Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall
Wally Serote would publish his famous poem ‘City Johannesburg’:
Jo’burg City
I travel on your black and white and robotted roads,
Through your thick iron breath that you inhale,
At six in the morning and exhale from five noon
Jo’burg City
That is the time when I come to you,
When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,
That is the time when I leave you.
… 2
Lesego Rampolokeng (2004) deliberately echoes Serote’s poem to the city in the 1990s:
Johannesburg my city
Paved with judas gold
Deceptions and lies
Dreams come here to die
Both poems draw out, with equal power, the dark eroticism, the failed promise, the intimate knowledge, like the body of a lover, the drama of entanglement, the claim to belonging (‘my city’), the inability of the city to be a home. While Serote attributes this relationship with the city to apartheid Rampolokeng suggests that such a relationship persists, like ‘judas’, into the post-apartheid present.
In contemporary literature, particularly fiction, the city emerges in an even more self-conscious way as an aesthetic, a political and an imaginary site, a vivid and explicit template for an entire array of social fears and possibilities (Gunner 2003b). The city skyline begins to appear on numerous book covers, signalling its status as subject at the centre of these narratives. While several critics (Titlestad 2003, Hoad 2004, Mpe 2003) have written about individual novels as fruitful sites for understanding city culture, the texts’ cumulative and insistent focus on the city as an idea has still to be properly explored.
Urbanist Jennifer Robinson (1998) has offered one of the more overt methodological challenges to reading the city from the vantage point of the ‘now’:
Our imaginations have lived for so long with the lines of apartheid city space, with the blank spaces in between, the deadening images of power drawn on the ground. … Can we begin to shift our experiences and our visions to capture and understand the world of always-moving spaces? What do the spaces of change and dynamism look like? In what sense was even the apartheid city – a city of division – a place of movement, of change, of crossings? (D7).
Robinson invokes the figure of Toloki in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995):
In the afternoon Toloki walks to the taxi rank, which is on the other side of the downtown area, or what is called the central business district. The streets are empty, as all the stores are closed. He struts like a king, for today the whole city belongs to him. He owns the wide tarmac roads, the skyscrapers, the traffic lights, and the flowers on the sidewalks. That is what he loves most about this city. It is a garden city, with flowers and well-tended shrubs and bushes growing at every conceivable place. In all seasons, blossoms fill the site (p 46).
Toloki passes across the lines of the apartheid city, across its cruel divides; he generates crossings, not so much, as Robinson notes, undoing the spaces of poverty as refusing to treat those spaces as one-dimensional. We are in the realm of Lefebvre’s ‘representational space’ and each time we move we potentially use space differently.
Robinson views the apartheid city from the fresh, experimental vantage that was opened up by the political transition. The new South African city is still a space where nightmarish divisions may be witnessed and where the fear of crime delimits dreams of truly public space (see Kruger 2003). But she nevertheless suggests that we think not only in terms of fixed structures but in terms of movement, journeys through the city.3
Rita Barnard (2006) writes that Mda’s shift away from an ‘earlier poetics of a grim documentation of physical surroundings to a new, more fluid sense of black urban experience’ parallels shifts in South African urban studies from a ‘near-exclusive concern with the location of physical structures and the visible aspects of urban organisation to a concern with the city as a dynamic entity’. Barnard notes, too, the difference between Toloki’s ‘proprietal strutting’ and the ‘servile, if ironic’ movements of Serote’s narrator in ‘City Johannesburg’.
In the last decade or so an international body of scholarship on the city has turned for inspiration to, but also begun to critique, the writing of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Walter Benjamin (1982). It has returned to these writers as a way of trying to name neglected urban spatialities and to invent new ones, to unearth emergent city figures to connect that which has been held apart, to draw out the city’s theatricality, its improvisations, its ironies (see Amin & Thrift 2002). De Certeau’s key insight was that people use cities by constructing who they are, producing a narrative of identity. They make a sentence or a story of particular places in the city, and the city is not available as an overview – the city is the way that it is walked.
Much of an earlier terminology of location and mobility – vocabularies of the nomad, the decentred, the marginalised, the deterritorialised, border, migrant and exile – was, by contrast, seldom attached to specific places and people, representing instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seemed as much the result of ungrounded theory as its putative subject (Solnit 2000). Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur (the aesthetic bohemian, drifting through the city like a film director) invites us to ‘read the city from its street-level intimations, to encounter the city as lived complexity, to seek alternative narratives and maps based on wandering’ (Amin & Thrift 2002, p 11).
For Zygmunt Baumann (1996) the figures which populate the Western metropolis, in addition to the flâneur, include the tourist (for whom the city is a spectacle), the player (who knows the rules of various urban games), the vagabond or vagrant (who moves at the borders of the establishment through the practices of transgression) and the commuter (who treats the city as a place you enter, park, work and leave – an autopolis). Interestingly, he fails to include the figure of the sex worker and, like most theorists of the city, he seems uninterested in what a gender-related city consciousness – the experience of the flâneuse, among other figures – would look like.
African cities suggest a number of other figures, which could be read back into European cities as well: one would be the figure of the sâpeur – the figure of spatial transition, operating in the interstices of large cultures, participating in a cult of appearance, especially expensive clothing; a mobile individual who, following Janet MacGaffey and Remi Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000), creates ramifying networks extending through time, space and multiple cultures as he circulates between countries, pulling off coups in otherwise invisible spaces in and between cities. Others, as we will see below, include the figure of the migrant worker, the aging white man, the illegal immigrant and the hustler.
Urban theorists, though, often tend to overstate the city as a space of flow, human interaction and proximate reflexivity. Although the figure of the flâneur draws important links between space, language and subjectivity, it leaves us with the question of whether the contemporary city based on an endless spread and multiple connections, is best grasped through the trope of wandering/wondering – or requires other imaginary means (Amin & Thrift 2002, p 14). The invocation of the flâneur in urban theory can underestimate the extent to which striating openness and flow are a whole series of rules, conventions and institutions of regulation and control, a biopolitics (p 26).4
In the case of Johannesburg, Michael Titlestad (2004) is correct in his observation that the city has been characterised less by practices of flânerie and drifting than by a set of divisions contrived by law, surveillance and threat, hostile to errant and nomadic meaning, to improvised selves and versions of social hope (p 29). Yet, as Amin and Thrift warn, we need to be careful about how we analyse space:
The