Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (review)

This volume reproduces Public Culture's special issue on Johannesburg (2004), omitting only Nuttall's interview with artist Rodney Place. It also includes some new essays and evocative images, especially charcoal drawings by William Kentridge and photographs of works by other Johannesburg-based artists like Penny Siopis. The introduction by Nuttall an Mbembe stresses their distinction between studies of the city that rely on paradigms of development, and their intention to focus on "urban form and city life as keys to understanding [Johannesburg's] metropolitan modernity" (11). Overstating their case somewhat by asserting that "few commentators" have focused on urban form, they slight predecessors such as Emerging Johannesburg (2003), edited by one of their contributors, Lindsay Bremner, and omit others like Ordinary Cities (2006), by Jennifer Robinson, both of which balance socio-economic analysis with reflections on urban form, as well as articles by several authors on re-imagining Johannesburg in journals at home (Scrutiny2, African Identities) and abroad (RAL, JSAS).

Despite the editors' skepticism about planning and development, the strongest contributors to Johannesburg remain those who combine expert knowledge of city history and current policy with street-level experience and the imagination of its future. In "People as Infrastructure," AbdouMalique Simone builds on his research on African cities from Douala to Khartoum as well as ethnographic investigation of Johannesburg's inner city to analyze migrants' and locals' informal practices of "belonging and becoming," which he and Graeme Götz formulated in Emerging Johannesburg (123−47). Against Simone's deep analysis, shorter pieces or "voice lines" on cosmopolitanism like Stefan Helgesson's essay on Mozambican poetry on Johannesburg and the email exchange between Tom Odhiambo and Robert Muponde seem unfinished. In contrast, Bremner's reflections on "reformulating township space" draw on her considerable work with urban design, documented in her book Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds (2004), so that her comments here on one project for which she was the architect, rebuilding Freedom Square in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was launched in 1955, resonate beyond this site to the city's manifold urban forms. Two other "voice lines" from the original publication stand out: Mark Gevisser's comments on Constitution Hill, where his work as "content advisor" (316) helped to shape the museum and other educational installations, are absorbing but might have been pithier had he presented his views directly rather than in interview responses (see also Segal, ed Number Four, to which Gevisser contributed); John Matshikiza's reflections in "Instant City" on his experience as a returning exile not only vividly plot the tension between belonging and alienation, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, but also, in his notion of the city as "unfinished movie" (222), evoke film and television narratives of Johannesburg whose representations of the city deserve attention.

Apart from the absent screens of film and television, several contributors highlight the city's surfaces. Following the editors' lead, David Bunn begins "Art Johannesburg" by asserting the city's "shallowness" (137) but his most illuminating comments, especially on Kentridge's animations, do more than "draw on surfaces" (143). As the single historian in the volume, Jonathan Hyslop digs deeper into the past to analyze significant sites and figures that may no longer show clearly on the surface of the present, from Mohantas Gandhi at the Hamidia Mosque in 1908, to Fanny Klennerman, Jewish socialist founder of Vanguard Bookshop, from the 1930s to 1970s the city's source for cosmopolitan reading, to writer Hermann Charles Bosman on fascist and anti-fascist clashes in Rissik Street in the 1930s. The agents of political confrontation may have changed since Bosman but the site has once again attracted attention; the Rissik Street post office, now shuttered, functioned as location for Hard Copy, a television fictional series on city journalists (2005−07) to which Matshikiza contributed, reminding viewers of the historical traces beneath the surfaces of the built environment.

Despite some omissions and editorial glitches (references in the bibliography to articles in...