de vue, cette réponse de Georges Balandier aux rédacteurs de la revue Espaces Temps résume parfaitement ma pensée : « Nous faisons un métier qui est aussi un métier d’écriture. Quand on prétend nous épater avec des néologismes inutiles, du langage lourd, du positionnement, du questionnement, je m’agace, parce qu’il est des façons de s’exprimer clairement qui sont fortes et ne servent pas à illusionner. Le XVIIIe siècle français, celui des écrivains philosophes et des Encyclopédistes, devrait nous inspirer », Georges Balandier, « Georges Balandier. Anthropologue de la modernité », dans Espaces Temps, 57-58, 1995, p. 79. En ligne : https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/espat_0339-3267_1995_num_57_1_3933.pdf.
Renewing urban anthropology: a view from Johannesburg
(In Tribute to Jean Copans)
Par
David B. Coplan
University of the Witwatersrand
Summary: The essay reflects upon the contribution of Prof Jean Copans to a broad range of major topics in Africanist anthropology in France and Africa. These contributions include his direct influence on the work of countless scholars internationally. In tribute, the author’s reflections continue with an explication of the current situation in anthropology in South Africa in the wake, and the light of, the recent university student protest movement.
Key words: Copans, de-colonisation, South Africa, anthropology, universities, protest
A re-crossed path
The original occasion for this essay was a tribute to my distinguished mentor Professor Jean Copans, held at the École des hautes études des sciences sociales in Paris 11–12 June 2019. Professor Copans has written extensively and often on the state of African studies and anthropology in France (Jean Copans 2007 ; 2011). So I thought to try my hand at reflecting on recent developments in our field in South Africa, a country about whose university climate Copans is much concerned. I enjoy as well a personal connection to Professor Copans, one of which I was not aware when I first met him in Cape Town in the late nineteen nineties at the invitation of our now sadly deceased colleague Patrick Harries, a renowned South African Suisse-Francophile and later Professor of African History at Basel. This prior connection was the life work of Professor Copans’ father, Simon “Sim“ Copans: American francophile, musical broadcaster, archivist, scholar, enthusiast, and tireless articulator of the deep interconnections between America, Africa and France in the metier of jazz (Simon Copans 1967).
Sim Copans (1912–2000) was a key matchmaker in France’s love affair with jazz, which blossomed in the post-War period. As an American soldier, Sim Copans landed at Normandy and took part in the liberation of Paris, and then became liaison with French broadcasting following his involvement with the Armed Forces Network and the installation of a station in Rueil-Malmaison outside Paris. Sim enthralled an entire generation with his passion for exposing and promoting jazz in France. He remained in France permanently as an American ambassador of culture: delegate and presenter with the Voice of America (he hosted a retransmission of the Newport Jazz Festival on French radio), head of the Franklin Roosevelt Cultural Centre (later the Benjamin Franklin Library at the American Cultural Centre in Paris), and founder of L’Institut d’études Américaines in 1959, where he also lectured. He was a major force in creating the jazz festival at Souillac, near Lanzac, his home from 1963 and where he died in 2000 (Behrman 1965 ; Moore 2011 ; Pottinger 2009). So it was not then surprising that Professor Jean Copans took an immediate interest in my work as an American anthropologist of the musical genres of southern Africa.
Performing Arts and the Making of Cities
My career in South Africa actually began before and during the epochal Soweto student uprising of 1976, which changed the face of urban South Africa. What impressed me at the time was of course the sufferings of the black South African majority, but equally the resistance, indeed the achievement of cultural performance practitioners in creating and cultivating a milieu of black urban performance against the odds and against the state. Foucault said, in a moment of Derridian paradox that if you want something to grow, then attempt to stamp it out. Yet it was not so much repression as malevolent neglect that enabled the performing and literary arts to flourish in black townships.
As a result of my field research, I was persona non grata in South Africa for fourteen years. Ultimately I was allowed back as a Fulbright Fellow in 1991, part of the first cohort of Fellows sent to South Africa since 1962. Then in 1993, as democratic elections loomed, I was offered a position in anthropology at the University of Cape Town. This seemed an unmissable chance to participate in the building of a new, inclusive system of university research and education. Or what we hoped would be. Higher education would be a battle ground of social reconstruction and the struggle for post-apartheid South Africa’s soul. And I wanted to fight on it. I thought I would do a tour of duty and return home, but that struggle has not ended and I am unable to retreat now that I am a prisoner of that war. Turning to the role of the performing arts in that war, what came to impress me most over the years, and occupied my teaching, was the productivity through which artists of all sorts create the lasting character of cities. Any city, but in South Africa’s case, a struggle against such heavy-handed odds.
Society as a contested Space
In South Africa, the particular forms that colonial capitalist expropriation and post-colonial economic development took and are taking undeniably make for a heady, sometimes poisonous stew. The political cooks have spoiled the broth, and well-intended policies have been undermined by incompetent and corrupt implementation rooted in patronage and cronyism. Within university departments of social sciences and humanities, there is a parallel impasse in social and economic theory and practice. The failure to repair the damage of colonialism and apartheid or prevent the widening of inequalities in social and economic resources has led to frustration not only among the marginalized population but among intellectuals as well. At present, academic argument has been reduced to blaming the financially and politically empowered, impractical calls for a populist socialism or sincere but impotent special pleading for numerous demographic categories beset by social predation and injustice. More controversially, formulating and more importantly implementing a strategy, whether politically viable or not, that can transform the victims of agrarian and industrial exploitation and suppressive social engineering into independent minded, self-reliant citizens of a constitutional liberal democracy is proving an intractable problem. Such a transformation self-evidently takes a very long and at some junctures, turbulent time.
For example, the majority of South Africans excluded from the middle classes do not identify the promises of freedom and democracy with participatory citizenship, personal autonomy, an open society, or self-determination. They identify them with material well-being, and a mythic return to the land. Which is why in some communities “democracy“ is blamed for social disorder and immorality. Demand for the fulfilment of “promises“, both made and never made, are responsible for the surge of support for the ironically-named Economic Freedom Fighters among marginalized black youth in the recent elections. The argument goes: if one is not economically secure, one is not free. Providing such security is believed to be the responsibility of the state, itself the victim of a parasitic, predatory new political elite. Concomitantly, it has so far not proved so far not possible to wean either political authorities or technocrats in the public sector away from patrimonial, client-based systems of resource mobilisation and distribution, and the resulting appropriation of public funds to serve personal networks of power and financial gain. Led by, and sometimes leading on, corrupt managers at para-statal enterprises, which constitute the greatest obstacle to economic reform and revitalisation, the private sector is also deeply implicated.
Many of those whose tasks are
