Sawyer seminar - institutionalizing and internalizing divisions

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, beginning its reading group with a series on Old and New Racial Formations. Over the next months, participants will reflect on the readings and discussions on race. This posting is by Christina Cielo, a doctoral fellow with the JWTC.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

Institutionalizing and Internalizing Divisions: Miscegenation, Segregation and De-Segregation

The conversation in the Sawyer Seminar Series on segregation emerged from a set of readings that highlighted historically institutionalized processes of race-making in South Africa. But an abiding concern in the readings and in the discussion was also the inability of racial categories to contain biological, social and economic phenomena.

This was evident in an extraordinary study we read on the early 20^th century production of the tuberculosis epidemic in the black South African population. In White Plague, Black Labor, Randall Packard gathers a wealth of data to show that the extent of the tuberculosis epidemic among black South Africans was related to the ways that their labor was exploited. Government policies directed by the economic interests of first mining, then urban industrialization, dictated blacks' spatial mobility, which in turn exacerbated their collective vulnerability to the disease.

Participants in the seminar linked this historical study to the current AIDS epidemic in South Africa. This idea sparked further remarks on the entanglements of contagion and fear, intimacy and race. Discussions of race relations often invoke its association with economic and social or symbolic power. But we need to look beyond power as domination and begin to try to understand the complex intertwining of affect and power. Urban white residents were uncomfortably close to the tuberculosis epidemic among migrant laboring Africans, and used it to justify segregation policies in the early 20^th century. If urban segregation was the fearful response to the contagion of “white plague” in that period, to what extent is the economic segregation of private and public health care systems a fearful response to health risks today?

But the story, as ever, is more complicated. It is not just that fear and power drive segregation and its consequent inequalities. There is always the excess of affect that mires such a direct cause-effect relation. Emotions and identifications do not fit neatly into categories that are authoritatively imposed. In the 20^th century consolidation of South Africa as a white nation, it was precisely the cleavages among whites as a group that shaped particular segregation policies. The 1913 Native Land Act that created black reserves kept rural whites and blacks from becoming too familiar or equal. If that were tolerated, as a proponent of the bill said, “they would soon find that they would be a bastard nation” (in Gilliomee, p.309). And such a nation would do little to sustain the driving economic force of industrialization that depended on categorical divisions of laborers. In the interest of capital, racial and class categories were adjusted hand in hand. One seminar participant asked, “Can you even put in place a structure of segregation without calibrating class categories as well?”

Early segregation policies were also shaped by an acknowledgement of the ways that identity is affectively grounded in particular places. The 1923 Native Urban Areas Act, passed on the heels of an influenza epidemic in Cape Town, restricted where blacks could live in cities. It attempted to prevent blacks from internalizing an identification with the industrializing cities which nevertheless needed their labor. Blacks' sense of belonging to the cities would be tantamount to a first step in making it theirs. As the prime minister of the Cape said, Africans should “go back to the place whence they came – to the native territories, where they should really make their home” (in Gilliomee, p.292). Yet the relatively small tracts of land reserved for what were eventually called “homelands” were wholly inadequate to sustain the majority black population. Since 1918, African homelands sustained less than a third of their inhabitants. By 1976, the proportion of homeland families' income from urban areas was over 70% (Gilliomee and Schlemmer, p.7).

The legitimizing narrative of segregation shifted throughout the 20^th century. By the 1960s, homelands were defined as separate nations, with their own authorities and citizenry. Yet this was in no way a threat to the white nation that South Africa was forging: “After all, what nation state can be held responsible for the educational expenditure or the unemployment, old-age and other welfare benefits needed in another sovereign land?” (Wilson, p.61). South Africa's process of capital accumulation in the first part of the 20^th century assured that investment took place not in these separate Bantustans, but in the cities that legislation prevented becoming black South Africans' “homes.” The result was a dependence that deprived the homelands of economic, social and symbolic power, forestalling any real political or economic sovereignty.

The parallels with contemporary international relations are striking. A colleague Marcel Paret is working on research that compares black migrant labor policies through apartheid in South Africa with current U.S. migration policies. Arizona, one of the four U.S. states that border Mexico, recently passed a bill that makes it a crime to fail to carry immigration documents and gives police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Marcel pointed out that this state bill controls Latinos and Mexican migrants in the United States just as the pass system controlled black labor in apartheid South Africa. In each case, the creation of a class of potential criminals presumes and constructs race.

Segregation depends on borders and fences. The sheer preponderance of physical boundaries in South Africa has come up repeatedly in the seminar. There was the bitter almond hedge built in 1660 in the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch to keep their settlers apart from the vast land that stretched up and beyond their ken. We ruminated on the mythic and material importance of the frontier in previous seminars. And now in Johannesburg, there are high walls and fences, many electric and alarmed, around homes to keep their residents safe. Perhaps, as a seminar participant commented, we need to better understand the conditions that make for constant fence-building. One thing that has become clear is our discussion is that fences, here and elsewhere, depend on and produce processes of racialization.

Yet post-apartheid, post-multiculturalism, distinctions and divisions do not map onto race quite so neatly. There is now an emerging black elite in South Africa. Differences are now incorporated into unequal systems, rather than used as the basis for explicit exclusions. Claims for the universality of citizen and human rights have also meant that the equality of human work can lead to its objectification as a commodity. As Simone Weil intimated some 60 years ago, there is indeed a profound link between human rights conceived as goods (i.e. the right to water, the right to health, etc.) and a market-based development model. Thus it is no surprise that universalization of “participation” throughout the developing world in the last decades has not transformed structures of inequalities. In Bolivia, for example, the Law of Popular Participation extended access to the state by incorporating local differences into decision-making mechanisms. So the customary authority, for example, is also the community's representative within the municipality. But critics note that this recognition and integration of cultural distinctions has also allowed difference to be “managed within a general economy of domination” (Crespo and Fernandez, p.37).

Still, the continued insistence on institutional respect for local and ethnic distinctions is a fundamental part of indigenous social movements worldwide. Last year, the Republic of Bolivia officially became the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Its new constitution defends not only representative and participatory democracy, but communal democracy as well, in an attempt to negotiate between positive and customary rights frameworks. In this context, and with a government brought to power by indigenous social movements, how are Bolivian state institutions and national legislation conceiving and racializing difference?

To answer that question is far beyond the scope of this blog entry. But I wonder if attempts to make and institutionalize distinctions and separations are unavoidable. After all, we need conceptual fences. It is our ability to distinguish differences, to define patterns and categories that help us make sense of and act on our world. But when do collective demarcations and borders become debilitating? When do definitions of who we are, and who others are, divide and blind and oppress us?

Following the ideas raised in the seminar, perhaps it may help us to take seriously the facts of excess and affect. Institutions and legislation not only produce results but also people with unexpected and radically different ways of seeing and experiencing and connecting to the world. The ways that we conceive of the institution of property, for example, would have to consider factors beyond market exchange values and even Marxist use values. Property and space, rather, are vital to a sense of belonging and becoming. Power and race relations are thus not only about segregation and domination, but also about the impossibility of the closure of racialized domination. This may help us understand the haphazardness and contingency of the historical processes of race-making. With this in mind, we can also more clearly see what today's divisions and categorizations, miscegenations and de-segregations, do for us and why. And so shape the horizons of our possibilities of living together.

By Christina Cielo

References:

Packard, Randall. 1990. White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

Giliomee, Hermann. 2003. The Afrikaners : biography of a people. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Giliomee, Hermann and Lawrence Schlemmer, eds. 1985. Up against the fences: poverty, passes and privilege in South Africa. Cape Town: D. Philip.

Wilson, Francis. 1985. "Mineral wealth and rural poverty: an analysis of the economic foundations of the political boundaries of South Africa," in Giliomee and Schlemmer (eds.)

Crespo, Carlos and Omar Fernandez. 2001. Los campesinos regantes de Cochabamba en la Guerra del Agua. Cochabamba: CESU/ UMSS/ FEDECOR.

Sawyer seminar - on 'race' relations

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. This posting is by Brigitte Bagnol.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

On ‘Race’ relations: Contours, lines, frontiers and borders

Taking upon Joan Scott’s invitation (1988: 44) to use her analysis of the process of construction of gender relationships to analyse other social process such as race, ethnicity and class, I would like to embark in this challenge adapting her model to “race” relations.

Paraphrasing Scott (1988: 42-49) my definition of “race” has two main parts and several interrelated elements. “Race” is a constitutive element of social relations based on perceived differences between people of different physiognomic and or physical characteristics but also of distinct linguistic and ethnic/national groups. “Race” is one of the social markers signifying relations of power. It can be a primary or a secondary way of signifying relations of power depending on the context and the structures of power of which it forms part.

Relations between groups of people of different origins or physical characteristics are also very often informed by perceived differences based on class and which are used to maintain unequal economic relation. But, for this reason, transformations in the forms of production and exploitation create different relationships and different forms of perceptions between people of different physical characteristics or origin. This is so because relations of alliances and conflicts evolve over time according to forms of production and exploitation thus modifying social boundaries and opening possibilities for the establishment of new forms of relations between people from different social classes and groups.

Social relations based on perceived differences between people of different colour and groups are influenced by factors that are specific to a context, thus stressing the importance of an emphasis on localised analysis. But they are also informed by a world history and globalized economic and cultural policies. The latter might explain why “race” relations and expressions of asymmetries, marginalization and discrimination have many similarities in France, United States, Brazil or South Africa although the history of these relations differs widely.

The question we need to ask is in what conditions and under which discursive and political situation specific differences become a determinant characteristic of relation between people? Among the factors shaping perceived differences between people of different colour/ethnicity/nationality one can distinguish the symbolic order which includes the language, signs and norms as well as the political and legal system; and the subjective identities.

1- Cultural symbols and norms (here I am condensing two categories developed by Scott)

Myths, lends, cultural concepts about colour/ethnicity/nationality associated with social value offer representations about differences that set up hierarchies. By example, dichotomic vision of white/black, pure/impure, light/dark, life/death, luck/bad luck, good/evil have influenced and might continue to influence perceptions of people of different colour/ethnicity/nationality. Cultural symbols are found and reproduced in context such as kinship, religious, educational, healing, political and legal systems and contribute to the creation of iconic and fixed identities in opposition to a reality of contestations and challenges of these symbols and norms.

2- Political context and legislation available

The national policies of inclusion or exclusion of different groups according to colour/ethnicity/nationality might or might not open possibilities for (re)imagining boundaries of identities and (re)thinking old culturally constructed archetypal identities. Policies such as Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa or the institution of racial quotas in Brazil contribute to the reformulation of identities or the fixation of identities based on colour/ethnicity/nationality.

3- Subjective identities

The search for a colour/ethnic/national identity evolves through a more or less transitory and circumstantial fixation at a certain time, in a given circumstance and along the life cycle. People with a basic colour/ethnic/national identity may play out a different colour/ethnicity/nationality identity depending on conventions, personal interest and social pressures. As queer studies indicate, identity can be separated from the physical body allowing people to experience identity without embodiment of physical characteristics. People in situations of migration experience the anxiety of non-identities, des-identities or trans-identities in-between borders, continents at the margins of assigned identities and in the process of creating a new identity. There is not a unique and monolithic way of being and feeling that one belong to a specific colour/ethnic/national identity as other markers of social identify might interfere or even supersede. Thus, aspects such as intersectionality (gender, age, kinship, lineage, religion, education, class) and performativity also need to be considered as they have a significant role in shaping perception of differences and social relations among polychromatic, polyethnic and polynational groups and individuals.

By Brigitte Bagnol

Scott, Wallach Joan. 1988. Gender a Useful Category of Historical Gender Analysis. In: Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 28-50.

Sawyer seminar - On Fences

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. Today’s blogging is by Ruth McFarlane.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

On Fences

Often it is the visually rich metaphors in the texts we prepare for our Sawyer Seminar study group sessions that stay with me the longest. This week the metaphor of “fences” was a thread throughout the readings.

Driving around, a visitor in this construction-riddled city girdled in yellow barricades, chain-link and orange plastic tarp strung between rods rammed into the earth – this city, this country, on the verge of welcoming the rest of the globe – I see fences of all kinds, both old and new. I think about people feverishly constructing a version of themselves to present to the world in a few short weeks. I think about modern cities built on layers of ancient ruins, relics of the conquered, and I wonder about all that is hidden under this new pavement.

For the April 28^th meeting, the Sawyer Seminar study group prepared texts dealing, generally, with segregation; its political and social history as well as patterns of poverty and disease and emerging labour and class hierarchies directly related to the design and implementation of pass laws and other controls of the apartheid system. It is often tempting, in our discussion of these troubling texts about the ‘old South Africa’ to spring forward and speculate about more hopeful possibilities for the future. But one participant wisely warned against moving into the future too quickly. Our first task, he reminded us, is to understand where we have been, what happened and why it happened.

An interesting theme that developed in the discussion was the relationship between notions of excess and the fences created by influx control policies. The comparison was made between the difference in the way U.S. slaves were treated before and after the British began the process of abolishing slavery, and the shifting policies regarding urban black labor in South Africa as borders beyond the city became more rigid and a labor surplus developed in rural and former “reserve” areas. Prior to abolition, the life of a slave working in the harsh conditions on plantations in the American South was understood to be seven years – slaves were literally worked to death. A steady supply of new bodies took the place of the dead. With British abolition new bodies became less readily available and the value and health of the enslaved became more relevant to the labor needs of the plantation masters. Not only did relationships change between master and slave but political tensions and legal battles arose between slave-holding states and non slave-holding states as issues of manumission, runaways, ownership of offspring, and illegal trafficking became more important.

A similar interplay of access and excess in the South African contest emerges in Giliomee and Schlemmer’s discussion of the independence of former “reserve” areas. Describing a shift in political opinion among South African leaders towards supporting the independence of Lesotho and Mozambique, the authors ask, “what nation state can be held responsible for the educational expenditure or the unemployment, old-age and other welfare benefits needed in another sovereign land?” The new sovereignty of these regions created borders at which the employment obligations of government and industry were conveniently detained. Political control remained virtually unchanged, however, as the new nations were still reliant on old, established patterns of migratory labor and highly vulnerable to economic coercion. Meanwhile, this side of the labor fence, new categories developed in urban black communities around access to jobs and in terms of permission to reside in the city permanently, quasi-permanently or only temporarily. As in the example from American slavery, new restrictions on access to employment created hierarchies within the black population and necessitated more intricate calibration of class and control. Fences created sovereignty but also denied it. Fences created new relationships not only between masters and servants but among the servants themselves.

Borders operate on our imagination and our morality. We imagine each other across the barrier and, in the process, we imagine ourselves. Slum removals, pass laws, and segregation all allowed white people to distance themselves, to imagine in various ways that the black population on the other side of the fence was irrelevant. This is, perhaps, best illustrated by Packard who highlights the drop in municipal tuberculosis statistics following the passage of the Slum Clearance Act in 1934 when black communities with high death rates were moved outside the city limit and outside the statistical population. And yet the fence is there, bearing witness, insisting silently that the people on the other side must have a terrible relevance. In his biography of the Afrikaans people, Giliomee writes about three Afrikaner leaders’ views on segregation at the beginning of the 20^th century. Although Sauer, Hertzog and Smuts differed on policy and possibility of equality, they agreed on something critical: all three men feared that equality among white and black people would spell annihilation of the white race in South Africa. The terrible relevance of blackness, otherness, pressing in at the fences served to convince the people inside that the perimeter must be protected at all costs and ratcheted to full-throttle the amorality of self-preservation.

The most dynamic moment in the discussion came close to the end of our time together when one participant admitted that she wondered how anyone could read these texts and not feel them viscerally. “These readings fucked me up. They really fucked me up.” The rawness of this comment got directly at the messiness of our project. We are a group of South Africans and foreigners from various professional and academic backgrounds, multiracial and diverse in many other respects as well. Sitting down to discuss the historical, economic, and sociopolitical context of South African policies of racial segregation, we encounter not just the fences of our collective pasts but the fences of our present and, among these, boundaries that are freighted with personal significance. In the course of our project of excavating the past, it seems impossible that we will not also dredge up deep, specific feelings about what has happened, what was done and left undone, or as one participant put it who was allowed to live and who was allowed to die.

Framing her comment, my colleague spoke about the distribution of milk to black urban locations in the 1930s as described by Packard. Her illustration asked us to focus on the horror of this one particular effect of urban segregation. The borders around black locations within the cities created economic and social conditions that severely limited access to food and literally starved black urban dwellers. Packard relates numerous studies from the 1920s and 1930s showing that black workers did not earn enough to buy food that would support basic nutritional requirements. Milk, among other staples, such as bread, was not readily available. Often only surplus milk not purchased by white consumers was delivered to black communities and even the surplus milk was too expensive for many. Instead many black city dwellers purchased condensed milk, which was more affordable because it could be diluted. Often the condensed milk was diluted until very little nutritional value remained. Not even milk, one of the most basic (and symbolic) sources of nutrition, made it through the fence unregulated. This illustration was important because it invited us, as a group, to cross the barrier between our work as scholars and our emotional response as human beings. We were reminded that a visceral reading of the text allows access to ways of understanding that are specifically located in the body. To understand who was allowed to live and who was allowed to die, to understand what happened and why it happened, it may sometimes be necessary for the texts to fuck us up.

Gilliomee and Schlemmer’s image of laborers trampling the fence around the rural labor commission office at the announcement of recruitment opportunities is, for me, both a bleak and hopeful one. Fences, laws, never keep everyone out. They can be trampled and broken as simply as they are erected if, generally, at much greater personal sacrifice and tragedy. Human beings will trample fences not just to make money but to find food, to chase the dream of a better life, to live with their families, and to have enough milk for their children. Fences can only withstand so much pressure and human beings always push very hard to survive.

Ruth McFarlane

Sawyer seminar - In a Moment of Danger

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. Today’s blogging is by Micaela Alicia Smith, a PhD student from Los Angeles, and a doctoral fellow with the JWTC.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

Reading the Flashpoints of South African Race Relations

The Sawyer Seminar readings and discussion for April 14th centered around the themes of peace and conquest, property and privilege, and the uneven and contested racial terrain structuring South African life, both within its historical and contemporary moment.

The discussion generated some productive comments on the structures of racial and class hierarchies, specifically when thinking through the South African Frontier and the violent embattlement for land and labor between Afrikaner burgher settlers, British colonial settlers, and Xhosa peoples. “Race is the modality through which class is lived,” is one of the most well-known phrases of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. If Afrikaner historian Hermann Giliomee argues Afrikaner victimhood centered around their identification as “a subject and inferior race,” can Hall’s argument be applied to Afrikaner burghers? At the same time, Giliomee argues the relations between Afrikaner burghers and Xhosa peasants were not rooted in a racial hierarchy; rather Afrikaner insistence on creating their own nation was primarily to maintain their hierarchy based on social status. A question raised was how to think through these tensions when social status cannot be defined without invoking race. A participant commented perhaps a more productive question can be: If we take as a given the ways in which both race and class structure the political economy of settler power, we can then ask: How do race and class differently produce and animate each other depending on the particular historical moment we are looking at?

The discussion then turned to whether we can identify the set of struggles Giliomee articulates as still remaining with us today. Can we live together? In a state of conquest, how is the making of order and peace produced? Property is understood as the material possession of land and cattle but it must not be forgotten property is first and foremost the materiality of one’s own body. The economy of one’s own survival, the right to defend oneself, makes the establishment of Truth and Justice for the State especially difficult when property is also used as a weapon of war. In these moments it becomes hard to identify the enemy, the loser, the racial Other—as this Other is also always shifting, where one cannot exist/survive without the other.

Yet, to what extent lies the danger of identifying this constantly contested racial terrain and the fluidity of each historical moment that defies any clear cut answers— like the dancing play of history, as accident and event? The danger can be navigated through a return to the everyday experiences of those marginalized, Black lives, their happiness, their pain, their desires. This is to say, while the fluidity and multiple subject positions each person inhabits are well understood and accepted, we must also attend to the logic of race and capital as fixing race and class, both historically and today—this unchanging racial logic we have inherited with the centuries of violent struggle over capital accumulation. Once located within the bodies of enslaved and their extracted labor, how do we read and bear witness to the planned evictions of the urban poor in preparation for the 2010 World Cup—a plan that will leave thousands homeless in an effort to cleanse the downtown urban core? How do we read the complete destruction of living settlements as if they never were, what are the interconnected strategies for state-building that promote urban regeneration at the same time there is a move to dehumanize lived neighborhoods as 'slums' and as sites of criminality that must be “cleaned up”?

This dredge of history, this cumulative weight, this act of conquest as a set of waves always made anew, also identifies the pain that does not change, that race is continually manifest for whites and Black people through very different lived experiences and investments. A question raised was how to read white fear, generated most recently by the murder of Eugene Terreblanche. A participant argued white fear is situated primarily vis-à-vis white wealth, since it is white cumulative wealth that has been crafted from the exploitation and active disinvestment of people of color. The history of Black revolt, including the burning of township schools by Black students is an act of self-inflicted violence — by burning a symbol of class mobility, Black youth are forcing whites, and the world at large, to pay attention to them, to recognize the separate and unequal system of education structuring Black life. While the embodiment of white privilege allow whites to feel threatened only through the fear of Black revolt, Black survival, rich and poor, cannot escape race as it structures their everyday life, where they live, where they work, where they play.

In this moment, on what basis can Truth and Justice be established? We can identify the same tensions that structured the Frontier Wars between white settlers and the indigenous African nations during the 19th century as still with us today. The murder of Eugene Terreblanche perhaps can be best understood as the most recent flashpoint of race relations. It is these moments that force the public to pay attention, yet we must also pay attention to the surprising alliances and to the fissures that open up because of the inherently unstable act of conquest. These are the possibilities and dangers we must attend to and which will continue to generate discussion for us—most especially when our discussions are grounded in a close reading of the texts, as these texts illuminate the other perhaps more subtle flashpoints living with us today.

Micaela Alicia Smith

Sawyer seminar - Racial Frontiers

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. Today’s blogging is by Kelly Gillespie, Anthropology lecturer at Wits and one of the JWTC organisers of the Sawyer Seminar Series, and Rebecca Freeth, an organisational development practitioner working in social justice organisations.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

Is the 'frontier' a useful concept for (South) Africa?
Kelly Gillespie

The first session of the Sawyer Seminar on Property, Race and Poverty took place at Wits University on Wednesday, with about forty people around the table discussing a set of readings concerning the early foundations of race in South Africa. To begin thinking about South Africa’s racial experiment, Achille Mbembe had selected for the group three historical texts on the ‘frontier’ in early colonial South African history (authored by Legassick , Giliomee and Penn).

The main thread of the conversation was to try to understand the worth of the ‘frontier’ as an analytical concept both in the historiography of South African racism as well as in understanding the historical present in South African society. The idea of the frontier has been often used by white liberal historians to characterize the colonial history of South Africa. Many have argued that the particular character of South African society, especially its virulent forms of racism, was produced at the geographic and social frontier between different colonial-era constituencies. But is the frontier-concept a fundamentally colonialist/white idea? Does it rely on a white political subject of conquest for its justification? Or is it possible to use the frontier-concept stripped of its historiographic positionality? Is it therefore useful in the project of producing histories attentive to black experience?

In our discussion, there seemed to be some discrepancy in answering these questions. Some saw the frontier as irrevocably tied to the project of white privilege, and were angered that we were even discussing it as a possible lens for characterizing South Africa. Some wondered what kinds of analytics would be useful in writing black history, or at least a history not founded on a supremacist doctrine. Some thought the frontier irrelevant in the face of later industrialization, a much more significant event in the production of South African life. Others, however, tried to find what might be of worth in the concept of the frontier. Some were of the position that the frontier was always a moment of resistance simultaneous to being a moment of conquest, necessarily implying the co-presence of black subjects in history. Some reflected on literatures from other parts of the world that were attempting to rework the frontier as a plausible concept. Others saw frontiers as a necessary development of capitalism more generally. Of most interest seemed to be a distinction made by Giliomee and elaborated by Nigel Penn on the nature of the frontier. Both used the distinction between the ‘open’ and the ‘closed’ frontier to write about the different phases in the experience of encounter between different kinds of subjects in colonialising territory.

While Giliomee’s text is more in the tradition of white history, Penn’s text uses the frontier to reflect as much as possible, given the constraints of South African archives, on the plural experience of colonial, and racial, encounter. Both, however, show how the frontier’s different phases allowed for shifts in the kinds of social arrangements and relations possible in that encounter. The ‘open’ frontier was a place in which encounters between white/European and black/African were by no means established, and new orders of law, power and property were flexible, volatile and contested, even as they were in production. Penn gives a rich account of the labour involved in effectively ‘closing’ the frontier, a phase in which property relations calcified and a region became subject to a more-or-less singular dispensation and law, one which secured the interests of white colonists. Closure was not an easy feat and not to be assumed as obvious.

It is this relationship between open and closed frontier that may provide a way for the frontier to be reclaimed as a useful analytic. The frontier, here, is the place and time at which diverse interests and a certain violence of plurality are narrowed into some kind of singularity, at which point sovereignty is established (and exception thereby produced). The frontier as a social and geographic formation is the space in which the temporal relationship between contestation/liminality/possibility and conquest/order/fixity is worked out.

One of the more interesting questions to emerge from this discussion was “If the ‘closed frontier’ is the point at which sovereignty is created, then does it not cease to become a frontier?’ In other words, is the concept of the ‘closed frontier’ not an oxymoron? What this question prompted was a conversation about the worth of retaining the concept of the ‘closed frontier’ precisely because it allows for a description of a state of sovereignty in which the traces of its own history remain. That is, in which sovereignty has not annihilated the memory of the violence of its own inception. In a sense then, the ‘closed frontier’ describes a tension between established sovereign relations and the residues of prior social relations, a tension that opens the possibility for political subjectivities and imaginations that could come to challenge the sovereign.

This reflection on the relationship between a disciplining sovereign and a political space for the remembrance of its origins – its denaturalisation – is perhaps a fruitful place to begin reconsidering the frontier as a useful analytic tool. This perhaps even more so in analyzing postcolonial contexts in which the past, the remains, the ruin have such purchase on the present, and the present always seems so vulnerable to exploitation and extreme forms of inequality. As private security companies secure territory for the extraction of mineral resources on the African continent; as they secure territory for the production of privileged lifestyles in gated communities and government enclaves, the manner in which frontiers are found, contested and closed (even as this closure contains the possibility of being reopened), seems to remain an important site for social concern and analysis.

Frontiers: Lines in the sand
Rebecca Freeth

A frontier is an imaginary line imbued with meaning. The meaning I imbue it with is a function of which side of the frontier I’m on.

As a frontierswoman, sitting on this side of the frontier, I invest it with hope and ambition. The only future I can imagine is forward, continuing to push this line into new realms of freedom and opportunity. Over there, beyond that line, I believe there is a world of untapped resources to which I can lay claim. My pioneer blood knows that this frontier is only a temporary pause, a short-lived resistance from the other side, before we move ourselves and our frontier forward again.

As a person indigenous to this land, sitting on that side of the frontier, it represents a sense of being crowded out. This is not my frontier. It was created by, and belongs to, those on the other side. The logic of it is foreign. I know what it is like to compete for the most prized land, to win or to lose, to assimilate or to be assimilated, to kill or to be killed. But the people on the other side of this new frontier play with different rules and, in their eyes, all I see are new horizons.

In this short blog piece, I would like to argue that we all have experience of being on both sides of a frontier. We know what it is like to push into new spaces – intellectual, physical or psychological – with exhilaration, determination and, sometimes, fear of the unknown. And we know what it is like to be intruded upon, to feel the space around us get smaller, more cramped, more threatening.

But it is too simple to suggest that these two frontier locations are experienced, in equal measure, by everyone. The co-creation of race and class, now – echoing the era of colonial frontiership in South Africa, then – means that if I am white and privileged, I am more likely to continue to push into new spaces, to exercise my birthright of power, to dislodge what is in the way of my pursuits. Shannon Sullivan, examining white privilege as a deeply ingrained and often unconscious habit (which is not to abdicate responsibility for it) writes, “To be a white person means that one tends to assume that all cultural and social spaces are potentially available for one to inhabit. The habit of ontological expansiveness enables white people to maximize the extent of the world in which they transact. But as an instance of white solipsism, it also severely limits their ability to treat others in respectful ways. Instead of acknowledging others’ particular interests, needs, and projects, white people who are ontologically expansive tend to recognize only their own, and their expansiveness is at the same time a limitation.” These ontological incursions, and the limitations they create, tell of the many invisible lines, or frontiers, we cross as we navigate race and class in South Africa.

In this last week with the murder of Terreblanche (AWB) and threats on the life of Julius Malema (ANC youth league), the frontier of race and racism urgently carved its way across our social landscape, visible this time even to those South Africans who usually enjoy the luxury of forgetfulness. For most, this line has been here all the time; sometimes a fault-line, sometimes a jagged edge, this time a precipice. What frontier mentality will we adopt? Will we just push this frontier back and forth between us, raising the ante each time? Or will we see that freedom lies, not on the other side of the frontier, but at the frontier itself? Can we stand at the frontier, fully committed to its transformation, neither stepping away in denial or hopelessness, nor pushing the other over the precipice?

References:

Legassick, Martin. 1980 [1970]. ‘The frontier tradition in South African historiography’, in Marks and Atmore (eds.) Economy and society in pre-industrial South Africa. London: Longman.

Giliomee, Hermann. 1988 [1979]. ‘The Eastern Frontier 1770-1812’, in Elphick and Giliomee (eds.) The Shaping of South African Society 1652-1840. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Penn, Nigel. 2005. ‘Introduction’ in The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s northern frontier in the 18^th century. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Sullivan, S. 2006. “Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege” page 25. For those interested in Sullivan’s theorizing about whiteness, Dr Samantha Vice will present her paper “How do I live in this strange place?” at the Hoernle research seminar in philosophy on April 15^th at Wits. While she draws on Sullivan’s ideas about the habitual enactment of white privilege, her thesis about white shame is her own.

Beyond the biennial: Bamako at 15 years

Photographer: Sammy Baloji. Title: Gécamines, from the series, Memory, 2006. Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Permission to reproduce gratefully acknowledged.

The Rencontres de Bamako, or African photography biennial, which ran from the 7th of November to the 7th of December 2009, in Mali’s capital city, provokes fervent conversation among visiting artists and spectators. Now in its eighth edition, the festival has picked up impressive momentum over the years. Yet there remains little consensus as to its bright spots or its shortcomings. Both call for more sustained critical exploration: what can the biennial provide artists and audiences beyond a passive venue for display? Can it instigate novel spaces or offer artists new ways of rethinking their work in a larger, post-pan-African world?

This year’s exhibitions testified to the sophistication and range of a rising generation of photographers, many of whose careers have benefited from opportunities connected with the event. But lost opportunities were equally in evidence – and sometimes glaring. In conversations with photographers, we heard, not surprisingly, that their demands and desires were not always best served by the Paris-based remote-planning apparatus. The expectations and agendas of distant patrons and markets, usually but not exclusively in Europe, and local Malian actors, are pulling the festival in opposite directions. Issues of sustainability have plagued the event from its inception and, in some instances, have become only starker. Overall, we were left with the impression that sponsors’ approach to organization and oversight of the Rencontres has not always kept pace with developments on the continent. Despite these many challenges, and the complexities of the cultural policies – and politics – behind them, we were encouraged by a number of promising new initiatives sprouting up.

The broad inclusion of artists from across Africa worked against any depth of display in the international exhibition. The mix of mature and new artists, cheek-by-jowl, was, for some, a strength of the event, and new artists provided some of the most compelling work. ‘Borders’ was the theme chosen by the event’s principal sponsor, Culturesfrance, an agency of the French ministries of Foreign Affairs, Culture, and Communication. Some have begun to ask whether a curatorial theme is still needed or relevant. Perhaps the real question should be: whose interest does it serve? This one emphasized the organization’s official goal: featuring African talent unknown in European exhibition circles. This aim responded to earlier biennials, which were populated by established, often expatriate African photographers.

This year’s creative directors and the Malian organizers faced, we learned, inordinate time pressure in the processes of selection and production. The main sponsors (Culturesfrance) dragged their feet in naming the creative directors (Michket Krifa and Laura Serani) until January 2009, an unthinkable 10 months in advance of the event. The delay undoubtedly accounts for the unevenness of many selections. It may also explain the reliance on pat and predictable interpretations in conceptual decisions about many of the groupings. This was particularly the case in the so-called international or pan-African exhibition: portraits of refugees and asylum-seekers were clustered in one or two galleries, the architecture of war-torn cities in another. In discussions of the reasons for the delay, and in the approach to the obstacles it inevitably threw up, what came through was the clunkiness of a top-down, institution-heavy approach.

Whether this approach is typical of ‘northern’ funding remains an open question in Bamako. Samuel Sidibé, director of the National Museum and the head of the biennial’s administration on the Malian side, cited pressure on the part of Culturesfrance to move management from the Malian Ministry of Culture to private associations – which have yet to be devised or, according to many in Bamako, are still precarious where they do exist – as a major factor contributing to this year’s delay and resultant organisational problems: ‘I myself was not in favour of this. Because I thought – I knew – that the [private] structures in Mali are not yet strong enough to manage an event like this’. In the end, this year’s event was not handed over to the non-state structures envisaged in France, and there was little indication that a hybrid public-private organizing body could, or should, be invented in the near future, as some had wished it might this year.

Those structures that have been established by virtue of the biennial’s influence have been conceived largely as development projects focused on stepping up the inclusion of Malian actors and institutions. The fate of these efforts remains wildly uncertain. There is growing criticism (voiced by scholars such as Achille Mbembe among others) of projects funding arts as a means of development and cultural diplomacy. Investment in schools, technical training, and infrastructure has not been able to address the gargantuan divides in access to resources across the continent, nor have these kinds of projects been converted to income-generators for Mali.

Take, for example, the production of the exhibition objects. Thanks to the biennial’s presence, Bamako now has a state-of-the art photo lab able to produce large-format exhibition prints: the Swiss-funded CFP (Cadre de promotion pour la formation en photographie). The CFP has produced prints for past editions, on a limited basis. This year, however, no prints were made in Bamako. All were made in Paris – and shipped, at exorbitant expense, framed and glazed, to Mali. It was explained that the job prices quoted to the festival’s direction by the CFP were 2-3 times higher than those given by the Parisian lab, Picto that ultimately did the printing. Without a local market for large-format prints, no lab can offer ‘competitive’ pricing. It is worth noting that shipping and associated costs such as insurance take up a large proportion of any festival’s budget, and clearing customs in ports around the world remains a monumental hassle. The decision to ship heavy, expensive, and fragile frames from Paris, together with complaints about the DVD players (year after year, videos are not working or not reset after routine power outages long familiar to residents of Bamako and other southern cities whose grids are overtaxed), has become emblematic of a near total disregard for site-specificity and contributes to the sense that the organizers are out of touch.

Renewed, with some success, were the French organisers’ commitments to bring all of the artists to Bamako, to hype them via invited African and European media outlets, and to host big parties where deal-making could unfold. Puma Creative and its spin-off, Creative Africa Network, deserve special mention for their mobility grant programme, which funded travel to Bamako for all exhibiting photographers. This and other efforts to broaden inclusion are only at the beginning stages and will be crucial to the Rencontres’ future. A deeper analysis must ask whether the artists need or want the hype and the deal-making as much as longer-term professional investments and access to other kinds of resources.

A notable exception to this mentality, which sees display as a direct line to the market, accompanied this year’s effort: a portfolio review sponsored by the Goethe Institut SudAfrika. This private forum featured five curators and ten artists, many whom had participated in earlier Bamako exhibitions. The event was decidedly off-programme, timed to overlap by a day with the biennial’s trading-week, so that many participants showed up only as the biennial’s creative direction and other visitors were departing. Peter Anders, the Head of Cultural Programmes for sub-Saharan Africa, inaugurated the first such workshop last year at Maputo. For him and others – Simon Njami worked closely with Anders in elaborating the initiative – the Goethe-sponsored portfolio reviews attempt to redress the biennial’s appearance as a ‘decoration or representation of national interests’. In contrast to the biennial’s professional-week programmes, Goethe’s forum was directed at artists in early and mid-career, and attended to the conceptual dimensions of each artist’s project.

Anders describes the programme as a direct response to the ‘lack of criticism on the continent’. The event’s organizers (including Cara Snyman, Cultural Programmes Officer) are keenly aware of the impact of the lack of fora for substantive critical discourse on the experiences and careers of contemporary artists. Says Anders of the sessions: ‘I’m not sure if it is an original or a new concept, but it is a very concentrated concept…not at all addressed to the public. […] For us at the Goethe Institut, this is a very valid format. To invest in individuals, and not to go ahead directly with realizing exhibitions, but really to support their career: their ongoing career’. Anders and his colleagues are not blind to the fact that this approach, i.e., investment in individual artists, and intensifying forms of critique, represents a marked difference from approaches and agendas that characterized the main event: ‘Our clients are our artists, and not a politician, so that’s the point’.

In a similar spirit to Goethe, but articulated from their own unique positions, many enterprising photographers had their own ideas of the biennial’s usefulness. They formed new alliances, and wondered about staging smaller shows connecting institutions ‘south to south’. In hotel gardens and at nightclub tables, they wondered about dependence on European funding, made claims to access, or doubted them. If the biennial’s organizers continue to maintain their tight grip on production and planning and to devote little to platforms for critical discourse, the artists – and a new generation of activist curators – have their own ideas about what the alternatives will look like.

It was not unusual for discussion of the future to begin with an explicit, often enraged, critique of centralized directives identified with the status quo. In the words of Ananías Léki Dago, a photographer from Côte d’Ivoire who has exhibited in Bamako from the early days, and who has also mounted a pioneering festival in Abidjan: ‘The problem is that the French cultural politics don’t help us to become independent. They organize everything in France and then they come here. They cook there and they come to eat here’. Another artist, who is not Malian but who has lived in Bamako for several years, recounted the story of how, when he was invited to propose a project for inclusion in this year’s biennial, he was given an appointment at a Paris address.

Small acts of resistance were made with gritted teeth and not a little good humor. Several photographers endured protracted layovers and multi-day treks to and from Bamako – refusing to fly to Harare or Maputo via Paris. But still they flew, to discuss their own and one another’s projects, other festivals, new initiatives and new prospects with independent curators and corporate collectors in Nigeria and South Africa – and to engage in broader expressions of solidarity. As Léki Dago also said: ‘My brothers and sisters are here. I have to see them. […] I think that we have to recognize that Bamako is the only important event for photography in Africa, so let’s go there, and when we meet each other, let’s talk. Let’s talk about what we can do, how we can organize ourselves amongst ourselves, from where we are now’.

Jennifer Bajorek, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London and
Erin Haney, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

Speed and Position: The Post-Event City

You can’t take the rush out of a gold rush town and get it to stroll or sit down. The rush is its nervous system fueled by large and singular events. Johannesburg likes to think of itself more as drag strip racing than random family outings in sensible cars. So the 2010 World Cup is the turbo kicking into Johannesburg’s already accelerated history.

The Heisenberg Principal of Uncertainty – more as metaphor than scientific fact – argues that speed and position cannot be measured simultaneously. Or in a nuanced understanding, the more precisely you know one, the less you know the other. It’s a question of concentration and degree, a question in which the observer is implicated.

Right now Johannesburg is concentrated on the Big Event accelerating it into another “World Class” future. It’s laying down fast infrastructure to prove it, from the Gautrain to the BRT, and like Haussmann’s Paris, it will be hard to ignore the spokes of World Class in 2010. It’s an undeniably exciting time for Johannesburg and South Africa.

But what remains of the city, or of cities generally, or of the societies and architectures that compose them, after the Big Event has rushed on to another part of the world? Do cities have other times to return to, or do they just get busy on the bid for the next World Class race meet?

In the uncertainty dilemma, Johannesburg favors speed. It’s a young city. Position is more of an afterthought, the grabbing of styles or the deployment of staging techniques. Or in that secluded moment, buckled up in an airline seat thumbing through the duty-free magazine and feeling compelled to want something, position is just a listless pause before takeoff.

Positions-making-and-having-their-own-times do not often occur in urban thinking in South Africa. It’s why Johannesburg has a problem understanding that immigration - as seepage more than tourism or business trips - is forming more complex urban situations, a cosmopolitan awakening that is continental. Johannesburg could become a unique city to live in, rather than an estate agent’s brochure to read, or a “World Class African City” to visit.

But lurking in Johannesburg there is always a yearning for the fast Las Vegas gambling town– a city where no one is born or dies, but everyone visits for at most two weeks: to make a fortune or lose one, to get married or get divorced, to get laid or hold forth with bourbon. Speed comes at a cost. At high speed, position is a post-modern desert on the way to a craps game - a dumping ground for retreads, sign posts and this week’s failed lottery tickets.

The Heisenberg dilemma of speed and position is not unique to Johannesburg as a city. The dilemma has occurred in all cities growing quickly from provincial origins into metropolitan futures, as more and more people demanded to live in them for whatever reason.

When the dilemma presented itself towards the end of the 19th Century, Chicago conveniently burned to the ground and infrastructure gave rise to the 20th Century version. Sentiment was a non-starter in Chicago’s new beginning. But other cities grappled with measuring the new slang of urban expansion against their outdated design and social dictionaries. In the case of 19th Century London or Paris, it was a repressive classical dictionary where tidiness, beauty and infrastructure were successfully deployed against the “social anarchy” of new urban societies demanding and making new urban forms.

Nowadays property values do the excluding work of classicism in World Class Cities and “New Urbanism” has become the solution for also-ran cities. Prepackage and fence-in, the pocket bourgeoisie add instant property value to World Class Satellites. A few extra bucks for a cappuccino is a small price to pay for hefty guards at the gates ensuring the pockets remain uncontaminated and free to believe they’re in that arcade in Milan.

In cities like Lagos or Sao Paulo, the slang is overwhelming and the dictionaries can’t cope. The organism is too large to put under current design macroscopes, despite heroic efforts by architect-visionaries like Rem Koolhaas, with unfortunately too little time to turn their full attention to Africa, South America or other exotica.

Philosophically, we no longer live in a Newtonian universe where space and time are neatly separated and can be discussed mechanically. To discuss position or speed now is to discuss each with the adjunct of the other, and acknowledge the observer in prejudices. It is relative, yes, but more it is a paradox that demands continual shifts in viewpoint and thinking.

Simply put, position accrues time(s) as depth. Positions are stained by social force and habit, cultural bric-a-brac, topography and climate, each coming laden with ideas and demands. They resist speed and suggest that other times be recognized and built upon. Position is not a nostalgic desire to stand still, but more like having dinner in a motor home speeding down the highway, the concentrated and existential time-within-Time we occasionally call living-for-life or savoring-the-moment.

Speed, on the other hand, is more often than not taken as a singular metaphor that becomes a mechanical solution or a psychosomatic internal combustion engine, a physical or mental force urging us all into a future that necessarily remains just out of reach.

Flying is still an unlikely miracle to most human beings. The unlikely miracle gave rise to the Uber-Bourgeoisie, a World Class that inverted immigration from a movement of the very poor to a movement of the very rich. To the Uber-Bourgeoisie, architecture and cities are an interactive string of spectacles and events designed in fast time. The Uber-Bourgeoisie hit the pause button when they need a moment to dwell in extruded apartments where the kitchen is in New York and the bedroom in Shanghai. World Class Architects are the designers and event managers of this new immigration, the iconic Moses accelerating the Uber Bourgeois into the promised stratosphere of spaces mimicking the space-time continuum and making reluctant concessions to local gravities to prevent champagne glasses falling off tables.

Glancing for a moment out of the aircraft window to look at a stretch of the Sahara that still takes weeks to cross on foot, then returning to read the Economist, it is justifiable to think that humanity now lives in irreconcilable times, and that the humanist, if mechanical proposition in Newtonian thought where space and time seemed predictable and cohesive and could form part of a social solution, is now impossible.

But then suddenly, as happens in the stratosphere, whether financial or architectural, the Uber-Bourgeois Shuttle hit an airless pocket and dropped thousands of meters. The ground and its footsloggers seem not only worthy of thought, but imminent.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a productive agrarian state in which he hoped cities would play a minor role. His cohort, Ben Franklin, made terse, dismissive edits to Jefferson’s meandering texts, probably because Franklin was impatient to get back to Paris, a city he loved to live in. Philadelphia he reserved for homilies. In the yin-yang of two thinkers carving a Humanist United States out of a soon to be indigenous-free stretch of land some 3,000 miles long, Franklin retained his emotional attachment to the continental European city as an interesting, enjoyable and elaborately social place. Jefferson, on the other hand, foresaw that in the New World, the city would become a mechanical wealth-making device where the rich exploited the poor - the translation of Newtonian mechanics into urban purpose.

Implicit in the 19th Century Industrial Revolution was the growing idea of the city as a functional device. 20th Century Modernism made this explicit and fine-tuned the parts - Corbusian houses as machines-to-live-in – to fit the idea of the city as a productive machine. Lately, with the functional device established, the post-Modern city can now be marketed worldwide as a consumable object or service.

In Heisenberg terms, the continental European city, by and large, through agglomerations of position established by long histories of occupation, resisted the singular idea of the city as speed-turned- device-turned-service. Cities in the New World were less able to resist this; they still fill and empty like a factory floor in economies measured by housing start-ups and foreclosures, as if dwelling were beside the point in contexts based on movement.

Johannesburg is a 20th Century city whose reason for being was the mining and processing of gold. It was born of industrial purpose and would have few references other than speed had it not occurred in Africa, the only continent, other than Asia, where viable indigenous populations had position enough to survive colonialism, then gain independence. So Johannesburg, if it emptied as a factory floor like Pittsburgh or Detroit, would always be guaranteed further occupation. It would lose one value, only to quickly gain another.

There should have been something reassuring in this, that Johannesburg was not weakly positioned in a desolate middle-class landscape like the Mid-West, where immigrant nuclear families were connected like vacuum cleaners sucking wealth from a fluctuating New World grid. Johannesburg might have understood its position more like Rome - a rock on the edge of an ocean, corroded and added to by consistent social tides.

But in the Heisenberg dilemma Johannesburg continues to ignore position and insist on speed. This is because Johannesburg understands itself as a New World City, rather than an Old World City, or Another World City.

Uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, Johannesburg was founded by settlers neither as an administrative capital, nor a commodity-based city or port. From the outset Johannesburg was an industrial city. So it embraced the paradigm of American cities like Pittsburgh and subscribed to the wealth-making ideas of New World cities, more or less as middle-class processing plants. The wave of post-World War II wannabe-middle-class European immigrants into South Africa certainly reinforced this idea.

But in populated Africa the paradigm was far from convincing. In the New World Continents of North America and Australia, indigenous populations were quickly decimated and an inversion was possible - immigrants became permanent and middle-class and the already marginalized locals stayed marginalized. These were continents that could fully embrace speed and create more or less convincing fictions of position on the blank pages of uninhabited landscapes.

It is almost as if, in realizing its mistake, Johannesburg was forced into denial and developed an obsessive-compulsive need to prove that is was not only part of the New World machine, but could develop it in alarming new ways.

In forcing the necessary immigrant-local inversion during the golden era of the New World City after 1945, Johannesburg and other South African cities began to conceive themselves as countries-within-countries with quality checks to control influx - plants that could then choose raw material from local populations to process into urban middle class. After the International Socialist rhetoric of pre-war South Africa gave way to a National Socialist government after the war, their constituents, the 80% rural Afrikaans population, were first in line to benefit. By the early 60’s, 80% had been urbanized.

Johannesburg was a highly efficient machine, often bemused by bad international reception of its resounding success. In obsessive compulsiveness, it not only kept up with New World infrastructure, but in things like plumbing surpassed the wildest expectations of Modernism, managing to keep the shit of 6 distinct groups of human beings separate and create spaghetti-like facades on factories - an unprecedented addition to Modernist design vocabulary.

The choice of speed and its translation into urbanism as a wealth transferring process, still lingers in post-94 Johannesburg’s thinking and behavior. Johannesburg’s World Class criminal efficiency can be seen as part of this habit, a consequence of propagating the city more as process than position.

But strangely enough, in the singular lead-up to the World Cup and the frenetic construction of mega-public transport systems, the city is showing interesting signs of establishing position, socially, politically and mythically.

The taxi drivers, a growing constituency since the waning years of apartheid, have worked South African cities into a web and lexicon of flexible connectivity, and relish the iconic value of their popular limousines in a city infatuated by smart cars. In the lead-up to the World Cup they are throwing a spanner in the public works, claiming not only their economic and functional role, but also their position as part of the city’s new mythology.

Other than the Russian Constructivist exuberance just after 1916, Modernism with its terse functional and protestant attitude to the human condition, had little to offer that was celebratory. On New Year’s Day in Durban, the taxi drivers eschew the merely functional role of getting people to work. Hundreds gather on the beach front, laden with passengers taking a holiday and setting up barbeques – a busman’s holiday of sorts. To an outsider this might be confused with large family outings, but in the sense of Heisenberg, it is the depthening of position as the 16 person taxi has developed a distinct urban sociability and along with this a political resistance to the one-machine idea endemic to both apartheid and post-apartheid political thinking in South African.

The mark of a city is how it deals with both celebration and tragedy. Whether it is tied to singular events like the Nuremburg Rally or other nation building tactics to gain a sense of social connection and belonging, or whether it develops these from the organic give-and-take and frictions of daily urban life. In South Africa’s continuing social insecurity there are still far too many National Holidays. It’s alarming in a country with a notorious history of collusion between capitalism and the national socialist state that being South African, being sociable and feeling worthwhile as a human being should still be considered the exclusive patronage of the central government or of the marketing ploys of capitalism galvanizing a nation into wanting what it cannot afford.

In the lead-up and aftermath to World Cup 2010, it would be good to remember the street traders and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. By 2002 street traders had staked their claims, like early gold prospectors, across the horizontal plane of inner city Johannesburg. In the interests of putting on a smart face for international visitors, traders were removed from many city streets for 2 weeks. 2 weeks is a short time in the speedy history of the world, but street traders could not suspend trading for longer than 4 days. So ironically a World Summit on Sustainability put an end to the fragile sustainability of many street traders.

2010 is a much different time from 2002. South Africa’s situation is now reflected globally in the crash of international capitalism and the reappearance of the ground. It seems a better time to concentrate on the experimental possibilities and implications for design and architecture in Johannesburg and other South African cities, than cling to maligned speculations on what is or what is not a World Class City.

By Rodney Place
Place is a Johannesburg artist. He has spent a few years in Eastern Europe.