This special issue was initiated on the occasion of a panel organized during the 7th European Conference on African Studies in Basel in 2017. 1 The unifying theme of this conference was "Urban Africa -Urban Africans. New Encounters of the Urban and the Rural." A small number of panels and papers focused on cities and their relationships with rural spaces prior to the 20th century. As is often the case in these international meetings, which take up different eras, geographical regions, themes, and academic disciplines, the 20th and 21st centuries largely dominated the exchanges. This observation -which testifies to the "presentism" that continues to characterize African Studies as a whole 2 -raises a number of questions. Would there still be a stake in demonstrating the presence of cities in Africa over the long term? If a historiographical field has now been established on the presence of cities prior to 1900, it is clear that this still lags behind in comparison to studies of the later period. 3 Since the 1930s, and again, in the 1950s and at the end of the 1980s, archaeologists and historians of Africa have wondered about the definition of cities and long-term urbanization processes. At a time when the number of Africans living in cities exceeds those living in the countryside, knowledge of the continent's urban past is currently of interest beyond academic circles. This knowledge is being disseminated through exhibitions, history magazines, and works of synthesis. 4 2 What new questions are now emerging, several decades after the first academic studies? What responses are people offering, and what sources are they mobilizing? This special issue offers a historiographical review of the research carried out on cities, while engaging with the most recent methodological reflections on the relationship