in new directions, capturing some of the multi-sidedness of Johannesburg’s modernity, showing it to be a place occupied by the black poor, squatters and slum dwellers, and also a centre of urban black culture that, as Paul Gready (2002) has written, ‘offered unprecedented possibilities for blacks to choose and invent their society from the novel distractions of urban life’ (p 145).
Openly critical of liberalism, Sophiatown’s writers, most of whom worked as journalists for Drum magazine,1 neither romanticised the rural nor condemned the moral degradation of the cities, contributing to a new tradition of writing which focused on black experience in the South African city. Much of their fiction tried to capture the racial landscape they inhabited: ‘the interracial frontier,’ writes Gready, ‘was fraught with contradictions and anguish, but while some like Themba later turned their back on it, others made their fictional and actual home in the quagmire of its tensions’ (p 148). They found a style of living and writing which, as Es’kia Mphahlele (1987, p 11) wrote, was ‘racy, agitated, impressionistic … [which] quivered with a nervous energy, a caustic wit’, one which Michael Chapman (1989) saw as providing a social barometer of the decade, and which tapped into the most urgent currents of life in the townships around Johannesburg. Journalism and imaginative writing, the ‘information’ of reportage and the ‘experience’ of storytelling, intertwined to produce writing in Drum shaped by idiosyncratic turns of phrase and narrative markers designed to arouse the reader’s curiosity (Chapman, p 209). In Mphahlele’s acute formulation, black politics was dramatised and, indeed, displayed theatrical style, and writers of the Drum decade found a relative freedom of expression that matched the political expression of the era (p 12). Rob Nixon (1994) has shown how, at a time when the very idea of belonging to the city was coming under increasing legislative pressure, the Harlem Renaissance helped emergent South African writers fortify their claim (p 16).
Sophiatown and its writers, then, dominated the critical imagination of the literary city, drawing the city as a subject more explicitly into being. At the same time, other writing, less focused on by critics, also gave the city voice. In Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom (1953), for example, the worlds of Vrededorp and Fordsburg, where he grew up, give way to an encounter with the city at large which was also the making of ‘a new kind of black person’ (p 195).
Born into urban poverty, the son of a coloured South African woman and an Ethiopian man, Abrahams begins to encounter himself in the city through the few books he can get his hands on (‘I desired to know myself … I was ripe for something new, the new things my books had revealed … I felt lonely and longed for something without being able to give it a name … impelled by something I could not explain, I went, night and night, on long lonely walks into the white areas of Johannesburg’ (pp 161-5)). Impelled by longing, but denied access to the city and a new kind of self at every turn, Abrahams finds a job as an ‘office boy’ at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and here begins reading ‘everything on the shelf marked American Negro literature’ (p 188), a process through which he learns to interpret his reality and to propel himself out of ‘life in South Africa’. Two decades later, Mongane Wally Serote would publish his famous poem ‘City Johannesburg’:
Jo’burg City
I travel on your black and white and robotted roads,
Through your thick iron breath that you inhale,
At six in the morning and exhale from five noon
Jo’burg City
That is the time when I come to you,
When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,
That is the time when I leave you.
… 2
Lesego Rampolokeng (2004) deliberately echoes Serote’s poem to the city in the 1990s:
Johannesburg my city
Paved with judas gold
Deceptions and lies
Dreams come here to die
Both poems draw out, with equal power, the dark eroticism, the failed promise, the intimate knowledge, like the body of a lover, the drama of entanglement, the claim to belonging (‘my city’), the inability of the city to be a home. While Serote attributes this relationship with the city to apartheid Rampolokeng suggests that such a relationship persists, like ‘judas’, into the post-apartheid present.
In contemporary literature, particularly fiction, the city emerges in an even more self-conscious way as an aesthetic, a political and an imaginary site, a vivid and explicit template for an entire array of social fears and possibilities (Gunner 2003b). The city skyline begins to appear on numerous book covers, signalling its status as subject at the centre of these narratives. While several critics (Titlestad 2003, Hoad 2004, Mpe 2003) have written about individual novels as fruitful sites for understanding city culture, the texts’ cumulative and insistent focus on the city as an idea has still to be properly explored.
Urbanist Jennifer Robinson (1998) has offered one of the more overt methodological challenges to reading the city from the vantage point of the ‘now’:
Our imaginations have lived for so long with the lines of apartheid city space, with the blank spaces in between, the deadening images of power drawn on the ground. … Can we begin to shift our experiences and our visions to capture and understand the world of always-moving spaces? What do the spaces of change and dynamism look like? In what sense was even the apartheid city – a city of division – a place of movement, of change, of crossings? (D7).
Robinson invokes the figure of Toloki in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995):
In the afternoon Toloki walks to the taxi rank, which is on the other side of the downtown area, or what is called the central business district. The streets are empty, as all the stores are closed. He struts like a king, for today the whole city belongs to him. He owns the wide tarmac roads, the skyscrapers, the traffic lights, and the flowers on the sidewalks. That is what he loves most about this city. It is a garden city, with flowers and well-tended shrubs and bushes growing at every conceivable place. In all seasons, blossoms fill the site (p 46).
Toloki passes across the lines of the apartheid city, across its cruel divides; he generates crossings, not so much, as Robinson notes, undoing the spaces of poverty as refusing to treat those spaces as one-dimensional. We are in the realm of Lefebvre’s ‘representational space’ and each time we move we potentially use space differently.
Robinson views the apartheid city from the fresh, experimental vantage that was opened up by the political transition. The new South African city is still a space where nightmarish divisions may be witnessed and where the fear of crime delimits dreams of truly public space (see Kruger 2003). But she nevertheless suggests that we think not only in terms of fixed structures but in terms of movement, journeys through the city.3
Rita Barnard (2006) writes that Mda’s shift away from an ‘earlier poetics of a grim documentation of physical surroundings to a new, more fluid sense of black urban experience’ parallels shifts in South African urban studies from a ‘near-exclusive concern with the location of physical structures and the visible aspects of urban organisation to a concern with the city as a dynamic entity’. Barnard notes, too, the difference between Toloki’s ‘proprietal strutting’ and the ‘servile, if ironic’ movements of Serote’s narrator
