Rapid urbanization, uneven infrastructure provision, and widening demands for efficient public services have intensified the relevance of smart-city strategies across African urban regions. Yet the transfer of generic smart-city models to African contexts remains analytically insufficient when local governance capacity, socio-economic inequality, informality, and infrastructural deficits are not treated as constitutive planning conditions. This article presents a consolidated scholarly manuscript on smart urban development in Africa by organizing the literature into a coherent urban-development framework centered on planning, governance, and performance assessment. The paper synthesizes the findings of a comprehensive literature review that examined more than 95 publications and consolidated 30 distinct smart-city definitions. It shows that the literature converges around three major dimensions—technology and data, economy/society, and governance—while also separating into two principal interpretive approaches: a techno-centric approach emphasizing ICT-enabled efficiency and infrastructural intelligence, and a human- and social-centric approach emphasizing participation, social capital, collaboration, and quality of life. Building on these conceptual foundations, the article systematizes seven key features of smart-city development, delineates the nine operative elements of an African smart-city approach, and translates these into a practical key-performance-indicator (KPI) architecture for urban administrators and policymakers. The discussion further integrates concrete African initiatives, including projects in Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco, and South Africa, to demonstrate how context, institutional capacity, and implementation feasibility shape smart urban trajectories on the continent. Framed for the scope of urban development and smart cities scholarship, the manuscript offers a policy-relevant synthesis that links conceptual clarity to urban planning practice and performance evaluation.