interview 2003).
Hillbrow, for Mpe, is figured as a partial and now patchy inventory of the old apartheid city and as a revised inventory of a largely black, highly tensile, intra-African multiculture. At the beginning of his book Mpe makes clear that the novel’s preoccupation with writing the map, navigating the streets, has much to do with the figure of the migrant itself: ‘Your first entry into Hillbrow was the culmination of many converging routes. You do not remember where the first route began. But you know all too well that the stories of migrants had a lot to do with its formation’ (p 2).
These migrant ‘routes’ refer to those who gravitate to the city from South Africa’s hinterland, but can also be taken to refer to the cross-border migrants from elsewhere in Africa to which the novel increasingly refers and who now make up much of the demographic outline of Hillbrow. The figure of the migrant comes to overlay the earlier trope of race (whites seldom appear in the novel, nor is race conflict a theme or major subtext of Mpe’s writing) and even dominates the urban spaces the novel explores. Hillbrow is a city of strangers, in which the terms of civility and incivility have to be negotiated. The novel sets up a tension between xenophobia – the hatred of the unknown, the ‘foreign’ – and ‘humanness’, invoked throughout the book. Many of these tensions are played out on the street itself.
Of course migrants are not necessarily ‘always-moving’ figures, but may instead be forced to follow well-beaten tracks. In the case of Johannesburg it may rather be the new black middle classes who are really ‘on the move’ in the city. Nevertheless, in fictional representations, migrants are shown, thus far, to be quintessentially ‘moving’ figures. Alan Morris (1999) has found that while race and racism in Hillbrow are still beset with contradictions and anomalies, most inhabitants say that racial barriers have broken down and that acts of overt racism are not common. On the other hand, the more than 23 000 Congolese and 3 000 Nigerians living in Hillbrow faced xenophobia and ‘political racism’ in a context in which the anti-apartheid struggle did not breed a pan-Africanist consciousness, or an instant ethos of international solidarity or respect for diversity (p 316; see Simone 2000), but which is nevertheless leading to the unofficial forging of the highly tensile beginnings of an ‘Afropolitanism’.
Neville Hoad (2004) reflects on how Welcome to Our Hillbrow, in its title and its content, invokes both a geographical specificity and a ‘form of worldliness’. It invokes, that is, the geographical place to which we are being welcomed (in the oft repeated title phrase, ‘welcome to our Hillbrow’) and the potential expansiveness of the ‘our’. Hillbrow has long been a place which has given its inhabitants an experience of urbanity and vivid street life, both of which offer possibilities, he shows, for different kinds of relationships to oneself and to strangers (what Lauren Berlant has called ‘stranger intimacy’; a form of citizenship). Hoad traces Mpe’s descriptions of possible connections between strangers in ‘our Hillbrow’. Thus, for example, despite Refentše’s cousin’s warning that ‘you do not go around greeting every fool in Hillbrow’ (p 12), he ‘again responds’ to an elderly, poverty-stricken man living on the street, with whom ‘you had become friends without ever saying anything to each other’ (p 16).
Moreover, Hoad argues, bodily fluids like tears, sweat, semen and blood provide transpersonal yet deeply personal metaphors between people – lovers – in the city. Some of these fluids are also the primary means of transmission of the HIV virus, just as they are ‘also deeply symbolic of the human capacity to feel, to create and to work’ (p 7). This vulnerability of the body, Hoad suggests, becomes the ground for both community and intimacy, and the terms of the welcome become clear: ‘to be embraced by the hospitality of the cosmopolitan is to accept the invitation to share the work of mourning’ (p 10).
Mpe is engaged in an act of renegotiating the terms of recognition set up on the street. Whereas many black South Africans in Hillbrow (themselves migrants from the villages and towns of the hinterland) see foreigners as ‘makwerekwere’ (‘kwere kwere’ being a derogatory imitation of unintelligible foreign languages), Mpe’s narrator describes Africans from elsewhere as ‘sojourners’ (p 18) like himself, ‘people taking their unplanned and haphazard journeys through our world’ (p 111), and xenophobia as the work of ‘ostracizing the innocent’ (p 20). Moreover, the real heart of xenophobia, he suggests, is less the city than the village itself. (‘Tiralong danced because its xenophobia – its fear and hatred for both black non-South Africans and Johannesburgers – was vindicated’ (p 54)).
Welcome to Our Hillbrow disavows a politics of hatred in favour of ethics of hospitality. In the stories it tells of lovers in the city, the dramas of Refentše and his friends and their relationships with women, their duplicities, betrayals and confusion, the narrative repeatedly performs an act of embrace: ‘Yes, she is. And so am I and all of us’ (p 64); ‘Refilwe was only doing what we all did’ (p 111); ‘You do not own life’ (p 67); ‘Welcome to our All’ (p 104). It is significant, though, that the story is written in the second person: the narrator refers throughout to a ‘you’, most often a device used in fiction as a way of talking to the reader directly, but here a way of talking to the dead (the ‘you’ addressed here is Refentše, who has died).
The book begins with the words ‘If you were still alive …’ (p 1), addresses a person who is ‘alive in a different realm’ (p 67) and ends by reflecting on heaven itself: ‘Heaven is the world of our continuing existence’ (p 124). Heaven becomes a place from which to reflect on life, and the narrator uses the device of addressing his dead protagonist to achieve this self-reflexive space. The book is not directly autobiographical, but Phaswane Mpe would freely tell (before his own untimely death) how it was written at a time when he himself felt suicidal – the book, that is, becomes an extended suicide note that also comes to save his life – by giving him a renewed desire for writing: this much at least we can extrapolate from Refentše’s own recorded desire to ‘explore Hillbrow in writing’ (p 30) and the narrators observation that ‘you wrote it in order to steady yourself against grief and prejudice, against the painful and complex realities of humanness’ (p 59).
There is much to suggest that the dead Refentše is, in part, Mpe himself, and that his embrace of a place in which one can be ‘alive in a different realm’ speaks of a search for deeper humanity, or healing. Heaven, in the book, and within Mpe’s frame of mind at the time of writing, ‘is not some far off place’ (p 47) but rather a continuum between life and death, a place of insights, from which to view and review ‘our world’. Mpe’s own sudden death in 2005 in his early thirties, and his stated desire just before his death to train to become a traditional healer are both prefigured in the novel’s unusual second-person form of address, drawing the worlds of the living and the dead ever closer together.
For Bauman (1996) civility is ‘the activity which protects people from each other and yet allows them to enjoy each other’s company. Wearing a mask is the essence of civility.’ Masks, he argues, permit pure sociability, detached from their circumstances of power, malaise and the private feelings of those who wear them. ‘Civility has as its aim the shielding of others from being burdened with oneself’ (p 95). In order for cities to become sites of civility, Bauman argues, people need to be able to occupy public spaces as ‘public personae’, without being ‘nudged, pressed or cajoled to take off their masks and let themselves go’ (p 96).
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