The concept of the city on the sub-Saharan continent presents a vast field of study whose limits we must define. Urbanization entails spatial, social, and temporal phenomena and thus almost by definition requires an interdisciplinary approach. Such an approach could certainly encompass history, geography, demographics, economics, political science, architecture and town planning, as well as anthropology and sociology. The interdisciplinary study of urbanization deserves emphasis because the research conducted in these different directions over the course of the past twenty-five years has been very uneven. We must not confuse the concepts of urbanization and modernization, although to distinguish the difference between the two can be a delicate matter. Since the colonial intrusion, the importance of making such a distinction is all the greater because the development of the former notion was subsumed by that of the latter.

Another remark: The author's personality, in writing this overview paper, is obviously present. As a piece of work written by an historian, this text takes into account the past of African cities and their evolutionary process, from their pristine origins to the eve of independence. This paper is mainly about the past, it touches only occasionally on the characteristics of modern African towns since independence and their likely future; in spite of social sciences constituting a whole, an individual cannot grasp everything. The analyses devoted to town planning and urban economics have been left to another specialist. In conformity with the author's education and interests, temporal dimensions will receive priority over transversal conceptual divisions; thus, the concept of time and change will tend to be neglected.

The Efik inhabit Calabar which is the capital of the Cross River State of Nigeria. They constitute a people of about 200,000 for whom well-documented archives and bibliographies exist mainly in Nigeria and in Great Britain (Ekpiken, 1970). The Ekpe Society (Bassey n.d.), a Leopard-Spirit group of initiates, is their regulatory institution which makes use of the ukara cloth and possesses an ideographic system of writing named nsibidi.

From 1979 to 1983, teaching structuralist-synchronic linguistics and semiotics at the University of Calabar in Nigeria created some degree of student hostility. In this paper it is attempted to reply to them. To do so, the so-called semiotic square had to be misused while still defining categorial terms. This square has been framed within the evolutionary process of a regional history (Aye, 1967). Then a transformational analysis of culture which needs to be tested elsewhere is proposed. It is hoped that this model may help to structure the amorphous field of interdisciplinary research in African studies. An attempt to describe Efik self-perception and how most of them see the development of their consciousness in time follows.

Two of the most obvious objectives were: 1) to understand how change in the course of Efik history affected an African people located at the crossroads of many cultures and what could constitute the real challenge to them of building a modern society in an environment which may be characterized today by two major criteria: “non-identity” and “non-alterity;” and 2) to examine how for the Efik themselves historical events persuaded them of having lost their past or even their recently adopted identity and why this nihilist ideology left them with no desire for what seemed to be an unpromising future.