Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (review)

Johannesburg is not often sought out as a destination for tourists or students of modernity. Yet it is a city whose remarkable history testiifes to the interdependence of modernity and race. It arrives on the pages of this book ready with metaphors to describe that relationship. For much of its past a quintessentially "racial" city, Johannesburg demonstrates the interconnectedness of metropolis and township, of city and sepulchre. "Beneath the central business district and the environs of Johannesburg," the editors write, "lie thousands of boreholes and drilling footages of varying depths—a testimony to the way in which, in the production of this Southern Hemispheric modernity, the world of race and systematized human degradation became part of the calculus of capital and dispossession, technology, labour, and the unequal distribution of wealth" (16–17).

It is a city of glittering surfaces, of superfuity and excess, the City of Gold (as it is described by its Zulu name, Egoli), but it is also a testament to the repressed memory of apartheid. "What distinguishes Johannesburg from the metropolitan norm," David Bunn writes, "is that this rhetoric of the surface has been implicated in an act of historical repression: in an inability to come to terms with the real origins of surplus value, in apartheid labor practices, and especially in the buried life of the black body, instrumentalized and bent into contact with the coal face, or ore seam, in the stopes far below" (137). A number of the essays echo the editors' assessment that the "dialectic between the underground, the surface and the edges is, more than any other feature, the main characteristic of the African modern of which Johannesburg is the epitome, and perhaps even of the late modern metropolis itself" (17).

The collection is responding to a signifying system which has represented Africa "as an object apart from the world, or as a failed or incomplete example of something else." It is attempting to "allow space for the articulation of the originality of the African modern, its capacity to produce something new and singular, as yet unthought" (9). But in the process, the editors make the (to my mind unnecessary) claim that Johannesburg is "the premier African metropolis, the symbol par excellence of the 'African modern'" (1). As a native of Johannesburg, I should have found such a pronouncement exhilarating. But instead I was thrown by its conceptual swerve. Even within South Africa, the extent to which Johannesburg's modernity is exemplary, not to mention the extent to which the city could be said to speak most authoritatively about apartheid, is debatable. And what of other African cities, with their own particular colonial histories, their revelatory relationships with global capital? What of the cinematic or literary or architectural modernity of Lagos or Harare or Dakar? What of non-Anglophone urban Africa? Perhaps the fact that the editors felt the necessity to make such a claim so deeply says more about the audience for whom this book was intended, or about the challenges of procuring a publishing contract from a major press on an African topic, than it does about Johannesburg itself.

Despite my reservations about this aspect of the book's rationale, I have no doubt that it will make an important contribution to the study of modernity and of postcoloniality. Simmel and Lefebvre are frequently mentioned, and the fâneur and his postcolonial iterations is a shadowy but persistent presence here: some of the contributors lament the perils of walking in Johannesburg, and celebrate those who do it anyway. The collection inspires questions for further study, including one about the relationship between the African urban and the African rural. The editors note a problem with the way in which Africans have been viewed by "anthropology, history, and literature… as fundamentally and even essentially rural creatures" (5). Mbembe also provides an instructive account of the (white) pastoral dream behind the city (46–47). The essays, both academic and anecdotal, are penetrating and evocative. Achille...