. Other ideas ranging from crop rotation to systems of planting also were transmitted. Crops from Africa like okra, watermelon, black-eyed peas, sorghum, coffee, kola nuts, and sesame were brought across the Atlantic and became staples of the American diet, especially in the South. Some crops, like peanuts, arrived from other parts of the hemisphere via the African slave trade.
Recent studies suggest that not only plants but also animals may share African genesis. The celebrated Texas Longhorn cattle, long thought to be a mix of Criollo and European cattle, actually contain DNA of Fulani cattle from West Africa, and descendants of enslaved Fulani herdsmen were some of the nation’s first cowboys. Indeed, by the end of the Civil War, fully 1 in 4 cowboys was Black.
Agriculture and animal management were not the only areas influenced by Africa and its descendants; the very taste of the new nation was given an African tinge by the myriad African American cooks who toiled in its taverns and kitchens. When many of the founding fathers sat to table, their meals were prepared by Black cooks and served by Black hands. Washington’s chef, Hercules; Jefferson’s chef, James Hemings; and unknown cooks for the signatories of the Declaration of Independence brought African American culinary know-how to the highest levels of the profession. In Star-Spangled Manners, Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, goes so far as to suggest that the very nature of America’s much-vaunted Southern hospitality owes more to African customs than European ones.
The scope of influence of African Americans in the beverage industry is still being uncovered, but already findings indicate that in the Colonial and Federal periods, a significant number worked in taverns as servers and were functioning as master brewers, as with Peter Hemings, James’ brother, who occupied that position at Monticello. Nathan “Nearest” Green, who was born enslaved, was the distiller who taught his craft to Jack Daniel. As it was a branch of the service industry, many of the country’s early bartenders were Black, and before Prohibition, most of the bartenders in Washington, D.C., were Black, even founding the Black Mixologists Club, a professional organization. Tom Bullock, who tended bar in St. Louis, wrote The Ideal Bartender in 1917, the first such tome penned by an African American—and one that became a bible for mixologists leading the craft cocktail revolution a century later.
Food also offered a range of possibilities for those with an entrepreneurial bent. Women in Gordonsville, Virginia, saw a market for selling food to passengers on the railroads that crossed the town: They sold fried chicken and baked goods through the train windows to hungry passengers. In 19th-century Philadelphia, Robert Bogle established a group of Black caterers who offered their services to the city’s well-to-do. Around the country, African American street vendors hawked everything from New Orleans calas (rice fritters) to pig’s feet in Harlem. African American eateries large and small have fed all Americans for centuries, from Providence’s first ale and oyster house, opened by Emmanuel Bernoon in 1736, to Edouardo Jordan and Mashama Bailey’s restaurants earning James Beard Awards today.
African Americans have toiled in every aspect of the country’s food—growing it, selling it, serving it, and creating and offering the beverages to accompany it. It’s a 400-year history that is only now in the 21st century being fully understood, researched, and told. It’s about time. —Jessica B. Harris, professor emerita at Queens College, is a culinary historian, consultant, and cookbook author specializing in the food of Africa and its diaspora.
Top left: An early bottle of Jack Daniel’s; the formerly enslaved Nathan “Nearest” Green was the first master distiller at Jack Daniel’s and the first Black master distiller on record in the U.S. Top right: This sort of rice mortar and pestle would have been used by enslaved Africans to hull rice in a West African technique. Bottom left: Fanner baskets, used across the Low Country to winnow rice, are a technology brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Bottom right: This Victorian oyster fork is similar to what might have been used in Thomas Downing’s luxurious Lower Manhattan oyster cellar. Many thanks to the Museum of Food and Drink in New York City, whose exhibit African/American: Making the Nation’s Table opens April 3. For details, visit mofad.org.
A WARM VAT OF RICE sitting on the stovetop is a family’s diagram of prosperity. Scorched-bottom silver pots chart out things you need to know about a brood. The engraved scratches are a remembrance of times of abundance and lack; a Tupperware canister front and center on the countertop is an allegorical sign of having more than you need.
Chef Joseph “JJ” Johnson’s culinary journey took him from fine-dining kitchen brigades to dreaming up FieldTrip, his newest restaurant. His fast-casual rice bowl shop sits in the cradle of Black life—Harlem, USA—offering items like fragrant Carolina Gold rice with barbecue-tinged proteins. His late Puerto Rican maternal grandmother inspired his asopao, a comforting chicken and rice dish, and the only difference is that he cooks his grains before combining the spice and poultry. His grandma Iris’ one-pot method turned out perfect, always.
East and west, north and south, the heart connects to the foot. From enslaved Africans cultivating in the Low Country in South Carolina and Georgia—the ancestors of today’s Gullah Geechee people—to Johnson’s eatery in Harlem, rice is a thread that connects generations of African American kitchens. When the Instant Pot hums or a chef’s culinary voice sings, ancestors are honored. All is well when the electric cord stays plugged into the home. —Nicole A. Taylor is the executive food editor at Thrillist.
At his Harlem restaurant, FieldTrip, JJ Johnson celebrates the place of rice in cuisines around the world with a menu built upon heirloom strains. “Rice is culture,” Johnson says, from the Carolina Gold rice on the menu, which was a pillar of the pre–Civil War economy and was cultivated by enslaved Africans, to the white rice in his grandmother’s brothy asopao.
Get the Recipe: Asopao
AT THE ONSET of the 19th century in New York City, working in the oyster business was commonplace for many African Americans. In 1810, the New York City directory listed 27 oystermen; 16 were Black. When Thomas Downing showed up in 1819, he arrived with deep knowledge of regional fish and bivalves. His hustle muscle and business acumen were also very much intact.
Downing was also an abolitionist, caterer, and entrepreneur. Born to free Black parents and raised along the eastern shore of Virginia, he was adept in Atlantic waters. Less than 10 years after arriving in New York, he opened an oyster restaurant at 5 Broad Street in Manhattan. Like it is today, Broad Street was in a bustling financial district teeming with bankers, traders, and people of means. Unlike the more humble oyster cellars of the day, his space was adorned with a chandelier, fine carpet, and curtains, distinguishing Downing from not only his fellow Black oystermen but also the entire industry. In those days, oysters were so abundant that all you could eat could be had for just six cents. By 1842, oysters swelled to a $6 million industry catering to the elite, and Downing grew wealthy.
Respected by his financial and political clientele, Downing leveraged his social and monetary capital as an abolitionist. He harbored refugees from slavery in his cellars. For Downing, the oyster business, and more broadly the catering business, was about freedom. In 1836, he helped found the United Anti-Slavery Society of the City of New York and campaigned for equitable voting rights.
For today’s Black chefs, Downing’s legacy is living history. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2018, 17% of chefs and head cooks were Black, about five percentage points higher than their representation in the entire workforce. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of Black-owned eating and drinking establishments increased by nearly 50%, according to the National Restaurant Association.
Though these numbers suggest broader participation in culinary arts among Black chefs, these chefs are part of a long lineage of independent culinary professionals who’ve taken what was once considered undesirable work and transformed it into a means of income and influence. Though industrialization and the Great Migration of the 20th century took many African Americans out of the kitchen, they are now returning to the industry. Chefs like Ashleigh Shanti, BJ Dennis, and Edouardo Jordan are bringing their full selves and history into their work. Their talents continue to unfold, each beautiful morsel a full-flavored reclamation of a centuries-old story. —Stephen Satterfield is an editor and cofounder of Whetstone Magazine.
A F&W Best New Chef in 2016, Edouardo Jordan explores the African and African American roots of Southern cuisine at his restaurants—JuneBaby, Salare, and Lucinda Grain Bar—in Seattle. In this recipe, he uses pikliz, a spicy, vinegary cabbage slaw from Haiti, to top oysters on the half shell.
Get the Recipe: Oysters with Pikliz
IN COLONIAL AMERICA, beef cows were herded by enslaved men, many of whom had been born in cattle-raising areas of West Africa. They brought with them skills inherited from several thousand years of cattle-raising. In the Carolinas, they were known as cow hunters. These men rounded up the animals to secure in the cow pens at night, managed the herd, and butchered stock to be sold. Then as now, beef was an important commodity: Beef, salted in casks, was a significant part of trade to Caribbean sugar plantations, while cattle on the hoof were regularly herded to markets in urban centers.
Before the Civil War, cattle ranching moved ever westward into Texas and New Mexico, and after the war, 25% of American cowboys were Black men. That’s 1 in 4 cowboys—men like Nat Love, Bass Reeves, and Bill Pickett—driving cattle on the two- to three-month journey along the Shawnee Trail, the Chisholm Trail, and the Goodnight-Loving Trail, bringing beef to northern shipping points in Kansas and beyond.
Black cooks also prepared and served beef, laying the foundations of American cuisine. All along the mid-Atlantic by the late 18th century, skilled plantation cooks had adapted English styles of beef cookery to the tastes of the dining elite. The 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-Wife listed no fewer than 18 beef recipes enslaved cooks were skilled at producing. Today, at The Grey in Savannah, Georgia, chef Mashama Bailey articulates this layered legacy in her braised beef shank recipe, flavored with peanut butter and coffee. —Leni Sorensen is a scholar and culinary historian in Crozet, Virginia.
Chef Mashama Bailey, chef-owner of The Grey in Savannah, Georgia (a 2019 F&W World’s Best Restaurant), nods to the layered story of beef in America by incorporating flavors and techniques that are part of this country’s African American culinary legacy. A dusting of ground peanuts finishes the dish, and peanut butter is swirled into the delectable sauce.
Get the Recipe: Glazed Beef Shanks with Coffee and Peanuts
TO MARK THE SHIFT CHANGE between meal services at Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, chef de cuisine Ashleigh Shanti leads her team in a focused but relaxed round of ingredient prep. Sometimes they pick crabmeat. Other times, they snap green beans. But often, usually, they strip collards. “We all do it together,” she says of the time they carve out to mentally reset for the evening ahead. It’s part of Shanti’s appreciation for tedious but crucial labor: “It reminds me of my aunt [and] my grandmother, just doing that one thing together.” With collards, it’s not just how you stew, sauté, or season them that matters. The essence of the dish comes forth in its making.
At Benne, the year-old restaurant celebrated for its deferential yet creative approach to telling a Black Appalachian food story, collard greens play sideman—but never second fiddle. They appear in Shanti’s collard green and shaved fennel salad, a raw application that Shanti says goes overlooked too regularly. They are traditionally stewed and served in their potlikker. Shanti often dries the leaves like “hanging britches” on a clothesline, taking a cue from her grandmother, who gave garlic and dragon beans the same treatment. She rehydrates them with buttermilk, cooks them down, and calls the side Buttermilk Britches in homage. Other uses of the brittle iteration get ground to a powder as part of the restaurant’s house seasoning blend with benne seed, mushroom powder, kitchen pepper, Maldon salt, and brown sugar.
African American culture has historically been obscured from how this region is presented, but its influence has been tangible for centuries. On the dining room wall, four prominent portraits of African American women hold court. They are Hanan Shabazz, Mary Jo Johnson, Earlene McQueen, and Mary Frances Hutchinson, all restaurateurs from decades past who fed the historic Black neighborhood The Block, where Benne on Eagle makes its home today. “Collards have shown up on all their menus at some point,” Shanti says of the women whose faces she can see from the open kitchen. “Collards are a dish that everyone in the community loved and can still relate to.” —Osayi Endolyn is a James Beard Award–winning writer living in Gainesville, Florida.
When they arrived in the United States, enslaved Africans embraced collards, a Northern European green, and brought to American soil the technique of stewing them in potlikker to absolute tenderness. At Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, chef Ashleigh Shanti thinly slices the leafy greens for a salad with fennel and crispy plantains.
Get the Recipe: Collard and Fennel Salad with Crispy Plantains
THE HISTORY OF ARACHIS HYPOGAEA, the peanut, originally domesticated in South America, became extremely Black almost immediately upon its introduction to West and Central Africa in the 1500s, during the early period of the transatlantic slave trade. The peanut was kissing cousin to the Bamana groundnut, a native edible that also produced shelled legumes in the ground. More prolific and versatile, used for everything from savory sauces to confections, the peanut spread and became a staple and, in time, crossed to North America on a reverse trip.
Called goobers or gooba peas by some, pindars by others, colloquial names for the peanut in the early American South had an Angolan connection, pointing to a fairly early introduction. Many enslaved Africans grew them in their provision gardens. In time the crop would know crossover appeal; by the 1830s and ’40s, there were peanut plantations exporting the snack to the urban North, and by the Civil War, soldiers were singing, “Goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas.” Boiled and roasted peanuts, peanut candy, peanut soup, and many other delicacies would join numerous confections, pies, cakes, and ice cream flavors laden with the peanut. And although he was not the inventor of the ancient preparation of peanut butter as many have thought, nobody popularized the peanut and its 300-plus uses more than Dr. George Washington Carver. —Michael W. Twitty is a food writer, historical interpreter, and culinary historian.
Chef and Vegetable Kingdom cookbook author Bryant Terry is finding even more uses for peanuts, like this mouthwatering collard-peanut pesto for roasted squash. Inspired by courgettes avec des arachides (French for “zucchini with peanuts”), a dish from the north-central African country Chad, it’s adapted here using winter squash.
Get the Recipe: Roasted Squash Wedges with Collard-Peanut Pesto
“EXPECT NOT GOATS AND COWRIES, for my yams are dry, and the barns are empty,” wrote Kukogho Iruesiri Samson, a Nigerian poet. Yams are considered to be the most common African staple aboard Middle Passage ships; some estimates say 100,000 yams fed 500 slaves, sometimes their only foodstuff.
Contrary to some folks’ conception of holiday pies and marshmallow-studded mash, New World sweet potatoes feature in those dishes, not yams, which are eaten in West Africa, the Caribbean, throughout Latin America, and in parts of Asia and are a different vegetable entirely. Sweet potatoes tend to be long and pointed, with orange flesh, and are fairly sweet, while yams have whitish flesh and are larger and more cylindrical. Sweet potatoes are creamier, yams floury, starchier. In either case, they can be boiled, mashed, fried, or roasted over embers. Yams are honored in West African and Brazilian ceremonies and offerings to the orixás, in song, and in literature. Okonkwo, Chinua Achebe’s tragic hero in Things Fall Apart, reveled in planting yams, deeming them the king of crops and thereby solidifying his manhood and ability to provide. In the New World, enslaved Africans found the sweet potato, which took its place. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man celebrated a Harlem sweet potato vendor’s steaming sugary pulp as nectar. He apologized for his ebullience and Carolina homesickness with every bite.
As the sweet potato takes up the role of the yam—foodstuff for sacred twins and ancestors—it epitomizes the adaptive creativity of the diaspora, a transfer food for Houston chef Jonny Rhodes to embrace in his Sweet Potato Gnocchi at his storytelling restaurant, Indigo. —Scott Alves Barton, PhD, is a chef and culinary educator.
In Houston at restaurant Indigo, chef-owner Jonny Rhodes offers a multicourse, neo–soul food tasting menu that tells the story of African, African American, and Black people in America. In this simple sweet potato dish, he finishes the tender gnocchi with a drizzle of sweet potato nectar and a shower of Parmesan cheese.
Get the Recipe: Sweet Potato Gnocchi
Sugarcane, the bamboo-like grass that yields what one of Alexander the Great’s commanders called honey from a reed, was brought to the Americas by Columbus in 1493. It flourished in the new hemisphere and transformed the agriculture, adding a diabolical twist to the production of sugar: the refinement of a plantation system in which huge tracts of land were worked by enslaved Africans. This system produced massive amounts of the white gold that fed Europe’s insatiable hunger for sugar to sweeten the coffee and tea that were all the rage.
Sugar came late into the United States: The first cane was planted in Louisiana in 1751, and by 1795, Étienne de Boré had produced the first granulated sugar crystals. In 1843, Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color, patented the multiple-effect evaporator that offered a safer, cleaner, and cheaper way of producing sugar than the traditional Caribbean methods. Its adoption was rapid, and by the middle of the 19th century, Louisiana had become a hub of Queen Sugar, producing a quarter of the world’s crop. Work in the cane fields was brutal and produced conditions that were even more harrowing than those cultivating rice, tobacco, indigo, or cotton. The history’s not always sweet, but there’s a lot of it in that small packet that comes with your morning coffee or tea. Think about that while sampling a piece of my mother’s lemon pie. —Jessica B. Harris
Legendary culinary historian, teacher, and author Jessica B. Harris has spent years documenting the foodways of the African diaspora. Here, she shares her mother's heirloom recipe for a spectacular citrus meringue pie that uses fresh lemon and lime juices, tempered with sugar and baked into a pastry shell made with freshly squeezed orange juice.
Get the Recipe: Mom's Citrus Meringue Pie


The term “Canadian Literature in English” refers to that which is written in what is now territorially Canada or written by Canadians abroad (see also Literature in French).
Writers have described Canada in many ways;for example, as a French or English colony, a “fifty-first state,” a Pacific Rim country, an Arctic giant, a friendly territory or an uninhabitable wilderness. Canadian literature has often had to deal with such differences in attitude, not just because many Canadian authors were born elsewhere and brought outsiders’ expectations with them, but also because popular attitudes often perpetuated stereotypes of Canada. Three pervasive stereotypes portray Canada as (1) a physical desert, (2) a cultural wasteland and (3) a raw land of investment opportunity and resource extraction. These distortions have created an audience for stereotypes, which Canadian writers sometimes reinforced by writing romantic adventures of the frozen North, in which everything local was savage or hostile and “civilization” was imported. But over time, they sought to record local experience and to use literature to shape their own culture rather than to imitate or defer to the presumptions of another society.
Insofar as Canadian culture continues to be shaped by a range of languages in use and by wide variations in geography, social experience, Indigenouscultures, immigrationpatterns and proximity to Europe, Asia and the USA, the “Canadian voice” is not uniform. Nevertheless, however much their aesthetic practices and political commitments may differ, Canadian writers bring many shared perspectives to their representations of nature, civility and human interaction, whether at home or abroad. Some critical approaches to Canadian literature have attempted to identify national or regional characteristics in literature. Other criticism (see Literature in English: Theory and Criticism) has fastened on language and formal strategies, theories of knowledge and meaning, ethics (variously defined) and the politics and psychology of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, identity and environment. “Canadian literature” does not therefore restrict itself to a particular set of topics, terms or even Canadian settings, nor does any set of topics and terms constitute a required ingredient in a Canadian book.
Motifs and Patterns
Although the national character is not always the subject of Canadian literature, the culture’s social attitudes and values can be seen in the language and forms it uses (seeLiterature in English: Language and Literary Form). For instance, communication is often achieved through tone as much as through direct statement. Irony is a dominant mode, litotes (the negative positive: not unappreciated) is a common speech pattern, trickster (rather than hero) figures recur, and a sense of humour (understatement, parody, mimicry, wry satire) punctuates much serious literary work. Some commentators have interpreted Canadian tendencies toward literary indirectness politically and psychologically, finding in it a sign of national insecurity and a group feeling of inferiority. Others argue that indirectness is a healthy demonstration of the culture’s ability to adapt an inherited tongue to its own purposes. Irony, for example, can undercut as much as apologize, and the quiet demeanour of an onlooker figure in a narrative can effectively undermine positions of ostensible power.
Several specific narrative patterns recur in Canadian writing, especially evident in fiction and life writing: (1) a community walls itself off from the wilderness (the “garrison mentality”); (2) a person leaves the homeland, adjusts to the new world, then finds the new “homeland” to be “alien”; (3) a person born in Canada feels like a permanent stranger in his or her own home; (4) people arrive in the new home only to find that they are excluded from power; (5) a person attempts to recover from the past the secret or suppressed life of a previous generation; (6) a woman struggles to come to terms with her own creativity and the inhibitions of her cultural upbringing (often told as conflict between colony and empire); (7) an apparently passive observer, surrounded by articulate tricksters and raconteurs, turns out to be able to tell both their story and his or her own, often ironically; (8) an adventurer turns failure into a form of grace; (9) a child grows up to inherit a world of promise, or a world of loss, frequently both at once; (10) a subjective historian meditates on place and memory; (11) characters celebrate space and wilderness, usually after a struggle to learn to accept that the wilderness provides spiritual therapy only on its own terms; (12) characters, adrift in a maze of words or a fog of ambiguity and anonymity, shape “acceptable fictions” into a workable life.
Writing about their society, many writers of short fiction, thenovel, autobiography or memoir, biography, poetry and drama have recurrently portrayed particular historical figures, both to reveal their intrinsic interest and implicitly to suggest how they epitomize certain cultural attributes or qualities of character. Such figures include Samuel Hearne, Louis Riel, Susanna Moodie, Sir John A. Macdonald, Emily Carr and William Lyon Mackenzie. In the retelling, sometimes transposed from their own time into the present, each possesses a vision but remains an ordinary human being, one with frailties, not a conventional hero. Characteristically, Canadian writing resists the binaries associated with perfectionism (right-wrong, good-evil, hero-villain ), embracing notions of multiple alternatives, working pluralities, multivoicedness and negotiated or evolving resolution instead. In narrative, violence generally functions as an instigation of action and as a penultimate event rather than as a solution or act of closure. Repeatedly, individual rights balance against community responsibilities. In more recent drama, poetry, and prose—even in much popular genre writing (see Popular Literature in English)—open endings predominate over conventional strategies of closure, inviting readers/listeners to participate in the play of alternatives and possibilities.
Settings often possess a symbolic dimension. CatholicQuébec recurrently figures in anglophone writing as a land of mystery, attractive but enthralling and morally dangerous; Ontario as an enigmatic blend of moral uprightness and moral evasiveness; Atlantic Canada as a repository of old values; the North as a land of vision; the Prairies as a land of isolation and acquisition; and the West Coast as a dream of the future in which people often mistakenly believe. Europe often appears as the home of refinement, deceit, and discrimination; the United States as a land of crass achievement and tangible success; and Africa as the embodiment of all that seems “other” to Protestant rationalism. In recent writing, Latin America and Asia (both East and South) are frequently configured as sites of political entanglement, which is expressed through inheritance and family ties or embodied in the complexities of larger communities. Within Canada, the land itself is recurrently associated with power, whether as property, region, a hostile force, a godly gift, the basis for resource extraction, the site of communication, the contested territory of competing cultural claims, the border or the ecological medium in which human life integrates with all other living beings in Nature.
Although most Canadians live in cities, until recently writers used rural and small-town settings more frequently than urban ones, and to the degree that they adapted conventional adventure and pastoral formulas to Canadian settings, they seldom questioned unstated assumptions about status and race. From early on in Canadian literature, however, essayists (see Essay in English) and travel writers (see Travel Literature) analyzed and challenged as well as celebrated Canadian political life. Often, women writers used fiction and autobiography to reveal social divisions within Canada that male adventure writers ignored or underplayed, and to suggest reforms. Recent writing by both women and men focuses more directly and fully on urban life as well as on social issues (ethnicity, gender, poverty, health, education) that transcend setting.
“Regional” writing also conveys political stances. The term is used in two ways: to refer to places ruled by a real or imagined centre, and to configure the variant parts that make up a collective unit or community. By rejecting a single definition of “Canada,” writing about regional distinctiveness sometimes declares separatist claims on identity and power and in other instances asserts the viability of a nation with a plural character (seeRegionalism in Literature). Increasingly, Indigenous writers and writers who draw on backgrounds other than western European ones have examined the political opportunities of Canadian pluralism, but also the social limitations of local convention.
A rough chronological guide to changes and developments in Canadian writing should not be equated with a simple chart of “progress”; each age (Colonial, Early National, Interwar and Postwar, Contemporary) reveals differing conventions, preoccupations and accomplishments. Hence, as fashions and critical tastes change over time, so do determinations of value and significance.
Canadian literature in English can be said to begin in the early 17th century with Jacobean poetry in Newfoundland; in the decades that followed with numerous explorers writing narratives of contact (seeExploration Literature); or in the mid-18th century with the epistolary fiction of the English garrison community in Québec. After 1776, in the Loyalistsettlements of Upper Canada and the Maritimes, many writers turned to political verse satire (see Humorous Writing in English; Literature and Politics). Newly founded newspapersand magazines(see alsoLiterary Magazines in English) became venues for political commentary, both conservative and reform-minded, as well as for literary expression, which in the 19th century generally followed Romantic, Sentimental and Orientalist fashions in Britain. Some scathing satire emerged in Nova Scotia. Novels and dramas followed historical romance and Gothic paradigms, as did most long poems. Mid-19th century autobiographies set in present day Ontario provide insight into daily life: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Anna Brownell Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) highlight British women’s various attitudes toward settlement, while the Nishnaabe missionary George Copway’s memoir The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (1847) both celebrates Christianity and emphasizes the value of Indigenous law, land use and religion. Short personal sketches of persons and places formed the basis for much travel writing and for the short fiction that emerged as a new genre during the 19th century. Folksong and folktale survive, but Native oral literature received scant literary attention until the later 19th century.
In the years leading up to Confederation and during the five decades following, much attention turned to literacy and political organization. Schools and universities opened, as did several Carnegie Libraries, part of a network of public libraries across North America financied by the fortune of Pittsburgh steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Writers celebrated their newfound nationalism and were drawn variously to such enterprises as the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Institut Canadien, the Royal Society of Canada, the Canada FirstMovement and Imperial Federation (see Imperialism). Philosophical and scientific writing flourished, encouraging thoughtful discourse across language lines. Travel (within Canada and abroad) encouraged other kinds of contact, and with it both impressionistic and reportorial writing. By the end of the 19th century, writers like Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) addressed racism against Chinese North Americans, while proponents of Women’s Suffrage and Prohibition wrote stories and essays that focused on issues of social change.
Many other social assumptions nevertheless remained largely unexamined. While attention turned to First Nations’ oral tales, writers treated them (despite the emergence of First Nations writers publishing in English) as “simple” texts, suitable in translation (if expurgated) mainly to entertain children. Tales and poems about “Indians,” such as Duncan Campbell Scott’s “The Onondaga Madonna” (1894), largely assumed that First Nations people were “a dying race” and their several complex cultures unsophisticated. Poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) drew on her Mohawk and British heritage to challenge these stereotypes and address the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadians. Nevertheless, the romance of the “Indians” was matched by a continuing romance of Empire. Ontario- and Maritime-based Canadian culture remained dominantly Celtic and anglocentric. Early creative narratives from the Prairies and the West Coast, while recurrently probing the real-life travails of immigrants and the exigencies of farm and forest management, were largely overshadowed in the popular imagination by Ontario romances of Presbyterian conversion.
By the early 20th century, many Canadian books won widespread international popularity, notably L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Of Green Gables (1908), a humorous tale of an orphan’s life in Prince Edward Island. C.G.D. Roberts’s and E.T. Seton’s seemingly realistic animal tales provide other examples, as do the comic sketches of Stephen Leacock , which parodied literary stereotypes and dealt ironically with social platitudes. In poetry, the Confederation group (William Wilfred Campbell, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott and Fredrick George Scott) produced the most important writings of the late 19th century; committed to closely observed details, they variously reshaped how the lyric represented nature, winter and the Canadian landscape.
Interwar and Postwar
Cultural and social attitudes changed during and after the First World War. One creative generation was lost but another emerged, objecting both to imperial assumptions of militarism and the language associated with it (see The First World War in Canadian Literature). New magazines affirmed the independence of Canadian thought. New prizes were established to recognize Canadian literary accomplishment. In the fiction of the 1920s, while some popular family chronicles continued to affirm conventional class distinctions, antiwar novels and class critiques began to appear, a trend magnified during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many writers focussed on uprooted or marginalized individuals and the troubled lives of non-English-speaking immigrants. Novelists championed industrial workers’ rights and sought fresh, more direct forms of speech, spurning the sentimental romance in favour of a more “realistic” (some called it a more “violent”) vocabulary. American literary practice—and the international avant-garde of postwar Paris—drew writers such as John Glassco and Morley Callagham; the short story genre thrived, espousing forms that resisted narrative closure.
Young writers also rejected received social values by mounting left-wing agitprop drama, writing dramas that satirized nationalist pageantry, publishing erotica, finding inspiration in the Group of Seven painters, and embracing the modernist dicta of the poet T.S. Eliot and others. Chief among emerging Canadian poets at this time were those associated with the “McGill” (or “Montreal”) Group, especially F.R. Scott for his commitment to social justice and Abraham Klein for his passionate embrace of his Jewish heritage. Over succeeding decades Dorothy Livesay became the voice of socialist feminism and Scott, with the poet-critic A.J.M. Smith, became an influential anthologist, shaping the early teaching of Canadian literature.
In the wake of the Second World War came a mix of propaganda, pacifist rhetoric, parodies of military ineptitude, and a new wave of progressivist writers, by turns humanist, anticlerical, community-minded and intellectually anarchist. Notable names include Irving Layton, Earle Birney, Gabrielle Roy (who remains one of the best- known francophone writers in translation), P.K. Page and George Woodcock. In the 1940s and 1950s, social policies were being drafted that would shape a Canadian sense of community for decades to come. New Literary Periodicals demanded a sharper, more locally grounded language. Radio technology also served this end. Public radio, established in 1932, led to a wave of cross-country spoken-word broadcasts, talks, dramas, readings of short stories and children’s programs, all reconfirming the sounds of Canadian speech as a literary medium, especially from 1943 on. Novelists such as Hugh MacLennan and Sinclair Ross urned again to local settings, rendering the prairies, the Maritimes and Montreal as sites of personal and political trauma. Critics now praise more highly the innovative stylistic practice of Ethel Wilson for her insights into women’s lives; Malcolm Lowry for his symphonies of despair and transient joy; Sheila Watson for her rendering of life as an elliptical mythology; and in a career that would last for half a century, Mordecai Richler for his frank and animated cultural politics.
Contemporary: Three Generations
Several social developments markedly changed Canadian society in the years following 1960. The large “baby-boom” generation matured, with the vocal “X” and “Y” generations following; immigration policies were altered to allow greater numbers of new citizens from Asia, Africa and Latin America; startling technological developments (from radio to the Internet) collapsed notions of space and sped up communication. All these changes had an impact on literary topics and techniques. Cross-border and cross-cultural contacts validated notions of cultural “hybridity” as a social norm, challenging conventional definitions of “ethnic purity” and “fixed identity.” Family biographies shifted focus from single lives onto lives-in-context. Multimedia presentations challenged conventions regarding the unity of literary form. Bilingual texts, triptychs (in fiction and drama), and discontinuous narratives in fiction and poetry all deliberately disrupted conventional linearity as a literary technique. Numerous integrated (but discontinuous) collections of short fiction appeared called sequences, cycles or “composite narratives.” Some of the major writers of these decades had just been emerging in the 1950s: Richler and two of the world’s foremost authors of short fiction, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, whose stories embed more than announce, reveal more than parade. They would be joined by Alistair MacLeod , Clark Blaise and numerous others.
The number of Canadian universities, small presses, accessible academic and literary periodicals (from Canadian Literature to Geist), courses in Canadian literature and creative writing schools also increased, in part because of the recommendations of the Massey Commission and the emergence of the Canada Council in the 1950s. Further government policies led to such social developments as the Charter Of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, but a sudden shift to policies that favoured fiscal restraint and cultural cutbacks occurred in the early 21st century and have persisted; the publishing industry, libraries, public media and scholarship were all affected. New technologies opened up opportunities for local (and frequently more innovative) publishing (including experiments in syllabic and concrete poetry, mixed-media presentations, performance poetry and other formats), yet they did not guarantee access to publicity and sales. Coteries came and went; so did scores of journals and papers. Newspapers faced hardships, and some stopped publishing print editions; this was due in part to a readership that had shifted to online news sources. Publishers of formula fiction remained monetarily successful. Some writers of mystery and science fiction achieved international stardom and praise for their literary achievements, as in the case of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1986), Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009 and 2013). But publishing houses that had thrived in the 1960s when American control over the information industry was resisted faced closure in the 2010s with the increasing influence of electronic publishing and multinational corporations. The CBC’s annual Canada Reads contest, which began in 2002, pits a selection of books against one another, each with its own celebrity endorsement. The event promotes Canadian writing and emphasizes the importance of a reading public yet simplifies literature and contributes to a competitive literary culture. Likewise, a plethora of prizes, often with corporate sponsorship, began to construct literature as spectacle. Many bookstores nevertheless closed.
Throughout the decades from 1960 onward, while there has been some evidence of a literary return to older forms of expression and fundamentalist redefinitions of ethics, writers more characteristically in each generation embraced social justice and reformist causes: for women’s rights (see Women’s Movement), for gay and lesbian equality (See Homosexuality), against colonialism and against increasing poverty. Children’s literature, an enterprise that flourished at this time, ranging from nonsense verse to problem-centred novels for young adults, addressed some of these same issues of race, gender, alcohol, drug abuse and social identity. Science writing, social history, life writing, environmental inquiry and other forms of “creative nonfiction” also frequently combined discovery with protest. Critiques of social arrogance in one decade (foreign wars, napalm, racism) morphed into critiques of other disparities in the next (discrimination by sex, gender, ethnicity, economics). Margaret Atwood embraced the new nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s (with the Centennial celebrations in 1967) but later tempered her observations in dystopias such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which challenges government control over women’s bodies. Robertson Davies’s Jungian novels expressed one pervasive understanding of myth and psychology; Robert Kroetsch’s poems and tales deconstructed such conventions and rerooted the epic in everyday vernacular experience. Language and literary form again became subjects for analysis and theoretical discussion, as in the work of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, as well as territories for dispute, as when Nicole Brossard’s critiques of French grammar influenced feminist writers in English, or when, in much of 21st-century fiction, conventional vulgarities became normative (and therefore potentially radical, culturally upsetting) speech.
The Writers Union of Canada formed in 1973, reflecting writers’ numbers and endeavouring to help deal with the challenges they face.
Other writers addressed cultural, social, and political alternatives in Canadian society, some of which were longstanding, others deriving from more recent changes in population, technology, language and communication. Many of these writers sought a balance between criticism of social practice (racism, passive dismissal, restrictive legislation) and celebration of social potential. A great number of Métis and First Nations writers have provided important commentary, variously critiquing colonialism and celebrating Indigenous life. More specifically (although authors address multiple topics in each work), Maria Campbell’s Half-Breed (1973), Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee (1973) and Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash (1985) depict journeys toward political consciousness; Ruby Slipperjack’s Honour the Sun (1987), Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed (1996), and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000) represent childhood and adolescence; Thomas King’s The Truth about Stories (2003) highlights the value of Indigenous creation stories; Marie Clements’s Burning Vision (2003) and Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass (2010) consider environment and land use; Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005) and Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (2012) address the residential school system, which has been further investigated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2008–15). The poet Robert Bringhursttranslated some of the great classic Haida oral tales, Al Purdy created poetry out of the rhythms of ordinary speech, Jack Hodgins turned Vancouver Island idiosyncrasy into a comedy of human aspiration, George Elliott Clarke and Wayde Compton called attention to Black writing in Canada, and increasing numbers of writers (including Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje and Wayson Choy) drew on their Asian heritage both to reflect on adaptations to difference and to dramatize the challenges and rewards of a fractured or shared history.
Developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the “war on terror,” and climate change awareness underscored global interconnectedness. While regions and places continued to provide inspiration for contemporary fiction, as in David Adams Richards’ Mercy Among the Children (2001) and André Alexis’s Pastoral (2014), stress was often laid on globalization’s impact on specific locales, as in Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (1999) and Lisa Moore’s February (2009). Environmental concerns were made central in Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child (2001), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle (2014), and Rita Wong’s Forage (2008) and undercurrent (2015), which share concerns about the global ramifications of overconsumption, waste disposal and polluted water. With a similar planetary focus, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009 and 2013) explores the frailty of national borders in the wake of climate change.
Globalization notwithstanding, literary interest in the nation-state persisted. Canadian writers’ attention to the United States increased after the September 11th terrorist attacks and Canada’s subsequent involvement in the “war on terror.” Dionne Brand’s encyclopedic Inventory (2006) and Douglas Coupland’s apocalyptic narrative Player One (2010) respond to the violence generated by terrorism and war. Historical narratives have provided an alternative way of engaging with Canada’s southern neighbour: Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (2011) and Alix Hawley’s All True Not a Lie in It (2015) reinterpret myths of the American west, whereas characters’ movement between American and Canadian settings in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s A Good Man (2011) suggests that the two countries have a shared history, in some respects at least. Perspectives on contemporary human migration, in the form of refugees and illegal immigrants, is provided in John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children (2015) and Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal (2015), thereby giving pause to literal and metaphoric borders, as well as the complex and multiple networks that connect people, places, environments and countries in a globalized era.