Ahead of our forthcoming review of Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (Wits UP, 2020), we are publishing here an accompanying Q&A.
Answering the questions is Nicky Falkof, co-editor (with Cobus van Staden) of the book.
Asking the questions – 3 each – alongside our AiW reviewer, Kagiso Nko, are three other scholars, thinkers and editors – each invested in the book’s project in different ways: Joanna Woods, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, and Katie Reid.
Anxious Joburg emerged from an in-person workshop and was published in October 2020. Now, as the fallout of November’s 2021 municipal elections in South Africa begins to show — a ballot marked by the lowest voter turnout in post-apartheid South African history with significant losses in South Africa’s economic metropolis of Johannesburg, former stronghold of the ANC — this Q&A about the book’s approach to the city ranges across its focuses, dating from the snapshot of its present moment to future possible anxieties, extending the questions of the text to the violence of July 2021 after former president Zuma’s arrest, and the anxieties of the global pandemic…
Co-editor of Anxious Joburg, Nicky Falkof is a writer and academic from Johannesburg, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Media Studies department at Wits University.
Kicking off our Qs for Nicky is Kagiso Nko (who is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, where he is broadly reading around Blackness, Township life in South Africa and happiness.)
Nko: A huge source of anxiety is penned to be a ‘black anonymous figure’ in about half the chapters. How do we reconcile this with doing away with racialized and stereotypical views on how black people are viewed – especially as dangerous?
Falkof: There are only three chapters that deal with the anonymous black man as an imaginary threat (Derek Hook’s, Renugan Raidoo’s, and mine), but I think it’s quite significant that that was what stuck out in your experience of reading the book.
One of the primary motivations for this book, and for my own work in general, is to shine a lens on this tendency, which is still, in 2021, endemic in cultural discourses among non-black South Africans. White anxieties, which are my particular area of interest, are literally built around the excessive figure of a mythical black man who presents an exceptional source of threat to worried whites, who see themselves as extraordinary victims in SA. You ask how we reconcile this with an anti-racist agenda that rejects the associations between blackness and violence/danger, and at least part of the answer is that we actually talk about it. We foreground and highlight these paranoid myths to make it clear that they are myths.
Things shouldn’t be this way, but the fact remains that white people’s anxieties, and the fears of the cushioned middle classes in general, get a disproportionate amount of attention in media and political discourse so we can’t just ignore them and hope they go away. We saw so much of this during the ‘community’ vigilante actions that characterised the recent looting and riots in KZN and Gauteng: all black South Africans, everyone, from elderly people to women with children, were classified as dangerous at those roadblocks. These racist representations have power and need to be interrogated as robustly as possible.
Nko: I know this is a bit of an unfair question, but do you think the book is a true reflection of anxiety in Jo’burg?
As a media scholar I am contractually obliged to argue that there are no ‘true’ reflections! I’m being flippant, of course, but there is some truth to this.
Firstly, we can only claim to be giving a realistic reflection of the specific anxieties that these chapters deal with, rather than with the multiple other affective experiences that classify Joburg life. And, secondly, we have to acknowledge that the anxieties we do deal with are mediated through the perceptions and positions of the chapters’ authors. So I don’t honestly think we can claim that this book, or any scholarly work really, is a completely authentic representation of lived reality, because of the processes and selection and interpretation that reality goes through.
But I don’t think that undermines or devalues the work at all: the chapters in this book give really insightful views into certain elements of certain Joburg realities. I don’t know that it’s even possible, in just one book, to give a properly definitive picture of such a complex and mutable city.
Nko: The idea behind Baeletsi Tsatsi’s ‘Taxi Diaries’ to be spread throughout the book – what was the thinking there?
Letsi is a really wonderful storyteller. Cobus (my co-editor) and I were very struck by her taxi stories, tiny snippets of unvarnished urban life that sum up a lot of what fascinates us about Joburg: the conditions of mobility and immobility, the endless inequalities and constrictions, the necessity of relating, the changeability, the warmth. We loved the way she gently narrated a certain kind of urban movement and the negotiations and compromises it requires. We knew that we wanted to include her work and we considered asking her to write a single longer story/chapter, but in the end it felt really natural to have her narrate the reader through their experience of the book in the same way that she narrates herself through her experience of Joburg.
As we say throughout, this is such an emotive city, it’s so full of complicated and demanding feelings. We wanted a throughline that emphasised this affect and kept the more scholarly chapters grounded in a sense of the daily realities of Joburg – and what is more real than trying to get around by taxi?
Joanna Woods (is a doctoral researcher at Stockholm University, whose project focuses on contemporary southern African speculative fiction; she is also our Comms Editor at Africa in Words).
Woods: First, I have to say how much I enjoyed reading this book!
In the Introduction, you note that “anxiety provides a common language, a collective rhetoric, that allows us to talk to each other about how we live here” (p.8). This is such a productive way of thinking about the state of anxiety and/or the state of being anxious. Could you comment on the creativity of anxiety: the potential that might be embedded in the concept? Perhaps especially in the context of Joburg, and South Africa?
I actually had just this conversation recently with a brilliant PhD student named Maya Loon, who has compelling arguments for why we should think about anxiety as productive. And to an extent I do agree that these kinds of persistent negative emotions can be part of what drives the enormous creativity of a city like Joburg. At the same time, though, I also want to push back against this idea in certain moments and contexts.
Zygmunt Bauman talks about cultures of fear as debilitating consequences of the powerlessness we feel in a distant and shifting political culture that we don’t really understand or relate to. I draw on that a lot in my own work: the kind of anxiety I’m interested in, and that this book is interested in, is a collective state that has its roots in social conditions (Sara Ahmed writes wonderfully about this) rather than an individual experience. I worry that defining this kind of anxiety as productive/creative can veer dangerously into a neoliberal vision of society in which even debilitating feelings are good because they make us do more, create more, produce more, which of course is in line with the way we are interpellated as capitalist subjects.
I think it’s necessary to be able to say that yes, the condition of anxiety is ubiquitous to modern life, and that it definitely has elements that spur meaningful work and thought, but at the same time to allow ourselves to admit that that’s kind of disastrous. We don’t necessarily have to find a positive application for the consequences of capitalism, and maybe, in imagining more just futures, we can think of a social world where we don’t always feel compelled to be moving and advancing. In a way I think my own focus on the anxious nature of this city is also a requiem for stillness, for not achieving, not scuttling, not being driven, which are of course not states I have personally managed to achieve, given that I work in academia in the 21st century.
Woods: There is a wonderful mix of contributions in Anxious Joburg – from essays to diary entries to a Q&A with photographer Sabelo Mlangeni. But were there contributions that perhaps didn’t make the final book, or that you feel were missing or would have liked to have included had there been time, space, or if word count allowed?
Absolutely, and as I said above there is no way a single text can encapsulate a whole city. There are so many gaps in this book, which we have had to learn to live with and readers have been very kind about. The nature of an edited project, especially one that develops from an in-person workshop, is you can only include what people are willing to write and submit, so there will always be things missing.
We tried to manage these by commissioning a few pieces (Aidan Mosselson’s and Njogu Morgan’s, for example), but there are still major lacunae we didn’t fill. In her preface Sisonke Msimang writes that this is a book about Joburg rather than Soweto, which would be very different, and she’s completely spot on as always, but for me the absence of Alexandra and other inner city townships sticks out.
We would have liked to include something explicitly on health anxiety: chapters like Khangelani Moyo’s touch on it, but we would have liked a conversation on HIV and/or TB, on clinics and hospitals and medical aid, on getting to and from healthcare locations. And, as Kagiso’s first question above made clear, we also have to acknowledge that the…
