AiW Guest: Kagiso Nko.
It is part of how Joburg narrates itself, in particular to itself.
Editors’ Introduction – Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden.
AiW note: This review of Anxious Joburg (Wits UP) was completed before our accompanying Review Q&A, published on November 10th. Alongside reviewer Kagiso Nko, researchers, editors and writers Joanna Woods, Katie Reid, and Tinashe Mushakavanhu explored their investments in the book’s project with one of its two editors, Nicky Falkof. References here to Falkof’s responses to Nko’s additional queries in that Q&A have been added and are linked accordingly.
Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global City (Wits UP, 2020) is a scholarly collection that opens up to other ways of looking at Johannesburg, or Joburg, as it is commonly known by residents. It is also a book that both necessitates and compels us to come to terms – time and again – with the city’s history of state mandated violence against black and poor bodies.
It is there in the first sentence of the book’s Foreword, by writer and thinker Sisonke Msimang: “For black people Johannesburg has always been a place of toil and misery”. The depth of this early reckoning — “always” — stays with me as I read on; it contributes to the questions I am prompted to ask myself, wrestling with them, it seems, along with the book’s editors and contributors — whose is the anxiety that ends up mattering most here?
Joburg experiences a high amount of crime and poverty, and, as the book consistently makes clear, it is also one of the most unequal cities in the world. The city is about 76% black, about 12% white, 5% Asian, and 6% coloured (in South Africa’s official term of population registration). Anxious Joburg also illustrates the ways that race is synonymous with class in South Africa: middle class fears are frequently ‘white’ fears – even given the growing black and non-white middle class in the socio-economic stratifications of South Africa’s largest city and economic hub.
I consider myself a Joburger, though not a native. I came about six years ago to study, and have had a love/hate relationship with the city ever since. My affinity might have led me, perhaps unfairly, to read this book with a certain expectation – reflective of my own experiences of Johannesburg as a young black man who is not from a middle-class background. Perhaps also because of my overfamiliarity, I kept oscillating between enjoying the sometimes thick descriptions and scholarly analysis, and thinking some chapters were unnecessarily long.
But they do develop the ‘snapshot’ of the experience of the city the editors say they hope to provide (p.14). Expertly edited by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden, their Introduction, “Traversing the Anxious Metropolis”, concedes that much of the available literature does tend to discuss “middle-class fear of crime in global south cities (Caldeira 2000; Ferraro 1995; Lemanski 2004; Spinks 2001)” (8). Falkof and Van Staden assert that their purpose is, instead, to put forward a very different take on Joburg – already a popular city of academic research and scholarship of the global south. The collection is an attempt to chart the emotional topography or the landscape of feeling of the city through anxiety, employed as “a common language, a collective rhetoric, that allows us to talk to each other about how we live here” (8), even in a city where the “segregationary urge plays a significant part in who lives where” (10).
In this and in various other ways, the book acknowledges the difficulties of the task it sets itself. Still this does not ease my feeling that mounts throughout: that it is primarily the anxieties of minority groups that come forward, and as fear of a black and criminalised ‘unknown’ or of an unacknowledged, anonymised and, so, silent other.
This is complicated. And on many levels. Take the book’s first formal chapter, “‘We Are All In This Together’: Global Citizen, Violence And Anxiety In Johannesburg”, by Van Staden, which reflects on the violent aftermath of the much-publicised ‘Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100’ concert of 2018. A “star-studded music and philanthropic event that took place in Johannesburg”, (23) Van Staden begins by acknowledging the concert’s success, on its own terms: it secured more than $7 billion in funding pledges for progressive causes and entertained a stadium full of music lovers at the Soccer City stadium, located there on the outskirts of Soweto in celebration of the centenary of Mandela’s birth.
However, there was an “eruption of public violence outside the stadium which significantly complicated its meaning”. For such an internationally high profile event, this represented, Van Staden argues, a coming together of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in a clash that revealed “Johannesburg’s specific anxieties” (23). Discussing the failure to provide security for the concert goers, Van Staden builds an argument from his own first-hand experience and other’s ‘citizen witness’ reports — which came primarily via individuals’ social media feeds, and so, in real time, both nationally and internationally, as newsmakers struggled to make sense of events on the ground.
Touching on some key issues that come up through much of the rest of the book, Van Staden highlights institutional and state failures specific to South Africa that disrupted the assumed smooth running of the ‘global’ technologies and aspects of the concert, such as load shedding — planned and scheduled blackouts by the state because of excessive power / electricity demand. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates that the anxieties produced by the incidents after the Global Citizen event were multi-layered, in how they reproduced exercises of dominant power over different bodies: state power (or lack of) over its citizens, with an almost total lack of accountability; and in the crowd, other power structures and many related anxieties come through – particularly in this case, the use of violence in the maintenance of a cisgendered “patriarchal hegemony” (32) and those threats that women and queer bodies face — all drawn in different ways along racial and socio-economically divided lines.
Van Staden concedes to the fact that the “middle class has been particularly vocal in complaining about these breakdowns” (29); he goes on to conclude that “the attacks on the concert-goers outside the venue can’t simply be read from the perspective of class” (31). The research, the chapter, and thinking of the writing all plays that out. But, I also want to argue, this event and the violence afterwards highlighted classed anxieties. It made them more, rather than less visible. Van Staden shows how one had to partake in a variety of Global Citizen awareness-raising actions in order to be entered into a raffle to get tickets — “(mostly social media based clicktivism)” (24). With South Africa’s data cell phone bundles, a lot of South Africans and Joburgers were already put out of the range of the belonging it made up (31).
In the developing psychological map of the city’s image under state capture, these particular localised circumstances — whose voices and anxieties matter most as Joburg citizens, and, again I would want to stress, in relation to those the editors’ introduction acknowledges are “louder” and therefore “easier to read” (13) — is a question that, in the end, does not sound at quite the same volume.
Perhaps it cannot. It does feel like the structure of the book becomes emblematic of this at points, seeming to cluster together, for example, and at the front half of the book, a number of those chapters which turn a critical lens on whiteness, its narcissism and fragility, and specifically white anxieties.
This grouping (chapters 4-7) amplifies the book’s concerns with post-apartheid anxieties as a symptom of the city’s changing psychogeographies, due to increased access of black people into formerly whites-only spaces. (See Falkof on this point in the accompanying Review Q&A, in response to my first question to her there.)
Derek Hook in “The white centreline vanishes: fragility and anxiety in the elusive metropolis”, Nicky Falkof’s chapter, “Ugly Noo-noos and suburban nightmares’, Renugan Raidoo in “The unruly in the anodyne: nature in gated communities”, and Mingwei Huang’s “The Chinatown back room: the afterlife of apartheid architecture”, take different approaches to what becomes a discomforting running theme of criminalisation and othering of the black body in the long wake of white middle class flight from the suburbs.
Huang, in directing her attention to Cyrildene, a suburb in the East of Johannesburg, asks “what does not transform?” in the hangover of racialised anxieties, does change the focus to the developments of post-apartheid Chinatown and the Chinese migrant community. This has been less visible in discussions about Joburg elite locations. Still, from the inside of one house lived in by the “Chinatown boss” (153) and a relatively self-enforcing environment, the house and the ‘maid’ or domestic labourer’s access is the point where issues of privacy, intimacy and domesticity continue to reinforce acute and brutalising stereotyping on the grounds of race. Fear of crime is not only directed towards unknown racial others but fixates on those in close quarters, whether domestic workers, gardeners, security guards, or workers’ partners.
Renugan Raidoo similarly relocates focus through the built urban environment to attachments to nature, pointing out the heritage aspect to the apartheid and colonial nostalgia that is built into the aesthetics of Joburg’s gated housing developments. The ‘natural’ that is created through these places exhibits a “menacing…
