Showing papers in "Social Dynamics-a Journal of The Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town in 2013"

Peripheries, suburbanisms and change in sub-Saharan African cities

Abstract: The paper reports on developments in the peripheries and suburbs of African cities south of the Sahara. Many African economies are expanding at unprecedented scale and with profound urban results. The paper is based on an extensive review of secondary sources and a modicum of fieldwork. Following Ekers, Hamers, and Keil (2012), the point of departure is suburbanism as “the combination of non-central population and economic growth with urban spatial expansion.” In the immense variety of African urbanisms, the purpose of the review is to explore what forms “suburbs” and peripheries take in various African contexts, including spaces which concentrate new economic activities, zones of middle- and upper-income residence, the meaning of informality of building, land markets and social activity, and the various elements of what is often termed “urban sprawl.” The paper seeks to identify trends in suburban growth, what the drivers of growth are, and how it is shaped by policy and institutional mechanisms that try...

The disappointment of nostalgia: conceptualising cultures of memory in contemporary South Africa

Abstract: Departing from a consideration of Jacob Dlamini’s book, Native Nostalgia, this essay critically reviews the conceptual terrain implied by “nostalgia,” re-situating it in relation to memory, especially where it intersects with debates over the status of “truth” in relation to “history.” We explore nostalgia through three dualities that underpin a burgeoning literature: remembering and forgetting, witnessing and testimony, and mourning and melancholia. Against conceptual oppositions that pit remembering against forgetting, or alternatively, that seek to remedy the fallibility of memory by seeking access to the “truth” of history, we suggest that nostalgia is probably more usefully understood as a practice of coincident temporalities. Nostalgia, in this sense, denotes a specific way of enfolding the past into the present, and indeed the future. We discuss two projects of post-apartheid testimony that work from, and on, the presumed antagonism that nostalgia sets up between “truth” and its possible distortion...

Positive Men: searching for relational dignity through health activism in a South African township

Abstract: This paper explores how men from a South African township appropriate health and rights discourses in times of existential needs and uncertainties, in order to construct isidima, or what the author calls a relational model of dignity. The activists’ efforts were tied to gendered moral practices of granting respect to others and expecting to be respected as “positive” men who struggle against gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. Their involvement in situations of moral breakdown, however, forged a situated transfiguration of gendered social relationships that went beyond both “traditional” notions of masculinity and “modern” ideals of liberal citizenship. The findings are based on life histories of 15 Xhosa-speaking men who were involved in the group Positive Men (PM). Furthermore, they are the result of direct and participant observation of key events that took place between 2007 and 2010.

Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp

Abstract: Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.

Policing in Johannesburg after apartheid

Abstract: This paper traces the genealogy of the “double paradigm shift” that transformed policing in Johannesburg after apartheid: from public to private and from reactive to proactive. The emergence of a market for residential security services led to the growth of a private security industry and a reconfiguration of urban governance. Responding to a growing demand for “proactive” security services, private security companies have recently begun innovating with new approaches to preventative security. These companies operate in a liminal zone of questionable legality, targeting poor black men as potential criminals to be excluded from the neighbourhoods of their clients.

Capitalism, city, apartheid in the twenty-first century

Abstract: This paper unfolds in three parts. The first section argues that there has been an innovation in the rights of private property, especially in the area of residential property. Starting in the 1960s, though only really coming into its own in the 1980s, the rights of private property have been grafted onto a regime of communal ownership. Thus, during the very period of capitalist ascendancy, historically non-capitalist forms of sociability were being elaborated from within the holy ark of capitalism itself, the relation of private property. The second part shows that the condominium or sectional-title estate is transforming urban landscapes across the globe, generating novel urban constellations that are frequently imagined and lived as non-suburbs. Effectively, the growth of townhouses is associated with the decline of the traditional suburb as an urban phenomenon. The third part of this essay focuses on a South African case study, where condominiums (or townhouses under sectional title) have become impor...

Building a revolutionary constituency: Mozambican refugees and the development of the FRELIMO proto-state, 1964–1968

Abstract: During the early 1960s, many Mozambicans fled from the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa to the sanctuary and friendly border of Tanganyika (Tanzania) to escape the escalating violence of the anti-colonial war. These Mozambicans experienced, like many political refugees, a crisis of status during this migration. In seeking to survive their migration to Tanzania, many existing social relations among Mozambican refugees were temporarily suspended during this transit. Under the auspices of FRELIMO 1 and the Tanzanian authorities, Mozambican refugees often found that their opportunities during this social breakdown were usually limited and redirected for the purposes of winning the anti-colonial war. Many of these people, regardless of gender or age, were also socially transformed by a continuum of survival skills that I call the bio-social experience. Many Mozambican refugees opted to work with FRELIMO as products of their own individual bio-social experiences. With the assistance of this revolut...

Towards a minor global architecture at Lamu, Kenya

Abstract: Major accounts of globalisation from a built environment perspective bring global cities and celebrity architects into focus. In this paper, I resist this and give an account of globalisation from the perspective of one of its minor architectures. A minor architecture is not a minor architectural language, but rather one that a minority constructs within a major language, encoding it differently and subverting its prevailing myths. The paper investigates this proposition by focusing on Lamu, the historic Islamic seaport and World Heritage Site on the northern coast of Kenya where a skirmish between local, national and global interests is currently underway over the construction of a new deep-water port. The port is a building site, not only of one of globalisation’s major architectures – a port, free economic zone and transportation corridor, but also of one of its minor ones, taking shape through the strategies Lamu’s organisations are deploying to object it. Through the analysis of Lamu in the longue duree – its coastal geomorphology and historic spatial protocols, I read these strategies as contemporary deployments of those long put to work at Lamu, through which land- and sea-based logics have been entangled.

The state and the colonial unconscious

Abstract: In this article, Fanon’s concept of the colonial unconscious – introduced in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1968) – is used to clarify the post-1994 political conjuncture in South Africa; in particular, unconscious forms of resistance against the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). Fanon’s concept of colonialism is first outlined and developed before his concept of the colonial unconscious is itself refined and put to work in the analysis of Brett Murray’s The Spear in terms of the return of the colonial repressed. It is argued, in conclusion, that the NDR needs to include within its ambit this unconscious dimension of South African politics without, however, giving in to the temptation of attempting to totalise and saturate all processes of subject formation.

Resisting the lure of deferral: realising the South African National Development Plan

Abstract: In a recent article in the South African newspaper City Press (“Strive the Beloved Country,” November 11, 2012) editor Ferial Haffajee argues that, although in the latest state plan for national de...

New community in a new space: artificial, natural, created, contested. An idea from a golf estate in Johannesburg

Abstract: Attention is constantly devoted to the question of living together and sharing spaces, which is often translated as a matter of social and spatial segregation and belonging to a community. New spatial, social and institutional geographies have emerged as a potential cornerstone of separateness and togetherness in South Africa with the emergence of the gated community. This article tackles the concept of “community” within the space of a golf estate (a type of gated community) located in the West Rand, Johannesburg. It aims to understand new geographies of the city through an analysis of the organisation and social life inside and outside the estate. The notion of community is explored by looking at the system engendered by the main legal actor within the estate, the Homeowners Association (HOA). It will be argued that some of these new spaces are made neutral through the action of the HOA, an agent that institutionally constructs a communitarian lifestyle, accepted and contested simultaneously by the resi...

Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a migrant labour hostel at the seaside

Abstract: In southern African narratives of migrant labour, hostels and compounds are represented as typical examples of colonial and apartheid planning. Visual and spatial comparisons are consistently made between the regulatory power of hostels and those of concentration camps. Several of these sites of violence and repression are today being reconfigured as sites of conscience, their artefactual presence on the landscape being constructed as places of remembrance. In this trajectory, a space of seeming anonymity in Lwandle, some 40 km outside of Cape Town, was identified by the newly established museum, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a structure of significance. The migrant labour compound in Lwandle, of which Hostel 33 is the last remnant, was designed by planners and engineers and laid out as part of a labour camp for male migrant workers in the 1950s. This article explores the ambitious project initiated in 2008, by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (and funded largely by the US Ambassadors ...

Visualising FRELIMO’s liberated zones in Mozambique, 1962–1974

Abstract: Headquartered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) engaged the Portuguese army from 1962 to 1974 in a ground war over Mozambique’s independence. At the centre of this military struggle were the geographical regions of the liberated zones, areas in northern Mozambique that FRELIMO designated as under its control. In order to make an exile movement present and real for illiterate populations, FRELIMO trained a group of its soldiers as photographers, who travelled across Mozambique to photograph the war. This act of photographing and distributing images had its political advantages for drawing international aid, but these image-making processes also risked disrupting the ethnically diverse coalitions that made up FRELIMO’s military and popular support. In an effort to address scholarship on liberation movements in Africa, which has overlooked the importance of photography, this article considers the technical, technological, and structural mechanisms FRELIMO instit...

Commemorating or celebrating? Reflections on the centenary of the Natives Land Act of 1913

Abstract: While no policymaker would claim to be celebrating the centenary of the Natives Land Act, the form and content of the commemoration of this significant event on the website of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has some unsettling parallels with the celebratory countdown to the Soccer World Cup of 2010. Rather than using the centenary to acknowledge the significant changes in relations to land of the past century, the state is treating it as an opportunity for political theatre that deflects attention from serious weaknesses in its land reform programme. If the centenary of the 1913 Land Act is to be an opportunity for meaningful reflection, then a more thoughtful engagement is required with major processes of social change and regional differentiation over the past 100 years.

The repeal of the land acts: the challenge of land reform policies in South Africa

Abstract: This paper analyses South Africa’s land reform policies post-1994 against the backdrop of the apartheid government’s manoeuvres through the repeal of the notorious Land Acts in 1991. The paper concludes that the democratic government could have avoided the challenges of ineffective land reform by taking into consideration land dispossession prior to 1913.

From “boys” to “men”? African and black masculinities, triangular desire, race, and subalternity in Charles Mungoshi’s short stories

Abstract: This article looks at African and black men and masculinities, triangulated desire, race, and subalternity in Charles Mungoshi’s short story collections. It examines the negotiation of desire, and its interface and interplay with power relations and their negotiation in the colonial and postcolonial economies of domination and gender as depicted in the short stories. It uses the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Girard’s mimetic theory of triangular desire, and Sedgwick’s theory of gendered triangular desire, to examine these dynamics. It argues that colonial and postcolonial power and gender relations are negotiated through a complex interplay of desire that cannot all be accounted for by both Girard and Sedgwick’s models, necessitating their modification to deal with the complexity of desire in a colonial and postcolonial context. The short story collections examined span the colonial and postcolonial eras and these are Coming of the Dry Season (1981), Some Kinds of Wounds (1980), and Walking Still (1997).

Negotiated denizenship: foreign nationals’ tactics of belonging in a Cape Town township

Abstract: This article draws on interviews and ethnographic research conducted in early 2010 in a Cape Town township to study the establishment and first stages of a newly formed organisation representing the interests of foreign nationals. It examines how and to what extent its early work has shown the potential to prise open alternative spaces for its members to participate meaningfully in local affairs without being “captured” by South African interests. Faced with intergroup distrust and the considerable pressures to assimilate into the prevailing political culture, the newly formed organisation adopted what I term “negotiated denizenship” as a distinctive tactic of belonging in an environment in which foreign migrants must earn access to certain basic rights and resources. By simultaneously engaging with existing nodes of authority in the community and establishing their own resource node, early evidence suggests that foreign migrants might be able to gradually influence local events and help to improve interg...

Can personal narratives heal trauma? A consideration of testimonies given at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract: This study investigates the therapeutic effects of narratives and linguistic expression in people who have suffered trauma. The kind of trauma considered is that which took place as a result of politically related violence in the South African liberation struggle, and the narratives and language discussed are selected from testimonies given during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Certain linguistic criteria identified by Pennebaker as predictors of successful therapeutic outcomes in the narratives of individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are applied to excerpts from the TRC testimonies. Linguistic analysis validates Pennebaker’s findings to some extent, but the investigation concludes that while linguistic expression may demonstrate cognitive processing and facilitate coherence, it is not enough to enable healing. Many factors, not only articulation, interact to determine the extent to which individuals can be healed. Some trauma is so intense that it cannot be verbalised...

Living together separately in South Africa

Abstract: This piece provides a response to the four articles in this edition. Drawing on some of the major themes from the articles, it asks what are the forms and meanings of new communities in post-apartheid urban South Africa.

Introduction: new and contemporary spaces in South Africa

Abstract: Over the last 20 years, South African and other publishing houses have released a regular stream of new titles on South Africa’s political history. The large majority of these concern the history o...

The people’s choice: options for land ownership in South Africa’s land reform

Abstract: This paper analyses land tenure reform in South Africa from the perspective of land redistribution and restitution projects. It takes the absence of a clearly defined tenure reform in the country as its point of departure to argue that land redistribution and restitution projects serve as a vehicle through which forms of land tenure in post-apartheid South Africa are expressed. There is dissonance between the official position on giving land to large groups under the legal entity of the CPA and the practice and preferences at project sites. The paper suggests that a progressive land tenure reform policy requires a bottom-up approach that takes into consideration various ways in which beneficiaries of land reform could own and use land.

The enduring spatial legacy of the Natives Land Act

Abstract: The centenary of the Natives Land Act of 1913 offers an avenue through which we can rethink and debate post-apartheid land reform. This paper focuses on how this Act epitomised the culmination of ideas about state and society and also laid the foundation for the social geography of the country. The Act set the stage for the configuration of the country through land as a tool for spatial planning. The principal objective of the paper is to highlight aspects of the Act that have cemented the social geography of the country, and to reflect on how and why those aspects continue to impede the redrawing of social and territorial borders in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper calls for a deeper reflection on the philosophical and material meanings that the Natives Land Act embodied, and how these have been disrupted or reinforced in whole or parts by post-apartheid policies and programmes.

“I too might once have been a prisoner”: oppressor’s paranoia in J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Breyten Breytenbach

Abstract: The oppressors and men complicit with oppression in J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist have markedly different personalities, occupy diverse social settings and become alive to the reader through different literary techniques, but they strikingly resemble each other, because they are paranoid, delusional and plagued by repressed feelings of guilt. The article identifies this approach to the oppressor’s mind as one that is typical of white writers writing against apartheid, and analyses the representations and functions of paranoia in Coetzee’s, Gordimer’s and Breytenbach’s texts as well as possible reasons for the strikingly similar portrayal of the oppressor’s mind.

Liberation betrayed by bloodshed

Abstract: On the evening of Thursday, August 16, in Johannesburg, I returned to my hotel for a well-deserved rest. I would turn on the TV, watch the news and then settle back to enjoy yet another episode of ...

Bringing the informal economy into the National Development Plan

Abstract: Building on the New Growth Path (NGP), the National Development Plan (NDP), proposed by the National Planning Commission (NPC), aims to reduce the unemployment rate from the current level of 27%, t...

The art museum in Africa – a utopia desired?

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that museums in general are utopias, “no-places” in which categorisations of objects can be opened up for destabilisation. Following a discussion of the ways in which the categories “material culture” and “art” are reflected in museums, I argue that once the museum is transposed to Africa, its function as a space in which heritage is maintained through the conservation and preservation is thrown into disarray. I argue further that this is particularly the case with the most utopian of museums, the art museum. I argue that most African nation states do not have national art museums, and offer an argument about why they have museums of “arts and cultures” instead. I end with an analysis of the history and situation of art museums in South Africa and possibilities for alternative ways of conceiving the art museum as an inclusive rather than exclusive space.

Cinema and Highlife in the Gold Coast: The Boy Kumasenu (1952)

Abstract: The Boy Kumasenu (Sean Graham, Gold Coast, 1952) produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit during the 1950s, before independence in Ghana, had a public impact and success with local Ghanaian audiences that other colonial films never achieved. About a boy, Kumasenu, who moves from a rural village to the city of Accra, the film attempts to represent an African experience of modern life, using a local cast. This article explores the film’s popular reception by drawing on advertisements, newspaper coverage, reviews, awards it received, as well as contemporary personal correspondence and retrospective interviews with the filmmakers. It proposes that the film’s appeals lay in its inclusion of highlife, its fashions, styles and music, popular in the Gold Coast, alongside cinematic conventions of documentary, drama-documentary, neorealist film styles and the Hollywood gangster genre, already familiar to urban Ghanaian audiences. Furthermore, its theme of urban youth and citizenship evoked the concept of the “African P...

Who built Jozi? Discovering memory at Wits Junction

Abstract: by Luli Callinicos, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2012, 160 pp., R180 (paperback), ISBN 9781868146079 Jozi, Johannesburg, Egoli (the place of gold), Jo’burg, Jobek, are all names by which th...