Rouge Flânerie: Cultural Takhawalu in Urban Extremes: Cape Town & Dakar (original) (raw)
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On the Edge of Scrutinizing and Reproducing Urban Imaginations of Johannesburg
Research in African Literatures, 2015
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The Authorship of Places: Reflections on Fieldwork in South Africa
Syracuse Scholar, 1986
Angeles. His teaching experience includes two years in Burundi, Central Africa. In 1974-76 he held a research scholarship at the Centre for Intergroup Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has also held posts at Ohio State University and Temple University. He has a number of publications on the colored population in Cape Town, most notably Outcast Cape Town (1981). The Authorship of Places: Reflections on Fieldwork in South Africa JOHN WESTERN II N 197 4 I WENT TO CAPE TOWN to do fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation on the replanning of the city by successive Afrikaner Nationalist governments since 1948. A racial law entitled the Group Areas Act had painstakingly gerrymandered the metropolis along the watertight racialliries of apartheid (literally, "apart-ness" in Afrikaans), thereby replacing in large measure the haphazardly semisegregated colonial city of the departed British Empire. Not only did the city get replanned, so did its citizens. The particular focus of my research was what happened to the more than 2oo,ooo people-the majority being so-called Cape colored (mixed-race) persons-whose lives were disrupted as a result of this vast exercise in social engineering as they were forced to leave their homes in neighborhoods now proclaimed to be for whites only. I concentrated on Mowbray, an inner suburb of Cape Town: the people living there who weren't white had to go elsewhere, mainly to new, custom-built "colored" ghe:.:os on the periphery of the city. This zone of mostly public housing is known as the Cape Flats. It is here that rioting against apartheid occurred in 1976, 1980, and again recently. How does one attempt to gain purchase on the nature of a city if one has never set foot there before? How does one start out, especially in a city whose very form (it rapidly became apparent to me) so clearly expressed conflict and societal stress? One of the ways I started doing my research was by the unremarkable but well-tried method of acquiring basic socioeconomic census material and then by plotting and cross-tabulating factual survey data from a self-administered 130-item questionnaire (with questions like, "How far were you from your job before you were moved? How far are you now? Did your job change as a result?"). I sought out information in the time-honored geographical manner of studying maps of the city at various periods. I read through the text of the Group Areas and other acts in the University 2
Long Street: A Map of Post-Apartheid Cape Town
No map fully coincides with the territory it represents. If the map and territory do not coincide, what can the map capture of the territory? According to Bateson, the answer is its differences. Drawing from Gregory Bateson’s ideas, we can envision an ethnographic representation of the city through which we can represent the urban territory through the different ways its inhabitants perceive it. In this article, I describe the process that led me to build a map of post-apartheid Cape Town from Long Street. I took inspiration from Bateson’s book Naven and compared it with the District Six Museum map in Cape Town with the objective of representing post-apartheid Cape Town through its differences.
The following dissertation considers the ways in which we have come to perceive of our post-apartheid South African urban spaces. It focusses on the representation of our contemporary urban spaces as I posit that they are re-imagined in the works of Phaswane Mpe, K.Sello Duiker, Nadine Gordimer and Lauren Beukes. In particular, it is concerned with the representation of Johannesburg, and specifically Hillbrow, in relation to the space of the rural, the suburban enclave and the city of Cape Town. I argue that while so-called urban ‘slums’ such as Hillbrow have been denigrated in the local imaginary, the texts that I have selected draw attention to the potentialities of such spaces. Rather than aspiring to ‘First World’ aesthetics of modernity then, we might come to see such spaces as Hillbrow anew, and even to learn from them as models, so as to better create more fully integrated and dynamic African cities.
Navigating Cape Town: A Poetic Cartography
2016
Cape Town has long been the site of conflicts over urban space. This study explored the potentials of a place-based poetry workshop as a tool for critically engaging with the urban environment. With the assistance of a well-established local poet, the researcher facilitated a poetry workshop that brought three young and emerging poets to contested public spaces including District Six, Company Gardens, and Church Square. After the workshop, poets submitted their writing to the researcher, who compiled and narrated a poem that showcased the voices of these poets while drawing attention to salient ideas evoked by the poets' work. The researcher also wrote reflexively during the entire research process and included reflexive writing samples in the book of poetry that contained the longer narrative poem. The poetry written by participants and researchers alike, as well as the researcher's observations from the workshop, indicate tremendous potential for place-based poetry workshop methodology. Participants engaged in a critical, selfreflexive process in which they learned about their own identities in relation to contested public space. Their poetry represented a form of democratized, interdisciplinary qualitative research, producing knowledge marked by critical engagement with memory and a focus on human and geographic bodies. The group writing process allowed participants to find commonalities that transcended their differences in identity and illuminated a common ownership of history and public space. This methodology shows promise as a tool for personal and social change in any urban locale, and should be adopted by researchers, activists, and artists alike. Lin-Sommer iii Dedication This book is dedicated to the memory of my bhuti, Jonathan Abrahams, Jomo. Thank you for showing me a love that knows no boundaries. Lin-Sommer iv Acknowledgements Thank you, Cape Town's poetry community, for welcoming me in like one of your own, Roché for your invaluable partnership in this project, Afeefa, Alison, and Ruby-Mae for adding your voices and your souls to the workshop, Thobs for the friendship and advice along the way, my flatmates for creating a home with me these last four weeks, Laura for listening to every poem I felt like reading, Tabisa and Stewart for organizing the last three months, the Somtsewu family for making me a member of the family, all the people in Langa who made me feel at home, Emma for believing in this project and sacrificing tirelessly to make it work, and Malika for inspiring me, guiding me, and, most of all, believing in me.