Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation: The Gaze from Southern Africa 2019005582, 9780367139568, 9780429029387, 9780429639357, 9780429636189

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Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation is a thoughtful and sophisticated philosophical meditation on borders, translation, and media and culture as agents of socio-cultural change, viewed from the perspective of the South. It ties in with a growing literature that critiques the Northern theoretical hegemony and contributes to ongoing debates in this area. Its tone is confident and its voice distinct. Herman Wasserman, University of Cape Town In this invigorating work written from the fecund vantage point of southern Africa, Pier Paolo Frassinelli deftly identifies the social borders created by our uneven world’s diverse “cultural time zones” but also the media crossings and translations that sometimes succeed in subverting our politically polarised planet. Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, University of the Witwatersrand

Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation

This book examines concepts of the border and translation within the context of social and cultural theory through the lens of southern Africa. Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation studies a diverse range of media representations of borders, imagined borders, border struggles, collectivity boundaries and scenes of translation: films, documentaries, literary texts, photographs, websites and other media texts and artistic interventions. The book makes a case for bringing together media texts and sociocultural experiences across multiple platforms. It argues that this transdisciplinary approach is singularly suited to the age of media convergence, when words, speech, music, videos and images compete for attention on the screens of digital devices where the written, oral, aural and visual are constantly mixed and remixed. But it also reminds the reader of the digital divides linked to socioeconomic, cultural, language and geopolitical borders. With its focus on sociocultural borders and translation, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media studies, African studies and cultural studies. Pier Paolo Frassinelli is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Routledge Contemporary Africa Series

Unfolding Narratives of Ubuntu in Southern Africa Edited by Julian Müller, John Eliastam and Sheila Trahar Reimagining Science and Statecraft in Postcolonial Kenya Stories from an African Scientist Denielle Elliott with Davy Kiprotich Koech Food Security for Rural Africa Feeding the Farmers First Terry Leahy African Language Digital Media and Communication Abiodun Salawu Open Access to Knowledge in Nigeria A Framework for Developing Countries Kunle Ola Contesting Inequalities, Identities and Rights in Ethiopia The Collision of Passions Data D. Barata Contested Criminalities in Zimbabwean Fiction Tendai Mangena Foreign Direct Investment in Large-Scale Agriculture in Africa Economic, Social and Economic Sustainability in Ethiopia Atkeyelsh G. M. Persson Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation The Gaze from Southern Africa Pier Paolo Frassinelli For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Contemporary-Africa/book-series/RCAFR

Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation The Gaze from Southern Africa

Pier Paolo Frassinelli

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Pier Paolo Frassinelli The right of Pier Paolo Frassinelli to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Frassinelli, Pier Paolo, author. Title: Borders, media crossings and the politics of translation : the gaze from southern Africa / Pier Paolo Frassinelli. Other titles: Routledge contemporary Africa series. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge contemporary Africa series Identifiers: LCCN 2019005582 | ISBN 9780367139568 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429029387 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429639357 (epub) | ISBN 9780429636189 (mobipocket) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and culture—Africa, Southern. | Boundaries—Social aspects—Africa, Southern. Classification: LCC P94.65.A356 F73 2019 | DDC 302.230968—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005582 ISBN: 978-0-367-13956-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02938-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on translations List of figures

viii x xi

1

The gaze from the south

1

2

Heading south

31

3

Intersecting temporalities, cultural (un)translatability and African film aesthetics

51

4

Living in translation

68

5

Reframing the rainbow

88

6

Signs of the times

119

Index

137

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me with the writing of this book, in some cases without knowing it. Among them, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, who is always willing to argue about ideas, people and places. Some of our conversations have been going on for years. Melissa has also given me an excuse to hang out and do research in cultural time zones I don’t often visit. Other friends and colleagues who took the time to talk with me or to respond to what I had to say include Danai Mupotsa, Polo Moji, Natasha Himmelman, Colin Chasi, Nyasha Mboti, Ylva Rodny-Gumede, viola candice milton, Julie Reid, Keyan Tomaselli, Handel Kashope Wright, Bruce Mutsvairo, Ntshavheni wa Luruli, Selina Linda Mudavanhu, David Watson, Antonio Pezzano, Annalisa Oboe, Luigi Cazzato, Paola Zaccaria and the members of the S/Murare il Mediterraneo research group. Thanks also to Ahmed Veriava, Prishani Naidoo, Nicholas Dieltsen, Caroline Tagny, Claire Decoteau, Andy Clarno and the rest of the Tribe of Moles reading group. The School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg has been a welcoming workplace where I have been able to roam free and cross all sorts of intellectual and disciplinary borders. In addition to the colleagues I have already mentioned, I would like to thank my Head of Department, Mariekie Burger, who ordered me to take research leave to complete the manuscript, as well as Shanade Barnabas, Varona Sathiyah, Antoinette Hoffman, Jane Duncan, Sarah Chiumbu, Dumisani Moyo, Shelley Barry, Gilbert Motsaathebe and Collen Chambwera for their support and for being great colleagues. Over the years, I have learned a lot from the students I have had the privilege to teach and supervise. I teach big classes, so I cannot list all of them, but I would like to thank some of my former and present postgraduate students for all that they have taught me: Lennon Mhishi, Morgan Ndlovu, Nicole Stoltenkamp, Musa Ngobeni, Jabulani (Sifiso) Mnisi, Varona Sathiyah, Lindsay Leslie, Allen Munoriyarwa, Linah Masombuka, Tumi Mampane, Linda Zwane and Mbongeni Msimanga. I have also learned a lot from my Zulu teacher, Cynthia Nxele: ngiyabonga sisi. Thank you to Lindsay Leslie (again!) for her bottomless reservoir of resilience and sense of humour. At Routledge, Leanne Hinves and Henry Strang have been supportive, smart and resourceful editors. Akin Omotoso, David Max Brown, Antoinette and Pitika Ntuli and Leon Sadiki sent me files with images and screenshots and granted permission to use them. I am deeply grateful for their

Acknowledgements ix generosity. Tumi Mampane and Constance Kasiyamhuru checked the final draft and assisted with the index. I must also express my gratitude to the Ultra Left Hiking Club and our fearless leader, Dale McKinley, for keeping me sane and reasonably fit. Finally, thank you to my mother Lia, who is always keen to read my writings and share her views on them. My biggest debt is to Lisa, who put up with it all supportively and, when it was needed, impatiently. Her work as a publisher and literacies scholar is a source of inspiration for me, and so are our shared travels and informal fieldwork in places close and far but especially on our continent. Early versions of Chapters 2, 3 and 5 appeared, respectively, in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Journal of African Cultural Studies. Chapter 6 is based on a talk that first appeared in a volume published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, titled (Post) Colonial Passages: Incursions and Excursions across the Literatures and Cultures in English. The editors and publishers are gratefully acknowledged for their permission to reprint this material here.

Note on translations

The English translations that I quote are included in the bibliography; where I reference texts in languages other than English the translations are mine. Unless I am quoting the original text, I avoid the use of prefixes for words in African languages. For instance, in the original, the Venda language is Tshivenda and Venda people are named Vhavenda (plural) and Muvenda (singular), but in English I refer to them as Venda; likewise, I refer to the isiZulu language as Zulu. This conforms to what happens to other languages when they are translated into English. I do, however, reproduce original diacritics and accents for names and words in languages other than English.

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Kinshasa. Viva Riva!, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga. Energy crisis. Viva Riva!, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga. Johannesburg. District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp. Aliens. District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp. Elelwani in the royal hut. Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli. The king’s emissaries. Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli. Elelwani moves to the royal palace. Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli. Elelwani surveys the land of the Venda. Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli. Elelwani and the white lion. Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli. Ade and Timothi. Man on Ground, directed by Akin Omotoso. The man in the green blanket. Photograph by Leon Sadiki. Pitika Ntuli, “Marikana Hill to Constitution Hill” exhibition. Photograph by Pitika Ntuli. “Remember Marikana” stencil by Tokolos Stencils Collective. Photo taken by the author in 2014. The man in the green blanket.

36 37 40 42 55 56 61 62 63 107 120 125 128 130

1

The gaze from the south

The neoliberal world order is the scene of a proliferation, rescaling, militarisation, walling, securitisation and externalisation of territorial borders. Sea boundaries plus over 300 borders – more than there have ever been – separate 195 recognised states, with 54 of them in Africa.1 United States President Donald Trump got himself elected (albeit without a majority of votes) in 2016 by promising to build a 2,000-mile-long wall along the US-Mexico border.2 The main comparison that has been drawn is with the concrete wall that the state of Israel has built along and inside the West Bank, but there are many more border walls and barriers that other countries have built, are currently building or are planning on building.3 And even where there are no walls or physical barriers, such as around Europe’s southern borders and Australia, their function is performed by structures, technologies, policies and techniques devised to control, regulate, filter and obstruct the movement of people. Even as we rapidly develop and expand infrastructure that connects places and facilitates the circulation of goods and resources, trade and communication – highways, pipelines, ports and tunnels, Internet cables and information and communication technologies – national and supranational borders continue to divide our planet.4 They are sites where human movement is governed and regulated through practices of selective inclusion and exclusion that mark people as either legal or illegal, and sort them according to categories of person – tourist, businessman, professional, student, refugee, asylum seeker, alien – that provide or deny the right to cross borders and access work permits, residency and citizenship. But these are not the only borders that striate our contemporary world, which continues to be crisscrossed by a multiplicity of rifts, partitions, latitudes, enclaves, differences and social divisions, including collectivity boundaries defined by class stratifications, linguistic barriers, racial and ethnic identifications, sociocultural practices and other markers of belonging and nonbelonging. This book revisits the concepts of the border and translation to explore possibilities for constituting and imagining forms of collectivity grounded on difference and forged in struggle against bordering regimes, devices and institutions. Borders partition social and geopolitical space and enclose the people who dwell inside of them. Translation creates a bridge between people separated by language difference. This separation may correspond to a territorial border or to a linguistic boundary that divides people who live in the same place. When we translate, we

2

The gaze from the south

assume that the languages involved and their speakers are discrete entities external to each other – hence the need for translation. But what if we denaturalise the norms that define these boundaries? What of collectivities constituted across them? Are other understandings and representations of translation possible and, if yes, what difference do they make? These are some of the questions addressed by Borders, Media Crossings and the Politics of Translation. Borders do not just correspond to the lines that demarcate the territories of sovereign states. They produce and are displaced onto a multiplicity of boundaries and criteria of discrimination. The borders that inscribe the space of the social are not necessarily physical or visible. They are sites of regulation, control and conflict not only over movement, but also over a variety of modes of inclusion and exclusion. These boundary lines can be drawn in different ways depending on the social, political and cultural discourses and projects that they are made to serve. And they are also experienced differently depending on how one is positioned or positions oneself in terms of nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, race and other social identity markers and divisions.5 In the chapters that follow, I will come back to these issues by looking at a diverse range of contemporary media representations of borders, imagined borders, border struggles, contested boundaries and scenes of translation. The first among them is the south-north meta-border. The south, or global south, is another name for what used to be called underdeveloped, developing, third or postcolonial world. It is not capitalised here to signal its slipperiness both as a geopolitical signifier – where does the south begin and end, exactly? – and as an object of knowledge rendered elusive by the disparate realities of the places that constitute its referent. Others have already remarked that the global south cannot be defined in substantive terms. South is a relational concept, not a stable geopolitical category.6 It has often been used as a synonym for underdevelopment, lagging behind in the competitive modernisation game, economic marginalisation, poverty, lack of infrastructure and the like, rather than as a fixed geographical location. Étienne Balibar observes that the “North itself contains much ‘South,’ and the South has not given up on becoming part of the ‘North.’ Where would a country like China be situated? Or Brazil?”7 For some, the global south includes the European south, Europe’s internal other and marginal inside; maps of the south-north development and wealth gap usually situate Australia and New Zealand in the global north; single countries and cities contain different “cultural time zones” – affluent suburbs and informal settlements, expensive shopping malls and slums – located on the two sides of the south-north imagined divide.8 Increasingly, we see a conflation of the frames of reference that define how we position and imagine the places that the south-north border is supposed to separate. The circulation of images of Africa via global media is a case in point. In 2011, The Economist published its famous “The Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising” feature article, where it was announced that “Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were African.” The article went on to celebrate Africa’s commodities boom, a favourable demography, the growth of manufacturing and service economies, a fast-growing middle class, soaring

The gaze from the south

3

foreign investment and more mobile phone users than America or Europe, as well as improvements in public health.9 In a companion piece, “Africa’s Hopeful Economies: The Sun Shines Bright,” readers were also informed that Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian cement tycoon, had taken over from Oprah Winfrey as the richest black person on the planet. For The Economist, this was good news all around for Africans: self-made African billionaires are harbingers of hope. Though few in number, they are growing more common. They exemplify how far Africa has come and give reason to believe that its recent high growth rates may continue. [. . .] Africa’s boom will continue to benefit Africans, serving the billion as well as the billionaires.10 From the “hopeless” continent of a decade earlier, still according to The Economist, Africa had been propelled upwards, much closer to the global north.11 Rising Africa in fact took a bit of sleight of hand. Gross domestic products did rise rapidly from 1998 to the global recession of 2008, but with limited trickling down. The celebrated growth of the African middle class relies on statistics that include in it people with poverty-level consumption expenditures between $2 and $20 per day.12 Other, more sober readings of the same data point to nearly half of Africa’s population living in poverty, and to an eruption of urban uprisings across the continent produced by “various dispossessions: wages and working conditions, state capture by elites, service delivery, civil liberties, land grabs, pollution and the like.”13 Lack of nuance and selective processing of data are the grounds on which media representations of Africa continue to either reproduce tired and predictable stereotypes, or to replace them with glossy images of a rising continent blessed by skyrocketing gross domestic products and leapfrogging technological development: “Yesterday’s ‘Afro-pessimism’ and today’s ‘Afro-optimism’ equally misrepresent the actual political transformations unfolding across the continent. Both leave out the vast majority of Africans, dismissing them as helpless victims or ignoring them in favour of the new African elite.”14 These conflicting images of Africa illustrate the ideological contestations involved in turning the diverse realities of the global south into theoretical abstractions. And it could also be argued that any difference the geographical marker south might have once signalled is hollowed out today by its subsumption under global capitalism. Yet, I still believe that there are good reasons to hold on to the label south provided we bear in mind that “like all geographical designations for ideological and political spaces and projects [. . .], its geography is much more complicated than the term suggests, and subject to change over time.”15 Historically, the south-north divide designates the main geopolitical displacement of the internal division of capital that Karl Marx taught us to know as class.16 In this historical narrative, the so-called primitive accumulation, imperialism, colonialism and globalisation designate the phases of the expansion of capitalism on a world scale:17 that is, the history of what, from a different theoretical standpoint, decolonial scholars describe as the creation of the “modern/colonial/capitalist/patriarchal world-system.”18

4

The gaze from the south

One of the postcolonial instantiations of the south-north divide is named by “coloniality,” a concept that “refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.”19 With reference to Africa, the term coloniality captures the unequal power relations that define the place of this continent in the history of capitalist modernity: “Africa has experienced the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, neoliberalism (Washington Consensus and Structural Adjustment Programmes), and today globalisation. Taken together, these processes constitute coloniality as a global power structure.”20 Much as or indeed because the new frontiers of global capitalism are increasingly to be found in the global south, the legacy and new permutations of the history of coloniality haunt its present and, no doubt, its future. After all, the “very adjective ‘rising’” – as in “Asia rising” or “Africa rising” – “suggests a uniform measure, whether applied to the intensification of capitalist-modernity as symbolised by growing GDP or, more metaphorically, the newly built phallic skyscrapers thrusting up into smogcovered skies.”21 My subtitle, The Gaze from Southern Africa, is not just meant to register a biographical datum – I have lived in South Africa for over 15 years. Nor do I believe that geopolitical location subsumes the many markers that define one’s subject position – including class, race, gender, citizenship, languages and intellectual and political affiliations. Still, in significant ways, we see the world from where we are.22 The concept of the “gaze” has been influentially used in this context by the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty to respond to pronouncements of western social scientists about “those living in non-Western cultures.” “Why cannot we,” Chakrabarty retorts, “return the gaze?”23 This is the project summed up by the title of Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe (2000). Its aim is “to displace a hyperreal Europe from the center” toward which Chakrabarty sees historical imagination continuing to gravitate. Provincialising Europe thus has to do with retrieving “that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous.”24 This same line of argument has been revisited more recently to suggest that even though western dominance is being challenged by geopolitical and economic dislocations – including China’s gross domestic product quickly approaching that of the United States, or India surpassing the United Kingdom to be the world’s fifth largest economy in 2018 – “what remains strong, and still needs to be provincialised and disrupted, is surely the West (not only Europe) as an ‘imaginary figure’ that keeps on addressing and interpellating the subjects that inhabit the global present.”25 The calls for decolonisation that have recently swept across university campuses in South Africa and elsewhere can also be read in this light. Coloniality manifests itself in “colonial matrices of power that continue to exist in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies of modern subjects in Africa and the entire global South.”26 Postcolonial and decolonial critiques of epistemic coloniality and north-south asymmetries of power/

The gaze from the south

5

knowledge include various calls for decolonisation, as well as a series of interventions that theorise theorising from the south.27 The impetus behind this body of work is to reclaim the south as a subject of knowledge: a site of theoretical and conceptual production in its own right – as opposed to a source of raw data about its people, places, societies, cultures and institutions to be interpreted and theorised from elsewhere. It is not the place here to adjudicate on the merits of these proposals. For the moment, I just want to register that they signpost an important site of struggle, in which I aim to intervene.

Borders A focus on borders helps to problematise discourses about globalisation as spacetime compression, deterritorialisation, standardisation and connectivity.28 Neoliberal globalisation has not delivered a borderless world. Instead, it has produced shifting relations between the state, capital and labour, as well as escalating conflicts over citizenship and identity engendered by the clash between new waves of migration and state and supranational modalities of selective inclusion and exclusion.29 The writing of this book has been accompanied by news of conflicts and contestations over borders, border crossings and the reinforcing of the southern European borders touched by the Mediterranean Sea: the borders that by separating the African continent from Europe trace one of the dividing lines between the global south and the global north. At the centre of these conflicts have been deeply raced public and political discourses that foment and exploit the fears and insecurities of local populations and direct them at vulnerable “others,” migrants – and especially migrants from Africa and the Middle East – who are perceived as not belonging, who are labelled “illegal” and who are made a scapegoat for all sorts of social ills. The borders that are supposed to keep them out have been turned into sites of tragedy and macabre spectacle: from the images of Alain Kurdi, the 3-yearold Syrian refugee whose corpse was found by a stranger on a Turkish beach on 2 September 2015, to those of boats full of men, women and children stranded in the Mediterranean Sea that are refused permission to dock. As the number of shipwrecks escalated, for “every 18 migrants who reached Italy by boat during the first seven months of 2018, one person drowned attempting that voyage.” In the same period, the total body count was 1,600 deaths.30 Chauvinistic attitudes – “go back to Africa” – have been turned into policy deliberations to “help them at home.”31 As if home were a permanently unchangeable address. As if mobility did not define being human and social, and weren’t a fundamental right sanctioned by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”32 As if there were no history, in which Europe is deeply implicated, behind all this.33 The last few decades have witnessed the dramatic growth of international migration. In 2016, over 300 million people were living outside their country of origin – which, it ought to be noted, is still a relatively small percentage of the world population, now fast approaching eight billion people, and in no way

6

The gaze from the south

justifies the current panic about migration in the United States and Europe. In fact, migration across the global south and within the African continent is now numerically more significant than south-north migration.34 When we talk about human mobility, in sheer numerical terms the big story of our time is not the 58,000 migrants and asylum seekers who crossed the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe’s shores in the first half of 2018, nor the 95,000 who did the same in the first seven months of the previous year, and not even the record of over one million arrivals in Europe in 2015, most of them seeking refuge from conflicts in the Middle East. There is no denying the human and affective impact of these journeys, where hope is too often turned into despair and death.35 Nor should we ignore the constituent power of these crossings, which are changing the face of Europe and producing new debates and struggles over issues of citizenship and identity. And neither should we pass over in silence the important initiatives of solidarity with migrants by individuals, groups and movements throughout Europe, often in conflict with their own governments. Still, it is a relatively small part of humanity that we are talking about – even though, as Balibar has noted, it is “highly representative, because its condition concentrates the effects of all the inequalities of today’s world” and its lack of rights indicates the distance that separates us from “human equality.”36 If we want to get a fuller measure of the scale of contemporary human migration and mobility, we must turn our gaze to the south, as well as east, of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea.37 In recent years, more Africans have moved to other African countries than to Europe and the global north. According to a study published in 2018, out of the 36 million Africans who left their countries in 2017, the majority – 19 million – relocated to another African country, while 17 million left the continent. Meanwhile, Africa received 5.5 million people from the rest of the world.38 The majority of African migration is within Africa, and the largest flows are to neighbouring countries through migration corridors in eastern, western and southern Africa. Large numbers of people are on the move. Many of them are crossing the ruralurban divide and moving to cities, turning more and more urban settlements into megacities that host a population of over ten million.39 Sub-Saharan Africa is right at the centre of this epochal change. It is estimated that this region will account for one-quarter of the global urban population growth of the next decades, bringing the number of Africans living in cities to 810 million by 2035 – 348 million more urban dwellers than in 2018. By the same year, this region will host five of the 41 world’s megacities – Lagos, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Luanda and Dar es Salaam. This ultra-rapid urban growth is happening in the absence of a corresponding expansion of formal employment opportunities: 60% of the subSaharan urban job market is estimated to be informal. Africa has more urban poor than any other region in the world.40 Borders are one of the main governmental devices deployed to manage, control and regulate this human flow. The securitisation of borders is part of an extraordinary expansion of investment in private security and military companies, as well as state investment in intelligence agencies and tools, whereby more and more advanced and sophisticated surveillance technologies and electronic devices

The gaze from the south

7

turn human beings into data.41 As migrants and movements of migration become increasingly visible and shape our contemporary world, borders are becoming more diffuse and mobile.42 They spread across multiple spatial scales that do not simply correspond to the lines that demarcate state or supranational sovereignty. Borders are within states (airports and embassies) and their management can be dispersed, externalised and outsourced – as with Australia’s offshore detention centres or the externalisation of the border of the European Union across the Mediterranean Sea. But borders are not only instruments that states and supranational institutions use to govern and manage the differential inclusion and exclusion of “foreign” bodies. They are also sites of struggle, contestation and tension “between access and denial, mobility and immobilization, discipline and punishment, freedom and control.”43 Borders are challenged, shaped and reshaped by movements of migration that cross, circumvent and resist them: “It is this challenge that makes borders and boundaries social relations, crisscrossed by the multifarious tensions between ‘border reinforcing’ and ‘border crossing.’”44 La linea between California and Tijuana, Mexico is an example of this, and so are the borders that separate South Africa from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, or those touched by the Mediterranean Sea. With the proliferation of borders has also come a mushrooming of studies of national and other territorial borders, frontiers and borderlands. This expansion of the field of border studies has been accompanied by a shift of focus from the geopolitical lines that separate nation-states to a broader interest in the structural forces that shape borders, the lived experiences and social conflicts clustered around them, and their discursive, performative and spectacular dimensions.45 These disciplinary developments in turn point to a Euro-American historical narrative framed on the one hand by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which symbolically inaugurated the period of post-Cold War globalisation, and on the other by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent securitisation of international relations.46 When we put it on a larger historical canvas, the study of borders also speaks to the emergence of the modern nation-state and its bounded political institutions of sovereignty and citizenship, as well as to the reconfiguring of geopolitical borders through the creation of supranational blocks such as the European Union, and to the conflicts and tensions between these two levels of sovereignty. If we shift the gaze to the African continent, related but specific temporalities emerge. In Africa, the “problematic of bordering” harks back to “the Westphalian template of the state that was imposed on Africa by colonial modernity and carried over into the postcolonial African present.”47 The postcolonial period inaugurated by the declaration of Ghana’s independence in 1957 has seen the preservation of the territorial borders instituted by European colonial powers between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. Originating from the arbitrary partition of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, when European powers divided the continent among themselves in the “scramble” for Africa, modern African states and the territorial borders inherited from colonialism remain in place well into the twenty-first century. Boundary maintenance to avoid territorial disputes and conflicts among newly independent states was the explicit policy of Organization of African Unity (OAU) established

8

The gaze from the south

in Addis Ababa in 1963.48 And even the creation of the African Union, which replaced the OAU in 2001, has not translated in freedom of movement across its countries. Much as the African Union’s Agenda 2063 lists among its aspirations “a continent where the free movement of people, capital, goods and services will result in significant increases in trade and investments amongst African countries,” as well as “an African Passport, issued by member states, capitalising on the global migration towards e-passports, and with the abolishment of visa requirements for all African citizens in all African countries by 2018,” the Seychelles is still the only country in Africa to offer visa-free access to all Africans. Notwithstanding the African Union’s celebration of the ideals of “Pan Africanism” and of “Africa’s Renaissance,” and its aspiration to an integrated and politically united continent,49 Africans need visas to travel to 54% of the rest of the continent’s countries and can get visas on arrival in 24% of other African countries.50 As Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka commented in the 1990s: One hundred years ago, at the Berlin Conference, the colonial powers that ruled Africa met to divvy up their interests into states, lumping various peoples and tribes together in some places, or slicing them apart in others like some demented tailor who paid no attention to the fabric, colour or pattern of the quilt he was patching together. One of the biggest disappointments of the OAU when it came into being more than 20 years ago was that it failed to address the issue. Instead, one of its cardinal principles was non-interference and the sacrosanctity of the boundaries inherited from the colonial situation.51 The modern history of African national borders is so intimately entangled with the institutional and political arrangements of colonialism and European territorial occupation that it has erased the underlying cartography of a pre-colonial world.52 As Mamhood Mamdani argues in Citizen and Subject (2017 [1996]), even ethnic and tribal identifications have distinct premodern and modern meanings. Their modern manifestations need “to be understood as a necessary consequence of a mode of rule that instrumentalised Africa’s cultural history rather than being its organic development.”53 Contemporary African states are the offspring of the colonial project. The state infrastructure and institutions on which they were built, the notion of sovereignty that legitimises them, and even the developmental mandate to which many of them have subscribed, were all inherited from colonial history.54 Postcolonial African states have maintained and defended the African borders drawn by European colonial powers. Hence the nationalist rhetoric that marked the postliberation period, when “most African governments set themselves the task of undertaking a vigorous process of nation-building with the aim of welding their multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multireligious countries into ‘one nation.’”55 Hence also the policing of national borders rendered porous by human migration and mobility, to which we will return in Chapter 4.56 But my overall point is that the figure of the border exceeds its identification with the territorial borders of state sovereignty. Even the boundaries of citizenship

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do not coincide with geopolitical borders. Citizenship divides people living in the same place and sets them apart as either citizens or outsiders who can be granted or denied legal identities. This division intersects with other collectivity boundaries, such as those named by class, race, rural and urban, or by ethnic and linguistic differences. In southern African metropolitan areas such as Johannesburg or Maputo, these divides are today defined by the conflicts and negotiations between state prescribed citizenship and contingent practices of sociality and mobility. These cities’ centres are transient spaces that people move into and through, often on their way to elsewhere, making it practically difficult – state prescriptions notwithstanding – to draw a clear-cut distinction between hosts and guests. As Loren Landau notes, in these crowded metropolitan spaces, “ethnic/ national heterogeneity and cultural pastiche are often the empirical norms” resulting in a shared condition of “permanent temporariness.”57 Southern African cities are “Characterised by cyclical, inward and outward patterns of human, material and discursive mobility” that “are emblematic of late capitalist, southern urbanism and give cause to reconsider the meaning of cityness and the boundaries of belonging.”58 But alongside these mobile boundaries, in South Africa there are of course the more rigid borders produced by the racialised socioeconomic inequalities inherited from the history of colonialism and apartheid, which divide cities and small towns from the surrounding townships and settlements where apartheid spatial planning relocated the Black majority, as well as the more recent ones built by new forms of class apartheid.59 These are most visibly demarcated by the physical barriers – high walls, electric fences, razor wire, gates and armed security – through which upper and middle class South Africans secure their houses and properties.60 In fact, gated communities and suburbs – a common feature of South African cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town – are quickly spreading to other African metropoles such as Lagos, Accra and Nairobi, where they increasingly define a “fortified lifestyle” that resembles that of fast-growing gated communities worldwide.61 Multiple borders cut across the space of the social. These are not always visible and yet thick boundaries. In a much-cited 1990 article, Arjun Appadurai wrote about the “disjunctures between economy, culture and politics” in the current global cultural economy and the “flows” and “scapes” that crisscross it.62 More recently, Melissa Tandiwe Myambo has coined the phrase “Cultural Time Zones” (CTZs) to define the segregated spaces created by the plethora of cultural boundaries that demarcate a “global” African city such as Johannesburg.63 Its social space is striated into multiple, uneven, overlapping and competing cultural times that separate discrete urban enclaves from adjacent spaces and join them with distant ones. In places such as upscale air-conditioned malls or gentrified neighbourhoods, the dominant cultural times and corresponding types of cultural capital needed to navigate them are not those of the region or the nation, but of globally networked cultural times. Another name for these cultural time zones is, of course, class – especially in Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of its convergence with cultural capital.64 Class differences signified by lifestyle are inserted into

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transnational cultural flows or patterns of consumption that extend or shorten cultural distance in ways that are incommensurable with geographical distance. The middle and upper classes who sip skinny cappuccinos or drink craft beer in the cafes of affluent Johannesburg suburbs are in many ways closer to a global middle class than to the informal settlement dwellers who live just a few kilometres down the road. “Closer,” though, does not mean that they are exactly the same. Multiple cultural times coexist in the same zone. Local sociocultural traces such as language use and accent, religious and ethnonational affiliations, or specific modes of appropriation of global cultural trends will make their presence felt in a number of ways. Still, for some, catching a plane from Johannesburg to Dubai or London is a less unsettling experience than crossing the class and cultural lines that divide the city they live in. In Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013), Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson similarly remind us of the “deep heterogeneity of the semantic field of the border,” which today points to “symbolic, linguistic, cultural, and urban boundaries” that “are no longer articulated in fixed ways by the geopolitical border. Rather, they overlap, connect, and disconnect in often unpredictable ways, contributing to shaping new forms of domination and exploitation.”65 The geopolitical boundaries that delimit sovereign state territories or political and economic unions such as the European one are increasingly crisscrossed by a multiplicity of “other lines of social, cultural, political and economic demarcation.”66 Borders do not simply divide the world. They configure it. They impede and at the same time channel a multiplicity of fluxes and movements: “borders, far from serving merely to block or obstruct global passages of people, money, or objects, have become central devices for their articulation.”67 They are “instruments for managing, calibrating, and governing global passages of people, money, and things,” as well as spaces that bring into relief “the transformations of sovereign power and the ambivalent nexus of politics and violence.”68 The “proliferation of borders and border struggles” is a key element of the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of contemporary global capitalism.69 Today, borders are sites of struggle “in which the turbulence and conflictual intensity of global capitalist dynamics are particularly apparent.”70 The role of information and communication technologies and digital media in redefining space and the lived experience of geopolitical divisions and barriers is undoubtedly relevant to this theorisation of the border. Information and communication technologies such as the mobile phone are key tools for maintaining social networks across geopolitical borders. They mediate mobility, sociality and belonging by facilitating communication across geographical space and territorial divisions. The global south and, in particular, the African continent today find themselves at the crossroads of these changes. Africa is currently the continent with the fastest rate of mobile phone adoption.71 Various commentators have noted how African citizens have taken to using digital media to “extend their voice well beyond the nation state and indeed the continent.” From the social media campaigns #Kony12 and #BringBackOurGirls, to hashtag protests and movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall in South Africa or the rise of YouTube celebrities like “the Nigerian ‘super pastor’ TB Joshua,” digital

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media “increasingly come to determine the outlines of how Africans enter and operate in the global public sphere.”72 But, of course, this online presence and the connections it creates are not unrelated to other social bonds and networks. They are also shaped by language, cultural affiliations and divisions, and other identity and socioeconomic markers rooted in offline relations. Although Internet penetration and mobile telephony are growing exponentially throughout the African continent, giving many access to digital media platforms, the digital divide remains a reality linked to class, gender, age and geographical location. In subSaharan Africa, mobile Internet subscription is still the only available platform for the majority of the population to get online. At the end of 2017, the percentage of unique mobile subscriber penetration still stood at 44% vis-à-vis a global average of 66%.73 For many of the continent’s poor, smartphones and data are still unaffordably expensive. Nor is bridging the digital divide simply a matter of access per se but rather of meaningful and effective access, unimpeded by the cost of technology and data and lack of digital literacy and other skills. Online communities create their own cultural time zones. I am thinking for instance of a blog and website like Africa Is a Country (Twitter handle @africasacountry), whose name redefines the African continent by parodying its being often associated with images of homogeneity and undifferentiation. Africa Is a Country’s collection of online commentary, original writing, media criticism, videos, audio and photography aims to reconfigure Africa and bring together an imagined community that transcends the continent’s borders. In the words of founder and editor Sean Jacobs, the aim of the project is “to destabilize the existing narrative of the continent and its peoples and, second, to capture how Africans think about their continent in dynamic relation to one another and to globalization.”74 Teju Cole has described Africa Is a Country as “a gathering space for an international and diasporic Africa,” a space that is, among other things, “about how to be young, privileged and black in a world of white hegemony.”75 The website does indeed creatively redefine the African continent, but in so doing it creates its own boundaries. Africa Is a Country brings people with shared interests together who may have never met physically, but, as Cole’s description illustrates, it also reproduces a kind of digital hegemony based on class, language and education, aesthetics, and “Afropolitan” experience.76 In this book, the term border refers not only to territorial borders but also to variously mediated and heterogeneous boundaries. These boundaries and the spaces they create are defined by forms of identification that reify them, but also by border struggles that can produce collectivities at variance with identities constituted in the name of nationality, citizenship or other institutionally and state sanctioned forms of belonging – and that, at the same time, may create their own sociocultural enclaves and divisions. My premise, which draws on a growing body of literature, is that in today’s world borders are crucial sites of conflict and transformation.77 They are key devices used for the government and regulation of human mobility – that is, for the selective inclusion and exclusion of human beings based on their categorisation as more or less desirable. They are also daily challenged by migratory movements and migrants’ practices of mobility and claims to rights,

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space and freedom of movement.78 But these are not the only borders to which I turn. I also look at the borders constituted by socioeconomic inequalities, as well as cultural, linguistic and other differences to explore ways of challenging and denaturalising these boundaries and imagining forms of collectivity and political subjectivity forged in struggle against them. To do so, I have tried to find a language that would enable me to account for the socio-historical realities that this task must confront. The concept of translation is the theoretical tool that I use to theorise the conflicts and subjectivities produced at the boundary lines of multiple sites of inclusion, exclusion, conflict and contestation.

The politics of translation Translation is understood here as a political concept. It is a usage that builds on the shift in translation studies over the last decades from a narrower focus on language to an exploration of the cultural, social and political implications of the concept of translation. The phrase “the politics of translation” first gained currency in contemporary cultural theory through an essay by postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose polemical objective is a practice of translation that fails to attend to the “rhetoricity of language” of non-European texts, so that “a species of neocolonialist construction of the non-western scene is afoot.”79 In this context, attending to the rhetorical texture of the text one translates, thereby disrupting the idea and praxis of translation as an instrument of colonial and neocolonial assimilation, has broad political implications vis-à-vis the unequal power relations between colonial or global and indigenous or local languages.80 Postcolonial theory has played an important role in politicising translation studies. It has drawn attention to how the practice of translation “always involves questions of power relations, and of forms of domination.” Beginning with colonialism’s inaugural act of renaming indigenous peoples and places, colonial translation of “indigenous written and oral texts into the colonizer’s language” was “part of the process of domination, of achieving control, a violence carried out on the language, culture and people being translated.” It served “the superimposition of the colonial apparatus into which all aspects of the original culture have to be reconstructed.”81 At the same time, postcolonial critics have also pointed to the possibilities for resistance and subversion opened up by linguistic and cultural translation as a two way process that involves “displacement, the carrying over and transformation of the dominant culture into the new identities that take on material elements from the culture of their new location.”82 Most prominently, postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha has extensively theorised how postcolonial migrants’ translated lives result in “borderline negotiations,” split identities and in-between liminal cultural positions that constitute an “empowering condition of hybridity.”83 On the other hand, other interventions insist on the asymmetries of power that still govern contemporary language hierarchies. In a recent contribution to this debate – “The Politics of Translation: Notes towards an African Language Policy” (2018) – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o returns to his lifelong concern with power relations

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between colonial and indigenous African languages to underscore, once more, how language choices on the African continent still bear the imprint of the legacy of colonialism: what “began in the colonial era, the delegitimization of African languages as credible sources and basis of knowledge, was completed and normalized in the post-colonial era.”84 As Mamdani reminded his audience during the 2017 TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town on “Decolonising the Postcolonial University,” Africa has two types of language: “one of these is the language of colonialism, inevitably a language of science, scholarship, and global affairs; the other is a colonised language, a home language whose growth was truncated because colonialism cut short the possibility of development of an intellectual tradition in the languages of the colonised.”85 Just as the colonial state can be theorised as an imperfect replica or translated copy of an original, so too does a postcolonial one that continues to deploy western languages to mediate its linguistic diversity. In these circumstances, the relation between local and global languages is the site of an unequal exchange that hampers the radical potential of translation, as a “language of languages,” for “enabling mutuality of being and becoming even within a plurality of languages.”86 For Ngũgĩ, this potential is today displayed by language use among “border communities” that operate across a variety of languages in a “networkingly” rather than hierarchical relationship. Among the communication strategies adopted by these communities are practices of translation and multilingualism that include developing a shared lingua franca that coexists with their other languages without displacing them (these practices are examples of what Naoki Sakai calls “heterolingual address,” on which more later).87 Decolonial thought has also concerned itself with the conceptual link between translation and the border. Decolonial “border thinking” designates ways of thinking and knowing that come from a “dichotomous locus of enunciation” historically “located at the borders (interiors or exteriors) of the modern/colonial world system.”88 Inspired by concepts such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” Richard Wright’s “double vision” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “new mestiza consciousness,” border thinking is rooted in local histories and subject positions situated at the border inscribed by colonial difference. By embracing border thinking, decolonial theory strives to undo the dichotomies that separate the inside and outside of modernity and coloniality by establishing alliances with critiques of modernity that it deems “internal” to modernity/coloniality – Marxism features prominently among them – even as it simultaneously underscores the “irreducible difference” of border thinking from “the monotopic critique of modernity from the perspective of modernity itself.”89 As an example of this, decolonial scholar Water Mignolo names the Chicano writer Gloria Anzaldua, who places “herself at the cross-road of three traditions (Spanish-American, Nahuatl, and Anglo-American),” thereby “creating a locus of enunciation where different ways of knowing and individual and collective expressions mingle.”90 “Double translation” is another name for border thinking. The phrase names the intersection of “incommensurable (from the perspective of modernity) forms of knowledge.” The example of double translation offered by Mignolo is the Zapatistas’ “Marxism

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modified by Amerindian languages and cosmology and Amerindian epistemology modified by the language of Marxist cosmology.”91 Double translation is the outcome of an encounter between indigenous movements and oppositional western political traditions that results not in the erasure of indigenous thought, but in a process of mutual translation. This bidirectional movement puts into conversation different worldviews across colonial difference – as opposed to imposing an abstract universal or reifying a cultural relativist dichotomy between them that is itself the product of colonial modernity and coloniality. In Mignolo’s words, border thinking is “thinking from dichotomous concepts rather than ordering the world in dichotomies.”92 The elaborations and interventions that I have just briefly recapped highlight the political valence of the concept of translation and have decisively contributed to lend it salience outside specialist translation studies. They foreground how translation is imbricated with issues of power and identity, as well as with the histories of modernity, imperialism, coloniality and globalisation. In this book, however, I look at a slightly different set of questions. I interrogate the theoretical and political work the concept of translation can do in helping us to conceptualise and reimagine borders and collectivity boundaries. My use of this concept thus intersects with recent discussions of citizenship, nationality, migration, borders, culture and geopolitics. Sakai’s theorisation of how translation and the border are both implicated in inscribing the space of the social – or “bordering” – is crucially important for rethinking the concept translation along these lines. Sakai starts by problematising the “conventional comprehension of translation that always presumes the unity of a language.”93 This corresponds to a regime of translation that implies what Sakai calls “homolingual address”: a mode of enunciation “whereby the addresser adopts the position representative of a putatively homogeneous language society and relates to the general addressees who are also representative of an equally homogeneous language community.”94 In this understanding of translation, the addresser and addressee are identified with the two languages, represented as discrete and homogeneous unities foreign to each other, between which translation takes place. Homolingual address “prescribes and demarcates the locus of difference between two presumably ethnic or national language communities.”95 Despite the differences and heterogeneity within each of the two linguistic communities demarcated by the act of translation, its conventional representation construes them as a dichotomy – either one or the other. Homolingual address “assumes the normalcy of transparent communication in a homogeneous medium” and posits a rigid separation, or border, between the ethnolinguistic communities it identifies with this medium.96 To the linguistic partitions prescribed by homolingual address, Sakai provides the alternative of “heterolingual address.” Instead of representing translation as “a transfer of a message from a clearly circumscribed language community into another distinctly enclosed language community,” heterolingual address posits them as nonaggregate and heterogeneous communities “of foreigners.”97 By assuming the heterogeneity and differences within the audiences put into contact

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by the act of translation, heterolingual address treats translation “as an essentially hybridizing instance” that corresponds to “a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner.”98 Central to this rethinking of translation is the “in transit” heterolingual position of the translator: Precisely because of her positionality, the translator has to enunciate for an essentially mixed and linguistically heterogeneous audience. In order to function as a translator, she must listen, speak, read, or write in the multiplicity of languages, so that the representation of translation from one language to another is possible only as long as the translator acts as a heterolingual agent and addresses herself from a position of linguistic multiplicity.99 The positionality of the translator thus points to a mode of address marked by the instability of the “we” through which collective subjects constitute themselves – one in which “our togetherness is not grounded on any common homogeneity.”100 Homolingual address is the modern regime of translation that corresponds to the emergence of the nation state. The unity of a language and of the corresponding language community is, according to Sakai, akin to Immanuel Kant’s “regulative idea,” which “organizes knowledge but is not empirically verifiable.”101 By demarcating one language community from another, the modern regime of translation is implicated with the tracing of a border that indexes forms of identification along ethnolinguistic and national lines. For Sakai, the normative representation of translation is a historical construct that corresponds to “an international world, consisting of basic units – nations – segmented by national borders into territories.”102 The formation and naturalisation of modern languages in conjunction with the rise of modern nation-states correspond to what Sakai calls “schema of co-figuration,” in which the unity of a language serves as a schema for nationality and, by extension, for other civilisational partitions.103 The multilingual southern African context from which I write does not neatly fit into the equation of language and nation. Sakai’s schema of co-figuration, however, sheds light on the monolingual model assumed as the norm and pursued by most postcolonial African countries, which have adopted it in form of a lingua franca, often the former colonial language, which coexists with indigenous languages and in contexts such as education or public discourse often ends up displacing them.104 Ngũgĩ describes this norm as “the fundamentalism of monolingualism”: A nation is not really a nation without a common language to go with the commonality of territory, economy and culture. In this context, African languages, because of their huge numbers, are seen as anti-nationhood. Monolingualism is seen as the centripetal answer to the centrifugal anarchy of multiplicity of languages. European languages are seen as coming to the rescue of a cohesive Africa, otherwise threatened by its own languages. [. . .] In reality, there are very few, if any, monolingual nations in the world. What most have is an officially imposed language as the national language: the language of power.105

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But what interests me most about Sakai’s argument is how reconceptualising translation as heterolingual address points to the constitution of a “we” or collectivity grounded on difference and at variance with national or ethnolinguistic identification, as well as with other homogenising identity markers. This is an invitation to think collectivities and ways of being in common constituted at and against the proliferating borders and boundaries that striate the contemporary neoliberal world order. In this sense, translation is a political concept and a social practice intimately related both to the presence of borders and to the “problematic of bordering” – that is, to how borders are drawn and inscribe the space of the social. In Sakai’s words, “bordering and translation are both problematics projected by the same theoretical perspective. Just as bordering is not solely about the demarcation of land, translation is not merely about language.”106

Media crossings In the chapters that follow, I turn to films, documentaries, literary texts, photographs, websites and other media texts and artistic interventions. I have chosen them because of their social and political relevance or their aesthetic and artistic value. Needless to say, my choices are subjective, but they entail criteria on which it might be useful to say a few words. I argue for challenging the disciplinary divisions and subdivisions that have been associated with the study of different kinds of cultural products, texts, media and expressive and representational forms – film studies, media studies, visual studies and literary studies. This, however, is not to say that the interpretive practices and paradigms, as well as the disciplinary histories and accumulated knowledge of each of these fields should be declared irrelevant and replaced by what a colleague calls a free-for-all “post-disciplinary ‘bring ’n share’ tabula rasa.”107 Arts and media have histories, their social meanings and configuration change, and the same applies to the disciplines that study them and to the bodies of knowledge and methodologies that constitute these disciplines. Ways of interpreting, reading and seeing are shaped not only by the expressive forms, cultural objects and media texts that elicit them but also by the platforms and forms of circulation and reception responsible for making these forms, objects and texts available to their audiences. The contemporary age of media convergence, when words, speech, music, videos and images blend and compete for attention on the screens of our digital devices, calls for a transdisciplinary approach that brings together media texts and sociocultural experiences across multiple platforms, thereby bypassing the divisions traditionally produced by discrete disciplinary and subdisciplinary specialisations. When the written, oral, aural and visual are constantly mixed and remixed, the results are hybrid and complex messages that create their own languages, modes of engagement, codes and forms of attention – hence the need for new transdisciplinary interpretive methods and practices.108 One phrase that has been coined to name this kind of media crossing is “comparative media studies,” which “typically includes not only text but also film, installation art, and other media forms.” Writing from the perspective of literary

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studies, Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman have introduced this label as an answer to the need to catch up with the digital world: we now find ourselves in situations where print-born assumptions linger and intermingle with practices such as social media networking, tweeting, hacking, and so on, to create highly diverse and heterogeneous social – technical – economic – political amalgams rife with contradictions and internal inconsistencies.109 In communication and media studies, this phrase is associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies programme, which focuses on “media practices across historical periods, cultural settings, and methods in order to assess change, design new tools, and anticipate media developments,” and also supports a “studio and workshop curriculum featuring the techniques and traditions of contemporary fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, journalism, digital media, video, and games.”110 “Cultural and media studies” is another name that has been used for the crossing of traditional disciplinary boundaries that I am proposing. It has the advantage of going beyond a narrowly textual focus.111 Across the south-north border, the label has been attached to a body of work that concerns itself with the interactions between culture, media, technology, expressive forms and their production, circulation and consumption.112 Cultural and media studies replaces a disembodied notion of the text with an emphasis on its sociocultural lived contexts and conditions of production and reception. It strives both to “cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes,” and to anchor textual interpretation in praxis (or “doing”).113 But the name we choose for this kind of transmedia approach is perhaps not especially important – so long as we register the need to challenge sedimented interpretive habits, disciplinary boundaries and norms of cultural and aesthetic value. This is the reason why I do not recommend the moniker digital humanities, in that it refers to the application of computational tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history and philosophy. The point is rather to rethink disciplinary divisions in the humanities and move beyond what has been called the two humanities: “literature, history, and philosophy on one side and communication and media studies on the other.”114 This begins with dealing with a plurality of forms, genres and traditions of written, oral, aural, visual and multimodal expression, as well as with their social life and significance. In this book, I combine textual and social analysis. What holds its various threads together is not a disciplinary focus, but rather a methodological and theoretical orientation and a set of concerns that speak to current social, political and cultural conflicts and dislocations. Chapter 2, “Heading south,” interrogates how the south-north border is being reimagined in the wake of Africa’s rapid urbanisation, large-scale human migration and precarisation, energy crises and neoliberal economic restructuring. I start by discussing a classic postcolonial text, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), in order to measure the distance that separates us from Said’s outline of

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modern imperialism and its culture and geopolitics. While Said historicised the twentieth century shift of global hegemony from Europe to the United States, the first decades of the new millennium have seen a sustained challenge to the western-centric paradigm of global modernity and the repositioning of Africa and the global south as the new frontiers of neoliberal capitalism. This historical trajectory frames a discussion of two contemporary African films: Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s neo-noir thriller Viva Riva! (2011) and Neill Blomkamp’s Johannsburgset science fiction movie District 9 (2009). I explore the geopolitical and cultural dislocations evoked by the title of the chapter by suggesting that the African urban landscapes represented in these films are legible as dystopian images of the planet’s future. In Chapter 3, “Intersecting temporalities, (un)translatability and African film aesthetics,” we leave the sprawling metropolitan areas that are spearheading Africa’s breakneck urban growth to look at the rural-urban divide that still defines much of this continent’s present realities. The chapter opens with an overview of some of the new trends, genres and cinematic languages in contemporary African cinema. From there, it moves on to discuss Ntshavheni wa Luruli’s Elelwani (2012), the first feature film ever shot in Venda. Destined for the international film festival and arthouse circuits – it was South Africa’s 2014 official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar competition – Elelwani unsettles the aesthetic canons that define how African films enter the global cultural market. To illustrate this point, I look at the aesthetic and cultural translations performed by the film’s cinematography and at how Elelwani disrupts linear conceptions of time by displacing the tradition-modernity dichotomy with an entanglement of temporalities that blurs its frame of reference. In Chapter 4, “Living in translation,” we cross from film to literature. Our takeoff point is the digital media presence of some of the best-known contemporary African and diasporic writers – from the Internet star status of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Teju Cole’s Twitter and Instagram experiments and Binyawanga Wainaina’s online hit “How to Write about Africa” (2005) – as well as the more diffuse “internetting” of African literature since the 1990s.115 From there, I proceed to consider how digital media shape contemporary narratives of migration. I zoom in on one such narrative, NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (2013), to examine the problematic of the border vis-à-vis both recent controversies surrounding the bordering of African writing – that is, how should we classify Europe- and US-based authors who claim an African identity – and the novel’s representation of the struggles and displacements engendered by contemporary migration movements and border crossings. Translation features prominently in this chapter as a political concept deployed to theorise the clash between homolingual conceptions of community constituted in the name of nation or ethnolinguistic identification and heterolingual forms of collective subjectivation shaped by border crossings. Chapter 5, “Reframing the rainbow,” brings us back to South Africa. I look at some of the contradictions of what, after the first democratic elections, Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu optimistically called the rainbow nation. The borders of

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the South African rainbow have been thrown into relief by the waves of xenophobia directed at African migrants and in some cases at South African Black ethnolinguistic minorities – hence the labels “Afrophobia” and “Negrophobia” – that have followed one another since 1994. This history is introduced by the juxtaposition of the xenophobic attacks of 2008 with the soccer World Cup of 2010: how can the the violent manifestation of chauvinism and anti-Black hatred represented by the former be reconciled with the celebrations of both national and Pan-African pride that defined the sporting event? To answer this question, I fall back on political theory. I argue that exclusionary state prescriptions about nation and citizenship have turned formerly anticolonial nationalism into a regressive ideology. I use this argument to make sense of the strident contrast between post-apartheid xenophobia and the radical declaration, included in the Preamble to the South African Constitution, that South Africa belongs to all those who live in it. Starting from there, I take stock of the vast South African archive of media representations, literary texts, feature films and documentaries that focus or touch on xenophobia. Among these, I discuss creative interventions that strive to imagine a post-identitarian politics that transcends national and ethnic identifications: from the inclusive cosmopolitanism promoted by Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) to Akin Omotoso’s feature film Man on Ground (2011) and the social media campaign that accompanied its release, titled “We Are from Here.” I argue that translating the idea of a shared common humanity into politics entails dealing with concrete issues tied to border regimes and contestations about citizenship rights. Finally, in Chapter 6, “Signs of the times,” I revisit the south-north border by comparing different images of Africa. I first survey the multimedia representations of Mgcineni Noki, aka Mambush, “the man in the green blanket,” one of the leaders of the 2012 miners’ strike who was killed by police during the massacre that took place outside the small town of Marikana, in the North West Province of South Africa. I begin with a photograph shot just a few hours before the massacre and retrace the making of the man in the green blanket through newspaper articles, a poem, a YouTube video, a stencil, art installations and performances, and other offline and online reproductions of this image. I end with an image that superimposes the man of the green blanket on the African continent. I contrast this image with that of the famous 2011 feature article “Africa Rising,” which celebrated a continent open for business and blessed with the rapid expansion of markets, the fast growth of a native middle class and of Internet users, and technology-led development. What does the south-north border look like when our gaze is filtered through the lens of the Marikana massacre, of the almost daily protests in South Africa’s townships and informal settlements, and of the uprisings and resistance of the urban and rural poor across the African continent?

Notes 1 My list refers to the states that are listed as members of the United Nations. See www. un.org/en/member-states/. Accessed 22 October 2018. 2 See Gainor, “Map.”

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3 In a recent estimate, 45 countries have built, are building or have proposed to build border walls (Gainor, “Map”). Different sources give slightly different numbers. See for instance www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-border-walls.html. Accessed 20 April 2018. According to this website, there is a total of 20 completed border barriers in the world, seven under construction, one planned and five proposed. In Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls (2018), Tim Marshall reckons that “Thousands of miles of walls and fences have gone up around the world in the twenty-first century. At least sixty-five countries, more than a third of the world’s nation states, have built barriers along their borders; half of those erected since the Second World War sprang up between 2000 and now” (Marshall, Divided, 2). 4 Parag Khanna describes this as a contradiction between functional and political space, connectivity and borders: “Our infrastructural matrix today includes approximately 64 million kilometers of highways, 2 million kilometers of pipelines, 1.2 million kilometers of railways, and 750,000 kilometers of undersea Internet cables that connect our many key population and economic centers. By contrast, we only have 250,000 kilometers of international borders” (Khanna, Connectography, 11). Even though these are useful statistics, I must underscore that the argument presented in this book challenges Khanna’s vision of a global march to ever-increasing connectivity and a “supply chain world” driven by infrastructure development and the market economy. 5 See Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler, “Imagined Boundaries and Borders.” In this initial discussion, I rely on Yuval-Davis and Stoetztler’s definition of borders and boundaries: “in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘border’ is defined as a ‘boundary’ and ‘boundary’ is defined as a ‘limit-line.’ For the sake of clarity, however, we relate to ‘boundaries’ when talking about limit-lines of collectivities and to ‘borders’ when referring to legal/ territorial ones” (Yuval-Davis and Stoetztler, “Imagined Boundaries and Borders,” 330). I will further specify the way I use the term border in the second section of this chapter. On borders and boundaries, see also Francis Nyamnjoh, who in his book on xenophobia in southern Africa, Insiders and Outsiders (2006), argues that the “reality of closures makes boundaries part and parcel of our globalised world. We are born into borders, and struggle for or against them our entire lives. These boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are political, social, cultural and, above all, material” (Nyamnjoh, Insiders and Outsiders, 24–25). On borders and translation, see Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of the Border”; and Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 277–312. 6 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 45–47. 7 Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, 15. 8 On Southern Europe and the global south, see, for instance, Dainotto, Europe (in Theory); Cazzato, ed., Orizzonte sud; Santos, “Epistemologies of the South and the Future”; Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions. On cultural time zones, see Myambo, “Africa’s Global City?” 9 The Economist, “Africa Rising.” 10 The Economist, “Africa’s Hopeful Economies.” 11 The Economist, “The Hopeless Continent.” 12 Bond, “‘Africa Rising’ in Retreat”; Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising, 1. 13 Bond, “Africans Rising.” See also Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising; and Ngwane, Sinwell and Ness, eds, Urban Revolt. 14 Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising, 1. 15 Dirlik, “Global South,” 13. 16 For Marx, the unfolding of modernity is the history of the expansion of capital on a world scale. See Marx, Grundrisse, 408: “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.” Emphasis in original.

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17 Following Mezzadra, “Living in Transition,” this history can be reconfigured as the phases of capital’s attempts to translate and recodify into “the language of value” the heterogeneity and “multiplicity of languages (that is, of forms of life, of social relations, of ‘cultures’)” that capital encounters on its path. 18 See for instance Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy.” 19 Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 243. 20 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Why Deoloniality in the 21st Century?” 11. 21 Myambo, “Africa’s Global City?” 77. 22 I must note here that I cannot fully endorse Walter Mignolo’s understanding of the phrase “I am where I think,” by which he points to our epistemic situatedness on either side of colonial difference. This view absolutises and too hermetically seals the borders between western and non-western thought. For instance, when Mignolo describes Marxism as an internal critique of modernity, one must object that to the extent that Marxist theory and politics have been “stretched” – to recall Fanon’s term – and translated by the encounter with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, something called Marxism cannot be relegated, tout ensemble, to the interior of modernity/coloniality. Which is not to say that the Marxist tradition has not been tainted by Eurocentric views and reductive understandings of the non-western world – far from it. The broader issue is that European and, by extension, western history and thought are not homogeneous and monolithic constructions, but the sites of struggles, conflicts and crises; and so, too, it is with the global south. On epistemic colonial difference, see, among others, Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity and “I Am where I Think.” 23 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 29. 24 Ibid., 45–46. 25 Mezzadra, “Living in Transition.” See Scott and Sam, “Here’s how Fast China’s Economy Is Catching Up to the U.S.;” and McRae, “This Year, India Will Surpass the UK.” 26 Ndlovu-Gatsheni. “Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?” 11. 27 On decolonisation, see, among others, wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind; Moving the Centre; and Globalectics; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa; Empire, Coloniality and Africa Subjectivity; and “Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?”; Mignolo, The Darker Side of Modernity; Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy”; Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality”; Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. On theorising from the south, see, among others, Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Connell, Southern Theory; and Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South. 28 See, among others, Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Robertson, Globalization; and Khanna, Connectography. 29 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 1–25; Paasi, “Boundaries in a Globalizing World.” 30 Kingsley, “Mediterranean Death Rate.” See also UNHCR, Desperate Journeys. 31 For a commentary, see Landau, “A Chronotope of Contained Development.” 32 See Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . 33 One could dig up once again Frantz Fanon’s words on how “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 96). Or it could be noted that “from 1980 to 2009, developing African countries lost up to $1.4 trillion in net resource transfers, which are comprised of both licit and illicit flows, including investment, remittances, debt relief and illicit financial flows” despite “foreign aid, natural resource exports, and other transfers, developed countries still take away more resources than they give to Africa” (Kar, Freitas, Moyo and Ndiaye, “Illicit Financial Flows and the Problem of Net Resource Transfers from Africa: 1980–2009”).

22 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51 52

The gaze from the south Khanna, Connectography, 22–23; UN DESA and OECD, “World Migration in Figures.” See UNCHR, Desperate Journeys. Balibar, “Per un diritto internazionale dell’ospitalità.” Emphasis in original. Achille Mbembe states that the “government of human mobility might well be the most important problem to confront the world during the first half of the 21st century” (“Scrap the Borders that Divide Africans”). See UNCTAD, Economic Development in Africa. As I discuss in Chapter 2, in the first decade of the millennium it was announced that for the first time in human history, the urban population has outnumbered the rural. See Davis, Planet of Slums, 1. See also UN DESA, “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050.” These data are excerpted from Bello-Schünemann, “Defining the Future of Africa’s Brave New World,” 13–15. The other part of the globe that is experiencing extremely rapid urban growth is Asia, and particularly China, where the last decades have seen “the world’s most rapid urbanisation, moving almost 500 million rural Chinese people into cities over the last 35 years. [. . .] The country already has at least 15 megacities (defined as cities with more than 10 million residents) and expects several more urban centres to reach megacity status, as it predicts the urbanisation rate to increase another 10% by 2020” (Roxburg, “Endless Cities”). See also Harvey, The Ways of the World, 1–5. Balibar, “The Borders of Europe”; Zureik and Salter, Global Surveillance and Policing; Mbembe, “Scrap the Borders that Divide Africa”; and Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, 16–18. Balibar, “The Borders of Europe”; Paasi, “A Border Theory.” De Genova, Mezzadra and Pickles, “Introduction,” 57. Mezzadra, “Living in Transition.” See also Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders; Mezzadra, Neilson, Scheel and Rahola, “Migration/Migration Studies”; and Tazzioli, De Genova, Mezzadra and Garelli, “Migrant Struggles.” On the discursive, performative and spectacular dimension of borders see, among others, De Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’”; and Coplan, “Border Show Business and Performing States.” Newman, “Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies,” 39; and Mezzadra, Dirittto di fuga, 174–184. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa, 6. I borrow the phrase “the problematic of bordering” from Naoki Sakai, who explains: “At the same time that it recognizes the presence of borders, discriminatory regimes, and the paradigms of classification, this problematic sheds light on the processes of drawing a border, of instituting the terms of distinction in discrimination, and of inscribing a continuous space of the social. The analytic of bordering requires us to take into account simultaneously both the presence of border and its drawing or inscription” (Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of the Border,” 25). Asiwaju, “The African Union Border Programme in European Comparative Perspective.” See African Union Commission, Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, 5, 17 and 4. See African Development Bank, Africa Visa Openness Report 2017, 10. Nigerian historian Anthony Ijaola Asiwaju points out that “the boundaries of modern Africa are so much the result of European impositions that all the legal instruments for dealing with them have remained exactly the same ‘treaties,’ ‘agreements,’ ‘protocols,’ and ‘notes’ as were established between the erstwhile European colonial powers” (Asiwaju, “The African Union Border Programme in European Comparative Perspective,” 68). On Pan-Africanism, the AOU and the African Union, see Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire and Global Coloniality, 64–73. Cited in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity, 46. Nyasha Mboti speaks of “cumulative memory losses” to describe the colonial history that in South Africa was materially and symbolically inaugurated by the planting of

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78

79

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Jan van Riebeeck’s wild almond fence in 1660. The fencing was the first act of colonial bordering on the southern tip of the continent. It was the beginning of the history that through a long series of frontier wars, land grabs and expropriations produced, first, “the Union of 1910, which fenced all Africans off the land by recognising the British and the Afrikaners as the only two races of South Africa,” and then the 50 years of apartheid that further marginalised and dispossessed the majority of South Africans in their country of birth. See Mboti, “Who Is (South) African?” 453. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, xvi. Cooper, Africa since 1940. Laakso and Olukoshi, “The Crisis of the Post-Colonial Nation-State Project in Africa,” 13. One cannot avoid thinking here of Frantz Fanon’s prescient warning that after independence, formerly anticolonial nationalism can lead “to a dead end” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 144). Landau, “Hospitality without Hosts,” 6–7. Landau, “Friendship Fears and Communities of Convenience in Africa’s Urban Estuaries,” 506. Following the inclusive definition of the Black Consciousness Movement, I use the capitalised term Black to refer to all the people of colour that the apartheid state categorised as Natives (Blacks), Indians and Coloured. Elsewhere, I use the term black (not capitalised) to refer to the racialised construct and identification. For a comparison of securitisation in Johannesburg wealthy suburbs and Palestine/ Israel, see Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, 2–24. Ilesamni, “The Roots and Fruits of Gated Communities”; Davis and Monk, eds, Evil Paradises. Over 12% of the greater Johannesburg region’s neighbourhoods are gated communities (Weintroub, “Affinities of Fear,” 50). Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 296. Myambo, “Africa’s Global City?” See Bourdieu, Distinction. Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, vii. Ibid., ix. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., viii. Ibid., 4. See Nyamnjoh and Brudvig, “Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa.” Jacobs, “Media Perspectives.” See GSMA, The Mobile Economy Sub-Saharan Africa 2018. Jacobs, “Emergent Africa Digital Identities,” 253–254. My definition of online cultural time zones is indebted to conversations with Melissa Tandiwe Myambo. Cited in Brittle Paper, “Teju Cole Explains why Brooklyn and Twitter Are African Cities.” Thanks to Natasha Himmelman for sharing with me her thoughts on Africa Is a Country. For a critique of Afropolitanism, see Grace Musila, “Part-Time Africans.” Musila underscores the “embeddedness of Afropolitanism in global capital and its attendant consumer cultures, urban cultures, as well as a deep-seated investedness in connectivity to the so-called global metropolis” (Musila, “Part-Time Africans,” 110). I have already mentioned this body of literature. See in particular notes 5 and 41–46. The emphasis on the constituent power of migrants’ movements, practices and claims defines the outlook of “autonomy of migration”: a “framework for advancing perspectives that foreground the subjectivity of migrant mobilities” (See De Genova, Garelli and Tazzioli, “Autonomy of Asylum?” 240–241). See also Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes; and Mezzadra, “The Gaze of Autonomy.” Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” 181.

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80 Another understanding of translation as a political concept that would carry me too far afield from my main argument, but that ought to be borne in mind, is Antonio Gramsci’s reconceptualisation of communist and revolutionary politics as translational praxis. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci notes: “In 1921: organizational issues. Vilici [Lenin] said and wrote: ‘We have not been able to “translate” our language into “European” languages’” (Prison Notebooks Vol. 3, 157). In order to translate into revolutionary praxis, political thought and forms of organisation need to speak to different social groups and maintain their coherence in specific social contexts – as opposed to dogmatically trying to make reality conform to an abstract schema. This understanding of translation as a practical activity is an integral part of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, a phrase that designates the translation of philosophy into politics, thought into action. For Gramsci, communist politics is a translational practice of concretisation of thought. 81 Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, 139–140. 82 Ibid., 142. 83 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 223–227. 84 Ngũgĩ, “The Politics of Translation,” 125. 85 See Mamdani, “Decolonising the Post-Colonial University.” 86 Ngũgĩ, “The Politics of Translation,” 131. 87 Ibid., 126–127. On “heterolingual address,” see Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 1–9. 88 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 85. 89 Ibid., 87. 90 Ibid., 5. 91 Ibid., 85. 92 Ibid. 93 Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of the Border,” 26. 94 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 3–4. 95 Sakai, “Translation,” 72–73. 96 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 8. 97 Ibid., 6. 98 Ibid., 3. 99 Ibid., 9; Sakai, “Translation,” 75. 100 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 7. 101 Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of the Border,” 27. 102 See Sakai, “Translation,” 73. 103 Ibid., 77–78. 104 For a useful overview, see Awobuluyi, “Official Language Policies in Africa.” 105 Ngũgĩ, “The Politics of Translation,” 125. 106 Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of the Border,” 25. 107 Tomaselli, “(Un-)Disciplined Indiscipline,” 171. 108 See Miller, Blow Up the Humanities, 93–116; and Ngũgĩ, Globalectics, 84–85. 109 Hayles and Pressman, “Introduction,” vii–x. 110 See MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. 111 Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman describe the approach they advocate “comparative textual media (CTM)” (Hayles and Pressman, “Introduction,” vii). 112 See, for instance, Tomaselli and Wright, eds, African Cultural Studies; Tomaselli, “Alter-Egos”; Tomaselli and Mboti, “Doing Cultural Studies”; and Tomaselli, Mboti and Rønning, “South-North Perspectives.” 113 See Miller, Blow Up the Humanities, 95; and Tomaselli and Mboti, “Doing Cultural Studies.” 114 Miller, Blow Up the Humanities, 2. 115 See Adenekan, “New Voices, New Media.”

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McRae, Hamish. 2018. “This Year, India Will Surpass the UK to Be the Fifth Largest Economy: But We Shouldn’t Worry Too Much.” The Independent 10 March. Accessed 4 May 2018. www.independent.co.uk/voices/uk-economy-india-china-g7-g20-industrialrevolution-western-technology-a8248341.html. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2006. Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Verona: Ombre Corte. ———. 2007. “Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude.” Transversal: Multilingual Webjournal 11. Accessed 15 April 2018. https://transversal. at/transversal/1107/mezzadra/en. ———. 2010. “The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration, and Social Struggles.” In The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. Edited by Vicky Squires. London: Routledge, 121–142. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, Brett Neilson, Stephan Scheel and Federico Rahola. 2015. “Migration/ Migration Studies.” Cultural Studies 29 (1): 61–63. Mignolo, Walter. 1999. “I Am where I Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 8 (2): 235–245. ———. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, Toby. 2012. Blow Up the Humanities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. n.d. Accessed 2 May 2018. https://cmsw.mit. edu/about/. Mpe, Phaswane. 2001. Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Musila, Grace. 2016. “Part-Time Africans, Europolitans and ‘Africa-Lite.’” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28 (1): 109–113. Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe. 2017. “Africa’s Global City? The Hipsterification of Johannesburg.” New Left Review 108 (November–December): 75–86. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2013. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. Dakar: Codesria. ———. 2013. “Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?” The Thinker 48: 10–15. ———. 2014. Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity. New York and London: Berghahn. Newman, David. 2011. “Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies: An Overview.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies. Edited by Doris WastlWalter. Farnham: Ashgate, 33–48. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1981. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey. ———. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey. ———. 2012. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2018. “The Politics of Translation: Notes towards an African Language Policy.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 30 (2): 124–132. Ngwane, Trevor, Luke Sinwell and Immanuel Ness, eds. 2017. Urban Revolt: State Power and the Rise of People’s Movements in the Global South. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

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Nyamnjoh, Francis. 2006. Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. Dakar: Codesria. Nyamnjoh, Francis and Ingrid Brudvig. 2016. “Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa: South Africa in Comparative Perspective.” In Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Francis Nyamnjoh and Ingrid Brudvig. Pretoria: HSRC Press, 1–18. Omotoso, Akin. 2011. Man on Ground. Johannesburg: T.O.M. Pictures. Paasi, Anssi. 2003. “Boundaries in a Globalizing World.” In Handbook of Cultural Geography. Edited by Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. London: Sage, 462–472. ———. 2011. “A Border Theory: An Unattainable Dream or a Realistic Aim for Border Scholars?” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies. Edited by Doris Wastl-Walter. Farnham: Ashgate, 11–32. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos. 2008. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century. London: Pluto Press. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Roxburgh, Helen. 2017. “Endless Cities: Will China’s New Urbanisation just Mean more Sprawl?” The Guardian 5 May. Accessed 1 April 2019. www.theguardian.com/cities/ 2017/may/05/megaregions-endless-china-urbanisation-sprawl-xiongan-jingjinji. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2006. “Translation.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2–3): 71–86. ———. 2010. “Translation and the Figure of the Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as Social Action.” Profession: 25–34. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Santos, Bonaventura de Sousa. 2016. “Epistemologies of the South and the Future.” From the European South 1: 17–29. Scott, Malcolm and Cedric Sam. 2017. “Here’s how Fast China’s Economy Is Catching Up to the U.S.” Bloomberg 6 November. Accessed 4 May 2018. www.bloomberg.com/ graphics/2016-us-vs-china-economy/. Spitz, Andy. 2017. Voetsek! Us? Brothers? Johannesburg: Left-Eye Productions. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “The Politics of Translation.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 179–200. Tazzioli, Martina, Nicholas De Genova, Sandro Mezzadra and Glenda Garelli. 2015. “Migrant Struggles.” Cultural Studies 29 (1): 80–83. Tomaselli, Keyan. 2012. “Alter-Egos: Cultural and Media Studies.” Critical Arts: SouthNorth Cultural and Media Studies 26 (1): 14–38. ———. 2015. “(Un-)Disciplined Indiscipline: The Langue and Parole of Film Studies in a Post-Disciplinary World.” South African Theatre Journal 28 (2): 171–179. Tomaselli, Keyan and Nyasha Mboti. 2013. “Doing Cultural Studies: What Is Literacy in the Age of the Post?” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (5): 521–537. Tomaselli, Keyan, Nyasha Mboti and Helge Rønning. 2013. “South-North Perspectives: The Development of Cultural and Media Studies in Southern Africa.” Media, Culture & Society 35 (1): 36–43. Tomaselli, Keyan and Handel Kashope Wright, eds. 2008. African Cultural Studies. Special issue. Cultural Studies 22 (2).

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UNCHR (United Nations Refugee Agency). 2018. Desperate Journeys: Refugees and Migrants Arriving in Europe and at Europe’s Borders, January–August 2018. Accessed 16 September 2018. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/65373. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). 2018. Economic Development in Africa Report 2018: Migration for Structural Transformation. New York and Geneva: United Nations. Accessed 30 September 2018. https://unctad.org/en/ PublicationsLibrary/aldcafrica2018_en.pdf. UN DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development). 2013. “World Migration in Figures.” Accessed 20 April 2018. www.oecd.org/els/mig/World-Migration-in-Figures.pdf. UN DESA. 2018. “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN.” Accessed 22 October 2018. www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/ population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Accessed 23 October 2018. www.un.org/en/ universal-declaration-human-rights/. Vila, Pablo. 2000. Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wainaina, Binyavanga. 2005. “How to Write about Africa.” Granta. Accessed 13 May 2018. https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/. Wa Luruli, Ntshavheni. 2012. Elelwani. Johannesburg: Shadowy Meadows Productions. Wa Munga, Djo Tunda. 2010. Viva Riva! Munich: Beta Cinema. Weintroub, Jill. 2019. “Affinities of Fear: Producing ‘Safe’ Spaces in a Suburb North of Joburg.” In Reversing Urban Inequalities in Johannesburg. Edited by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo. London and New York: Routledge.Young, Robert. 2003. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira and Marcel Stoetzler. 2002. “Imagined Boundaries and Borders: A Gendered Gaze.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 9 (3): 329–344. Zureik, Elia and Mark B. Salter. 2005. Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity. Devon: Willan.

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In theory Time goes by so fast. The occasion for the first draft of this chapter was provided by an invitation “to discuss the continuing relevance of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) on the twentieth anniversary of its publication.”1 It is the 26th anniversary now. And so, much as Said’s exploration of the roots of imperialism in western culture still has plenty to teach us, when one reopens the book, it does not take long to notice that it is in need of updating. Published in the immediate aftermath of the first Persian Gulf War (1990– 1991), Culture and Imperialism begins and ends with an impassionate denunciation of American global ascendancy and of the exceptionalist ideology on which its legitimisation was premised: “the last superpower, an enormously influential, frequently interventionary power nearly everywhere in the world,”2 Said writes, today “the United States is triumphalist internationally, and seems in a febrile way eager to prove that it is number one.”3 Said’s focus on the relation between culture and imperialism was dictated by an immediate concern that surfaces again and again in the text: the homologies between the massive presence of imperialism in modern European culture and the discourse of the new world order promulgated by US state agencies and their allies at the end of the Cold War. Hence the theory of recursivity that shapes the narrative of the book: the appearance and reappearance, first in European and then in American culture, of the idea of “imperium as [a] protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule,”4 whereby the rhetoric of the civilising mission of earlier empires is updated by the exceptionalist discourse of “American specialness, altruism, and opportunity.”5 The writing of Culture and Imperialism was prompted by a desire to expand the arguments about the east presented in Orientalism (1978) – that is, to “describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories”6 – as well as to fill its main narrative gap. “What I left out of Orientalism,” Said notes, “was that response to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization across the Third World.”7 So, in addition to generalising his earlier insights on how the othering and fixing of non-European identities constituted the epistemic foundation of the colonial enterprise, in Culture and Imperialism Said also depicts how the “consolidated

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vision” of imperial culture has been radically subverted by anticolonial and postcolonial political and cultural movements. Crucially for Said, the legacy of the intellectual currents and figures produced by these movements is marked not so much, or in any case not exclusively, by an assertion of radical alterity, but most significantly by what he calls “the voyage in”:8 by the acts of appropriation and contamination performed by writers and intellectuals from the formerly colonised world – Said singles out C.L.R. James and George Antonius as the precursors of this type of cultural work – who “have imposed their diverse histories on, have mapped their local geographies in, the great canonical texts of the European centre,”9 and whose work has resulted in the production of new hybrid and cosmopolitan cultural formations. Said’s polemical target in underscoring the transnational character of these acts of cultural resistance and opposition is “the old categories, the tight separations, and the comfortable autonomies”10 through which cultural boundaries are controlled by “the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism.”11 In a programmatic passage placed at the end of the first chapter, Said writes that to oppose this dogma and undo the damage it has caused, “we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future.”12 Postcolonial critiques of mainstream Euro-American social and cultural theory have exposed how from a standpoint that places the roots of modernity solely in the west, even when other modernities are conceived at all, they are seen as simulacra, replicas, second order ones. This is the ideological construction that the geographer Jim Blaut has labelled “the colonizer’s model of the world” – the equation of modernisation with westernisation. The doctrine of “geographical diffusionism” that undergirds this model depends not only on notions of the west as the site of progress and of the belatedness of the rest of the world, but also on the belief that western advancement takes place in isolation.13 From the perspective of geographical diffusionism, modernity is the positing of the west as the norm, the universal in relation to which “others” are defined. Against this background, a privileged strategy of postcolonial theory has been to reinsert into the signifiers “Europe” and “the west” the traces of the presence of those others that the assumptions of western autochthony and self-determination serve to efface. Hence the ubiquity in this body of work of notions such as hybridity, creolisation or transculturation, which are aimed at highlighting the mixing of cultures and identities, and the impure, hybrid, creole and transcultural character of the cultural formations produced by the colonial encounter and its legacies. An important corollary of this theorising is calling the west to acknowledge its own hybrid and transcultural history.14 Inserting the experience of imperialism and the histories of colonised people into European and more generally western culture was also the project of Said’s Culture and Imperialism. It is a project that remains relevant. And yet, two decades and a half down the line, Said’s words invite reassessment on several grounds. The first, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s critical remarks in Empire (2000), is that even as Said looks at the new, post-Cold War world order, the privileged target of his critique remains how “current global power structures” perpetuate the “cultural

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and ideological remnants of European colonialist rule.”15 For Hardt and Negri, this critique misses the novelty and specific features of the decentred and deterritorialised form of rule they name “Empire”: “The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers.”16 Whether or not one agrees with everything Hardt and Negri have to say about Empire – and many have argued that their statements about the decline in sovereignty of nation-states were quite overhasty17 – there is no doubt that the global hegemonic power of the United States, which, as Said himself notes, had already started to be eroded in the 1980s by “the recession, the endemic problems posed by the cities, poverty, health, education, production, and the Euro-Japanese challenge,”18 has in the meantime been further weakened by the economic and financial crisis that exploded in 2008.19 As macroeconomic indicators highlight, while the United States and the rest of the west sluggishly advance or stagnate, it is the global south that has become the site of real economic action. In line with a now consolidated trend, at the beginning of 2013 The Economist’s annual almanac of predictions for the year ahead noted that the ten fastest-growing national economies were all located in Asia and Africa – six and four, respectively – and one of its bloggers underscored that “only the emerging economies (a phrase that now seems to cover countries that have long since emerged – witness China, second only to America in economic weight)” were “promising robust growth for the coming year.”20 If we fast-forward to 2016, the geopolitical distribution of this list has not significantly changed: seven Asian countries – Turkmenistan, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, India, Bhutan and Vietnam – and three African ones – Ivory Coast, Rwanda and Djibouti.21 Trade networks are also pointing to similarly shifting geographies: “While starting from a low base, the China-African trade volume of more than $250 million per year is now almost double U.S.-Africa trade and projected to catch up with Europe-Africa trade.”22 Which is not to say that all is well for the new pace setters in economic growth. In their travelogue Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes (2016), where they provide a thick description of the impact of Chinese capital and infrastructure megaprojects on the everyday life of the African continent, Kevin Bloom and Richard Poplak remind us of the “paradoxes,” “binaries” and “confounding dualities” that continue to define sub-Saharan Africa’s patterns of development: some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, exceptional rise of per capita income, some of the world’s best returns in foreign direct investment, and the permanence of conditions of severe poverty for almost half of its inhabitants.23 Still, when we look at the geopolitical world map today, locating a hegemonic centre of economic or political power certainly seems much more difficult than it was two or three decades ago. Indeed, what appears to require scrutiny and revision is the opposition between “the modern metropolitan West” and its “peripheries” that frames Edward Said’s discussion of their “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories.” In the twenty-first century, the association of the term “metropolitan” with the west increasingly comes across as an anachronism. Of

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the 20 largest cities on the planet, calculated by metropolitan population, 19 are in what we have become accustomed to call the global south, and only one (New York) is located in the west.24 The current scale of urbanisation in Asia and Africa utterly dwarfs anything the west has ever experienced. In the 1980s, China added more urban dwellers than all of Europe did in the entire nineteenth century. Cities like Dhaka, Kinshasa and Lagos are growing at a rate no western city has ever approached.25 Urbanisation is moving south. The data collected by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) show that today Africa “has the fastest rate of urbanisation in the world,” which will result in this continent more than doubling its urban population “over the next two decades, from 294 million in 2000 to a staggering 742 million in 2030, and 1.2 billion in 2050.”26 According to Mike Davis, this rate of urbanisation represents a watershed in world history comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial Revolution.27 It is a sign – one of many – that some of the world’s most radical change is, for better or worse, happening in the global south. This is, at least, the claim put forward by Jean and John Comaroff in Theory from the South (2012), where they argue that contrary “to the received Euromodernist narrative of the past two centuries – which has the global south tracking behind the curve of Universal History, always in deficit, always playing catch up – there is good reason to think the opposite.”28 The current breakneck growth of Asian and African urban areas is, the Comaroffs note, a case in point, with megacities such as Lagos having come to represent a stepped-up version of western urbanisation, a model for the future “of all cities.”29 They stress that it is the global south that most intensely feels the effects of the socioeconomic dislocations that are currently taking place on a world scale, thus to prefigure the future of the global north. It is the thesis summed up by the subtitle of the book, how Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa: a “provocative,” “partially parodic” and “counter-evolutionary” statement meant to perform an ironic demystification of the canonical narratives of modernisation, which depict the global south as the always deferred, the not-yet, the site of delayed historical change understood as late arrival.30 The world view on which these narratives are based no longer holds up (if indeed it ever did), note the Comaroffs, who claim that “the material, political, social, and moral effects of the rise of neoliberalism are most graphically evident” in what have long been construed as peripheries of western modernity, and especially the African continent.31 This is the geopolitical space where neoliberalism first unleashed the very worst of what it had in store for the rest of the world, which is today catching up with the global south in “witnessing rising tides of ethnic conflict, racism, and xenophobia, of violent criminality, social exclusion, and alienation, of rampant corruption in government and business, of shrinking, insecure labour markets, afflicted middle classes, and lumpen youth, of executive authoritarianism, popular punitiveness, and much more besides.”32 According to the Comaroffs, all of this means that Africa – or rather “Africa as imagined in Euro-America” – is “becoming a global condition.” In “the history of the present, the global south is running ahead of the global north, a hyperbolic prefiguration of its future-in-the-making.”33

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This is no doubt a thought-provoking thesis. Even though, as some of the critics of Theory from the South have noted, it risks turning the global south into an amorphous and homogenising signifier that occludes the differences between the locations it designates and their unique histories.34 That said, if we accept the idea of the south as a culturally embedded, “ex-centric” designation that only works in relation to a constitutive outside,35 the data that the Comaroffs bring to the fore make a compelling case for their assertion that “the history of the present reveals itself more starkly in the antipodes.”36 From turbocharged urbanisation, to the growth rate of the economy, to the pervasiveness of neoliberal social restructuring and engineering, inclusive of hyper-flexible forms of exploitation of labour, surplus extraction and processes of capital accumulation through the expropriation of land, water and raw materials, all of which see the global south leading the way, it does indeed seem plausible to suggest that the key question is no longer whether the west ignores or recognises the “coevalness” of the non-west. Instead, it “is whether the West recognizes that it is playing catch-up in many respects with the temporality of its others.”37

Viva Riva! and District 9 The point of this chapter, though, is not to try to ascertain whether the statement that Euro-America is evolving toward Africa is empirically accurate – and anyway, what would count as conclusive evidence? – but rather to start thinking about some of the interpretive strategies it enables for cultural criticism. To do this, I discuss two films that go some way towards providing a narrative, visual and aesthetic representation of some of the imaginaries that this claim evokes: Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s Kinshasa-set crime thriller Viva Riva! (2010) and District 9 (2009), Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction hit about the arrival of extraterrestrials in Johannesburg. I have chosen these films not only on account of the international acclaim they have received,38 but also because they are significant examples of the turn to genre film across the African continent: from western and gangster movies to romantic comedy and the whole repertoire of popular genres appropriated and remixed by the Nollywood industry.39 To paraphrase Said’s argument about the contrapuntal relation between the western archive and cultural production in the formerly colonised world, filmmakers and cultural producers from the global south are today increasingly imposing “their diverse histories on,” and mapping “their local geographies in,” the genres of western mass cultural production and commercial cinema and fiction – each of which has a representational history that associates it with the range of styles, social types and situations, historical contexts and geographical settings that were presented in previous incarnations of the genre. Hence the unsettling experience of watching a slick noir set in the streets of Kinshasa such as Viva Riva!: a film in which the novelty value of the richly textured representation of the unfamiliar Congolese urban setting – this is the first feature film shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since President Mobutu Sese Seko shut down the local

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film industry in the 1980s40 – is enhanced by seeing it superimposed on the range of expectations that the generic conventions carry with them. In fact, this is precisely what grabbed the attention of Anglo American film critics when Viva Riva! came out: hence the “repackaging the revenge thriller in parakeet colours and distinctive African beats” of the review in the New York Times, or the “smell of authenticity about the ramshackle location [Wa Munga] has chosen” for his “sturdy thriller” detected by the Guardian’s reviewer.41 Right from the opening sequence, the viewer is confronted with the powerful visual and aural impact of the place where the film, which is shot in Lingala and French, is set: a grubby, chaotic metropolis where everything, from the muddy, potholed streets to the scraped and stained decrepit buildings, seems almost beyond repair (Figure 2.1).42 Wa Munga’s camera scans the crumbling surfaces of the city and its human infrastructure with evident relish and turns them into the stage for the rehearsal of a whole range of generic conventions: the sex and violence mix typical of neo-noir flicks, with the piquant local addition of the display of naked black bodies moving to the rhythm of percussive African beats, the many twists in the plot that, as in any good fast-paced thriller or action movie, keep the story in motion and the tension up, and so on. The first images, interspersed with long shots of the teeming streets of Kinshasa, all point to the energy crisis that is gripping the city: close-ups of a pair of hands counting a big bundle of US dollars and of petrol being poured into a tank from a plastic container, followed by a medium shot of a van packed with people that is being pushed by hand, and by more close-ups of someone sucking petrol out of another tank and of a handwritten cardboard sign at a petrol station that says “Plus de carburant” [“No fuel left”] (Figure 2.2). In the next shot, the camera

Figure 2.1 Kinshasa. Source: Viva Riva!, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga.

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Figure 2.2 Energy crisis. Source: Viva Riva!, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga.

takes us into the petrol station, and once there, we are pulled toward and into the dark interior of the empty fuel tank of an old Mercedes. The screen then briefly goes black and becomes the background for the red letters of the title, which a moment later start floating on a very large river that is being traversed by two motor-powered dugout canoes carrying oil barrels. Responsible for setting the plot in motion, these barrels also represent a resonant geopolitical signifier. They point to the extractive economy that through the exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, especially minerals and oil, has repositioned Africa within the “neoliberal world order” as, yet again, a supplier of raw materials and natural resources.43 The canoes are driven by African men who are heading to Kinshasa, where Riva (Patsha Bay Mukuna) is going to meet his business partner, G.O., who owns the warehouse where they will keep the oil while they wait for the right moment for the basic speculative move in a time of scarcity: sell when the commodity you have is in short supply and hard to get, so its market value is peaking. In G.O.’s words, “The price keeps going up, tomorrow it’ll explode. Then I’ll sell it all.” Riva has returned to Kinshasa after spending ten years in Angola, where he got the oil he has brought home. He is followed by a gang of Angolans led by the ruthless Cesar (Hoji Fortuna), who is after the loot he claims Riva stole from him. To complicate matters, soon after the beginning of the movie, Riva falls in love with Nora (Manie Malone), a redhead beauty who turns out to be the girlfriend of local crime boss Azor (Diplome Amekindra), “the strong man of Kinshasa.” As we follow Riva, who is chasing Nora and being chased by both the Angolans and Azor and his men in a city that defies cognitive mapping – no monumental or other

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recognisable urban landmark is ever in view – Kinshasa’s streets, houses and nightlife become the setting of a distinctively contemporary African cinematic aesthetics. This temporal situatedness is underscored by the elision of history, most notably that of the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial moment, performed by the film, which does not provide any historical narrative or thesis to contextualise the action. Even the genre’s standard biographical account of the making of the criminal, which normally provides some kind of socio-historical rationalisation for his life choices – think of Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema (2008) – is reduced to a few flashbacks and dialogues vaguely pointing to an intergenerational conflict between Riva and Nora and their parents. It is money, cash flashed at every opportunity and serving as a signifier of consumerist desire, which provides the one-dimensional motive and source of action, rendering superfluous any other rationalisation. When Nora, who is also the daughter of a history teacher, rhetorically asks Riva, “You have never opened a history book, have you?,” Riva replies: “You know, as for us, we’re looking for money. History. . . .” In the whole film, there is only one passing reference to colonialism – Cesar’s disparaging remark about the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): “This country is the worst cow pie I’ve ever seen. Maybe you should have remained colonised.” Viva Riva! is situated in a present detached from the past and represented as its own social and political failure – a reminder of the fifth position, after Somalia, Chad, Sudan and Zimbabwe, held by the DRC in the Fund for Peace’s much-cited Failed States Index, recently renamed Fragile States Index, when the film was shot.44 The postcolonial state, or indeed any kind of institutional infrastructure, is either absent or only present as a highly corrupt policing and military apparatus, which appears to be uniquely there for the self-enrichment of those who have made their way through its ranks. Officials who are constantly busy asking for bribes and blackmailing anyone they come across are the embodied, conspicuous presence of a “failed state.”45 Riva and his antagonists, Azor and Cesar, do not really have any system to confront – as in classical Hollywood gangster movies, where the protagonists’ value system stands in ideological opposition to that of official society and its institutions – only each other. Representatives of official institutions do not even try to maintain the pretence of abiding by the laws, rules or codes of behaviour they are supposed to uphold. They are fully part of the criminal economic network and perfectly integrated with its logic. Corruption and greed completely engulf the world of Viva Riva!, including religious institutions and their representatives. As Father Gaston (Bavon Diana Landa) puts it, “Priests need fuel too, alas.” The withering away of the state and its dysfunction have, of course, become key tropes in the discourse of much contemporary geopolitical analysis. A number of interventions have played with the notion of the failed state to designate a global question, which Viva Riva! brings into relief from the vantage point of the DRC.46 But to locate the image of Africa presented by the film within the global present, I return to the energy crisis with which it starts. A recurrent scenario of many a dystopian and science fiction film – from, say, the Mad Max franchise (1979–2015) to Avatar (2009) – the exhaustion of the earth’s oil supplies and

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natural resources has increasingly functioned in the last few decades as the end point of the narrative of progress against which the Comaroffs set their argument. This is the narrative of modernisation that corresponds to the emergence and consolidation of a model of oil capitalism that according to many analysts is now approaching a terminal decline brought about by the overconsumption of the source of energy on which it is dependent. As Imre Szeman suggests: Oil capital seems to represent a stage that neither capital nor its opponents can think beyond. Oil and capital are linked inextricably, so much so that the looming demise of the petrochemical economy has come to constitute the biggest disaster that “we” collectively face.47 The looming crisis in worldwide oil supplies represents a collective nightmare to which we – including our cinema and other forms of cultural production – are failing to imagine alternatives. What we have instead are either the utopian fantasy of the discovery of new, clean and limitless energy resources, “the unobtanium of James Cameron’s Avatar,” or “postapocalyptic scenarios – cautionary tales about where our fiction of surplus might lead.”48 Viva Riva! can be seen, among other ways, as one such cautionary tale. Much as the film linguistically and visually draws attention to its Kinshasa setting – including through the stunning music score, which mixes traditional Congolese rumba with contemporary local rap – its narrative is reinserted into global cultural and economic networks both by its use of generic conventions and by the universalising function of signifiers such as oil and US dollars. The world represented by Viva Riva! is thus yet another instantiation of “the reduction of everything to the price tag and the flattening out of motivations to the sheerly financial” that characterise a good deal of contemporary popular culture.49 In other words, I suggest that the film’s post-apocalyptic urban landscape, with a city gripped by a perennial energy crisis and a society in the midst of decline and systemic failure, complete with a dysfunctional economy based on speculation on volatile and scarce resources, is legible as a dystopian image of a global future that is here prefigured by the gritty representation of a contemporary African metropolis. This brings us to the second film that I want to discuss in this chapter, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, whose originating idea was precisely that the world is heading south. In Blomkamp’s words: The film doesn’t exist without Jo’burg. It’s not like I had a story and then I was trying to pick a city. It’s totally the other way around. I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. What I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.50 What this future looks like Blomkamp makes clear in another interview: From a photographic standpoint, there was what I wanted to convey about Johannesburg, which is that it’s almost this burnt, nuclear wasteland, at least

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Wire fenced, faded by the sun, grim, dry and dusty, surrounded by informal settlements: this is Johannesburg as seen from Chiawelo, one of the poorest areas of the township of Soweto, or from the mine dumps south of the city centre (Figure 2.3), where the movie was shot in the middle of winter – a bleak, gritty image that is historically rooted in the visual repertoire of late apartheid-era South African film and documentary.52 Like the story it tells, District 9’s visual texture points to an intersection of temporalities that superimpose a dystopian view of the present – as opposed to the image of a possible future that is advancing upon us of the classic temporality of science fiction – on allusions to the institutionalised racial segregation engendered by the apartheid system.53 Just as in Viva Riva!, the opening scenes bring into view an unfolding social crisis, which in this case is precipitated by the arrival of an alien spaceship that has stopped over South Africa’s biggest metropolis. We hear the voiceover saying, “Now, to everyone’s surprise, the ship did not come to a stop over Manhattan, or Washington, or Chicago, but instead coasted to a halt directly over Johannesburg.” The movie is set in 2010, almost 30 years after the spaceship got stuck in the sky over Johannesburg and the aliens it hosted – “a million of them,” one commentator estimates – were saved by the humans, who then proceeded to put them in a refugee camp named District 9. Filmed alternately as a mockdocumentary that shifts between the present tense of the footage and the past tense of the commentary, and in more canonical cinematic style, District 9 begins with a wave of anti-alien riots and the consequent plan to relocate the aliens to

Figure 2.3 Johannesburg. Source: District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp.

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another camp, District 10, situated 200 kilometres away. This in turn sends us back not only to the forced removals of the apartheid era evoked by the camps’ names54 but, zooming in on the present, also to the xenophobic attacks that took place throughout South African townships and inner cities in 2008, when the movie was being shot. The many direct references to these events include a scene in which humans march on the alien settlement armed with pangas and knobkieries, and the interviews with the denizens of Johannesburg who repeat standard xenophobic stereotypes, here ludicrously distorted by the references to the aliens: “They are spending so much money to keep them here, when they could be spending it on other things, but at least, at least they are keeping them separate from us”; or, most preposterously: “If they were from another country, we might understand, but they are not even from this planet.” Troublingly, though, these stereotypes are not just allegorised through the representation of human hostility toward the aliens. They are also problematically reproduced by the portrayal of Nigerian immigrants as a gang of criminals, arms traffickers, practitioners of witchcraft and prostitutes led by the ferocious and cannibalistic Obesandjo (Eugene Khumbanyiwa), who have settled in the refugee camp to exploit the aliens by selling them the cat food they crave.55 Caught up between the humans and the aliens is Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), the zany caricature of a petty Afrikaner bureaucrat who is tasked by the brilliantly named Multinational United (MNU) to direct the forced removals from District 9. Soon after the beginning of the operation, Wikus is contaminated with the alien liquid that kick-starts his Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a “prawn,” as the aliens are called on account of their perceived resemblance to the crustacean.56 This turns out to be the central narrative thread of the film. The metamorphosis reduces Wikus to a being deprived of the rights bestowed by human citizenship – of “the right to have rights,” to quote Hannah Arendt’s discussion of how “the loss of home and political status” as a citizen results in “the expulsion from humanity altogether.”57 It also leads to Wikus’s collaboration with the alien scientist Christopher Johnson, who is working underground to produce the fluid – which happens to be the substance that contaminated Wikus – that will allow him to restart the spaceship. The confrontation with MNU – whose potentially radical or utopian political implications are, on the other hand, promptly undermined by the segregationist horizon in which, as Wikus spells out, it is reinscribed: “I can go home. You can go home. [. . .] You can take all the prawns with you” – brings the two allies into conflict with a configuration of power that, according to Shaun de Waal, is what is most “contemporary” about District 9: “that the removals are being conducted by a huge multinational rather than the state. In fact, the state is conspicuous by its absence here.”58 What gives the film its sharpest political edge – “its eagerness to take the most outlandish aspects of our present at face value”59 – is arguably its representation of the biopolitical territorial structure of multinational capitalism, which is shown as operating in a line of continuity with the apartheid state. This regime of biopolitical control is based on governmental practices that produce new forms of social stratification, division and spatial incarceration whose matrix continues

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to be the logic of segregation60 – not to mention the shared logic of biologically grounded scientific racism and of the most disturbing aspect of MNU operations: the biotechnological programme aimed at replicating the aliens’ DNA, which is necessary to operate their weaponry. But a political reading of the film must also try to establish whom the aliens “represent” (Figure 2.4). Largely eschewing questions about their physicality or the organisation of their society, in which District 9 is not really interested – all we have on the latter are human speculations about how the crisis on the ship came to be and the vague suggestion that Christopher Johnson is some kind of leader, expert or superior specimen – the film is rather invested in playing with the parodically allegorical possibilities opened up by the aliens’ anthropomorphisation: the “clicks” in their speech, their taste for meat (not only cat food, but also cow heads and the like), or the trumped-up scandal about the “prolonged sexual activity” with aliens that the media present as the cause of Wikus’s metamorphosis (a thinly disguised metaphor, together with the references to Nigerian prostitutes who engage in inter-species transactional sex, for miscegenation).61 Although Blomkamp stops short of presenting us with a straightforward allegory, the aliens have been variously described as a grotesquely caricaturised figure for the stereotype of a “shiftless, violent, and degenerate urban African lumpenproletariat,”62 cat food-eating “bottom feeders” who stand in for the continent’s urban-based multitudes and surplus population,63 or “doppelgangers of the black working class or poor shack dwellers who feature marginally in the film without being brought into the limelight.”64 If so, District 9 is mostly bent on capitalising on the dark comedic effects and political satire produced by the human rationalisation of the aliens’ behaviour and

Figure 2.4 Aliens. Source: District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp.

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their presence among us.65 The segregationist logic produced by the fear of the other, which is exploited by the ruthless multinational that has taken over governmental functions, is the key element that Blomkamp uses to articulate a dystopian scenario depicted in the here and now of Johannesburg’s urban landscape. If the cognitive estrangement performed by science fiction serves to show the present in a new, future-oriented or “alien” light,66 Blomkamp short-circuits its temporalities by portraying a present that turns into an apocalyptic version of itself. It is the idea also behind Blomkamp’s much less inspired and more flatly allegorical Elysium (2013), where the global south – in this case visually represented by some of the poorest areas of Mexico City – is made to stand for the grim future of a polluted and overpopulated planet that the rich 1% has vacated to relocate in a green and luxurious space habitat, from where it keeps exploiting the planet and its destitute multitudes while keeping them at a safe distance. But to go back to District 9, I have suggested that, like Viva Riva!, Blomkamp’s first film lends itself to be inserted in a historical narrative in which the African urban locations both films use as settings do not represent the backward other of a western-centred modernity, but rather the present of a world of which they prefigure both the impending crisis and how to survive (in) it. Stefan Helgesson notes that if “the taste for apocalypse stems from an experience that western exceptionalism is being threatened [. . .], then the contemporary experience in the Global South – of which District 9 is a symbolic representation – is much more complex.” There are places and people in the global south that are already “‘living the apocalypse’ (from the perspective of a once-dominant West), but even so, life goes on in a pragmatic, patchwork fashion.”67 Djo Tunda Wa Munga makes exactly the same point about Kinshasa city dwellers: “For 20 years, Kinshasans have lived through every spirit-crushing experience – war, crime, corruption, shortages, poverty and the break-up of the family. Yet their clocks still keep on ticking, and life goes on.”68 Life, that is, as the condition of precarity and survival. Viva Riva! ends with the image of Riva’s young friend, Anto (Jordan N’ Tunga), who after the explosion of the truckload of stolen oil and the death of all the main protagonists (except Nora) sits in Cesar’s SUV with the bag full of money he left behind. A Congolese rumba kicks off and Anto plays with the steering wheel, smiling and daydreaming, imagining himself as the car’s affluent owner. It is clear, however, that his newly acquired wealth does not stand for an opportunity to escape, for there is no suggestion that there is anywhere to escape to. All that seems to be at stake for him is survival: surviving the spell money represents, haunted by the echo of Nora’s words, “In this country you think money is everything. [. . .] Money is like poison. At the very end it always kills you.” Likewise, precarity and survival also affectively dominate District 9’s final sequence. After the long, noisy, relentlessly violent action scenes leading to Christopher Johnson’s departure, the film ends with an image of District 10, where the aliens have been relocated to live in tiny tents reminiscent of both a refugee camp and the “matchbox houses” built by the apartheid regime for South African Blacks. As we read in the superimposed script, this camp “now houses 2.5 million aliens and continues to grow.” After that, we are left with Wikus who, as he is waiting for the return

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of Christopher Johnson, desperately tries to hold on to what he considers his true being – his humanity – by making a flower out of garbage for his estranged wife. In the last paragraph of Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said also writes about survival. For Said, its possibility is located at the intersection of culture and politics: No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems to be no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that is what human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connection of things.69 By contrast, to the extent that Viva Riva! and District 9 can be said to point to a notion and the possibility of survival, this is one that is constitutive of being as such, of an affirmation of life in the face of its precarity, disposability and insecurity.70 It may well be what is ultimately most contemporary about them.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

See AISCLI, “6th AISCLI Conference.” Said, Culture and Imperialism, 54. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 8. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 239–261. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 15. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 61. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World. See for instance Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 199–200. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 146. Ibid., xii. See, for instance, Balakrishnan, ed., Debating Empire. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 298. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, US power had already started to decline in the 1970s. See Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power. J.A., “The Fastest Growing Economies of 2013.” Here is the list: Mongolia, Macau, Libya, China, Bhutan, Timor-Leste, Iraq, Mozambique, Rwanda, Ghana. “The Fastest Shrinking and Growing Economies in 2016.” Khanna, Connectography, 38. Bloom and Poplak, Continental Shift, 2–3. See World Atlas, “The 150 Largest Cities in the World.” According to this website (other sources provide slightly different lists), the 20 largest cities in the world ranked by population are: Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, São Paulo, Mumbai, Mexico City, Beijing, Osaka, Cairo, New York, Dhaka, Karachi, Buenos Aires, Kolkata, Istanbul, Chongqing, Lagos, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, Guangzhou.

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25 See Davis, Planet of Slums, 2. American geographer and anthropologist David Harvey registers that “Some astonishing news reports are coming out China. The United States Geological Survey, which keeps tabs on these things, reports that China consumed 6,651 million tonnes of cement in the years 2011–13 compared with 4,405 million tonnes the United States used over the period 1900–1999. In the United States we have poured a lot of concrete, but the Chinese must be pouring it everywhere at unconscionable rates” (Harvey, The Ways of the World, 1). 26 Pieterse, “Grasping the Unknowable,” 5. Another projection: a report by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts that by 2050 the population of Nigeria will surpass that of the United States and that half of the global population growth between now and 2050 will be in Africa. See United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects. 27 Davis, Planet of Slums, 1–19. 28 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 12. 29 Ibid., 14. The Comaroffs draw on claims about the repositioning of southern cities at the forefront of global urban developments that can be found in the writings of several scholars who work on African, Asian and Latin American cities – see, for instance, Koolhaas and Cleijne, Lagos; and Edensor and Jayne, Urban Theory beyond the West. 30 Despite the qualifiers used by the authors to draw attention to the playfulness of their subtitle, commentators have objected that the notion of Euro-America’s evolution toward Africa remains misleading. For instance, Srinivas Aravamudan argues that “‘evolution’ toward Africa – whether serious or parodic – is no evolution at all, but a deterioration” (Aravamudan, “Surpassing the North,” 10). 31 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 15. 32 Ibid., 18. 33 Ibid., 18–19. 34 See for instance Quayson, “Coevalness,” 27. 35 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 31–32. See their definition of the south: “the ‘south’ cannot be defined, a priori, in substantive terms. The label bespeaks a relation, not a thing in or for itself. It is a historical artefact, a labile signifier in a grammar of signs whose semiotic content is determined, over time, by everyday material, political, and cultural processes, the dialectical products of a global world in motion. This, incidentally, is why, for certain purposes but not for others, some or all of ‘the east’ may be taken to be part of it” (ibid., 47). Emphasis in original. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 14. On coevalness, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (1983). 38 Viva Riva! was the recipient of six African Movie Academy Awards in 2011 – including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography – and of the 2011 MTV Movie Award for the Best African Movie, while District 9 won the 2010 Saturn Award for Best International Film presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. 39 See for instance the recent appropriations of the aesthetic and cinematic conventions of the western film in Licinio Azevedo’s The Train of Salt and Sugar (2016) and Michael Matthews’s Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017), or the many South African and Nigerian crime stories, gangster movies and romcoms. Olivier J. Tchouaffe relates how “Movies such as Viva Riva! recontextualize western movie genres with African tropes” to the impact of “emerging and converging digital platforms such as streaming technologies, social media and Internet video downloads on laptops, iPhones, iPads, smartphones, YouTube, Netflix, DVDs, VODs, cable and satellite” (Tchouaffe, “Perspectives on New Popular African Cinema,” 300). Nollywood is the term commonly used for the Nigerian film and video industry, which has grown into one of the world’s largest film industries. See Haynes, Nollywood. 40 See Smith, “Congo’s First Feature Film in 25 Years.”

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41 See, respectively, Catsoulis, “Viva Riva!” and Pulver, “Viva Riva!” 42 In the interview that accompanies the DVD, Wa Munga comments that he conceived the movie “as an opportunity to show Africa and to show Kinshasa in a way that had never been seen before: all the colours, all the documentary part, where you feel the reality, but you also feel the texture of the world, you also feel the texture of the interiors [. . .] in houses and in the streets” (Wa Munga, Viva Riva!). 43 See Ferguson, Global Shadows, 194–210. 44 See Foreign Policy Special Report, “2010 Failed states Index.” 45 For accounts of how the socioeconomic and political contradictions of the contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo look to the outsider’s eye, see Hochschild, “Rape of Congo”; and Bloom and Poplak, Continental Shift, 173–215. 46 See for instance Bull, “States of Failure”; Chomsky, Failed States; and Hitchcock, “The Failed State and the State of Failure.” 47 Szeman, “System Failure,” 807. 48 Szeman, “Literature and Energy Futures,” 325. 49 Jameson, “Realism and Utopia in The Wire,” 366–367. 50 Blomkamp, quoted in Smith, “District 9.” 51 Blomkamp, quoted in O’Hehir, “Is Apartheid Acceptable?” 52 In the DVD’s feature “The Alien Agenda: A Filmmaker’s Log,” Blomkamp explains that “we really had access to the area” where much of the film is shot, “and we could only build our additional shacks because all of [its] residents were moved into RDP houses somewhere else in Jo’burg” (RDP houses are houses that were built as part of a government-funded social housing project. The acronym RDP stands for Reconstruction and Development Programme). Mocke Jansen van Veuren notes that “The gritty feel of the film is reminiscent of 1980s apartheid-era film and television images of struggle and conflict, a texture that has been internationally saleable for decades as ‘authentically’ South African” (van Veuren, “Tooth and Nail,” 571). 53 The latter are, however, less prominent than in the short film on which District 9 is based, Alive in Joburg (2005), which is replete with subsequently expunged historical references. Compared to its predecessor, District 9 is more distinctively situated in a future-oriented political present. For an interpretation of District 9 as an allegory of apartheid-era settler-colonialism, see Veracini, “District 9 and Avatar”; while a reading that contextualises it in post-apartheid South Africa neoliberal dispensation can be found in Wagner, “District 9, Race and Neoliberalism.” On the temporalities of science fiction, see Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. 54 For the benefit of non-South African readers, District 6 is the name of an area in Cape Town from where people of colour where forcibly removed in 1982, in accordance with the Urban Areas Act of 1955. Its story is told on the website of the District 6 Museum, which was established in 1994 and remains one of the most important and moving museums devoted to documenting the history of apartheid. See District Six Museum, “About District Six”: District Six was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. It was established as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants. District Six was a vibrant centre with close links to the city and the port. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the process of removals and marginalisation had begun. The first to be forced out were black South Africans who were displaced from the District in 1901. As the more prosperous moved away to the suburbs, the area became a neglected ward of the city. On 11 February 1966 it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. More than 60 000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.

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55 According to Quayson, “in the social imaginary of District 9 it is the Nigerians that are the true Other. The prawns are only partially so, because they are shown to possess superior “human” characteristics of familial love, reason (in the mastery of science), and political consciousness (in the prawn leader’s desire to come back and save his people)” (Quayson, “Unthinkable Nigeriana”). 56 For the benefit of the reader unfamiliar with Johannesburg folklore, this also seems a reference to the “Parktown prawn,” a species of king cricket endemic to Southern Africa that gets its English name from the Johannesburg middle class suburb of Parktown, where it is common and widely reviled. 57 Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, 296–297. 58 De Waal, “Loving the Aliens.” 59 Marx, “Alien Rule,” 164. 60 Another quasi-mandatory reference that would be beside the point to discuss here is to Giorgio Agamben’s theorisation of the logic of “the camp” as the “very paradigm” of “the political space of modernity itself” (Homo Sacer, 171–174). For some suggestions as to where this discussion might lead, see Marx, “Alien Rule,” 165; and Helgesson, “District 9,” 173. 61 On the history of the representation of the alien body and the epistemological and political questions it opens up, see Fredric Jameson’s discussion in Archaeologies of the Future, 119–145. 62 Moses, “The Strange Ride of Wikus van de Merwe,” 159. 63 Clover, “Allegory Bomb,” 8. 64 Van Veuren, “Tooth and Nail,” 574. An interesting issue with respect to the identity of the aliens is the languages they speak. While the “humans” speak various variations of accented English and some local indigenous languages, the “aliens” speak an unintelligible language that incorporates the “clicks” of South African indigenous languages, and the “Nigerians” speak a mix of colloquial or even caricatured versions of South African and other African indigenous languages. 65 See ibid., 571: The film consists of a patchwork of clashing modalities: verité documentary style and science fiction, horror and satirical farce, redemption film and splatter flick. These modalities themselves represent a sometimes camp caricaturing of filmic styles, including “expert” commentary from staff of the “University of Kempton Park”; as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that most elements in the film, not least of all the human and alien characters, share this element of caricature. 66 67 68 69 70

See Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Helgesson, “District 9,” 174. Wa Munda, quoted in Clarke, “First Sight.” Said, Culture and Imperialism, 408. For a discussion of the range of meanings attached to the adjective precarious in contemporary theory and their relevance to contemporary cultural production, see Frassinelli and Watson, “Precarious Cosmopolitanism.”

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. AISCLI. 2013. “6th AISCLI Conference: Cultures and Imperialisms 2013.” Accessed 30 May 2018. www.aiscli.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Cultures-and-imperialisms.pdf. Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2012. “Surpassing the North: Can the Antipodean Avant-Garde Trump Postcolonial Belatedness?” The Johannesburg Salon 5: 10–13. Arendt, Hannah. 1958 [1951]. The Origin of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books.

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Azevedo, Licinio. 2016. The Train of Salt and Sugar. Maputo: Ebano Multimedia. Balakrishnan, Gopal and Stanley Aronowitz, eds. 2003. Debating Empire. London: Verso. Blaut, Jim. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford Press. Blomkamp, Neill. 2005. Alive in Joburg. Toronto: Spy Films. ———. 2009. District 9. Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures. ———. 2013. Elysium. Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures. Bloom, Kevin and Richard Poplak. 2016. Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Bull, Malcolm. 2006. “States of Failure.” New Left Review 40: 5–23. Cameron, James. 2009. Avatar. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox. Catsoulis, Jeannette. 2011. “Viva Riva!” New York Times 9 June. Accessed 2 June 2018. http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/movies/viva-riva.html?_r=0. Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Failed States. New York: Metropolitan Books. Clarke, Cath. 2011. “First Sight: Djo Tunda Wa Munga.” The Guardian 31 March. Accessed 5 June 2018. www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/mar/31/first-sight-djo-tundawamunga. Clover, Joshua. 2009. “Allegory Bomb.” Film Quarterly 63 (2): 8–9. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. De Waal, Shaun. 2009. “Loving the Aliens.” Mail & Guardian 28 August. Accessed 5 June 2018. http://mg.co.za/article/2009-08-28-loving-the-aliens. District Six Museum. n.d. “About District Six.” Accessed 2 April 2019. www.districtsix. co.za/about-district-six/ Edensor, Tim and Mark Jayne, eds. 2012. Urban Theory beyond the West: A World of Cities. London and New York: Routledge. Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foreign Policy Special Report. 2010. “2010 failed States Index.” Accessed 3 June 2018. http:// foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/16/2010-failed-states-index-interactive-map-and-rankings/. Frassinelli, Pier Paolo and David Watson. 2013. “Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O’Neill’s Netherland and Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (5): 1–10. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 2017. The Ways of the World. London: Profile Books. Haynes, Jonathan. 2016. Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Helgesson, Stefan. 2010. “District 9: The Global South as Science Fiction.” Safundi: The Journal of American and South Africa Studies 11 (1–2): 172–175. Hitchcock, Peter. 2008. “The Failed State and the State of Failure.” Mediations 23 (2): 70–87. Hochschild, Adam. 2009. “Rape of Congo.” The New York Review of Books 15 July. Accessed 3 June 2018. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/aug/13/rape-of-thecongo/?pagination=false.

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J.A. 2013. “The Fastest Growing Economies of 2013: Speed Is not Everything.” The Economist. The World in 2013 Blog 2 January. Accessed 1 June 2018. www.economist.com/ blogs/theworldin2013/2013/01/fastest-growing-economies-2013. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. ———. 2010. “Realism and Utopia in The Wire.” Criticism 52 (3–4): 359–472. Khanna, Parag. 2016. Connectography: Mapping the Global Network Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Koolhaas, Rem and Edgar Cleijne. 2007. Lagos: How It Works. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Marx, John. 2010. “Alien Rule.” Safundi: The Journal of American and South African Studies 11 (1–2): 164–167. Matthews, Michael. 2017. Five Fingers for Marseilles. Johannesburg: Game 7 Films/Be Phat Motel Company. Miller, George. 1979. Mad Max. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. ———. 1981. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. ———. 2015. Mad Max: Fury Road. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Miller, George and George Ogilvie. 1985. Mad Max beyond Thunderdome. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Moses, Michael Valdez. 2010. “The Strange Ride of Wikus van de Merwe.” Safundi: The Journal of American and South African Studies 11 (1–2): 156–161. O’Hehir, Andrew. 2009. “Is Apartheid Acceptable: For Giant Bugs?” Salon 12 August. Accessed 5 June 2018. www.salon.com/2009/08/12/blomkamp/. Pieterse, Edgar. 2011. “Grasping the Unknowable: Coming to Grips with African Urbanisms.” Social Dynamics 37 (1): 5–23. Pulver, Andrew. 2011. “Viva Riva! Review.” The Guardian 23 June. Accessed 2 June 2018. www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/23/viva-riva-review. Quayson, Ato. 2009. “Unthinkable Nigeriana: The Social Imaginary of District 9.” The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Blog 16 October. Accessed 5 June 2018. http://jhbwtc.blogspot.com/2009/10/unthinkable-nigeriana-social-imaginary.html. ———. 2012. “Coevalness, Recursivity and the Feet of Lionel Messi.” The Johannesburg Salon 5: 26–29. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Smith, David. 2009. “District 9: South Africa and Apartheid Come to the Movies.” The Guardian 20 August. Accessed 5 June 2018. www.theguardian.com/film/2009/aug/20/ district-9-south-africa-apartheid. ———. 2011. “Congo’s First Feature Film in 25 Years Opens in 18 Countries.” The Guardian 19 October. Accessed 2 June 2018. www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/ congo-movie-viva-riva-released-africa. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Szeman, Imre. 2007. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (4): 805–823. ———. 2011. “Literature and Energy Futures.” PMLA 126 (2): 323–325. Tchouaffe, Oliver J. 2016. “Perspectives on New Popular African Cinema, History and Creative Destruction in Viva Riva! (2011).” Journal of African Cinemas 8 (3): 299–312.

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The Economist. 2016. “The Fastest Shrinking and Growing Economies in 2016.” 2 January. Accessed 1 June 2018. www.economist.com/news/economic-and-financial-indicators/ 21684788-fastest-shrinking-and-growing-economies-2016-gdp-forecasts. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Division, Population Estimates and Projections Section. 2013. World Population Prospects, the 2012 Revision. Accessed 18 September 2018. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm. Van Veuren, Mocke Jansen. 2012. “Tooth and Nail: Anxious Bodies in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 26 (4): 570–586. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “District 9 and Avatar: Science Fiction and Settler Colonialism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 32 (4): 355–367. Wagner, Keith B. 2015. “District 9, Race and Neoliberalism in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg.” Race & Class 57 (2): 43–59. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2003. The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press. Wa Munga, Djo Tunda. 2010. Viva Riva! Munich: Beta Cinema. World Atlas. 2019. “The 150 Largest Cities in the World.” Accessed 11 March 2019. www. worldatlas.com/citypops.htm. Zima, Ralph. 2008. Jerusalema. London: United International Pictures.

3

Intersecting temporalities, cultural (un)translatability and African film aesthetics

In this chapter we leave the sprawling metropolitan areas that are currently being written up as the sites of Africa’s “hyperbolic prefiguration of [the global] futurein-the-making”1 to move to northern Limpopo, in the Venda region at the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe, where we find the setting of Ntshavheni wa Luruli’s Elelwani (2012). Filmed and produced for the global arthouse film circuit, Elelwani is a film that unsettles established aesthetic canons and cultural and narrative codes: a cinematic artefact that provides the viewer with no obvious points of comparison. Elelwani is certainly no Hollywood or genre film. Nor is it an example of explicitly political third cinema or an ethnographic film.2 And neither does it belong to the new wave of “trash” described by Kenneth Harrow as the emergent aesthetic of African cinema in the age of Nollywood3 – even though there are thematic convergences with Nollywood genres such as the epic video-film, which also bring into view the “labyrinthine” space-time connections between the village and the city.4 One could perhaps trace Elelwani’s aesthetic roots back to earlier moments in African cinema: to films such as Soulemayne Cissé’s Yeelen (1987) or Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yaaba (1989), categorised by Manthia Diawara under the heading of the “return to the source” theme, whose cinematic grammar was grounded in African oral traditions and cultural imagery.5 But although Elelwani shares with them the use of African languages, a focus on rural life and the beauty and simplicity of the photography and camera shots,6 in wa Luruli’s film local cultural sources are treated a good deal more playfully – see, for instance, Elelwani’s (Florence Masebe) switch to Dalai Lama-style dress and her boyfriend Vele’s (Shanisani “Ashifashabba” Muleya) comic return as a fake prophet in the final scenes. The attention to marginalised communities and experimentation with form are also shared with some of the most significant developments in South African post-apartheid cinema:7 from, say, Darrell Roodt’s neo-realist portrayals of the struggles of rural women in Yesterday (2004) and Meisie (2007) to Mark Dornford-May’s hybridisation of documentary film and opera in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005). Here, though, social and political concerns and aesthetic experimentation are inserted in what turns out to be a romance storyline: a “Venda love story” that “morphs, among other things, into a quirky, weird and wonderful subplot subsequently involving a mystery white lion, a masked figure living in the heart of the forest and a royal power struggle.”8

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Elelwani performs multiple aesthetic, generic, linguistic and cultural displacements. It is a film that comes to us in translation. This is not only because it was shot in Venda, a distinctly minor language spoken by just over 2% of South Africa’s population,9 and released with default English subtitles, thereby forcing its viewers to confront the aural dissonance between the words spoken by the characters and the script at the bottom of the screen. In addition to the linguistic translation that frames the reception, the problematics of cultural translatability and untranslatability are also foregrounded by the film’s aesthetic and narrative strategies. To begin with, there is its multi-layered visual texture, which appropriates the symbolism and imagery of a seemingly traditional culture that is translated into cinematic material for the first time (this is the first Venda feature film ever made). Set in the seemingly marginal landscape of rural Limpopo, this is nonetheless a movie packaged for the circuits of contemporary global media distribution and consumption. In the words of co-producer Jyoti Mistry: this was not a straight-to-DVD film made for a singular local Venda or South African audience, although these audiences would be important in ensuring its local box-office success and in affirming the authenticity of the narrative world. The idea was to create an art house film that would offer a window into Venda culture to an international audience as well.10 In the event, Elelwani would be the official South African 2014 submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar competition. It was also selected at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou and the Luxor International Film Festival in 2013, while Florence Masebe would win the award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the film the Achievement in Best Production Design at the African Movie Academy Awards in the same year. Wa Luruli, who is no stranger to the international film industry – his Curriculum Vitae includes working as assistant director on Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) and Malcolm X (1992)11 – has described Elelwani as an act of love towards a place and its people. It is also an attempt to challenge sedimented preconceptions about African cinema’s representational function: “People outside of Africa, when they watch the story, the first thing that comes to their mind is ‘culture.’ So we are kind of pigeonholed, stereotyped. [E]veryone who has seen this story, even South Africans [. . .] all they want to see is culture.”12 Elelwani was scripted and filmed with an awareness that its narrative and the landscape in which it is set would be filtered through a whole range of expectations about how to shoot, read and view (rural) Africa – a challenge that inexorably presents itself at every turn in the history of African cinema.13 I quote wa Luruli again on this: “The story must not be exotic, [. . .] no African stereotypes or clichés, no wild animals. Certainly, I am not going to shoot somebody in the sunset. No romanticising African culture. I said the feel of the film must exude the feeling of mystery.”14 Hence Elelwani’s aesthetic and narrative minimalism. Many are the questions that linger in the film and that it stops short of answering, not least those to do with its representation

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 53 of a world that is ostensibly situated in the present but almost suspended in time. To what extent is the story that Elelwani narrates truly situated in the present? Or is it a nostalgic representation of the Venda people and their culture that we are shown, a mythical life-world imaginatively resituated out of time and unaffected by its passing, a location that has miraculously escaped engulfment by the all-embracing force of contemporary global media-saturated capitalism? To just mention the most banal example: what kind of representation of the “real” is one set in a present with no personal computer, no TV set and, most puzzlingly, no cell phone ever in sight? (Although we have a red Volkswagen Golf, a digital camera and a microwave oven.) In short, what kind of authenticity is staged here? And how are we supposed to read it? (When the film was shot, the landscape had to be airbrushed to hide from view the signs of its presentness. For instance, the royal palace scenes were filmed in the “Fundudzi Cultural Camp,” which is set in a densely populated rural area and has been fitted with solar panels.)15 Loosely adapted from a 1954 novel written in Venda by Dr Titus Maumela, which is still untranslated into English, the film transposes its story into a contemporary South Africa that is presented as an outside world still separate from, yet encroaching upon, the life of the community it depicts. As Jyoti Mistry recalls, “in adapting the novel for the screen the relevance of the narrative to a contemporary context was paramount to the director. In this sense, the representation of the cultural aspects is a stylisation and (director’s) interpretation of the Venda culture.”16 By short-circuiting the distance between past and present, Elelwani challenges a linear narrative of tradition giving way to modernity, which it replaces with the abrupt encounter between tradition and the gendered modernity represented by its eponymous protagonist. Called on to reconcile the past with the present,17 Elelwani’s return to her village can be read as an instantiation of the heterogeneous, entangled temporalities that Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as “a plurality of times existing together.”18 According to Achille Mbembe, this is the entanglement of temporalities that defines the postcolony: “this time of African existence is [. . .] an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones”; it is a time that harbours “the possibility of a variety of trajectories neither convergent nor divergent but interlocked, paradoxical.”19 In other words, it is not just a matter here of signalling what Ernst Bloch called the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous20 – in this case, the survival of pre-capitalist elements such as traditional family structures in an age marked by technological advancement and economic and cultural globalisation. Rather, the emphasis in Elelwani is on how the intersecting temporalities it represents open up new possibilities for reconstellating the past and the present and for imagining alternative futures. In the words of its director, Elelwani forges “a bridge between what it was and what it is.”21 “What it was” is, at its most simple, village life, “culture” and “tradition,” which are threatened by the “what it is” that is encroaching upon them: the “what it is” for which “democracy” stands as an elastic metonymy. As Vele puts it, “This is the new South Africa. Mandela has been out of jail for a long time. We have a new cons titution. [. . .] Let’s move with the times, please.” What we have

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here is a representation of a place caught at a moment of change, trying to adjust to the present, resisting and being disrupted by it, whose genealogy in African cultural production takes us all the way back to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Indeed, a big chunk of the work of seminal African film directors such as Souleymane Cissé, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Ola Balogun, Kwaw Ansah, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Ousmane Sembène and even of contemporary Nollywood filmmakers can be seen as series of variations on this same theme:22 from the linking of “certain forms of modernity to neo-colonialism and imperialism” and the simultaneous debunking of romanticised “pure and original” traditional values in earlier African social realist cinema,23 to the mix of history, legend, mythology and Afrofuturism in recent Nollywood epic video-films.24 Although they lend themselves to be construed in dichotomous terms, on this continent tradition and modernity often coexist in surprising or, to quote Mbembe, paradoxical ways. As Harry Garuba argues, the recurrent appearance of a concern with the conflict between tradition and modernity in African cultural production should not lead us to force its products, and the socioeconomic realities from which they emerge, into the interpretive straightjacket of “the dialectic of ‘residuality’ and ‘emergence.’”25 Instead, we should pay attention to the crisscrossing and overlapping of multiple temporalities and to “a time that is both naturalized and secularized.”26 Elelwani also disrupts linear constructions of time. This disruption is embodied, first and foremost, by its main character, Elelwani, whose name means both “memory” and “promise.” Her arrival at the village corresponds to the unsettling irruption of the present into the “traditional” landscape where the narrative is set. Freshly graduated from a South African university, she has come back home to rural Limpopo with her boyfriend to see her family and celebrate her achievements, which include being awarded a bursary to pursue her graduate studies in the United States, before moving on with her personal and professional life. Her visit is supposed to be a short parenthesis, a stopover in a place she believes represents her past. Things, however, will not work out that way, for her past ensnares her present and future in ways that she does not suspect. The opening image is Elelwani’s name tidily written with white chalk at the centre of a black screen, with below the phrase, in red, “based on the novel by Dr Titus Maumela.” This is followed by a flash-forward in which the protagonist is seen clad in the red and orange dress that will be her own by the end of the film. She is in the royal hut, a well-adorned rondavel with at its centre the bed covered in leopard and other animal skins that Elelwani approaches to caress with her warm lit, perfectly manicured hands (Figure 3.1). The first words that we read, while we hear the voice of the protagonist speaking in Venda, are: My name is Elelwani. I am Mu-Venda. In my culture the name you are given denotes the time and place in which you are born. Often it determines the path you are going to take in life. Mine means to remember, Elelwani.27

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 55

Figure 3.1 Elelwani in the royal hut. Source: Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli.

And it is indeed remembering that will shape Elelwani’s path into the future, which will also be a journey into memory. Immediately after this scene, we have the opening credits superimposed on panoramic images of the green, cloudy mountains of northern Limpopo and on the red VW Golf in which Elelwani and her “butterfly” (the Venda word and symbol for the loved one) enter the landscape, while cows have to make way to the beeping automobile. It is a journey home that ends with Elelwani slowly re-entering the village life she had left behind to pursue her academic career. Her plan is to leave again soon to move to Chicago, the place she identifies with “freedom!,” while leaving the village behind is associated with “No more picking up cow dung.” But there is more than “cow dung” to Elelwani’s past. She and the audience soon discover that she is a “princess,” the beneficiary of the patronage of the king of the Venda – the traditional authority that still coexists with the government of the Republic of South Africa – to whom she was promised as a wife in return for his financial support towards her studies. These are the two subject positions her return sets against each other. “Today’s life has changed,” she tries to explain to her parents as she rejects her arranged marriage. But as she and the viewer will learn, there is no simple, singular way of making sense of that change. Love “is greater than culture,” Elelwani argues. It is a truism the film will actually bear out, but only by greatly complicating and redefining the dichotomous terms in which Elelwani sees love and culture at the beginning of the story.

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Scenes of translation When she discovers her fate, Elelwani initially rebels and tries to explain to the king’s emissaries (Mashudu Rubson Dima and Johannes Ralinala) why she cannot honour her parents’ agreement with the king (Figure 3.2). The dialogue comically stages the difficulties of cultural translation and, with them, the problem of untranslatability: ELELWANI:

That is a bursary. I was given that bursary, to further my studies overseas, in America. I was chosen out of hundreds of other students all over the world. This bursary is worth a lot of money. If I don’t take this opportunity, my sponsors will be very disappointed. EMISSARY 1: Princess Elelwani. This man [. . .] Mr. Maliga, who gave you this basabasa, after he has educated you, what does he want in return? ELELWANI: It’s free. [. . .] EMISSARY 2: Is there such a man, who can till and plough his land and end up not consuming his goods? [. . .] Princess, this man, Mr. Maliga, does he want to marry you? ELELWANI: America is not a person, it’s a country. EMISSARY 2: Oh, it’s a country. Does it have a King? ELELWANI: Something like that. A President. Like President Mandela. EMISSARY 2: Which means he too was locked up in jail for a long time, like Mr. Mandela.

Figure 3.2 The king’s emissaries. Source: Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli.

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 57 EMISSARY 1:

Well, if that is the case, tell him to give this basabasa to some other people out there who need it. Tell him that you are married now. If he’s just like Mr. Mandela, a man of such magnanimity love, humanity and forgiveness, I am sure he will understand.

“Something like that” says Elelwani (in the English translation) to explain that the institution of the presidency of the United States is analogous to that of the king (“thovele”) of the Venda. She uses the English word, “president,” which she explains with reference not to the abstract concept it signifies, but to a singular incarnation of it, former South Africa president Nelson Mandela, whence the comical misunderstanding whereby the king’s emissaries associate the meaning of the word with this historical figure. The technical term for “something like that” is catachresis: a figure of speech that designates something for which a language does not offer an exact equivalent, and must thus replace with a metaphor, an approximation or an imperfect translation. In this scene, the phrase signals the distance and border between two worlds that Elelwani simultaneously inhabits – two worlds usually identified with the shorthands “tradition” and “modernity,” which, as we have seen, are themselves catachrestic terms, in that they connote a dichotomy that erases the entanglement of temporalities that defines their complex and patchy relation. Elelwani, who will eventually cross the borders that separate these two worlds and that divide her, is an exemplary embodiment of the position of the translator. As Naoki Sakai explains, translation “is an act of articulation that takes place in the social topos of difference or incommensurability,” and specifically “cultural difference, to which translation is a response.”28 Hence the ambiguous, internally split positionality of the translator, who is summoned to mediate the difference and is thus in transit between two language communities. Forced to confront the untranslatability between the two worlds she inhabits, Elelwani resorts to catachresis, imperfect translation, as an attempt to build a bridge across the sociocultural border between them. In this sense, her dialogue with the king’s emissaries turns out to be a reminder that the presence of the untranslatable is what determines both the necessity and the difficulty of translation.29 Elelwani only consents to marry the king after a protracted resistance that involves both silence and trying to persuade her parents that her new self is irreconcilable with the idea of an arranged marriage. She tells this to her father in a scene set in the family hut, where Elelwani utters her words while prostrate on the floor, her gaze lowered to show respect: “today’s life has changed. It’ll be very difficult for me to carry out this ancient tradition. I will not marry a man I do not love. I will marry the man my heart chooses.” To “traditional culture,” Elelwani thus initially opposes not an unqualified assertion of freedom but a culturally encoded ideology whose roots can be traced back to early modern Europe, where we have “the emergent construction of romantic love as mutual heterosexual desire leading to a consummation in marriage, a union of both body and spirit.”30 On the face of it, this dichotomy would seem to recall Kirsten Holst Petersen’s classic definition of the double bind in which African feminist politics is caught:

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“the African discussion is between feminist emancipation versus the fight against neo-colonialism, particularly in its cultural aspect.”31 It is a dilemma with which African feminist scholars have repeatedly wrestled. Obioma Nnaemeka has written of the conflicting demands for political allegiance placed upon their work: if they accord their traditional culture some modicum of respect, they are dismissed by feminists as apologists for oppressive and outdated customs; if they critique their culture, they are faced with put-downs and ridicule from members of their own society as having sold out.32 In a similar vein, Amina Mama has noted how postcolonial feminist scholars have to contend with “dubiously defined nativist notions of custom and creed.” She argues that the reduction of the complexity and multiplicity of selfhood to the oversimplifying discourse of “identity” has translated into the production of enmities “discursively orchestrated, first by colonial regimes, then by the subjective conservatism of postcolonial rulers, and later compounded by the duplicity of global economic institutions.”33 More recently, in her work on wedding rituals in contemporary South Africa, Danai Mupotsa highlights that there is often an: assumption for some that women who enter “traditional” marriage rites are more predisposed to patriarchal violence than those entering a civil arrangement. The site of the modern, read as freedom and choice, can be deemed to be in contradiction with tradition which, for women, is an un-freedom. Mupotsa suggests that these rituals in fact defy the “binary logics assigned to [. . .] them” and should be recognised “as being both modern and traditional, communal and individualistic, representative of freedom and unfreedom, romantic as well as obligatory.”34 In this view, the story of Elelwani also displaces the well-rehearsed dichotomous gendered construction of the tradition and modernity conflict. Her insubordination against the law of the father in the traditional Venda community is complemented by another refusal to abdicate to an alternative version of male authority. This is Elelwani’s refusal to follow an injunction that in her view would make her move from a form of patriarchal control to another, also marked by her silencing and subordination. When an uncomprehending Vele suggests that they should simply elope and leave behind her family, village and people – “We don’t have to be held ransom by our culture. Hello!” – Elelwani asserts herself by refusing to let Vele dictate her next move: “Do you hear what you’re saying? Because from where I sit you sound exactly like my father. It’s all about yourselves. Telling me what to do.” Instead of following her “butterfly” – the Venda term, “susu,” for the loved one – Elelwani decides to stay and fight her father and his culture from within. She does so by making her mostly silent refusal signify her right to freedom of choice and autonomy. It is a winning strategy, which leads to her father’s defeat and to his decision to set her free of her familial and cultural obligations. Not only

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 59 is the father defeated, he is emasculated and ridiculed in front of his community, financially ruined, forced to even consider selling Makhulu, his sacred goat, turned into “the gossip of the village” and accused of “harassing his daughter.” Elelwani’s exposure of the real motivations behind the façade of traditional custom – “selling me off for breeding purposes” – is a truth the film confirms, exposing the indebted father’s selfish reliance on his deal with the king to escape his increasingly desperate economic situation. Yes, Elelwani will end up marrying the king, but out of her own volition, in an act of sisterly solidarity when she realises that her refusal would have led to the sacrifice of her young sister Rendani (Prudence Msipha). The socio-political and cultural territory the film traverses is a distinctly contemporary one. It is demarcated by the “tension between women’s rights and cultural rights,” which has “acquired a particular salience in the post-apartheid dispensation.”35 Far from being relegated to the past of apartheid-era homelands, traditional institutions continue to feature prominently in South African politics. The “turn to tradition” enthusiastically embraced by former President Jacob Zuma has consolidated the role of traditional institutions and leaders in the ownership and management of communal land. In the name of traditional culture, the ruling African National Congress has institutionalised an additional tier of government that by 2011 comprised 7,771 state recognised traditional leaders: “12 Kings; 1 Principal traditional leader; 882 Senior traditional leaders; and 6876 Headmen/ women.”36 Apparently distant from the contemporary realities of a fast urbanising South Africa, areas designated as traditional communities are home to 30% of the national population.37 Cherryl Walker has named these developments “the return of traditionalism.” She argues that this is not good news for South African women: “for most traditionalists the proper gender order is one in which women have a clearly prescribed role within their families and communities and defer to male authority within a hierarchy of male-dominated institutions.”38 Against this background – which, it should be noted, the film does not overtly address – Elelwani’s ascendancy to the throne and victorious fight within the traditional structure of power in the second part of the story would seem to subvert the proper gender order of traditional Venda society. However, the question remains as to whether assuming a position of power in a patriarchal structure actually subverts it or limits itself to placing a woman, no matter how powerful, in that structure, thereby contributing to its reproduction. More questions linger: will Elelwani’s position of power change power relations in her society? What will it do for ordinary women? According to Jyoti Mistry, Elelwani’s embodying the multiple subject positions of intellectual, modern woman and representative of a traditional power structure within which by the end of the film she exerts power over the women and men who are now her subjects, lends itself to be read “metonymically.” From this perspective, Elelwani’s power, which in the final voiceover comes to coincide with her statement “I am free,” is the “promise” of freedom not only for her but also “for the rural Venda women of Limpopo.”39 This is a reading that emphasises how the film undermines patriarchy from within a society seemingly without a viable model of male power. Still, the question

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remains as to whether the film’s denouement can be read as representing the promise of freedom from the power relations that preside over gender hierarchies in the Venda community. But perhaps framing Elelwani in this way too easily reinserts it in representational codes that ultimately fail to capture what is most appealing and unsettling about this film; something that I would argue has to do with cultural (un)translatability, especially if we keep in mind its transnational arthouse cinema target audience. As Nonhlanhla Mnisi has noted, the film brings its global audience to a seemingly remote and mysterious world that it refuses “to explain or reveal all its secrets.”40

Cultural (un)translatability The film’s denouement is anticipated by a series of flashbacks that hint at the mystery that Elelwani will be called on to solve. They involve a necklace, a stone representing the crown, Elelwani’s predestined role as the “chosen one,” and a palace intrigue involving the king and his siblings. All of these subplots begin to unravel when, after saying farewell and returning her engagement ring to an incredulous Vele, Elelwani moves from the family village to the royal capital. Her transition to royalty – a self-translation that involves (re)discovering another version of herself – is opened by a scene in which she puts on her new outfit and listens to the customary instructions proudly imparted by her mother: cover your calves, fetch water at the river, feed the in-laws and husband, show respect, apply cow dung in the courtyard and “Do everything that you are told.” Meanwhile Elelwani is silent, her eyes lowered: the two women are together in what is supposed to be a moment of intimacy, but instead they represent two mutually untranslatable worlds, black boxes undecipherable to each other. It is the same with Elelwani and her father when he comes to fulfil his duties and tell a resigned daughter how marriage is supposed to work: “hot as a boiling pot, when it spills over, you must hold on no matter what, do not let go.” The sheer meaninglessness and irrelevance of these words to Elelwani at this point are the measure of an unbridgeable difference and incommensurability that mark the impossibility of translation.41 In the next scene, the beginning of Elelwani’s new journey, her traversing the border between seemingly untranslatable worlds, is portrayed by a visually stunning carnivalesque sequence in which she first crawls and then walks out of the family homestead, covered in a pale blue and white blanket. She is following one of the king’s emissaries and is herself followed by a multi-coloured procession of cheering women and girls (Figure 3.3), while Madzwara (Sammy Moeti), the village licensed fool, intones his refrain: “We’re exterminated. Crazy things are happening; there’s no one to save us; not even a promise that will be found at all.” It is an ominous warning that resonates throughout the film, speaking both to the dangers faced by the community at a moment of unpredictable change and to what awaits Elelwani in the still inscrutable world she is about to enter. A beautiful, quiet abode of clean surfaces, neatly chiselled angular stones, thatched rondavels and spotless green surroundings, the royal capital turns out to

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Figure 3.3 Elelwani moves to the royal palace. Source: Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli.

be “a place that’s full of deception,” where what “you see and hear is as fake as a grasshopper’s eyes.” It is a place haunted by the intrigue that involves Makhadzi (Elsie Rasalanavho), “the throne behind the throne,” and her brother Ratshihule (Mutodi Neshahe). They are waiting for their brother, the sick, disfigured, maskwearing king Thovhele (Vusi Kunene) to die in order to usurp his throne, which was denied to the first born Makhadzi on account of her being a woman. Elelwani’s destiny is to scupper their plan, inherit the kingdom and save the land of the Venda. It is revealed to her by Madzwara, the “chosen mentor to [Elelwani’s] real husband,” after she has entered the “forbidden hut” where she discovers the masked king: “You are the Chosen One, meaning that when your husband king Thovhele dies, He will bequeath the Crown to you.” At this point, the film abandons any resemblance of narrative realism to immerse itself in a mythical world that has a rarefied, dreamlike quality to it. And it is in fact in a dream that Elelwani finally and unconditionally surrenders to her destiny. In it, she finds herself in a sacred place she knows “to be forbidden for women”: the place that used to be the home of Gwede birds, now extinct and only existing in children’s songs that are themselves being forgotten. It is the site where the Venda people’s sacred forest and kings’ burial grounds are; a place under threat from that same outside world, the present of post-apartheid South Africa and global capitalism, which Elelwani associated with freedom at the beginning of the film and that she is now leaving behind in an act of self-translation that has turned her into the inheritor and protector of the communal land bequeathed to her by the Venda king, who sings to Elelwani in her dream: “This land of Venda. You must never sell. This land is our heritage. And for our children. I hope you understand me. The wishes of the dead must never be broken.”

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When Elelwani awakes, she ritually replaces the king by removing his mask, taking the stone that represents the crown, exchanging their identical necklaces and finally covering Thovhele’s disfigured face with a leopard’s skin. She can now announce her new, translated self both to her people and to Vele, who reappears disguised as a prophet in another surreally carnivalesque scene. And it is precisely when Vele reveals his identity and suggests that they complete what they had begun that Elelwani’s new self comes fully into being: “It doesn’t work like that anymore. When the time comes, Her Majesty will tell you.” Elelwani’s and her subjects’ new beginning is visualised by two silent scenes, in which we first have a point of view shot of Elelwani staring at the land of the Venda (Figure 3.4), and then a slow sequence in the sacred forest where she is performing rituals, visited by the mythological white lion that protects the kings’ graves (Figure 3.5). As this scene fades to a black screen, we see appearing the English translation of the Venda words Elelwani is uttering: My journey has brought me to myself. I am the butterfly that once was a caterpillar. I am the wild flower that carries her thorns. I now wear the beads of my own choice. I am Elelwani. And I am free. I am Elelwani. Let the horns hit me. What Elelwani really is, however, is a truth as inaccessible to us as it is to Vele, who will have to be told when the time for his wedding has come. Wa Luruli’s film evokes – but does not reveal – the multiple layers of meaning hidden beneath its narrative surface. It makes us aware of the presence of levels of signification

Figure 3.4 Elelwani surveys the land of the Venda. Source: Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli.

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 63

Figure 3.5 Elelwani and the white lion. Source: Elelwani, directed by Ntshavheni wa Luruli.

that we intuit but ultimately cannot grasp, of something that belongs to a signifying system and life-world the film has introduced to us but not made transparent. Elelwani’s final words intimate that what we have just watched is a moral fable. Her story seems to point to something like the utopian function of the fairy tale: what Ernst Bloch describes as “the happiness of ‘once upon a time’” that “still affects our visions of the future.” In this temporal construction, the past is the place where the resources of hope are retrieved, rescued to be deployed for the creation of “a wish-fulfilment that is not bound by its own time and the apparel of its contents.” We also learn from Bloch that in the world of fairy tales “evil [. . .] is still seen at work here in the present.”42 Elelwani’s tale, however, does not point to an acritical celebration of the past vis-à-vis an evil present. It is closer to the mode of “re-enchantment” that Harry Garuba describes as “animist materialism,” a form of consciousness of the material world that opens up “a whole new world of poaching possibilities, prepossessing the future, as it were, by laying claim to what in the present is yet to be invented.”43 Is Elelwani a moral fable meant to open up a narrative space for imagining the future – its protagonist’s future, as well as that of her community and, by extension, of the world they represent – in new ways, which are not bound by the past or the present? And if yes, what future? The impossible task of answering these questions sends us back to Jacques Derrida’s definition of the untranslatable as pertaining to a “poetic economy” in which what we call translation “always fails to restore the singular event of the

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original.”44 It is its dwelling in this poetic economy that makes Elelwani an original and aesthetically significant film: not so much a literal return to authentic African sources as an attempt to explore new possibilities for local filmmaking that challenge stereotypes of what an African film should look like and its position within world cinema.

Notes 1 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 19. I refer to my discussion of contemporary African cinematic representations of a global south that is running ahead of the global north in the previous chapter. 2 On third cinema, see Wayne, Political Film; and Guneratne and Dissanayake, Rethinking Third Cinema. Wa Luruli has stated that he “did not want to make an ethnographic film” (“My Directorial Choices in the Making of Elelwani.”) 3 Harrow, Trash. 4 See Makhubu, “Interpreting the Fantastic.” 5 Diawara, African Cinema, 159–166. 6 Wa Luruli has described the way he thought the film should be shot as “very simple: no tricks, no cleverness, [. . .] it’s got to be elegant and it’s got to be simple” (“My Directorial Choices in the Making of Elelwani”). 7 See Botha, South African Cinema, 203–251. 8 Elelwani Symposium. 9 According to the 2011 census, Venda is spoken as a first language by around 1,210,000 people – that is, roughly 2.4% of the South African population (see South Africa Gateway, “The 11 languages of South Africa”). Although in an early version of this chapter, published in Journal of African Cultural Studies, I used the prefixes for the Tshivenda language and Vhavenda people upon request from the journal editor, here I have removed them in accordance with the rest of the book (see Note on Translation, x). Their use in English is contested and most subtitles in the film use “Venda” without prefixes. 10 Mistry, “Filmmaking at the Margins of a Community,” 126. 11 Wa Luruli has also directed the feature films Chikin Biznis. . . The Whole Story! (1999) and The Wooden Camera (2003). 12 Wa Luruli, “My Directorial Choices in the Making of Elelwani.” 13 See Diawara, African Cinema and African Film; and Harrow, Postcolonial African Cinema. The histories of African cinemas are punctuated with the problems of translation and untraslatability. Since the emergence of the first indigenous film industries, African filmmakers who wanted to “Africanise” their medium had to free it from “the clichés and stereotypes that burdened Africa and Africans in the cinematic medium because of its legacies from colonial and ethnographic film” (Prabhu, Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, 216). Second, African filmmakers who have tried to reach an international public have had to confront the horizons of expectation produced by how global media and cinemas represent this continent and its people. In this context, as Anjali Prabhu writes with reference to the pioneering work of Ousmane Sembène, African filmmakers who have taken seriously their “responsibility” to African people and their continent have had to Africanise and interpellate the international spectator through stories, images, sounds, words, rhythms and movements that would remain faithful to local settings, lives, affects and experiences while translating them into a cinematic language decodable by members of a global community “in which Africa has too long been negatively framed or simply neglected” (ibid., 14). In other words, what Prabhu calls “Africanisation” of the cinema of Africa and its viewers involves something so deceptively simple as “the creation of African spaces, characters, and narratives in the cinematic medium” (ibid., 15).

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 65 14 Wa Luruli, “My Directorial Choices in the Making of Elelwani.” 15 Information about the making of Elelwani is gathered from conversations with Ntshavheni wa Luruli. 16 Mistry, “Filmmaking at the Margins of a Community,” 124. 17 I am indebted to Nyasha Mboti for the suggestion that the film can be interpreted as a representation of the past that reconciles with the present. Mboti uses this inversion of a linear conception of time – whereby the past has no say about the present, except as its origin, precondition or potential (see Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History) – to interpret the final scene, where the newly crowned Elelwani goes to the forest and is approached by a white lion that leaves her unharmed (Mboti, “Visual Symbolism in Elelwani”). In the mythology of the Venda, a sacred white lion haunts the Thathe Vondo forest to protect the graves of the chiefs buried in it. 18 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 109. 19 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 16. 20 Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 106. 21 Wa Luruli, “My Directorial Choices in the Making of Elelwani.” 22 For overviews of the recurrence of this theme in African cinema see, among others, Diawara, African Cinema, 140–166; Akudinobi, “Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema”; and Nagib, “Ouédraogo and the Aesthetics of Silence.” For a discussion of how the tradition/modernity dichotomy plays itself out in contemporary African cultural production, see Ekotto and Harrow, “Introduction.” 23 Diawara, African Cinema, 141. 24 Makhubu, “Interpreting the Fantastic,” 299. 25 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 265. 26 Ibid., 280–281. 27 Here and in the rest of the chapter I transcribe the original English subtitles. 28 Sakai, “Translation,” 71. Emphasis in original. 29 In Emily Apter’s words, “If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. And if such replicas were possible on a regular basis, there would not be any languages, just one vast, blurred international jargon” (“Preface,” xiv). It follows that the very idea of translation is based on the impossibility of a perfect translation – what Gayatri Spivak calls “the unending negotiation with the untranslatable” (“Translating in a World of Languages,” 39). 30 Callaghan, “The Ideology of Romantic Love,” 60. 31 Petersen, “First Things First,” 235. 32 Nnaemeka, “Urban Spaces, Women’s Places,” 164. 33 Mama, “Challenging Subjects,” 13. Emphasis in original. 34 Mupotsa, “The Promise of Happiness,” 186. 35 Walker, “Uneasy Relations,” 207. 36 Department of Traditional Affairs, Strategic Plan for the Fiscal Years 2011–2014, quoted in ibid., 223. 37 See ibid., 225. 38 Ibid., 210. 39 Mistry, “Filmmaking at the Margins of a Community,” 132. 40 Mnisi, “Elelwani.” 41 As in the rest of this book, my understanding of translation as a theoretical concept is indebted to Naoki Sakai’s writings, where translation is theorised “as an act of articulation that takes place in the social topos of difference or incommensurability” (Sakai, “Translation,” 71) and that, crucially, “is not merely about language” (Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of the Border,” 25). 42 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 163. 43 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 271. 44 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 56.

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Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. 1994 [1958]. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books. Akudinobi, Jude. 1995. “Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema.” IRIS 18: 25–38. Apter, Emily. 2014. “Preface.” In Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Edited and Translated by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vii–xv. Bloch, Ernst. 1988. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009. Heritage of Our Times. Cambridge: Polity Press. Botha, Martin. 2012. South African Cinema 1896–2010. Bristol: Intellect. Callaghan, Dympna. 1994. “The Ideology of Romantic Love: The Case of Romeo and Juliet.” In Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh, The Wayward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, 59–101. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cissé, Souleymane. 1987. Yeelen. Paris: Atriascop. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Diawara, Manthia. 1992. African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Munich: Prestel. Dornford-May, Mark. 2005. U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Cape Town: Spier Films. Ekotto, Frieda and Kenneth Harrow. 2015. “Introduction: Rethinking African Cultural Production.” In Rethinking African Cultural Production. Edited by Frieda Ekotto and Kenneth Harrow. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1–16. Elelwani Symposium Concept Note. 2014. University of Johannesburg, 15 November. Garuba, Harry. 2003. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture 15 (2): 261–286. Guneratne, Anthony and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. 2003. Rethinking Third Cinema. London: Routledge. Harrow, Kenneth. 2007. Postcolonial African Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lee, Spike. 1991. Jungle Fever. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures. ———. 1992. Malcom X. Directed by Spike Lee. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Makhubu, Nomusa. 2016. “Interpreting the Fantastic: Video-Film as Intervention.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28 (3): 299–312. Mama, Amina. 2001. “Challenging Subjects: Gender and Power in African Contexts.” In Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Amina Mama, Henning Melber and Francis Niamnjoh, Identity and Beyond: Rethinking Africanity. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 9–18. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mboti, Nyasha. 2014. “Visual Symbolism in Elelwani.” Paper presented at the Elelwani Symposium, University of Johannesburg, 15 November. Mistry, Jyoti. 2015. “Filmmaking at the Margins of a Community: On Co-Producing Elelwani.” In Gaze Regimes: Film and Feminisms in Africa. Edited by Jyoti Mistry and Antje Schuhmann. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 118–132.

Temporalities, (un)translatability, aesthetics 67 Mnisi, Nonhlanhla. 2014. “Elelwani: An Insight into Tshivenda Culture.” Mail & Guardian 31 January. Mupotsa, Danai. 2015. “The Promise of Happiness: Desire, Attachment and Freedom in Post/Apartheid South Africa.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 29 (2): 183–198. Nagib, Lucia. 2001. “Ouédraogo and the Aesthetics of Silence.” In African Oral Literature: Functions in Contemporary Contexts. Edited by Russell H. Kaschula. Cape Town: New Africa Books, 100–110. Nnaemeka, Obioma. 1997. “Urban Spaces, Women’s Places: Polygamy as a Sign in Mariama Bâ’s Novels.” In The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature. Edited by Obioma Nnaemeka. London: Routledge, 163–192. Ouédraogo, Idrissa. 1989. Yaaba. Paris: Arcadia Films/Ouagadougou: Les Films de l’Avenir/ Zürich: Thelma Film. Petersen, Kirsten Holst. 2006. “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Oxford: Routledge, 235–238. Prabhu, Anjali. 2014. Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Roodt, Darrell. 2004. Yesterday. London: Distant Horizon. ———. 2007. Meisie. Johannesburg: Welela Studios. Sakai, Naoki. 2006. “Translation.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2–3): 71–78. ———. 2010. “Translation and the Figure of the Border: Toward an Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action.” Profession: 25–34. South Africa Gateway. n.d. “The 11 Languages of South Africa.” Accessed 4 April 2019. https://southafrica-info.com/arts-culture/11-languages-south-africa/. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. “Translating in a World of Languages.” Profession: 35–43. Virno, Paolo. 2015. Déjà Vu and the End of History. London: Verso. Walker, Cherryl. 2014. “Uneasy Relations: Women, Gender Equality and Tradition.” In The New South Africa at Twenty: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Peter Vale and Estelle H. Prinsloo. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 207–230. Wa Luruli, Ntshavheni. 1999. Chikin Biznis. . . The Whole Story! Johannesburg: Richard Green & Associates. ———. 2003. The Wooden Camera. 2003. Paris: Odelion/London: Tall Stories/Johannesburg: Richard Green and Associates. ———. 2012. Elelwani. Johannesburg: Shadowy Meadows Productions and Blackboard Trust. ———. 2014. “My Directorial Choices in the Making of Elelwani.” Paper presented at the Elelwani Symposium, University of Johannesburg, 15 November. Wayne, Mike. 2001. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press.

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We now move from film to literature. This media crossing is in keeping with the age of media convergence, when “Televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; films are streamed via rental companies; and so on. Genres and gadgets that once were separate are linked.”1 Digital media and information and communication technologies have blurred the lines between different forms of cultural production and modes of consumption: our multiple screens flicker between words, music, advertisements, videos, music and images; the written, oral, aural and visual are constantly mixed and remixed, thereby producing hybrid, multimodal forms of expression and engagement. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observes, the “language of texting and emailing and access to everything including pictures and music in real time is producing a phenomenon that is neither pure speech nor pure writing. [. . .] It is neither one nor the other. It’s both. It’s cyborality.” Ngũgĩ’s coinage of the term cyborality, from which he derives cyborature to name the permutations of orature and literature in the age of the Internet and social media, signals the challenge cyberspace poses to the “aesthetic feudalism” that in modern western culture and its colonial outposts established a hierarchy between the written and the oral whereby the latter, “even when viewed as being ‘more’ authentic or closer to the natural, is treated as bondsman to the writing master.”2 In this chapter, crossing the boundaries between media provides an apt point of entry into the work of some of the best-known and best-selling writers associated with contemporary African literature, not in the least because of their engagement with different media, and especially their digital media presence. The most prominent example is the Internet celebrity status of Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. By June 2018, Adichie’s talk “The Danger of a Single Story” had hit over 15 million views on ted.com and over 3 million on YouTube, with well over 1,000 comments for each video, while her TedxEuston talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” sampled in Beyoncé’s 2013 single “***Flawless,” was scoring over 4 million and a half views on YouTube.3 Similarly, Teju Cole’s fame is associated not only with his books but also with digital media interventions such as the 2014 Time of the Game Twitter experiment. In it, Cole asked his then 160,000 followers to tweet photos of their TVs showing the soccer World Cup with a caption indicating where they were watching the game and what time it was. As Cole

Living in translation 69 explained in a tweet: “@tejucole We live in different time zones, out of sync but aware of each other. Then the game begins and we enter the same time: the time of the game. 5:57 PM – 8 Jul 2014.”4 Time of the Game resulted in “‘a synchronized global view of the World Cup’” that aggregated “over 2,000 different photos of people’s TVs showing the World Cup.”5 In fact, Cole’s entire writing career has marched in step with the evolution of digital and social media. His first book, the novella Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), was first published online as a blog. Then came his Twitter fame, which coincided with the publication of the novel Open City (2012). He has since moved to Instagram (at the time of writing, Cole’s Twitter account has been dormant since 2014), where he gained traction by producing a photo essay using reposted images of the Mona Lisa.6 And another wellknown example of this kind of media crossing is that of Binyavanga Wainaina’s hugely popular 2005 Granta essay “How to Write about Africa,” which “grew out of an email” about a special issue on Africa that a pissed-off Wainaina had sent to the editor when he was a graduate student in England. Consisting of an edited version of the original email, Wainaina claims that the essay “became the mostforwarded story in Granta history.”7 Digital media also find their way into and out of African and diasporic authors’ books. In Adichie’s Americanah (2013), the main character, Ifemelu, sets up a blog called “Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” Her anonymous blog postings, typed in a different font from the rest of the text, provide a counterpoint to the unfolding story, in which Ifemelu first migrates to the United States and then comes back to Nigeria, where she starts a new blog, “The Small Redemptions of Lagos.”8 Adichie has explained that the blogs were meant to create a seemingly non-fictional space within the narrative: “I wanted this novel to also be social commentary, but I wanted to say it in ways that are different from what one is supposed to say in literary fiction.”9 The second blog would have a short life of its own outside the covers of the book. Between 27 August and 2 November 2014, a series of posts on topics ranging from everyday life in Nigeria to responses to the representation of Africa in western media were uploaded, as if Ifemelu had written them, at https://americanahblog.com/, where they are still accessible.10 The impact of digital media on this body of literature in fact goes beyond this or other uses and references. Contemporary narratives of migration by African and diasporic authors articulate the complex relations between the rupture produced by migration and the role and limits of new communication technologies in bringing separate worlds together.11 The phrase “new-media-driven narratives” has been used to describe how novels such as Americanah and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) address “issues of affect and access, which the influence of expanding virtual networks on social relations is making increasingly visible.”12 Nor is the role of digital media and information and communication technologies in giving form to contemporary narratives of migration circumscribed to their appearance and thematisation in the text or to their deployment as a narrative device. Caren Irr theorises a new subgenre she labels the “digital migrant novel” – in which she includes the “African migration fiction”

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of Teju Cole’s Open City, Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames (2007) and Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2007) – where digital media provide a representational template and spatial sensibility that enable the move “from the discrete geography of nations to the overlapping and virtual spaces of communication technologies.”13 But digital media are not only the playground of African and diasporic literary stars who use them as narrative devices and to enhance their visibility. What Shola Adenekan calls “the internetting” of African literature dates back “to the mid to late 1990s, when many young African writers, wanting to escape the politics of book publishing, began to publish poetry, short stories, and essays on African listservs, personal blogs and creative writing websites.”14 Today, “there are dozens of poetry and creative writing communities online.” They testify both to the possibilities opened up by digital media for hybridising written and oral forms of expression and to their complex imbrication with the offline world: poetry posted on Facebook may be performed for members of the public in the real space of Lagos and Nairobi, and the recording of those performances may be posted on YouTube and Facebook for consumption by the online public. Young poets such as David Ishaya Osu (Nigeria), Dami Ajayi (Nigeria), and Redscar McOdindo K’Oyuga (Kenya) publish poems almost every week on Facebook, many of which later form part of print collections. These works may also appear as part of a collection of a creative book project. These processes arguably involve reshaping the text for different formats, and through this process the creative piece is unfixed and susceptible to changes.15 Digital media offer a platform for the production, circulation and reception of diverse texts and performances through modes of delivery that make them travel outside of the literary establishment and its canonical forms. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Russell Kaschula suggest, the multimodal and transmedia forms of expression and communication we encounter online interrupt the hegemony of writing the west imposed on African cultural forms and open up new possibilities for its hybridisation with the oral and other expressive modes.16 Still, a note of caution as to the scale and reach of digitally mediated literary production and consumption is in order. African digital literary networks are largely middle class, urban and elite spaces. Adenekan underscores that: The poets, novelists, critics, and consumers of [African literary] works [that circulate online] are people with the language capability to enjoy them. They can afford fast and reliable internet, are often based in metropolitan centres of Africa, Europe, and America, and some even spend much of their time in these places.17 The listservs he surveys, such as ConcernedKenyanwriters, Krazitivity, USAAfrica Dialogue and Ederi, do not exceed a few thousand active users. There is no disputing the digital divide on the African continent, where only a minority

Living in translation 71 of people have meaningful access to digital technologies, devices, software, data, effective connectivity and digital literacy skills (i.e., computer and other proficiencies). Where people only have access to the cheapest type of devices – “dumb” or “feature” cellphones – they are more likely to be using them for oral communication than to enjoy the other affordances of digital media. As I note in Chapter 1, bridging the digital divide is not just a matter of access but of meaningful and effective access, unimpeded by the cost of data and lack of digital literacy skills. But even so, despite unequal access to digital technologies, and despite the current constraints on digital connectedness in Africa and the global south, information and communication technologies and digital media have played an important role in reshaping communication and cultural production, circulation and consumption across the African continent and the diaspora.18 In the discussion of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names that follows, I revisit the polysemic and heterogeneous figure of the border and its relations to the affective, linguistic, cultural and material dimensions of the experience of migration. Before I move on to it, however, I should like to note that even as I read NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel to explore these issues, I try to pay proper attention to the formal aspects and protocols of reading that pertain to a literary text. At the same time, I treat this text as a representation and embodiment of social life, and thus also attend to the “salient realities of its connectedness.”19

Bordering literature We Need New Names, which came out in 2013, is the debut novel of Zimbabwean émigré Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, aka NoViolet Bulawayo.20 Its first chapter is a short story, titled “Hitting Budapest” (2011), which won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011: an auspicious prequel for a novel that made it onto the shortlists for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, on top of which it was awarded the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature (2013), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (2013), and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Debut Fiction (2014). This is a literary work that fully belongs to what French critic Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters”: an uneven “world literary space” organised by publishers and international prizes to constitute literature into a field with its own hierarchies of power, and with literary and aesthetic priorities superimposed on it by commercial and funding agencies.21 As the prize won by “Hitting Budapest” advertises itself as The Caine Prize for African Writing and the shortlisting of We Need New Names for the Man Booker International Prize was hailed as the first for a Zimbabwean author,22 NoViolet Bulawayo – who was born in Tsholotsho, Zimbabwe, in 1981 but moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, when she was 18 and still lives in the United States – has found herself entangled in controversies about geography and the location of African literature. This is a debate that has surrounded several of the choices made by the judges of the Caine Prize, including in 2013, when the prize was won by Utahborn Tope Folarin, who now lives in Washington, DC, for a short story, “Miracle”

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(2013) set in Texas. Some commentators felt compelled to ask: how African is that? Shouldn’t prizes for African writing go to authors who actually struggle to make a living on the continent where the writing is supposed to come from and be about?23 Nor is this ongoing controversy just about the Caine Prize. There have also been complaints from various quarters that some of the most prominent contemporary literary writing associated with the adjective “African” turns out to be by expatriates narrating life in other places, with Africa only there as the characters’ biographical background or as a place they see through transnational and cosmopolitan lenses. In addition to We Need New Names, entries in this list include novels such as US-based Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames, Teju Cole’s Open City, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), just to name some of the most best-known examples. For instance, writing in the South African weekly Mail & Guardian a few days before the beginning of the 40th African Literature Association Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand in April 2014, of which they were co-organisers, Johannesburg-based academics Dan Ojwang and Michael Titlestad aired their boundary worries in an article titled “African Writing Blurs into ‘World’ Literature.” The article begins by reminding the reader of how, “especially in the 1960s,” African literary journals and magazines “such as the Kampala-based Transition, the Nigeria-based Black Orpheus, and Drum and Contrast in South Africa,” or Présence Africaine for francophone authors, contributed to the promotion of African writers who would then make it on the world stage by signing for Heinemann (the publishing house that owned the African Writers Series before it was taken over by Penguin South Africa, which unsuccessfully tried to relaunch it in 2010) or for some other international publisher.24 Ojwang and Titlestad write that this set-up has gone, replaced by generous but more modest initiatives – magazines such as Kwani? in Kenya and Chimurenga in South Africa – and by the movement of the epicentre of African writing to the northern hemisphere, where “African” literature is shaped by non-African commercial, aesthetic and thematic priorities: The African cultural bankers of the present are largely émigré writers, such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, Segun Afolabi, NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Teju Cole, Helon Habila and Moses Isegawa. These authors’ works are generally mediated for African readers by reviewers and academics abroad, and most have acquired their status through winning international awards. [. . .] This dilemma – writing about Africa without living in it – makes these novels accessible to non-African readers, but also, unfortunately, contorts the continent’s past and present. One’s imagined readership (from publishers and editors to the public) constitutes, in fundamental ways, the work one is writing. African literature written primarily for non-Africans – or, more specifically, those who are not Nigerians, Zimbabwean, Kenyan – is, by definition, less specifically textured. It risks blurring into “world literature,” much like the anodyne mishmash of “world music.”25

Living in translation 73 I have quoted this article at length because there is something puzzling about its premise: namely, that the place of residence of a writer – “writing about Africa without living in it” – should guide our judgement of a literary work.26 After all, James Joyce wrote Ulysses ([1922] 1992), which was published first in serialised form in the United States and then as a novel in France, while living in Zurich and Paris – that is, with non-Irish editors, publishers and reading publics in mind. Is the novel’s Dublin setting therefore, “by definition, less specifically textured”? Why should we accept this axiom? By whose definition? Or does it apply to African literature only? In addition, Ojwang and Titlestad’s reference to “world literature” strikes me as a category mistake, for “world literature” is a label that primarily tags a practice of reading and classifying, not of writing. This is, for instance, David Damrosch’s assumption when he describes this category as “encompassing all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin”27 and as “a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our time and place.”28 To these two definitions, Damrosch then adds another two that qualify the first: “world literature is an elliptical refraction of national literature,” by which he means that even when they circulate beyond their language and nation of origin, literary works continue to bear their marks; and “literature that gains in translation,” which indicates how, for various reasons – “because its language doesn’t translate well or its cultural assumptions don’t travel” – one work can be less “translatable” than another.29 It is clear, however, that even in this pragmatic definition translatability cannot be pinned down to a text’s lack of local texture. Comparing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake ([1939] 2012) to Dubliners ([1914] 2014), Damrosch notes that the latter, “a far more localized work, has been much more widely translated and has had a far greater impact in other languages.”30 All of which is not to say that it isn’t perfectly legitimate to question the way the category “world literature” is construed, what aesthetic or thematic concerns it is identified with, and how African writers fit into it. My issue is with the bordering criteria that inform Ojwang and Titlestad’s evaluation of literary texts. I was not able to attend the academic event that Ojwang and Titlestad’s article prefaced in the South African press, so I do not know how representative it is of the views expressed at the 2014 African Literature Association Conference, where delegates assembled to present papers on “Texts, Modes and Repertoires of Living In and Beyond the Shadows of Apartheid.” But their statements do seem to give voice to a perspective shared by other researchers currently writing about African literature. Sweden-based literary scholar Ashleigh Harris is a case in point. She has devoted a critical intervention to highlighting how African diasporic writers are today producing “texts formulated in spaces no longer conversant with everyday life in Africa.”31 Noting, in 2014, that only “5 of the 14 winners from the inception of the [Caine] prize in 2000 are permanently residing in Africa,”32 Harris goes on to state that this is symptomatic of the growing identification of African literature with a form of writing that has turned away from the quotidian realities of the place associated with its name. For Harris, We Need New Names is part of “a body of writing” which “is capitulating to a notion of literary

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form that [. . .] is not in dialogue with African everyday life.”33 She sees NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel as “an awkward book” – an awkwardness produced by its being split into two separate parts, which she believes reflects the awkwardness of the author’s own position as an émigré: The everyday of Africa, quite masterfully rendered in the first section, is reduced to a kind of backstory for the real narrative: life as an immigrant in America. As such, I would argue, African everyday life becomes subsumed into the demands of American readership. The problem of narrative form (an awkward and inadequately motivated break in the middle of the novel) becomes indicative of a greater underlying awkwardness: the positioning of the African writer in and for America.34 I am not sure of why the break in the middle of the novel is said to be “inadequately motivated.” Right from the beginning of the narrative, migration is placed at the centre of the protagonist’s and her friends’ desires and horizons. But what seems truly awkward to me is the statement that setting the second part of the novel in the United States translates into “African everyday life” being subsumed “into the demands of American readership.” Why?35 The same question arises with the dichotomy between “a notion of creative writing and the novel produced in the global north” and “the writing of the spaces of Africa” that Harris sees exemplified by Teju Cole’s Open City, which she complains about being “hailed as a great African novel” while “almost entirely circumvent[ing] the everyday reality of Lagos.”36 As Open City is set in New York and Brussels, the latter is hardly surprising. Again, why this narrowly mimetic notion of African literature having to mandatorily represent African “everyday reality”? What is this “everyday” in “African life” with which fiction writers should concern themselves to earn the qualifier “African” (as opposed to “African-immigrant”)? Why are these borders and checkpoints of the imagination being erected? It does not come as a surprise that many diasporic writers of African origin have grown increasingly weary of the controversies surrounding “African writing” and attendant prescriptions about what should constitute it. Taiye Selasi has distanced herself from this category by criticising the use of the adjective “African” to describe a singular body of writing (or anything singular, for that matter): “If states make suspicious categories for art, continents are closer to useless [and] of all the earth’s landmasses, Africa may well be the most culturally, religiously, ethnically and linguistically diverse.”37 In a similar vein, replying to the seemingly unavoidable question about how he prefers to be identified as an author, Teju Cole has answered that he does not care, and playfully added: “My writing has European antecedents, Indian influences, Icelandic fantasies, Brazilian aspirations.”38 Conversely, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ has exploded the category “African literature” by proposing that an “African writer should be anyone who wishes to be identified as one. And being an African should not come at the expense of multiple identities. [. . .] Let African literature burst through the seams.”39

Living in translation 75 For my part, I have started by recalling this debate less out of an interest in locating the borders of African literature than as a point of entry into the question of the border itself, which I am going to discuss in relation to the linguistic, conceptual and political work that translation does in We Need New Names. In other words, the purpose of this chapter is not to engage in an exercise in literary categorisation. But if it were, I would find myself in agreement with Aaron Bady, who argues that what is most interesting about this kind of exercise are the questions it opens up. As “the inadequacy of ‘African’ as a descriptive adjective has gone from polemic to parody” – as in the website Africa Is a Country – the lack of consensus on what constitutes African literature or who is an African writer should be embraced, so as to “ask questions that don’t allow for single stories.”40 Which brings me back to We Need New Names, a novel that problematises constructions of identity defined in geographically bounded terms by exploring the heterogeneity, porosity and mobility of the many borders that crisscross our globalised world. It does so, however, even as it alerts us to the precarity and vulnerability of the mobile identities and communities shaped by the experience of migration.

Crossing borders We Need New Names is a novel about migration and displacement – experiences it brings to the fore by having the main character cross the borders that separate an unnamed place that looks very much like Zimbabwe from the United States, to which she relocates at page 147. Sandwiched between her two lives, before and after migration, is a short bridging chapter, titled “How They Left,” in which the narrative voice shifts from the first person singular of the intradiegetic narrator – Darling, the protagonist, who tells the first part of the story as a ten-year-old child and the second as an adolescent – to the third person plural: Those with nothing are crossing borders. Those with strength are crossing borders. Those with ambition are crossing borders. Those with hopes are crossing borders. Those with loss are crossing borders. Those in pain are crossing borders. Moving, running, emigrating, deserting, walking, quitting, flying, fleeing – to all over, to countries near and far, to countries unheard of, to countries whose names they cannot pronounce. They are leaving in droves.41 “Crossing borders”: the phrase repeated as a refrain points not only to the subject of the narrative, but also to its organising device, the border that divides the novel into two sections of almost identical length, which are rearticulated by the partition that separates them, sutured and resignified by it: imagined worlds that the border tears apart but also connects and makes us see as part of a whole. This is a border that does not simply correspond to the geopolitical lines and territorial divisions between nation-states – Zimbabwe and the United States do not, of course, share a national border – but also to a plurality of processes responsible for segmenting, shaping and recombining space and time, to sites of “political,

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cultural, and social mobility,” as well as to the “symbolic dimension” of the figure of the border as a marker of social, linguistic and cultural difference.42 As we have seen, this conceptualisation of the border draws on Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s Border as Method (2013), which highlights how borders both separate and constitute space, impede but also channel movement: “far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows, [borders] have become essential devices for their articulation.”43 The point is not simply that borders have two sides and connect as well as divide, but more specifically that they play a key role both in “producing the times and spaces of global capitalism” and in shaping “the struggles that rise up within and against these times and spaces.” People cross borders, but borders also cross them: they “cross the lives of millions of men and women who are on the move, or, remaining sedentary, have borders cross them.”44 In We Need New Names, even before the main character migrates to the United States, the polysemous and heterogeneous figure of the border is brought into view by the repeated crossings and reconfigurations of a social space marked by an accumulation of geopolitical signifiers. In the first chapter, the Eastern European city of Budapest names the wealthy neighbourhood into where Darling and her friends – Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina – cross to steal guavas. Seemingly incongruous geopolitical referents marking, dividing and connecting space keep piling up: “on the other side of the quarry, separated by a bush,” we have Shanghai, “where not too long ago people were trying to dig for diamonds before the soldiers chased them away” and where Chinese construction workers are now building a shopping mall.45 These are the places where the children go looking for fun, food or “zhing-zhong” – “watches, jewelry, flip-flops, batteries”: cheap Chinese “kaka” that lasts “only for a few days”46 – leaving their informal settlement, bitterly ironically named Paradise, as they sing “Who discovered the way to India? [. . .] Vasco da Gama! Vasco da Gama! Vasco da Gama!”47 Situated in a supposedly marginal, poverty-stricken corner of the planet, the landscape of the first section of the novel is traversed by global cultural flows and geopolitical signifiers that the children can cognitively map fully as much as they make sense of the borders, barriers and social divisions that traverse their city and separate Paradise from Budapest and Shanghai. This is the globalised world that enters Paradise as the “black tracksuit bottoms and a faded orange T-shirt that says Cornell” worn by Bastard;48 as “the people with cameras and T-shirts that say BBC and CNN” who “come to shake their heads and look and take our pictures like we are pretty” during the forced removals that leave the place where the children live looking “like a fucking tsunami”;49 as the US dollars and euros in which the local preacher, Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro, wants to be paid to cleanse the protagonist’s house, where her father is dying of HIV/AIDS;50 or as the protagonists of the US TV series ER, whose names the children adopt in the novel’s eponymous chapter to perform an abortion (which they fail to complete) on their little friend Chipo. It is a world the children literally turn into the playground for their “country-game” and that they visualise as a striated space, cut across by borders that correspond to the extreme inequalities that not only make some countries

Living in translation 77 more desirable than others, but that also turn some of countries into no countries at all, subspecies of countries: Everybody wants to be certain countries, like everybody wants to be the U.S.A. and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and France and Italy and Sweden and Germany and Russia and Greece and them. These are the country-countries. If you lose the fight, then you must have to settle for countries like Dubai and South Africa and Botswana and Tanzania and them. They are not country-countries, but at least life is better than here. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka, and not even this one we live in – who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?51 The migration of the protagonist to the United States is represented as an escape from one of these “rags of countries”: a crossing of borders that, as Polo Moji has noted, is inserted in a broader “cycle of displacements and ruptured kinships,” starting with the forced removal of Darling’s community to the informal settlement of Paradise and her father’s migration to Johannesburg.52 The proliferation of borders represented by each geographical displacement and affective rupture points to the entanglement of the material and imaginary dimensions signified by the figure of the border. Crossing into Budapest represents chasing materialistic dreams fully as much as migrating to the United States: “One day I will live here, in a house just like that, Sbho says, biting into a thick guava.”53 Heterogeneous borders crisscross and constitute space and its imaginings, with distances being now erased by the subsumption of different places under the signifier of wealth (or lack thereof) they represent, and now rematerialised in the physical space they signify: I am blazing out of this kaka country myself. Then I’ll make lots of money and come back and get a house in this very Budapest. Or even better, many houses: one in Budapest, one in Los Angeles, one in Paris. Wherever I feel like, Bastard says.54 [. . .] America is too far, you midget, Bastard says. I don’t want to go anywhere where I have to go by air. What if you get there and find it’s a kaka place and get stuck and can’t come back? Me, I’m going to Jo’burg, that way when things get bad, I can just get on the road and roll without talking to anybody; you have to be able to return from wherever you go.55 It is in relation to the problematic of the border that, as we shall see in the next section, translation comes to play a central role in the narrative, which points to how borders border, inscribe and configure the space of the social.

Living in translation Darling’s migration is part of a collective exodus from a place where “things are falling apart” – an intertextual nod that adds yet another geopolitical and historical

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layer of meaning to the narrative. The reference is, of course, to Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which narrates the collapse of an autonomous way of life as a result of the arrival in Africa of European colonialists and missionaries – a collapse whose long-term effects can still be detected in the contemporary displacements represented in Bulawayo’s text. After she moves to the United States, Darling is herself torn apart by an increasingly unfulfillable desire for her motherland – “There are times [. . .] that no matter what I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that”56 – which is exacerbated by the trials and tribulations of adapting to a new place – the stagnating America of a deindustrialised Detroit and the monotonous suburban landscape of Michigan, here brilliantly renamed “Destroyedmichygen” – where one’s language, accent, body, origins, mannerisms and world view have become signifiers of alterity and are often read through the lens of stereotyped preconceptions about a faraway and unknown place: Africa. As the narrator says at one point, sending us back to W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” here revisited from the perspective of the latest generation of African immigrants, “It’s hard to explain, this feeling; it’s like there’s two of me.”57 The narrative, which includes several sentences in Ndebele, the protagonist’s mother tongue, repeatedly draws attention to language as a signifier of (un) belonging, psychic (dis)connection and social (im)mobility. For Darling, fitting in in America means, literally, living in translation – or, as she puts it, “sound[ing] American”: the TV has taught me just how to do it. It’s pretty easy; all you have to do is watch Dora the Explorer, The Simpsons, SpongeBob, Scooby-Doo, and then you move on to That’s So Raven, Glee, Friends, Golden Girls, and so on, just listening and imitating the accents. [. . .] I also have my list of American words that I keep under the tongue like talismans, ready to use: pretty good, pain in the ass, for real, awesome, totally, skinny, dude, freaking, bizarre, psyched, messed up, like, tripping, motherfucker, clearance, allowance, douche bag, you’re welcome, acting up, yikes.58 A marker of her partial integration in the United States, Darling’s mastery of the American accent also turns into an indicator of the supervened disconnection from her community in the motherland, which is underscored by the ridicule poured on her by her mother – “He-he-he, so you are trying to sound white now!”59 – and old friends – “that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you”60 – on the other end of a Skype call.61 This tension between a translated existence and the identity associated with the mother tongue and country traverses, in various ways, all the characters of African origin we encounter in the second part of the novel. It is so for Darling’s Aunt Fostalina, who, after failing to communicate with a telesales agent, picks up the phone and calls a friend to tell the “story to someone in our language, because this is what you must do in America whenever something like this happens.”62

Living in translation 79 It is the same with Uncle Kojo from Ghana, who every time he gets a chance to speak “in his language that nobody understands”63 rediscovers a suppressed part of himself and becomes someone else. Whenever “he finds someone from his country, everything about him is different – his laugh, his talk, his eating – it’s like something cuts him open to reveal this other person I don’t even know.”64 “The problem with English,” Darling explains, is that by the time you get “to say the words out loud and have them sound right [. . .] something strange has happened to you.”65 Speaking in English is like crossing the border that crosses you. For all these characters, living in the United States means learning to eke out a living by doing seasonal, precarious and underpaid jobs, often more than one – “When I am not cleaning the toilets or bagging groceries, I’m bent over a big cart like this, sorting out bottles and cans.”66 Along the way, they have to negotiate cultural and linguistic differences that make everyday life a continuous act of translation and self-translation. The dangers of psychic disconnection are always there for the African migrants who populate the novel. They manifest themselves in Aunt Fostalina’s obsession with her body, from which she tries to erase the traces of her African self, shaping it into an ideal American one by compulsive dieting and exercising in front of TV aerobics shows. They are even more evident in Uncle Kojo’s degeneration into a wandering alcoholic, as he tries to drown the sorrows caused by his son’s decision to join the US Army and go to fight in Afghanistan. And they are most vividly illustrated by the tragicomic figure of Tshaka Zulu – so named because he identifies with the heroic king warrior, the father of the Zulu nation – who sold his father’s cattle against his will to migrate to America. Now retired, he is summoned to sing traditional songs at African expats’ community gatherings and ceremonies, but otherwise lives confined to a mental hospital in a room he has turned into a fantasy version of a mythologised homeland, complete with “the poster of a topless Masai girl, crazy beads all over her body” and an eclectic assortment of images and newspaper clippings of “Nelson Mandela when he came out of jail,” of “Kwame Nkrumah, Kofi Annan, [. . .] Desmond Tutu, Miriam Makeba, Brenda Fassie, Hugh Masekela, Lucky Dube, [. . .] Credo Mutwa, [. . .] Bébé Manga, Leleti Khumalo, Wangari Maathai, and so on.”67 We also see them in Darling herself, who in a fit of anger reacts to her friend Chipo’s suggestion that she has abandoned and betrayed her country by throwing her computer against the bedroom wall she had previously smeared with the Ndebelefied English phrase “iBioiyiribashi” (biology is rubbish).68 At first glance, these depictions of the traumatic effects of displacement would seem to assign We Need New Names to the narratives of migration that Caren Irr groups under the heading of “traumatic migration narratives,” whose specimens are “frequently rooted in trauma,” figure immigration “as the agonizing loss of a home culture” and have protagonists wavering “between a painful past and social exclusion in the American present.” Taking her cue from Paul Gilroy, Irr argues that this genre is affectively grounded in a “postcolonial melancholia” that “precludes a more contestatory and pragmatic focus on interethnic coexistence in the present.”69 However, much as the structures of feeling of the trauma of migration and of what the narrator calls “hunger” for her country are undoubtedly central to the

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narrative, We Need New Names can also be read as belonging to the new form of “digital migrant novel” that Irr describes as having replaced “the romance of migrant psychology with a focus on the media.”70 In this subgenre, the rigid divisions demarcated by national and other geopolitical borders are replaced by a conception of geographical space and human connectivity modelled on digital media networks. Regardless of whether it actually represents digital media, the digital migrant novel reproduces the logic “of a dispersed, peer-to-peer media system” networked through “routers” that “serve as translation machines that encode, decode, and recode.” The new form of migrant novel sketched by Irr thus supplements the older representational stereotypes of an experience of migration defined by nostalgic attachment to mother tongue and homeland and by the trauma of displacement with new “maps of transnational arenas” and “life stories that exceed those provided by sending or receiving nations.”71 In We Need New Names, this transition is epitomised by the role played by global pop culture throughout the novel. Far from representing a place completely separate from Paradise, America is already fully part of the imaginary of the children we encounter in the first half of the narrative. The transnational cultural and social geographies forged by multiple mediated encounters that produce hybrid formations and identities also come to the fore in the chapters that portray Darling’s interactions with her closest American friends and their consumerist, digitally mediated life in suburban America – which revolves around watching porn on the computer, outings to shopping malls and exchanging gossip and text messages about boys and sex. It is the English language itself that reconfigures the borders that divide Darling’s motherland from America. Compared to the slang spoken by Kristal, her loud-mouthed African American friend, Darling’s accent and linguistic habitus – her “proper” English inherited from the former British colony – become signs of distinction and identity markers immediately translatable into the classed and racialised hierarchies of power and social prestige that traverse American society: [Darling to Kristal] Everybody knows you can’t speak proper English. Like right now: Say what? What on earth is that? I say. [. . .] And what is naamean? Naamsayin? I’m finna go? All that nonsense you speak. Is it too hard for you to just say I beg your pardon? Or simply, What did you say? You know what I mean? You know what I’m saying? I am going to go? [. . .] [Kristal to Darling] Uh-huh, I beg your pardon my ass, trynna sound like stupid white folk, she says.72 Being African is encoded as speaking “proper English,” which Kristal – who speaks Ebonics, a culturally encoded language also known as African American Vernacular English73 – recodes as trying to sound white, or rather as the translated idea of whiteness “proper English” signifies for her. Old and new migrants function as translation machines that redefine and subvert the signifying systems they enter. Their translational and conflicted acts of linguistic and cultural appropriation and identification open up a space for thinking beyond geographically

Living in translation 81 bounded ethnonational constructions of identity and community – even though We Need New Names repeatedly reminds the reader of the affective power of the attachments that the latter embody. At the centre of the novel’s and its protagonist’s affective world is the tension between these attachments and a transnational and translational dimension that undoes the binary opposition between home and adoptive country, and mother and adopted language and accent. This recalls Naoki Sakai’s distinction between homolingual and heterolingual address. As we have seen, homolingual (or “monolingual”) address designates the conventional understanding of translation, in which ethnocultural divisions between discrete linguistic communities are reified through a mode of enunciation “whereby the addresser adopts the position of representative of a putatively homogeneous language society and relates to the general addressees who are also representative of an equally homogeneous language community.”74 To this regime of translation Sakai opposes that of heterolingual address: a situation of address in which an implied audience is not a homogeneous language community and which “assumes that every utterance can fail to communicate because heterogeneity is inherent in any medium, linguistic or otherwise.” In this situation, “we are together and can address ourselves as ‘we’ because we are distant from one another and because our togetherness is not grounded on any common homogeneity.” In heterolingual address, the addresser is just one more foreigner among foreigners – as opposed to a mediator between two homogeneous linguistic communities separated by a border, which are disaggregated and reconstituted into a “nonaggregate community of foreigners.”75 Likewise, in We Need New Names, the ethnic and national divisions indexed by homolingual address are muddled up and reconfigured by the proliferation of forms of identification, subjectivation and community formation associated with the proliferating borders and their crossings that the narrative brings into view. By the time they manage to reinvent their new life in the United States, the nationally identified “those” who “are crossing borders,” whom we met in the middle of the novel, have reconstituted themselves into a “we” whose being in common is defined by the recognition of their shared condition and fate. In one of the most moving chapters of the novel, titled “How They Lived,”76 the narrative abandons again the first person singular, this time to shift to a choral first person plural that embodies the speaking voice of a migrant community situated outside the boundaries of citizenship and constituted on the basis of difference. At the very moment when national and ethnic divisions are superimposed (literally: see the naming of individuals as nations and ethnicities in the quotation ahead) on people’s identities, the narrative discloses another linguistic and social dimension that points to Sakai’s heterolingual address – to a way of living in translation whereby “the ‘we’ of a community” is established “without taking national, ethnic, or linguistic affiliation for granted”:77 And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. [. . .] And because we were illegal and afraid

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Living in translation to be discovered we mostly kept to ourselves, stuck to our kind and shied away from those who were not like us. [. . .] And when at work they asked for our papers, we scurried like startled hens and flocked to unwanted jobs, where we met the others, many others. Others with names like myths, names like puzzles, names we had never heard before: Virgilio, Balamugunthan, Faheem, Abdulrahman, Aziz, Baako, Dae-Hyun, Ousmane, Kimatsu. When it was hard to say the many strange names, we called them by their countries. So how on earth do you do this, Sri Lanka? Mexico, are you coming or what? Is it really true that you sold a kidney to come to America, India? Guys, just give Tshaka Zulu a break, the guy is old, I’m just saying. We know you despise this job, Sudan, but deal with it, man. Come, Ethiopia, move, move, move; Israel, Kazakhstan, Niger, brothers, let’s go! The others spoke languages we didn’t know, worshipped different gods, ate what we would not dare touch. But like us, they had left their homelands behind. They flipped open their wallets to show us faded photographs of mothers whose faces bore the same creases of worry as our very own mothers, siblings bleak-eyed with dreams unfulfilled like those of our own, fathers forlorn and defeated like ours. We had never seen their countries but we knew about everything in those pictures; we were not altogether strangers.78

At this point, the narrative breaks through ideas of community and identity constituted in the name of national or ethnolinguistic identification to let us glimpse a different mode of collective subjectivation. “We” here is no longer the signifier of a homogeneous ethnolinguistic or national collectivity. It is the name of a community made of all of those who are different but share the experience of migration and the condition of exploited and illegal subjects: of a “nonaggregate community of foreigners,” whose lives traverse and are traversed by the proliferating borders that produce the “heterogeneous time and space of contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism.”79 We Need New Names thus offers both a powerful literary representation of the affective displacements and ruptures that accompany the experience of migration, and a glimpse of the possibilities for their reconstitution at and across the borders that shape so many precarious lives in our vulnerable and mobile times.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Miller, Blow Up the Humanities, 95. Ngũgĩ, Globalectics, 84–85. See Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story.” Quoted in Meyer, “When the World Watches the World Cup.” Ibid. See https://twitter.com/tejucole?lang=en and www.instagram.com/_tejucole/?hl=en. Both accessed 7 June 2018. In his latest book, Known and Strange Things (2016), Cole critiques the thematic and aesthetic standardisation of social media photography – billions

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of images of “pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch” manipulated with “the same easy algorithms” – even as he acknowledges the new criteria of optical discrimination and pleasure afforded by the increased access and exposure to photographic images, including art photography uncredentialled by the art gallery or book (Cole, Known and Strange Things, 154–159). Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa II.” Adichie, Americanah, 418–423. Adichie and Rifbjerg, “Americanah International Author’s Stage.” Blog accessed 17 June 2018. Toivanen, “Emailing/Skyping Africa.” Isaacs, “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence,” 174. Irr, The Geopolitical Novel, 26. Adenekan, “New Voices, New Media,” 3. Ibid., 2. Ngũgĩ, Globalectics, 84–85. In addition to Ngũgĩ's cyborality, Russell Kaschula has coined the related term “technoauriture” in an attempt to capture “the intersection of orality, the written word and digital technology” (Kaschula and Mostert, “From Oral Literature to Technoauriture,” 4; see also Kaschula, “Imbongi to Slam.”) Adenekan, “New Voices, New Media,” 4. On digital media, communication and cultural production on the African continent, see among others Jacobs, “Emergent Africa Digital Identities” and “Media Perspectives”; Nyamnjoh and Brudvig, eds., Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa; and Mutsvairo, ed., Digital Activism in the Social Media Era. See Felski, The Uses of Literature, 5. The author’s name change was prompted by the experience of migration. When she moved to the United States and people stopped calling her by her nickname Nkha, Bulawayo decided to call herself by what would become her pen name: “It’s actually my mother’s name. My mother was Violet and she died when I was 18 months so I keep the name to sort of honour her memory. Bulawayo is my home town and seeing I live outside that I just wanted to connect to my people.” (Bulawayo cited in Steger, “NoViolet Bulawayo”). In Ndebele, Bulawayo’s African tongue, the prefix “no” means “with”: i.e., NoViolet means “with Violet” – a meaning that is delexicalized and lost in translation. Casanova, The World Republic of Letter. BBC News, “Man Booker Prize 2013.” See Kellogg, “Nigerian American Tope Folarin Takes Caine Prize for African Lit.” Ojwang and Titlested, “African Writing Blurs into ‘World Literature’.” To accompany the relaunch of the series, Penguin established the Penguin Prize for African Writing, which ran for only one year, in 2010. Faced with very low sales of the existing and new titles, Penguin – at the time owned by Pearson Education – decided, without making an official announcement, to put on hold the publication of new titles in the series because it was not financially viable (information gathered from conversations with Lisa Treffry-Goatley, the publisher at Penguin South Africa from 2010 to 2011). Ojwang and Titlestad, “African Writing Blurs into ‘World Literature.’” With reference to the digital media presence of the “émigré writers” whose role as “African cultural bankers” Ojwang and Titlestad complain about, it is ironic that they list “the seductions of the web and social media” as one of the reasons that “African readerships are under siege.” For a more extended discussion that questions the association of the advent of digital media with the decline of African literature, see Frassinelli and Treffry-Goatley, “Digital Media, Literacies and African Literature.” I want to stress that this is not to say that the very real material difficulties encountered by emerging African authors, or that the influence of publishers in the United States or England in determining what does or doesn’t get published, are insignificant. See for instance Nwaubani, “African Books for Western Eyes.”

84 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Living in translation Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. Ibid., 281, original emphasis. Ibid., 281–289, emphases in the original. Ibid., 289. Harris, “Awkward Form,” 7. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. With reference to permanently residing in Africa and being conversant with the everyday realities of the continent, it is also worth noting that the first part of We Need New Names, described by Harris as masterfully rendering the “everyday of Africa,” is clearly set in post-2000 Zimbabwe, long after the author had moved her permanent residence to the United States. Harris, “Awkward Form,” 6. Selasi, “African Literature Doesn’t Exist.” Cole, “Interview.” Wa Ngũgĩ, “African Literature’s Rich Heritage.” Bady, “‘African Writers in a New World’.” Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 145. Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 5–19. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4–6. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 43. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 2. Emphasis in original. In the Caine Prize version of the short story, Bulawayo had even more geopolitically resonant road names like “SADC Street” and “IMF Street.” See “Hitting Budapest,” 44–45. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 12. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 49. Moji, “New Names,” 182. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 153. Ibid., 210. See W.E.B. DuBois’s powerful description in The Souls of Black Folks (2–3): It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Living in translation 85 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 194. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 286. Camille Isaacs argues that computer mediated communication is here shown to be unable to replace the embodied affects of physical proximity and community belonging. See Isaacs, “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence,” 180: “there is an embodiment to affect (not just visual and aural modes) that not even a synchronous form of communication can engender. Despite synchronous CMCs’ implicit promises to bridge the gap between individuals across the globe, Darling is physically excluded from life back home.” Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 197. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 286–287. Irr, The Geopolitical Novel, 23–26. See Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. Irr, The Geopolitical Novel, 26. Ibid., 28–29. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 221–222. Emphasis in original. See Isaacs, “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence,” 183. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 4. See also Sakai, “Translation,” 72–74. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 7–9. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 237–250. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 8–9. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 237–243. Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, xi.

Bibliography Abani, Chris. 2007. The Virgin of Flames. London: Vintage. Achebe, Chinua. 2001 [1958]. Things Fall Apart. London: Penguin. Aednekan, Shola. 2016. “New Voices, New Media: Class, Sex and Politics in Online Nigerian and Kenyan Poetry.” Postcolonial Text 11 (1): 1–21. Adichie, Cimamanda Ngozi. 2009. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Accessed 7 June 2018. www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. ———. 2013. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2013. “We Should All Be Feminists.” Accessed 7 June 2018. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi and Synne Rifbjerg. 2014. “Americanah – International Author’s Stage.” 20 May. Accessed 7 June 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8r-dP9NqX8. Bady, Aaron. 2014. “‘African Writers in a New World’: An Introduction.” Post45 17 October 2014. Accessed 9 June 2018. post45.research.yale.edu/2014/10/african-writers-in-a-newworld-an-introduction/. BBC News. 2013. “Man Booker Prize 2013: Shortlist at a Glance.” 11 September 2014. Accessed 9 June 2018. www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-24035156. Beyoncé. 2013. “***Flawless ft. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” Accessed 7 June 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyuUWOnS9BY. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2011. “Hitting Budapest.” Bostonreview.net November/December 2014: 43–47. Accessed 9 June 2018. bostonreview.net/bulawayo-hitting-budapest.

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———. 2013. We Need New Names. London: Chatto & Windus. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City. New York: Random House. ———. 2014 [2007]. Every Day Is for the Thief. New York: Random House. ———. 2015. “Interview (with Aaron Bady).” Post45 19 January. Accessed 9 June 2018. post45.research.yale.edu/2015/01/interview-teju-cole/. ———. 2016. Known and Strange Things. London: Faber and Faber. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. DuBois, WEB. 1994 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover. Felski, Rita. 2008. The Uses of Literature. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Folarin, Tope. 2013. “Miracle.” The Caine Prize. Accessed 9 July 2014. caineprize.com/ pdf/2013_Folarin.pdf. Frassinelli, Pier Paolo and Lisa Treffry-Goatley. Forthcoming. “Digital Media, Literacies and Africa Literature.” In African Literary and Philosophical Possibilities. Edited by Aretha Phiri. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Harris, Ashleigh. 2014. “Awkward Form and Writing the African Present.” The Salon 7: 3–8. Irr, Caren. 2014. The Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Columbia University Press, Kindle. Isaacs, Camille. 2016. “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence through Social Media in the Work of Adichie and Bulawayo.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 17 (2): 174–188. Jacobs, Sean. 2015. “Emergent Africa Digital Identities: The Story behind ‘Africa Is a Country.’ ” Journal of African Media Studies 7 (3): 345–357. ———. 2017. “Media Perspectives: New Media and African Engagement with the Global Public Sphere.” In Africa’s Image in the 21st Century: From the “Heart of Darkness” to “Africa Rising.” Edited by Mel Bounce, Suzanne Franks and Chris Paterson. London and New York: Routledge, 190–192. Joyce, James. [1914] 2014. Dubliners. London: Penguin. ———. [1922] 1992. Ulysses. London: Penguin. ———. [1939] 2012. Finnegans Wake. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaschula, Russell. 2004, “Imbongi to Slam: The Emergence of a Technologised Auriture.” Southern African Journal of Folklore Studies 14 (2): 45–58. Kaschula, Russell and André Mostert. 2011. “From Oral Literature to Technauriture: What’s in a Name?” World Oral Literature Project. University of Cambridge: Cambridge. Accessed 7 June 2018. www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/237322/ WOLP_OP_04.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Kellogg, Carolyn. 2013. “Nigerian American Tope Folarin Takes Caine Prize for African Lit.” Los Angeles Times 9 July. Accessed 9 June 2018. www.latimes.com/books/ jacketcopy/la-et-jc-nigerian-american-tope-folarin-takes-caine-prize-for-african-lit20130709-story.html. Mengestu, Dinaw. 2007. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. London: Penguin. Meyer, Robinson. 2014. “When the World Watches the World Cup, What Does that Look Like?” The Atlantic 15 July. Accessed 7 June 2018. www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2014/07/when-the-world-watches-the-world-cup-what-does-it-look-like/ 374461/. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Living in translation 87 Miller, Toby. 2012. Blow Up the Humanities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Moji, Polo. 2015. “New Names, Translational Subjectivities: (Dis)Location and (Re)Naming in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.” African Cultural Studies 27 (2): 181–190. Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ. 2013. “African Literature’s Rich Heritage Must Embrace the Wider Horizons.” The Sunday Independent 1 December. Mutsvairo, Bruce, ed. 2016. Digital Activism in the Social Media Era: Critical Reflections on Emerging Trends in Sub-Saharan Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 2012. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press. Nwaubani, Daobi Tricia. 2014. “African Books for Western Eyes.” The New York Times Sunday Review 28 November 2014. Accessed 9 June 2018. www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/ opinion/sunday/africanbooks-for-western-eyes.html?_r=0. Nyamnjoh, Francis and Ingrid Brudvig. 2016. “Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa: South Africa in Comparative Perspective.” In Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Francis Nyamnjoh and Ingrid Brudvig. Pretoria: HSRC Press, 1–18. Ojwang, Dan and Michael Titlestad. 2014. “African Writing Blurs into ‘World’ Literature.” Mail & Guardian 4 April. Accessed 9 June 2018. https://mg.co.za/article/2014-04-03african-writing-blurs-into-world-literature. Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2006. “Translation.” Theory Culture Society 23 (2–3): 71–86. Selasi, Taiye. 2013. “African Literature Doesn’t Exist.” Opening Address, 13th International Literature Festival Berlin 4 September 2014. Accessed 9 June 2018. literaturfestival. com/medien-en/texte-en/opening-speeches/AfricanLiteratureDoesntExistFINAL.pdf. ———. 2013. Ghana Must Go. New York: Penguin. Steger, Jason. 2014. “NoViolet Bulawayo: A Cry for Home.” The Sidney Morning Herald Entertainment 1 August. Accessed 9 June 2018. www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/ noviolet-bulawayo-a-cry-for-home-20140728-zxlul.html. “The Small Redemptions of Lagos.” 2014. Accessed 17 June 2018. https://americanahblog. wordpress.com/. Toivanen, Anna-Leena. 2016. “Emailing/Skyping Africa: New Technologies and Communication Gaps in Contemporary African Women’s Fiction.” Ariel 47 (4): 135–161. Wainaina, Binyavanga. 2005. “How to Write about Africa.” Granta. Accessed 7 June 2018. https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/. ———. 2010. “How to Write about Africa II: The Revenge.” Bidoun. Accessed 7 June 2018. https://bidoun.org/articles/how-to-write-about-africa-ii.

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The borders of the rainbow The rainbow nation is the label coined by Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu after the first democratic elections of 1994 to name post-apartheid South Africa: a nation defined by the harmonious image of different racial, ethnic and cultural identities that coalesce into a multi-coloured whole. The rainbow metaphor was meant to point to the transcendence of a history of racial segregation, oppression and exploitation into a multiracial and multicultural collective identity that would enable South Africa to imagine itself as a diverse national community. It is a metaphor that has been taking a pounding in recent years, as the persistence of racialised socioeconomic inequalities continues to be a stain on both the rainbow and the nation. But it still says something about the foundational role of racial identities and relations in the “new” South Africa. For anything that can be said to be new in this country must rise above the racial divisions and attendant class hierarchies and sociocultural boundaries that South Africa has inherited from the old version of itself. How new is the new South Africa? When this question is asked, it is usually with reference to what in South Africa goes by the shorthand “transformation”: the progress made in undoing the racialised inequalities and divisions left behind by colonialism and apartheid. Less often has this debate lingered on other forms of exclusion and discrimination, such as those linked to citizenship. Notwithstanding the promotion of the idea of an African Renaissance by former President Thabo Mbeki and, more recently, the embracing of Pan-Africanism and decolonisation by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student movements, much of the post-apartheid debate about transformation and identity has left unquestioned the frame of reference of the nation-state and its political prescriptions. While in recent years, post-apartheid rainbowism has been repeatedly called a fallacy because of its failure to deliver social justice and equality among South Africans across the racial divide, it is the concept of nation on which it is premised that is in need of more sustained critical interrogation. In the words of South African author and media commentator Sisonke Msimang, “the founding myth of our post 1994 country has remained insular and exclusive, a story of freedom and the right to life for South Africans.”1

Reframing the rainbow 89 The violent manifestations of xenophobia mainly, albeit not exclusively, directed at African immigrants that have scarred post-apartheid South Africa show, or ought to have shown, the tension between the idea of a rainbow nation and the exclusionary nationalist discourses and practices that frame it. After 1994, the borders that separated the apartheid state from the rest of the African continent have not only been maintained but have solidified, as is shown by the steady increase in the number of deportations since the 1990s, which reached its peak in 2008–2009 (280,837), before the introduction of the new Dispensation of Zimbabweans Project (DZP) permits in April 2009.2 Reliable data about the number of foreign-born migrants who reside in South Africa are hard to come by. According to the census produced by Statistics South Africa in 2011, there were just over 2 million migrants living in South Africa at the time, while in a community survey conducted in 2016, the number had declined to 1.6 million – 2.8% of the entire population. In 2015, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) estimated that there were over 3.14 million international migrants living on South African soil. This was, however, an approximation based “on a series of assumptions” that confirm the difficulty with figuring out what the real number actually is.3 And it is similarly difficult to draw a clear-cut profile of who they are. The 2011 census reported that more than 75% of foreign-born migrants residing in South Africa came from the rest of Africa, with 68% of them from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region (Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe), while the 2016 community survey shows that Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Namibia, United Kingdom, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and India are the top ten sending countries.4 Data also show that migrants living in South Africa belong to a variety of socioeconomic sectors, tend to reside in townships and urban areas, and a significant number of them are asylum seekers.5 But these bits and pieces of information do not provide a detailed and comprehensive description of the immigrant population, and certainly they do not confirm the exaggerated claims that have been broadcast by South African media about “millions of Zimbabweans living in South Africa” or “one-third of Malawi’s population” living and working in the country.6 Still, uncertainty about the number and social profile of migrants from the rest of Africa has not prevented them from being used as scapegoats for many of South Africa’s ills and problems. The most visible manifestations of anti-foreign and, more specifically, antiAfrican sentiments in post-apartheid South Africa are the outbursts of xenophobic violence that have followed one another since 1994. Chief among them are the 2008 brutal attacks that started in the townships and inner-city areas of Johannesburg, and from there spread to the rest of the country. But while the intensity and scale of the xenophobic violence that swept across South Africa in 2008 was and remains unprecedented, this is by no means an isolated episode. African migrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique were assaulted by armed gangs as early as January 1995.7 Xenophobic threats and attacks have been periodic

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occurrences throughout the first two decades and a half of democracy. There were violent attacks against foreigners in the Cape Flats, in Cape Town, in 2000; in the Gauteng township of Zandspruit in 2001; in the Port Elizabeth township of Motherwell in 2007; in Mamelodi township, in 2008; throughout the country in April 2015; and in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, in February 2017, when a large anti-immigrant protest also took place in the capital Tshwane. Between 2010 and 2014, about 200 mostly African foreign nationals were killed in sporadic attacks.8 Nor, contrary to some of the claims that were too hastily made after the 2008 attacks, is xenophobia a “popular” phenomenon “coming up from below” and not “from the elites” or “the country’s leaders.”9 Xenophobic attitudes and discourses have been shown to permeate not only the South African public sphere but also state institutions.10 Statements made by state officials, politicians and traditional leaders include comments about the high number of criminals among undocumented, but also documented, immigrants; the competition for scarce economic resources represented by Africans from the rest of the continent; and African migrants being responsible for spreading diseases. Among these, there are Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s notorious remarks in the late 1990s, when he was Minister of Home Affairs, about the “millions of aliens who are pouring into South Africa” and getting in the way of meeting the needs of its people. Buthelezi singled out, in particular, Nigerian drug dealers and criminals.11 Nor are Buthelezi’s utterances unique. One year before the most violent wave of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid history, a report compiled by the Africa Peer Review Mechanism panel of eminent persons noted that “xenophobia against other Africans is currently on the rise.”12 Likewise, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly warned that South Africa’s public culture is openly xenophobic.13 In 2016, a Human Rights Watch report maintained that statements “by traditional leaders and government officials may have fuelled” the episodes of xenophobic violence that flared up in 2015. The report singles out the words of Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, who “told media that foreigners should ‘pack their bags and go home.’” It goes on to note that the “government did not publicly and unambiguously condemn Zwelithini’s reckless and inflammatory statements.” One month after these statements were uttered, “thousands of people looted foreign-owned shops and attacked non-South African nationals in the city Durban, province of KwaZulu-Natal. As a result, several people died and over 2000 were displaced.”14 In the same year, South African Small Business Minister Lindiwe Zulu commented on the xenophobic attacks and looting of foreign-owned shops in Soweto, Johannesburg, by saying that foreigners “need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is to the people of this country first and foremost. [. . .] They cannot barricade themselves in and not share their practices with local business owners.”15 If we fast forward to July 2017, we have more of the same, with the Deputy Ministry of Police Bongani Mkongi ascribing responsibility for crime and hijacking of buildings in Johannesburg to “foreign nationals.” In a statement that was condemned by the South African Human Rights Commission as grossly incorrect and dangerously xenophobic, Mkongi said: “How can a city in South Africa be 80% foreign national? That is dangerous. South Africans have surrendered their own city to

Reframing the rainbow 91 the foreigners.”16 But these statements are not the only way that the South African state and its representatives have targeted migrants from the rest of the continent, who find themselves at the receiving end of documented abuse of power, harassment, stereotyping, extortion and gratuitous use of violence by the police and at the notorious Lindela repatriation centre near Johannesburg.17 According to surveys conducted since the late 1990s, xenophobia finds expression in the attitudes of broad sectors of society. South African citizens have been found to be hostile to foreigners across class, gender and racial lines – though some groups, such as the white minority, have been found to be more hostile than others.18 The views expressed indicate that a growing number of South Africans want strict limits placed on immigration and electrified borders, favour deporting foreign nationals who do not contribute to the economy, and are of the opinion that there are too many foreigners in the country.19 It has also been found that South Africans tend to see immigrants from North America and Europe more favourably than those from the rest of the continent, who are believed to create unemployment and to be a drain on the country’s economic resources.20 For instance, a survey of social attitudes conducted in 2012 indicated that the majority of the adult population identified African immigrants, and especially Nigerians, “as the most undesirable foreign immigrant group.”21 Hostile attitudes towards other Africans clearly point to some of the contradictions that undermine the inclusive ideal of a rainbow nation, beginning with the statement, contained in the Preamble to the South African Constitution that “South Africa belongs who all who live in it”: We, the people of South Africa, Recognise the injustices of our past; Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity. Preamble to the Constitution of South Africa, 1996.22 The same phrase also appears in the Freedom Charter, drawn up by the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg, on 25–26 June 1955, and adopted by the African National Congress and its allies as a manifesto in the struggle against apartheid: We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.23 Perhaps nowhere are the contradictions of rainbow nation discourse revealed more starkly than in the juxtaposition of two events that bring into relief how, in Gillian

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Hart’s words, “the multiple, conflicting articulations of nationalism [. . .] can – and do – pull in different directions”:24 the xenophobic attacks of 2008 and the soccer World Cup that took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010. On the one hand, we have the violence and brutality that on 11 May 2008 spread from Alexandra, Johannesburg’s oldest township, to the province of Gauteng and to other cities around the country. Over two weeks, gangs of South Africans armed with pangas, spears and knobkieries went on a rampage against other Africans, as well as South Africans from ethnic and linguistic minorities, which resulted in the killing of more than 60 people, the rape of dozens, the wounding of almost 700 and the displacement of more than 100,000.25 On the other hand, there is the arrival in South Africa of the most popular modern sports event, celebrated with the dramatic expressions of national and continental pride epitomised by Nelson Mandela’s breaking into tears live on television at the announcement of the selection of South Africa as a host in 2004. The strident contrast between these two moments in post-apartheid South African history not only speaks to some of the limits and failures of the project of the rainbow nation but it also highlights to the difficulty in finding interpretive categories to interpret the paradoxes they represent and symptomatise. How do we reconcile the pogroms of 2008 with the joyous image of South Africans who, after the elimination of the national team at the first round of the soccer World Cup, revived Pan-Africanism by supporting Ghana all the way to the quarterfinals? As Ghana approached the game against Uruguay on 2 July 2010 – which they lost on penalties – the front pages of local newspapers shouted their support for the fellow Africans. “It’s time for BaGhana” (a wordplay on the nickname of the South African national team “Bafana Bafana” – Zulu for “the boys the boys”) titled Johannesburg’s The Star, while The Citizen responded with “Go Baghana! Continent unites behind Black Stars, Africa’s last world cup hope” (“Black Stars” is the nickname of Ghana’s national soccer team).26 Yet, even as these words appeared on the billboards that advertise newspapers in the streets of South African cities, they were surrounded by the sound of renewed threats of xenophobic violence.

Nationalism, citizenship and xenophobia In an article published in the Cape Times a few weeks before the beginning of the tournament, amidst predictions that another wave of violent attacks against African migrants would follow the World Cup, Michael Neocosmos argued that South African citizens were “swept along by [a] politics of fear.” He asked whether “this fear [can] be seen as an indication of a ‘neo-apartheid’ – a form of racial and ethnic exclusion – which, while exhibiting some similarities with the version we have tried to overcome, is not simply a left-over but a new product of postapartheid society.” For Neocosmos, this fear is reconducible to the ideological interpellation of South African post-apartheid nationalism, which has turned “an emancipatory ideology in the context of a struggle for freedom” into “a chauvinistic one which expresses a denial of freedom.”27

Reframing the rainbow 93 The apartheid state had turned Black South Africans into aliens. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were treated as non-citizens who belonged not to South Africa but to the various Bantustans that the apartheid government had created to segregate them – Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Venda, Gazankulu, Lebowa, QwaQwa, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele and KwaZulu. After 1994, citizenship continues to be used to differentially categorise the people who live and work in the country. New discriminatory practices are engendered by what Neocosmos describes as the reduction of citizenship to indigeneity as the salient political identity implanted by the post-apartheid state.28 As Loren Landau also argues, the new democratic dispensation reproduces the apartheid logic of a divide “between a deserving citizenry and outsiders who can be denied legal identities despite their proximity and utility” by applying it to new categories of persons: whereas “the apartheid state sustained an onslaught on South African citizens’ residential rights,” the “post-apartheid state has employed similar techniques to alienate and isolate non-nationals.”29 Too often, notwithstanding the periodic official celebrations of Pan-Africanism or the African Renaissance, in South African public discourse there seems to be no perceived contradiction between striving to undo the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and a politics of belonging that divides African people into “citizens” and “foreigners” according to the borders also inherited from colonialism and apartheid. For Neocosmos, this blind spot is rooted in the post-apartheid state’s interpellation that associates access to rights, resources and entitlements to a conception of citizenship that is “‘exclusive’ and territorialised in the form of indigeneity.”30 The upshot of this construction of citizenship is a “politics of fear” that construes other Africans who live in South Africa as “foreigners” who threaten the gains of democracy and take what state discourse and legislation prompt South Africans to see as “our” resources.31 To be sure, the nexus between xenophobia, citizenship and state prescriptions based on indigeneity can be qualified in a number of ways. There is, first of all, South African exceptionalism, also inherited from colonialism and apartheid, which sees the rest of the continent as a poor and corrupt backwater from whose desperate or opportunistic inhabitants national wealth and resources must be protected.32 The racist stereotypes that were used to rationalise and justify apartheid have been replaced by crude prejudices that now single out particular nationalities that are identified by accent or physical characteristics such as a darker skin and other stereotypes – the association of Nigerians with drug dealing, that of Zimbabweans with illegal immigration, and so on. The othering and stereotyping of other Africans mirrors how many South Africans see themselves in relation to the rest of Africa: part of it but exceptional, superior to the rest of the continent’s inhabitants and living in a better and more desirable country. Hence the use of terms such as “Afrophobia” or “negrophobic xenophobia” to explain the racialised othering that too often informs South Africans’ perceptions of black Africans from across the country’s borders.33 It is also important to stress the class character of post-apartheid xenophobic attacks. Those who have been physically harmed are generally poor Africans,

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while the rich, both black and white, have for the most part been spared – hence Nigel Gibson’s argument that the rich, who “were not singled out for attack,” “were by definition not ‘foreigners’ in South Africa.”34 But even if the most visible and violent manifestations of xenophobia have concentrated in poor areas, it would be inaccurate to relegate xenophobic attitudes uniquely to the poorer sectors of society. As I have already noted, studies have shown that xenophobic views and sentiments are present not only in South African public discourse but also across the social spectrum. In addition, one can point to the rural-urban divide inherited from the apartheid state’s spatial planning and regulation, whereby Black people were only allowed to enter white urban areas as labourers and temporary sojourners but could not live in them, which has been seen as still influencing official and popular discourses about rural-urban migration.35 Together with ethnic chauvinism, the latter helps explain why South Africans from minority ethnolinguistic groups, such as Tsonga or Pedi, were also perceived as outsiders and targeted in the xenophobic attacks of 2008 – a third of the people killed were South African citizens. Even though some might have been mistaken for foreigners, ethnic identity did play a significant role in selecting the targets for attacks, who were often identified using the Old Testament method of the shibboleth, whereby people were asked to prove their ethnonational belonging by correctly pronouncing the Zulu word for elbow, indololwane.36 Another related explanatory frame is the spatial layout that South African urban areas have inherited from apartheid. The post-apartheid city is still a segregated city. Segregation is now on the basis of wealth, which determines access to often highly securitised or gated middle and upper class suburbs, and continues to relegate the black urban majority to townships, informal settlements and city centres and neighbourhoods where they are now threatened by gentrification projects that increase the cost of living in “upgraded” areas and push out poor people to make room for more affluent dwellers.37 In this context, the African migrants who share the same living areas and conditions become easily targetable scapegoats for the effects of socioeconomic marginalisation whose sources and beneficiaries are beyond the physical reach of South African urban poor.38 When the xenophobic attacks happened in 2008, many commentators pointed to the anger and frustration for lack or poor quality of “service delivery” – the provision of housing, water and electricity connections, sanitation, jobs and other forms of social support – in poor urban areas. They also noted how these attacks were part of the generalised violence, inextricably linked to socioeconomic inequality, which pervades many aspects of everyday life in South African cities.39 Besides structural factors, scholars and commentators have also emphasised local ones, including competition for political and economic power in marginalised urban areas where lack of political leadership and the takeover of its function by local gangsters provides an explanation for both xenophobic violence and the state’s failure to contain it. For instance, the Centre for Forced Migration Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand highlighted the role played by local and aspirant leaders, during the 2008 wave of xenophobic attacks, in

Reframing the rainbow 95 mobilising “residents to attack and evict foreign nationals as a means of strengthening their personal political or economic power within the local community. In many instances, violence has been organised by business owners intent on eliminating competitors.”40 Some politicians – most prominently former South African President Thabo Mbeki – even denied that these were xenophobic attacks and attributed their cause to local episodes of criminality.41 To find out what is at stake in the everyday politics of xenophobia, we can also turn to Johannesburg filmmaker Andy Spitz’s documentary Voetsek! Us? Brothers? (2017), which provides a forensic examination of the mundane realities that led and can at any moment lead again to the explosion of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Zooming in on one of the areas where violence erupted in 2008, the informal settlement of Makause, in the province of Gauteng, over a period of almost ten years, the film highlights a whole repertoire of motivations for this violence that include the opportunities for theft offered by the vulnerability of undocumented foreigners, the absence of a political alternative to the status quo, and how foreigners are turned into scapegoats and easy targets for the anger produced by an array of social and economic crises. All of which is discursively compounded by the construction of non-citizens as “foreigners” and “aliens” who must go back to their countries and solve their problems, rather than coming to South Africa and taking from “us.” As we hear the various interviewees saying, “foreigners, we don’t want foreigners”; “They must go back to Zimbabwe. They must sort out their problems like we did a long time ago in South Africa”; “There is no government here. In Makause government doesn’t exist”; “I sold about eight houses around here that I took after the xenophobia. I sold them for 2000 rands, 10,000 rands, 8000 rands because I didn’t have any money”; “If I get rid of that one tomorrow maybe I’ll get a job.” The documentary also portrays how xenophobia is resisted and contested. It shows how, after the dust has settled, the realisation eventually sinks in that the problems that getting rid of foreigners was supposed to resolve in fact remain. In the words of Lulana Sithole, a South African resident of Makause: I can’t see any changes since we chased them away. [. . .] They are crying that foreigners take their jobs. [. . .] I thought about it and wondered. Couldn’t this be resolved by discussing it together saying “gents and ladies as fellowworkers we have a problem. When you accept low-wages it affects us like this. Please let’s unite as black people fighting for better pay.” Voetsek! Us? Brothers? documents how the conflicts over inclusion and exclusion play themselves out in the making, unmaking and remaking of a local community. As it was noted by a member of the audience at the Human Rights Festival screening of the documentary at Constitution Hill, in Johannesburg, on 24 March 2018, local communities, including that of Makause and others where xenophobic violence has erupted, are by no means unified: “poor people organised against xenophobia. What we also need to give attention to is how poor people in these organisations mobilised against violence and stood with foreign

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nationals against xenophobic violence. It happened in very many communities and continues to happen.”42 But amidst these divisions, conflicts and contestations, the question remains as to where the root causes of the widespread presence of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa are to be found. Much as South African exceptionalism, socioeconomic and spatial inequalities, diffuse violence and local factors provide important contextual elements that contribute to explain how, where and to some extent why xenophobic violence has recurrently erupted since 1994, the fundamental question remains how the “us” versus “them” is constituted to select the targets of xenophobic violence. How is the dividing line drawn between attacker and victim? The fact that Africans from other countries and non-nationals have been primarily – albeit not exclusively – at the receiving end of xenophobic violence clearly singles out nationality as a determining factor. In his analysis of postapartheid state politics and legislation, Neocosmos reminds us of how “the process of ‘nation-building’ (whether explicit or implicit), is not simply about the creation of ‘national unity’ around a common political project, it is also about demarcating that unity from others – from ‘foreigners.’”43 Mahmood Mamdani agrees that “both the explanation and the responsibility” for xenophobic views are ultimately to be found in post-apartheid nationalist politics and political leadership, which have “provided the lead and signalled to the population this [xenophobic view] by defining in narrow terms who belongs, who has entitlements and who can vote.”44 The recurrent references to access to resources and entitlements such as housing, jobs and rights that form the core of xenophobic discourse point to national belonging and citizenship as the key criteria of discrimination. As Neocosmos persuasively argues, these criteria are not in opposition but in continuity with “a particular kind of state politics [. . .] associated with a specific discourse of citizenship.”45 The post-apartheid South African state’s construction of citizenship and the processes of differential inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered lay bare some of the ambiguities that surround the statement that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” Even the Bill of Rights that constitutes Chapter 2 of the South African Constitution qualifies this statement by specifying that while basic human rights – such as the right to dignity, life, freedom, security, water, education, housing and healthcare – are granted to “everyone,” political rights such as the right to form a political party, participate in its activities, stand as a candidate and vote in elections, as well as basic economic rights such the “freedom to choose their trade, occupation or profession freely,” and indeed the right to “citizenship” and “the right to enter, to remain in and to reside anywhere in the Republic” are only granted to South African “citizens.”46 By distinguishing between “citizens” and “everyone,” the fundamental law of the country demarcates the boundaries between citizens and others and grants them differential rights. It gives access to rights and benefits that are denied to those who, even if they live in the same place, are excluded from citizenship. Citizenship constitutes a community defined in opposition to those who do not belong to it – foreigners or non-citizens (although,

Reframing the rainbow 97 as South African inequalities indicate, the rights and benefits of citizenship, such as socioeconomic rights, are unevenly distributed even among citizens).47 In 1995, with the adoption of the new Citizenship Act, South Africa introduced a restricted version of jus solis as a criterion for granting citizenship, whereby to be recognised as a South African citizen a person must be born in South Africa to South African citizens or permanent residents. Other immigrants can only acquire citizenship through naturalisation after they have obtained a valid permanent residence permit or certificate of exemption. According to the website of the South African Department of Home Affairs, in “terms of granting Permanent Residency Permits, emphasis is placed on immigrants who are in a position to make a meaningful contribution to broadening the economic base of South Africa.” Criteria that determine eligibility to apply for a permanent residence permit – which can only be obtained after having resided in South Africa on the basis of a work permit for a minimum period of five years – include being in possession of a permanent work offer, having exceptional skills and qualifications, intending to establish a business, qualifying as a refugee or retired person, being financially independent or being a relative of a South African citizen or permanent residence permit holder.48 In addition to the Citizenship Act, a Green Paper on International Migration was drafted in 1997 but rejected by the government. It was followed in 1999 by a White Paper with the same name that became a Bill in 2000, and by the adoption of the Refugees Act in 1998, as well as by the first comprehensive Immigration Act in 2002.49 A new Green Paper on International Migration was released by the Department of Home Affairs in June 2016 and turned into a White Paper that provides recommendations on policy and strategic interventions on 28 July 2017. The new paper, whose purpose is to determine who has the right to enter and stay in South Africa and under what conditions, recommends striking a balance between “the country’s ability to adequately embrace global opportunities” and “safeguarding our sovereignty and ensuring public safety and national security.”50 Thus, while it acknowledges that migration does represent “opportunities,” the paper addresses migration policy in terms of a tension between embracing these opportunities and the security threats posed by migrants. Furthermore, even though the paper importantly advocates a shift to a more “Africa-oriented” outlook, “as opposed to the current one that is based on historical ties with Europe,”51 it promotes selective inclusion on the basis of socioeconomic status and other categorisations that divide migrants into socially and economically more or less useful and desirable. The paper recommends putting in place “adequate policy, strategies, institutions and capacity for attracting, recruiting and retaining international migrants with the necessary skills and resources.”52 It also suggests that the existing system, which is deemed to have produced “a misconception that immigrants have a constitutional right to progress towards permanent residency or citizenship status (naturalisation),”53 should be replaced by one that delinks residency and citizenship. The paper argues that granting citizenship to foreign nationals should be considered as “exceptional” and conditional on attending a compulsory induction or orientation programme.54 In sum, the paper’s declared aim is finding ways

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of selecting, attracting and retaining “sought-after international migrants (tourists, professionals and business persons),” while reducing “irregular migration from neighbouring and other countries.”55 The entire approach of what is presented as a progressive step forward in the South African state’s approach to migration is thus geared to easing access and granting residence permits to desirable categories of persons and excluding those migrants who are not considered economically and socially valuable. The most recent White Paper, as well as existing legislation, bear witness to Landau’s argument that the “logos of contemporary citizenship” insists in categorising South African residents according to a division between “an entitled majority” and “those who, by virtue of their origins, can only claim social legitimacy and recognition by demonstrating their utility to a true and deserving political community.”56 “What then,” asks Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, “of the radical declaration of the Freedom Charter and the South African Constitution that South Africa belongs to all those who live in it,” including “those who are not legitimate citizens,” such as “‘illegal aliens’ and new immigrants?”57 How do we reconcile the universalism of rights promoted by the Preamble to the South African Constitution with the exclusionary dimension built into the conception of citizenship adopted by the post-apartheid South African state? These questions in turn raise two sub-questions. The first is whether a conception of citizenship derived from a European tradition based on a sedentary notion of national identity and belonging is still adequate to our continent and more broadly to the rest of the world. As Neocosmos notes: it has really to be questioned whether a concept of “citizen” developed [. . .] in a context when nationhood and birthplace coincided, is still applicable [. . .] when this correspondence no longer exists and has ceased to exist for some time, most notably in Africa. Neocosmos adds that perhaps “it is time to replace such a concept by one of ‘people from all walks of life’ or ‘persons from everywhere.’”58 In a similar way, Achille Mbembe also remarks that “the liberal democratic form has been too reliant on the idea of the citizen” and that “the time has come to supplement the idea of the citizen by that of the right to mobility granted to every single human person under, of course, a certain set of conditions.”59 This right is in fact already enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, which grants everyone “the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”60 But even when freedom of movement is guaranteed and recognised, citizenship remains a contested terrain of inclusion and exclusion. In postcolonial Africa, an important point of departure to look for an alternative to the regime of citizenship implanted by the post-apartheid South African state’s prescriptions can be found in the chapter on “Algeria’s European Minority” in Frantz Fanon’s L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959), published in English with the title of A Dying Colonialism (1965). Fanon, a member of the central committee of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), was himself

Reframing the rainbow 99 a “foreigner” from Martinique.61 Writing about Algeria’s European minority and the participation of French democrats in the Algerian war of liberation, Fanon states, “in the new society that is being built there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian. In tomorrow’s independent Algeria it will be up to every Algerian to assume Algerian citizenship or to reject it in favor of another.”62 It is an inclusive conception of citizenship that provides a counterpoint to the warning about the regression of nationalism “to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism” under the leadership of “bourgeois” postcolonial elites that Fanon would issue a few years later, in the chapter on “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” that he included in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).63 It still also prompts us to pose the question of how to reimagine an inclusive notion of citizenship for the present.64 The second sub-question has to do with the practices of migration and the presence and everyday struggles of migrants in post-apartheid South Africa: with how their claims to rights and freedoms – which, importantly, are not the same as a desire or request for assimilation – challenge the borders of citizenship sanctioned by its legally codified construction and turn them into a site of struggle. In other words, how do migrants and their presence enrich our political imagination? What tensions do they produce in the politics of identity and belonging that ground the project of South African nation building (beginning with the underlying contradiction between the inclusive “we” of the Preamble to the South African Constitution and the post-apartheid state’s prescriptions about citizenship)?65 In the rest of the chapter, I probe this cluster of questions by looking at a variety of media texts – literary texts, feature films, documentaries and media campaigns – that enable us to explore some of the opportunities for critical intervention opened up by representations of xenophobia and by creative responses to it. How social phenomena are represented matters: representations shape and account for how the world is perceived. Intervening in the conflict of representations that construct social phenomena from different angles, works of imagination can provide alternative perceptions and imaginings of the world around us. They can create new lenses through which we look at existing social realities and arrangements, new languages that rationalise, narrativise, interrogate, critique or transcend them.66 In the section that follows, we will shift our attention to this work of representation. As in the rest of the book, we will cross the boundaries between genres and media. Welcome to Our Hillbrow We are now going to look at cultural products that address and represent xenophobia and invite us to rethink the idea of national community from the standpoint of those it excludes. In literature and narrative non-fiction, these comprise a growing body of literary works that includes Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline (2000), K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), Simao Kikamba’s Going Home (2005), Andrew Brown’s Refuge (2009), Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013) and Kopano Matlwa’s

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Period Pain (2016), as well as the photographs and life narratives collected by Glynis Cacherty in Suitcase Stories: Refugee Children Reclaim Their Identities (2008), Johnny Steinbergs account of the life of Somali refugee Asad Abdullah in A Man of Good Hope (2014), and Loren Landau and Tanya Pampalone’s collection of personal stories I Want to go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis (2018). Moving to cinema, South African feature films that have zoomed in on stories of migration and xenophobia include Zola Maseko’s The Foreigner (1997), Khalo Matabane’s Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (2005), Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), Jahmil Quebeka’s A Small Town Called Descent (2011) and Akin Omotoso’s Man on Ground (2011). To these, we must add the documentaries produced by the Filmakers Against Racism collective in the wake of the 2008 xenophobic attacks: Andy Spitz’s Angels on Our Shoulders, Adze Ugah’s The Burning Man, Danny Turken’s Affectionately Known as Alex, Okepne Ojang, Kyle O’Donoghue and Miki Redelinghuys’s Congo My Foot, Omelga Mthiyane and Riaan Hendricks’s Baraka, Rehad Desai’s Two Camps and Tumi Moraka’s Nowhere Else to Go. As I have already mentioned, more recently, Johannesburg-based independent filmmaker Andy Spitz has produced a documentary, Voetsek! Us? Brothers?, which retraces the history of xenophobic violence from 2008 to the present by recording the lives of both victims and perpetrators in the Johannesburg informal settlement of Makause, as well as in other locations that have been the sites of xenophobic attacks. Among the literary texts, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow remains the aesthetically and politically most ambitious attempt not only to represent xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa but also to reframe “the new democratic rainbowism” through this lens.67 Mpe’s novel looks at the nation with an estranged gaze. It provides a fine-grained, photographic representation of contemporary South African places and social dramas – the eruption of xenophobia, the AIDS pandemic – which are playfully described as “stuff that would be called surrealism or magic realism or some other strange realism were it simply told or written as a piece of fiction.”68 Welcome to Our Hillbrow opens with the 1998 soccer World Cup, the second to which the South African national team, Bafana Bafana was admitted after the anti-apartheid boycott of South African sport by the international community. The first chapter, titled “Hillbrow: The Map,” sends us back to the celebrations for Bafana Bafana’s victory against Ivory Coast in 1995, soon after the birth of the new South Africa: You would recall the child, possibly seven years old or so, who got hit by a car. Her mid-air screams still ring in your memory. When she hit the concrete pavements of Hillbrow, her screams died with her [. . .]. The traffic cops, arriving a few minutes later, found that the season of arrest had already passed. Most people, after the momentary stunned silence of witnessing the sour fruits of soccer victory, resumed their singing. Shosholoza [. . .] Shosholoza [. . .] drowned the choking sobs of the deceased child’s mother [. . .] Welcome

Reframing the rainbow 101 to our Hillbrow! you heard one man say to his female companion, who was a seeming newcomer to this place of bustling activity, visiting it for the first time since the conspiracy between her parents and fate decided to usher her presence onto the face of the Earth.69 Through the juxtaposition of the scene of jubilation for the soccer victory, complete with the singing of the traditional song Shosholoza, and the death of the child, the novel introduces what will become one of the central themes of the narrative: the “sour fruits” of nationalism. As a counterpoint, we have the repetition of the phrase “welcome to our Hillbrow.” The refrain welcomes the reader and the protagonists to the most densely populated neighbourhood in Johannesburg’s inner city; an area that emblematises urban decay and rampaging criminality, but that is also one of South Africa’s most cosmopolitan urban areas. In this finely crafted opening sequence, Refentše, the young protagonist who in order to pursue his academic studies has migrated to Johannesburg from the small rural village of Tiragalong, is accompanied by the narrative voice in his daily walk to the metropolitan campus of the University of the Witwatersrand. With a splitting of temporalities that reminds of many a modernist novel, the urban crossing also becomes a journey into memory. It prompts reminiscences of the first stories about Hillbrow, the “menacing monster,” that the protagonist had heard from the migrants who came back to visit Tiragalong, and of the “children of Tiragalong” who did not come back, swallowed by the irresistible “lure of the monster.”70 These memories are followed by the recollection of the protagonist’s first direct experiences of the streets, the places and the inhabitants of Hillbrow, and above all of their xenophobic hatred of makwerekwere (the derogatory onomatopoeia used to single out foreigners, derived from the sound, kwere kwere, that according to local prejudice other Africans make when they speak their strange languages). The narrative builds up to a crescendo that culminates with the upbeat stream of consciousness that, immediately after a reference to the suicide of the protagonist, closes the opening chapter: the streets of Hillbrow and Berea and Braamfontein overflowing with Makwerekwere come to pursue green pastures after hearing that Rolihlahla Mandela welcomes guests and visitors unlike his predecessors who erected deadly electric wire fences around the boundaries of South Africa trying to keep out the barbarians from Mozambique Zaïre Nigeria Congo Ivory Coast Zimbabwe Angola Zambia from all over Africa fleeing their war-thorn countries populated with starvation like Ethiopia. [. . .] Makwerewkere stretching their legs and spreading like pumpkin plants filling every corner of our city and turning each patch into a Hillbrow coming to take our jobs in the new democratic rainbowism of African Renaissance that threatened the future of the locals Bafana Bafana fans momentarily forgetting xenophobia and investing their hopes in the national team whose entry into the World Cup was its first attempt in such matters the fans also investing in the Moroccan team the Nigerian Super Eagles and singing at least they are African unlike the

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Reframing the rainbow French the English the Danes and all that jazz and xenophobia. [. . .] All these things that you have heard seen heard about felt smelt believed disbelieved shirked embraced brewing in your consciousness would find chilling haunting echoes in the simple words [. . .] Welcome to our Hillbrow . . .71

“Welcome to Our Hillbrow”: this is the place from where originates the tragic story that involves the protagonist, Refentše, and his circle of lovers, friends and family relations. Refentše’s suicide causes the killing of his mother, accused by the people of Tiragalong of having practiced a deadly witchcraft that destroyed her son’s brain. This is followed by the suicide of Refentše’s girlfriend Lerato, and then by the death of the first “bone” of Refentše’s “heart,” his teenage love Refilwe, who after moving to Oxford to pursue her postgraduate studies discovers that she has contracted AIDS (independently of her new Nigerian lover who, like Refilwe, is at the terminal stage of the illness). The final chapter, “The Returnee,” opens with Refilwe’s return to Tiragalong, where she prepares to die surrounded by the prejudices about makwerekwere and her stigmatised illness, which she had herself previously contributed to disseminate. Her last move is to join Refentše and the other protagonists of the story in “Heaven,” where she is welcomed by the closing words of the book: “Refilwe, Child of our World and other Worlds [. . .] Welcome to our Heaven.”72 The final and the other welcomes are extended by the unusual second person singular of the narrative voice, which incorporates both the addresser and the addressee: the unnamed narrator addressing the characters and the characters addressed. This is the fictional device from which originates the cosmopolitan humanism that Mpe’s novel strives to promote. The second person singular with which the narrative voice interpellates the protagonist corresponds to an inclusive you that, as the various narrative threads unravel, is extended to other characters in the story, most notably Refilwe, so as to create a network of relationships that keeps expanding and gives shape to a community that constitutes an alternative to the one represented by the nation – South Africa being tellingly absent from the names of places to which the characters are welcomed. In this sense, the use of the second person singular echoes that of the inclusive possessive “our” that we find in the title of the novel and functions as a refrain throughout the text. There are two questions that the reader cannot escape: who is it that welcomes the characters, as well as the reader, to “our” Hillbrow? And “whose” Hillbrow? Both questions point to how the novel invites us to rethink citizenship by juxtaposing it to a cosmopolitan and inclusive version of belonging that is metonymically represented by Hillbrow, a site of dwelling open to all of those who choose it as their abode. As with the addressees of the narrative voice, the concentric circles of inclusion created by the possessive pronoun “our” also progressively expand, so that after “our Hillbrow” we have “our Oxford,” “our England” and “our Heathrow.”73 These are, however, all places characterised by both the international composition of the people who inhabit or pass through them and by the prejudices

Reframing the rainbow 103 of the locals towards the “foreigners” who have arrived to occupy what they consider their land: Our Heathrow strongly reminded Refilwe of our Hillbrow and the xenophobia it engendered. She learnt there, at our Heathrow, that there was another word for foreigners that was not very different in connotation from Makwerekwere [. . .]. Except that it was a much more widely used term: Africans.74 The open inclusivity of the possessive pronoun “our” thus comes constantly into conflict with the barriers created by the identitarian outbursts that in Hillbrow, Heathrow, England or Oxford re-establish those divisions between us and them that the narrative voice tries at every step to overcome by integrating places and identities: “Hillbrow in Hillbrow. Hillbrow in Cape Town. Cape Town in Hillbrow. Oxford in both. Both in Oxford. Welcome to our All.”75 This conflict is reverberated throughout the novel by the performative ambiguity of the possessive pronoun “our,” which encapsulates the tension between the novel’s utopian impulse and the identitarian closures of the inhabitants of the places that symbolise and embody both the possibility of an inclusive cosmopolitanism and its negation. It is only in “our Heaven,” the place where the narrative voice welcomes Refilwe in the last sentence of the text, that a version of a “we” that knows no boundaries is finally realised. This is a place where reality is constituted by what “exists in the imagination of those who commemorate our worldly life” and who “through the stories that they tell of us, continue to celebrate or condemn our existence even after we have passed on from this Earth.”76 It is a space located in memory, in the world of storytelling, in a “Heaven” where the main characters reunite to “discuss ways of turning their spoken and unspoken thoughts into written fictions and poems.”77 The utopian impulse of the novel and its tragic dimension are thus complementary to each other. The narrative intimates that the radical cosmopolitanism it portends can only be actualised in an imaginary world far removed from reality. But even so, if this denouement can be read as a metaphorisation and idealistic celebration of a cosmopolitan ideal that does not manage to achieve a properly political dimension, Welcome to Our Hillbrow still articulates the immanent conflict between a defensive identitarian politics and contingent forms of life in common that subvert its privileged points of reference.78 Hence the tension encapsulated by the narrative voice, which in the very moment that welcomes us to “our Hillbrow” recalls both the forms of exclusion and identitarian attachments that characterise this place and its precarious and constantly evolving forms of communal life. Welcome to Our Hillbrow brings into view the conflict between migrants whose lives unsettle and reconfigure ideas of belonging and the exclusionary responses that they have to confront. At the same time, the novel’s displacement of its utopian impulse, whereby the inclusive cosmopolitanism it promotes is resituated into “our Heaven,” bears witness to the difficulties in imagining a post-identitarian politics that could actualise a new conception of belonging: a politics born out of

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struggle against an exclusionary idea of belonging that would valorise what Sandro Mezzadra describes as “the common experience of not belonging, the collective claim to an irrepressible difference.”79 Welcome to Our Hillbrow thus invites us to imagine the possibility of constituting a “we” that transcends existing identitarian parameters, while at the same time making us aware of its precarity and of the borders and collectivity boundaries that – in Hillbrow, South Africa and elsewhere – stand in the way of its actualisation. Man on Ground In Akin Omotoso’s feature film Man on Ground, a fictionalised depiction of xenophobic violence on the East Rand, Johannesburg, the message also hinges on the constitution of an inclusive “we” vis-à-vis the “us” and “them” logic of xenophobia. This message is encapsulated by the Facebook campaign that accompanied the release of the film, “We Are from Here.” “Here,” as the image of our planet on the campaign poster illustrates, is the planet earth, and “we” is the whole of humanity. This is also the message elaborated in the film by London-based Nigerian banker Ade (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) in a whisky-fuelled conversation with South African small entrepreneur Timothi (Fana Mokoena) against the background noise of xenophobic violence: ADE: What are they doing out there? TIMOTHI: Tensions about houses. Who

can get them and who can’t. Usuallyforeigners can’t. That fire out there, it’s a call for people to listen to us. ADE: I saw an interview once with an astronaut, who said that when in space one realises, while gazing on the planet earth, that we have mistakenly constructed these narrow borders of geography in order to mimic the narrow borders of our mind. However, when looking upon the planet earth from space, the truth that this is our collective home becomes blatantly obvious. I only hope that we realise that the labels “us” and “them” are one and the same. The message could not have been clearer: we share a common humanity, we all inhabit this planet, our collective home, and we should share that, too. These are undoubtedly laudable sentiments, but I want to ask whether they can form the basis for an effective anti-xenophobic politics. To begin with, even though interviews with the director and the “We Are from Here” campaign suggest that Omotoso intended the film’s audience to embrace Ade’s reflection about the view from space that reveals a planet undivided by borders, in the film Ade’s monologue comes across as a non sequitur. As Timothi explains, the conflict is about the allocation of resources – government’s houses. Unless it addresses the concrete issues tied to the distribution of wealth and entitlement to these resources, the statement that we are all from the same planet is a formally correct but ultimately empty abstraction. Indeed, one cannot not consider here Ade’s class position and compromised role, as a well-off banker, within the existing structures of socioeconomic inequality. We are indeed all from “here,” but we

Reframing the rainbow 105 are positioned within hierarchies of power and wealth and at the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination, oppression, exploitation and inequality. We are constituted, defined and cut across by socioeconomic and political relations, and by markers of identity that go by the names of – among others – culture, nation, language, ethnicity, religion, class, race, gender and sexual orientation. We are the subjects of rights bestowed upon us or denied by state prescriptions about who is or is not a citizen. As Phaswane Mpe’s novel invites us to contemplate vis-à-vis post-apartheid democratic rainbowism, a more inclusive “we” than the one prescribed by exclusionary nationalism is something that needs to be created and invented (whether or not Mpe’s novel offers a viable version of this “we” is another matter). Man on Ground came out in 2011 to significant critical acclaim. It was nominated for seven 2012 African Academy Movie Awards and won one for best supporting actor (Fana Mokoena), as well as the Special Jury Prize for the film. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, was selected as the only South African film at the Berlin International Film Festival, and won Best Director, Best Editor, Best Producer and Best Director of Photography at the African Audio-Visual Awards. It also got generally good reviews. Africa Is a Country editor Sean Jacobs praised Akin Omotoso for “not shying away from hard questions – in this case migration, xenophobia, corruption, state inaction and political opportunism – while still creating and producing work that can be entertaining, gripping and accessible.”80 The film straddles the genres of murder mystery and social thriller. It is about Ade’s search for his missing brother Femi (Fabian Adeoye Lojede) in Extension 29, in the east of Johannesburg, during an eruption of xenophobic violence.81 However, not much happens in the film. The use of suspense music, stylised images of fire and close-ups on a match being lit, as well as the frequent flashbacks and flashforwards, seem so many attempts to create a modicum of tension as the plot slowly strolls towards the denouement. The most significant narrative and aesthetic choice in Man on Ground’s representation of xenophobia is arguably the move away from the violence in the streets. In its stead, the film focuses on the drama of the two expatriate Nigerian brothers: Femi, a former activist who left Nigeria after being tortured and is struggling to start a new life and eke out a living in South Africa, and Ade, who is visiting the country and tries to see him. As Ade goes to look for Femi in Extension 29 after being informed by Femi’s fiancée Zodwa (Thishiwe Ziqubu) about his disappearance, he finds himself stuck in Timothi’s house, where he spends the night conversing about the current events and eventually unravels the mystery of his brother’s death. The film’s intimate focus – which was partly dictated by budgetary considerations that limited the director’s options82 – engenders a relation between the lives of the protagonists and the collective dimension of xenophobia that is readable as a tension between the aesthetic and narrative conventions of commercial cinema and the director’s commitment to deliver a socio-political and moral commentary on xenophobic violence in contemporary South Africa. Man on Ground appropriates and exploits some of the narrative conventions of mainstream and genre

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film – as in the chase action scenes at the end and in the privileging of individual character through Femi and Zodwa’s tragic romance – while at the same time aligning itself with what Helene Strauss calls “cinema of social recuperation.”83 Strauss applies this phrase to Adze Ugah’s The Burning Man, a documentary film about Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave (1975–2008), to whom Man on Ground is also dedicated. The title of the documentary refers to the death of the protagonist, a 35-year-old Mozambican man who was burned alive in the township of Ramaphosa, in the east of Johannesburg, on 17 May 2008 during the xenophobic attacks, and whose burning body became one of the most widely circulated and gruesome images of the pogroms. Strauss argues that Ugah’s documentary “retrieves the subjective singularity of the man who was burnt to death” by reweaving “the complex affective and inter-personal threads that constitute the experiential fabric of migrant subjectivity.”84 To do so, the director follows Nhamuave’s remains to the native village of Vuca, in the Inhambane Province of Mozambique, where his family and loved ones still live, and retraces the earlier stages of his life, as well as the network of relations that he left behind. The Burning Man was produced as a contribution to the collective work of Filmmakers Against Racism (FAR), a group of activist filmmakers who came together to document the xenophobic violence that erupted in 2008 and provide a critical tool to reflect on its consequences. A shared narrative strategy of several of the films they produced is to bring into view the lived experience of xenophobia by having the camera follow the survivors of the attacks as they try to reconstitute their lives. For instance, in Okepne Ojang, Kyle O’Donoghue and Miki Redelinghuys’s Congo My Foot (2008), the directors follow the steps of the immigrant band Tina La Musica and their manager (filmmaker Okepne Ojang) as they try to resurrect their ensemble in the aftermath of the disruption to their lives caused by the attacks. Likewise, Andy Spitz’s deeply moving Angels on Our Shoulders (2008) lets the eyes and voices of displaced children and their families tell the story of their encounters with xenophobic violence. Spitz narrates the aftermath of xenophobic violence through the stories of its victims, who are dealing with the trauma it caused at the Rand Airport Displacement Camp, where a group of immigrant teachers set up the makeshift Good Hope School in a double-decker bus. In a similar vein, Omelga Mthiyane and Riaan Hendricks’ Baraka (2008) follows the return of foreign shop owners to the community of Masiphumelele, in the Western Cape, after the xenophobic attacks that took place there. Man on Ground also attempts to recreate the affective dimension of the impact of xenophobic violence on the lives of those who were at the receiving end of it. It does so by focusing on the emotional entanglement between Ade, his brother Femi and their partners and distant mother. The first reference to xenophobic violence, in form of a petrol bomb thrown at a shack, is prefaced by Femi’s voice as he is reading a letter addressed to his “Dear Mommy.” Throughout the first part of the film, as the murder mystery begins to unfold, the viewer is introduced to the sheer ordinariness of Femi’s life. His desires and aspirations revolve around his love story with Zodwa, a young South African hairdresser with whom he is going to have a child and start a family. Man on Ground thus derives much of its

Reframing the rainbow 107 affective power from the contrast between Femi’s mundane desires and humanity and the brutal, seemingly mindless violent reality of xenophobia. Reverse and point of view shots reinforce this tension by introducing the spectator to the emotional responses of the characters to the world around them. The camera often lingers on Ade’s face (Figure 5.1) – for instance, when Ade’s gaze mediates the sound and proximity of street violence. The film invites the viewer to look at xenophobia through someone else’s eyes. It positions us as witnesses not so much of xenophobic violence itself – which is for the most part referenced indirectly through news reports and stylised images of fire – but of the personal and affective relations that it disrupts. Man on Ground thus prompts the viewer to interrogate the ethical responsibility of feeling what someone else feels, of witnessing the pain of others: what Sarah Ahmed describes as “an ethics of responding to pain” that “involves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel.”85 Following Ahmed, the question one must ask of this ethical response is whether the “call of such pain” becomes “a call for action, and a demand for collective politics.”86 Asked in an interview about what message he wanted audiences to take away from the film, Akin Omotoso answered: Hopefully, the message behind one of Hakeem’s monologue when he says that despite the fact that we have constructed borders, (that mimic the narrow borders of our mind), when we look down on planet earth from space, the fact that this is our collective home is blatantly obvious. He ends it by saying, “I only hope that they realize that the labels ‘us’ and ‘them’ are one and the same.”87

Figure 5.1 Ade and Timothi. Source: Man on Ground, directed by Akin Omotoso.

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As I have already noted, the dialogue that prefaces Hakeen’s thoughts on borders – which he perhaps too easily psychologises as “mimicking the narrow borders of our mind” – includes a reference to the government’s housing allocation and the exclusionary politics of indigeneity on which it is premised. However, the film does not follow this lead. Even though we are shown a community meeting where Vusi (Makhaola Ndebele), a very unpleasant local troublemaker, harangues the crowd on housing issues, his motivations are shown to have more to do with personal bitterness than with politics. Vusi appears to have almost single-handedly started the riots. He instructs a gang to kill Femi because, according to Timothi’s wife Lindiwe (Buyi Mazibuko), he hates him. It follows that xenophobia is rationalised as the doing of an evil man who is able to instigate violence in his community as a way to act upon his feelings of personal hatred. Yes, the violence is linked to the houses taken by foreigners, but this lead is not fully investigated and followed through. Man on Ground thus largely elides the political issues that relate xenophobia to the state. In fact, it explicitly delinks xenophobia from state politics. At the end of the film, there is a coda provided by a scene with an immigrant vendor who stands up to gang members who want to evict him by saying that he will only go if the president tells him, thereby placing the arbitrary brutality of the gang in opposition to the legitimate power of the state. As in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, in Man on Ground, the critique of xenophobia is primarily sustained by a utopian impulse. This is perhaps most evocatively visualised by the aerial view of the city that immediately follows Ade’s speech about the astronaut’s epiphanic realisation of the resemblance between the narrow borders of geography and those of our mind while gazing on the planet earth from space. The tracking shot of the Johannesburg skyline, when the camera zooms out of the conflicted metropolitan landscape to show it to us as an undivided whole, gives us a view of the city that we can take as a metonymy of the borderless world imagined by Ade in his monologue. But of course, the view from the sky gives us an image of a shared but distant world: a view that consigns the people who inhabit the city and the conflicts that divide them to a position of invisibility.

Conclusion Both Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Man on Ground are creative responses to the social and political crisis represented by the violent manifestations of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. Both offer the alternative utopian vision of a world without borders. This utopian world is represented respectively in heaven or in an aerial view – the astronaut who looks down on planet earth from space and the camera that zooms out of the urban landscape – which elevates us above the messiness of everyday realities and conflicts. The way out is to literally create a distance from a crisis to which neither Welcome to Our Hillbrow nor Man on Ground offers a workable solution. Mpe’s novel and Omotoso’s film shed light on the arbitrariness of the identitarian closures and collectivity boundaries that provide xenophobia with its rationale. To these, they oppose the imagined alternative of an all-inclusive cosmopolitan

Reframing the rainbow 109 “we” undivided by borders. What we must ask of this vision, though, is what its conditions of possibility are. Phrases such as “welcome to the world of our humanity,” “we are from here,” “the labels ‘us’ and ‘them’ are one and the same” appeal to a shared common humanity whose commonality cannot simply be taken as a given. It must be performatively and politically constituted. As Antonio Negri writes in a different but related context, “‘We’: it is the name of a horizon, the name of becoming”:88 the possibility of alternative forms of collectivity is grounded on social relations and conflicts, and on their production of subjectivity, rather than on human nature, identity, essence or foundation. Their creation needs to push against exiting borders, divisions and hierarchies of power – not only those produced by citizenship but also by class, race, ethnicity, gender and all the other markers of difference and inequality that position us in society. If so, then the most radical political dimension of both the novel and the film is not to be found in their overtly political messages, but rather in their making visible forms of contingent sociality and community constituted across ethnolinguistic and national collectivity boundaries.89 It is its textured representation of relationships across political and social borders and of the rich sociality between people who are different that makes Welcome to Our Hillbrow a politically valuable work of the imagination. The same applies to Man on Ground, where the portrayal of the affective relations that link its Nigerian and South African protagonists – Femi, Ade, Zodwa, Timothi and Lindiwe – provides a more powerful statement about a shared common humanity than its overt anti-xenophobic message. A radical and effective critique of xenophobia must be based on a critical examination of the political arrangements and discourses that constitute its rationale. It should also point to ways of living, being and becoming that can create a more inclusive dispensation. My point in discussing Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Man on Ground and, in the previous chapter, We Need New Names has been to suggest that works of imagination, fiction and film can play a valuable role in this project.

Notes 1 Emphasis in original. Msimang argues that the idea of the rainbow nation has served to entrench South African exceptionalism and a sense of belonging based on the shared experience of apartheid. See Msimang, “Belonging”: South Africans may not always like each other across so-called racial lines, but they have a kinship that is based on their connection to the apartheid project. Outsiders – those who didn’t go through the torture of the regime – are juxtaposed against insiders. In other words foreigners are foreign precisely because they cannot understand the pain of apartheid, because most South Africans now claim to have been victims of the system. Whether white or black, the trauma of living through apartheid is seen as such a defining experience that it becomes exclusionary; it has made a nation of us. [. . .] Aided and abetted by the TRC and the discursive rainbow nation project, South Africans have failed to create a frame for belonging that transcends the experience of apartheid. Twenty years into the “new” dispensation, many South Africans still view people who weren’t there and therefore who did not physically share in the pain of apartheid as “aliens.” The darker-hued these aliens are, the less likely South Africans are to accept them.

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2 See Jeynes, “Factsheet: Detention and Deportation of Undocumented Migrants in South Africa at the Lindela Repatriation Centre.” 3 See Statistics South Africa, Census 2011: Migration Dynamics in South Africa; and Chiumia, “Factsheet: How Many International Migrants Are There in South Africa?” 4 See Meny-Gilbert and Chiumia, “Where Do South African International Migrants Come From?” 5 Gordon, “Xenophobia across the Class Divide,” 495; see also Crush, “Complex Movements, Confused Responses.” 6 See eNCA, “Millions of Zimbabweans Live in South Africa”; and Chiumia, “‘Totally out of the Question’ that a Third of Malawi’s Population Live in SA.” 7 See Human Rights Watch, “Prohibited Persons,” 5. 8 For a documentary account of recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa, see Spitz, Voetsek! Us? Brothers? 9 Glaser, “(Dis)connections,” 53–54. 10 See Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners”; Human Rights Watch, “Prohibited Persons.” 11 Cited in Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 85. 12 Cited in ibid., 121. 13 Human Rights Watch, “Prohibited Persons,” 4. 14 Human Rights Watch, World Report 2016. 15 Cited in Magubane, “Reveal Trade Secrets.” 16 Timeslive, “You Are Fuelling Xenophobia.” 17 See Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 87–95. 18 Gordon, “Xenophobia across the Class Divide,” 501. 19 SAMP, The Perfect Storm, 1–2. 20 Gordon, “Xenophobia across the Class Divide,” 497. 21 See ibid., 499. 22 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, “Preamble.” In 2015, Pumla Williams, Deputy Director General of Government Communications, Republic of South Africa, footnoted the Preamble of the Constitution as follows: “We are on record in saying that South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, including the foreign nationals, but they have to have the proper documentation” (cited in Spitz, Voetsek! Us? Brothers?). 23 The Freedom Charter, 1955. 24 Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis, 78. 25 Landau, “Introducing the Demons,” 1. 26 Thanks to the staff of the Johannesburg City Library for facilitating access to its newspaper archive. 27 Neocosmos, “South African Citizens Swept along by Politics of Fear.” In Andy Spitz’s documentary Voetsek! Us? Brothers?, which zooms in on the informal settlement of Makause, in Gauteng, during the period that follows the xenophobic attacks, this is a theme that comes up over and over again: how access to resources on the basis of indigeneity is what sets South Africans apart from other Africans in South Africa. This is brought up not only by xenophobic statements by South Africans but also by repeated comments by victims of xenophobic violence that South Africans are lazy and just expect the government to give things to them and do things for them. 28 Neocosmos adds that post-apartheid reduction of citizenship to indigeneity has been accompanied by the demobilisation and depoliticisation produced by the state-driven “top down model of nation building” that replaced the inclusive popular struggles of the 1980s, which welcomed the contributions of non-South Africans and international support. See Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 10 and 63.

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34 35 36 37

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Landau, “Introducing the Demons,” 7. Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 15. Neocosmos, “South African Citizens Swept along by Politics of Fear.” Neocomos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 4. See Matsinhe, “Africa’s Fear of Itself”; and Gqola, “Brutal Inheritances” and “Intimate Foreigners.” Landau objects that explanations “rooted in negrophobia” fail to “account for regular attacks on Chinese and South Asians. Nor do they help to understand why citizens from Swaziland and Lesotho were relatively unscathed while some South Africans were targeted” (Landau, “Introducing the Demons,” 3). Melissa Tandiwe Myambo also notes that there is often “an assumption that all migrants from the global North are white. That is not true. There are black British, Afro-Germans and African Americans etc. who come to South Africa.” Furthermore, she objects that “Pakistanis, Chinese and Somalis as well as Venda speakers etc. can be targeted for xenophobia thus superseding the Afrophobic framework” (personal communication). While this may indeed be the case, and explanations based on negrophobia and Afrophobia ought to be nuanced and qualified, it is undeniable that the lion’s share of the attacks on foreign nationals and of xenophobic discourse targets black Africans from other African countries. Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa, 193. See Landau, “Introducing the Demons,” 5. See Worby, Hassim and Kupe, “Introduction.” With reference to Johannesburg, see, among others, Myambo, “Africa’s Global City?” See also Kurt Orderson’s documentary Not in My Neighbourhood (2018), which provides a comparative portrayal of the new forms of “spatial violence” and exclusion represented by gentrification and commercial developers’ “upgrades” in Cape Town, Sāo Paulo and New York. Pumla Dineo Gqola explains why Africans are prevalently targeted in violent xenophobic attacks, rather than European and North American passport holders who live in affluent suburbs, by arguing that “It seems like a paradox, but these ‘foreigners’ are open to brutalisation and looting precisely because of their interplay with sameness and difference. The foreigners’ presence is simultaneously characterised by similarity to the marginal communities whose lives are deeply inscribed by layers of violence and because of their difference. They are rendered ‘foreign’ and disposable selectively, like other groups in these communities that are prone to large-scale physical attack, such as Black pensioners, and Black lesbian and queer youth. All these groups live intersectional marginalities” (Gqola, “Intimate Foreigners,” 71). In Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa (2008), a book produced soon after the attacks, Eric Worby, Shireen Hassim and Tawana Kupe write: The violence that seeks to dispossess those identified as ‘Other’ to the nation is revelatory of the unfinished and contradictory nature of the transition from the authoritarian apartheid project. A decade and a half after the transition to democracy, vast numbers of South Africans feel anything but included in the nation’s rainbow. Despite considerable effort, the post-apartheid state has been unable to provide even basic entitlements to safety, health and the right to secure the means of life. In the absence of this kind of fundamental protection, people are abandoned by the state and thrown back onto their own resources for survival. To live in a shack, without any prospect of regular employment, to be destined to die a slow and undignified death from AIDS or tuberculosis, is to live in a condition of abjection – to be consigned to bare life beyond the limits of the political community. In the new South Africa as in the old, killing and being killed are normalised because people are always dying anyway. (Wordby, Hassim and Kupe, “Introduction,” 7)

40 See Forced Migration Studies Programme, “Xenophobia,” 2.

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41 For instance, in his Address at the National Tribute in Remembrance of the Victims of Attacks on Foreign Nationals in Tshwane (then Pretoria), on 3 July 2008, former President Thabo Mbeki said: “The dark days of May which have brought us here today were visited on our country by people who acted with criminal intent. What happened during these days was not inspired by a perverse nationalism, or extreme chauvinism, resulting in our communities expressing the hitherto unknown sentiment of mass and mindless hatred of foreigners – xenophobia” (Cited in Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 121). Mbeki’s denial of xenophobia was not an isolated utterance. Here is former President Jacob Zuma after an outbreak of violence erupted at an anti-immigrant March in Tshwane in 2017: “I think we love using phrases in South Africa that at the time cause unnecessary perceptions about us. I think we are not [xenophobic], it’s not the first time we’re with the foreigners here” (cited in Sekhotho, “Zuma: I Doubt South Africans Are Xenophobic”). Landau notes that “The government continues to sideline xenophobic violence the same way it does most violence affecting poor South African communities. It has naturalised anti-outsider violence by blaming it variously on criminality or the natural resentment poor South Africans feel towards those they perceive as ‘stealing’ opportunities from them” (Landau, “Xenophobia in South Africa”). 42 My transcript. 43 Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 77. 44 Quoted in Hunter, “Xenophobia Starts at the ‘Top.’” 45 Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 10. 46 See Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, “Chapter 2: Bill of Rights.” Neocosmos also notes that “the 1996 constitution [. . .] makes important distinctions between the rights of citizens and those of persons (including foreigners), and as such provides a basis for ‘legal’ discrimination against foreigners by making the distinction in the first place” (Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 78). He goes on to ask, “The apartheid state provided full citizenship rights to foreigners after a few months if they were white. Why could the present state not do the same for others?” (Ibid., 80). 47 See, among others, Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, 58–60; Werbner and Yuval-Davis, Women, Citizenship and Difference, 1999; and Hassim, “From Presence to Power.” 48 See www.home-affairs.gov.za/index.php/permanent-res. Accessed 26 July 2018. 49 For a synthetic critical review of some of these documents, see Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 77–84. See also Crush and Williams, “The South African White Paper on International Migration.” 50 Department of Home Affairs, White Paper on International Migration for South Africa, iii. 51 Ibid., 15. 52 Ibid., 3. Elsewhere, the White Paper expresses concern that “South Africa has not been successful in attracting and retaining sought-after international migrants, such as skilled and business persons. Instead the majority of international migrants are either low-skilled, asylum seekers or those who are granted residence on the basis of relationships (relative’s visas)” (ibid., 30). 53 Ibid., 41. 54 Ibid., 43. 55 Ibid., 34. Comparatively speaking, I am a beneficiary of existing differential inclusion immigration policies. By virtue of being an academic and in possession of a PhD, after several years of living in South Africa, I was granted an “exceptional skills” work permit that allowed me to apply for permanent residence. In 2014, eleven years after I had come to live in to South Africa, I was issued a South African Identity Document. 56 Landau, “Postscript,” 227. The White Paper confirms Francis Nyamnjoh’s observation that “Where migrants are welcome, interest in having them tends to be limited to those with skills or capital to invest” (Nyamnjoh, Insiders and Outsiders, 1–2). 57 Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 69. 58 Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 77–78. Neocosmos also suggests that an argument could be made for work, rather than indigeneity, to be used

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as a criterion for granting citizenship rights (ibid., 80, 113, 116). In my view, this is a problematic suggestion. The problem with it is that with the shifting nature of work and precarity, especially on the African continent where informal forms of employment prevail, this criterion would be not only very difficult to apply but it would also reproduce existing forms of discrimination (see Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, 69–71). Mbembe, in Mezzadra, Mbembe and Obarrio, “Global Borders and Emerging Formations of Racism in the Contemporary World.” Elsewhere Mbembe writes that “categories and concepts borrowed from the Western lexicon such as ‘national interest,’ ‘risks,’ ‘threats’ or ‘national security’ might not be helpful” in crafting “an Africa-centered migration policy.” Mbembe notes that these categories “refer to a philosophy of movement and a philosophy of space entirely predicated on the existence of an enemy in a world of hostility. This is the reason why today, deeply ingrained traditions of Western anti-humanism have found their most manifest expression in current anti-immigration policies” (Mbembe, “Scrap the Borders that Divide Africa”). See Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In an autobiographical passage Fanon recalls: “It is a year now since I have joined the Algerian Revolution. Remembering the difficult and ambiguous contacts I had had at the outset of the Revolution, I had some fear that I might not be welcomed. My fear was unfounded. I was welcomed like any other Algerian. For the Algerians I am no longer an ally. I am a brother, simply a brother, like the others” (Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 176). Ibid., 152. Emphasis in original. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 156. In the chapter on “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” Fanon defines anticolonial nationalism as an emancipatory political ideology. Its emergence is part of a sequence in which the national stage is the site of the mobilisation and unification of “the people” against colonialism. The claim to nationhood and the struggle for democracy and national independence mark the moment of integration of sectoral or local struggles against specific injustices and abuses. However, after national liberation, nationalism risks turning into a regressive politics. “Nationalism,” Fanon argues, “is not a political doctrine, nor a program. If you really wish your country to avoid regression, or at best halts and uncertainties, a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness” (Ibid., 203). As Fanon writes in one of the best-thumbed passages of the book: “National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been. The faults that we find in it are quite sufficient explanation of the facility with which, when dealing with young and independent nations, the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to then state” (ibid., 148–149). It is the native ruling class – the middle class and the national bourgeoisie – that Fanon sees as embodying this weakness, rooted not only in colonial history but also in how the national bourgeoisie rejects popular politics and mobilisation, which the national bourgeoisie replaces with “the notion of the nationalization and Africanization of the ruling classes” (ibid., 155). Meanwhile, percolating through the fabric of society, actions and slogans aimed at seizing power and resources end up turning foreigners into competitors, thereby assuming an ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, racist and xenophobic character: “Between resounding assertions of the unity of the continent and this behavior of the masses which has its inspiration in their leaders, many different attitudes may be traced. We observe a permanent seesaw between African unity, which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion, and a heartbreaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form” (ibid. 175). Neocosmos notes that the “shift from citizenship as a unifying notion during the struggle for independence [. . .] to citizenship in the post-colony which is now founded on a notion of indigeneity and is essentially exclusive” outlined in Fanon’s writings “could easily be a description of changes in South Africa between 1984 and 1990, and

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especially since 1994 and the establishment of post-colonial liberal democracy when, within the public sphere, the celebration of Africanism and an ‘African Renaissance’ has alternated with xenophobic statements and practices towards other Africans” (Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners,” 10). Reflecting on the nexus between citizenship and xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa, Neocosmos asks, “what kind of politics is most conducive to an overcoming of xenophobia?” The alternative he sets, via a rereading of the Freedom Charter inspired by Fanon’s inclusive conception of citizenship, is between a “politics which treats people differently depending on whether they are citizens or not,” and “a politics which stresses that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ as the Freedom Charter stated” (Ibid., 89–90). I have quoted and discussed Neocosmos at length because, some disagreements notwithstanding, I find his intervention the most incisive contribution to the debate on xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. For an important discussion of these issues – i.e., migration, belonging and the borders of citizenship – see Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, 57–78. For a statement on the ideological and utopian function of the artistic and cultural text, see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 271–290. I slightly reformulate and amend Jameson’s argument in Frassinelli, “Il nuovo Sudafrica e gli alieni,” 415–416. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 27. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 26–27. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 100–102. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 123–124. Ibid., 113. See Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy” for such a reading of the text. For political readings of Welcome to Our Hillbrow vis-à-vis post-apartheid South African nationalism, see also Green, “Translating the Nation”; and Hoad, “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism.” Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, 77. Emphasis in original. Jacobs, “Akin Omotoso’s Country.” Incidentally, Ade’s and Femi’s characters reference Omotoso’s earlier film God Is African (2003), where Hakeem Kae-Kazim was Femi, a Nigerian student. Some of Omotoso’s directorial choices, such as the absence of big crowd scenes, were dictated by budgetary constraints (Omotoso, personal communication). Strauss, “Cinema of Social Recuperation.” Ibid., 107. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 30. Ibid., 39. Cited in James-Cyrus, “Review: Man on Ground.” Negri, Inventare il comune, 204. For a discussion of the contingent and diverse forms of sociality in migrant-rich urban spaces in southern Africa, see, for instance, Landau, “Hospitality without Hosts” and “Friendship Fears and Communities of Convenience in Africa’s Urban Estuaries.”

Bibliography Ahmed, Sarah. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. 2nd Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Blomkamp, Neill. 2009. District 9. Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures.

Reframing the rainbow 115 Brown, Andrew. 2009. Refuge. Cape Town: Zebra. Cacherty, Glynis. 2008. Suitcase Stories: Refugee Children Reclaim Their Identities. Cape Town: Double Storey. Chiumia, Sintha. 2016. “Factsheet: How Many International Migrants Are There in South Africa?” Africa Check 14 August. Accessed 30 June 2018. https://africacheck.org/ factsheets/data-migrants-numbers/. ———. 2017. “‘Totally out of the Question’ that a Third of Malawi’s Population Live in SA.” Africa Check 13 January. Accessed 30 June 2018. https://africacheck.org/reports/ totally-out-of-the-question-that-a-third-of-malawis-population-live-in-sa/. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. 1996. Accessed 20 April 2019. www.gov.za/ documents/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996 Crush, Jonathan. 2012. Complex Movements, Confused Responses: Labour Migration in South Africa. Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP). Migration Policy Brief No. 25. Crush, Jonathan and Vincent Williams. 2001. The South African White Paper on International Migration: An Analysis and Critique. Waterloo, ON: Southern African Migration Programme. SAMP Migration Policy Brief No. 1. Department of Home Affairs. 2017. White Paper on International Migration for South Africa. Accessed 26 July 2018. www.dha.gov.za/WhitePaperonInternationalMigration-201706 02.pdf. Desai, Rehad. 2008. Two Camps. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism. Duiker, K. Sello. 2001. The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Cape Town: Kwela. eNCA, 2013. “Millions of Zimbabweans Live in South Africa.” 4 August. Accessed 30 June 2018. www.enca.com/africa/millions-zimbabweans-live-sa. Fanon, Frantz. 1965 [1959]. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1965 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Forced Migration Studies Programme. 2010. “Xenophobia”: Violence against Foreign Nationals and other “Outsiders” in Contemporary South Africa. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand. Accessed 26 July 2018. www.migration.org.za/wp-content/upload s/2017/08/%E2%80%98Xenophobia%E2%80%99-Violence-against-Foreign-Nationalsand-other-%E2%80%98Outsiders%E2%80%99-in-Contemporary-South-Africa.-IssueBrief-3.pdf. Frassinelli, Pier Paolo. 2012. “Il nuovo Sudafrica e gli alieni.” Studi Culturali 9 (3): 401–418. Freedom Charter. 1955. Accessed 20 April 2019. www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/invento ries/inv_pdfo/AD1137/AD1137-Ea6-1-001-jpeg.pdf. Gibson, Nigel. 2011. Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Glaser, Clive. 2008. “(Dis)connections: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of ‘Foreigners.’” In Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa. Edited by Shireen Hassim, Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 53–63. Green, Michael. 2005. “Translating the Nation: Phaswane Mpe and the Fiction of PostApartheid.” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 10 (1): 3–16. Gordon, Steven. 2015. “Xenophobia across the Class Divide: South African Attitudes towards Foreigners 2003–2012.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 33 (4): 494–509. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2008. “Brutal Inheritances: Echoes, Negrophobia and Masculinist Violence.” In Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa. Edited by Shireen Hassim, Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 209–222.

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———. “Intimate Foreigners or Violent Neighbours? Thinking Masculinity and PostApartheid Xenophobic Violence through Film.” Agenda 30 (2): 64–74. Hart, Gillian. 2013. Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Hassim, Shireen. 1999. “From Presence to Power: Women’s Citizenship in a New Democracy.” Agenda 15 (40): 6–17. Hoad, Neville. 2007. “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” In African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 113–126. Human Rights Watch. 1998. “Prohibited Persons”: Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees in South Africa. New York, Washington, London and Brussels: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2016. World Report 2016: South Africa Events of 2015. Accessed 19 July 2018. www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/south-africa. Hunter, Quanita. 2015. “Xenophobia Starts at ‘the Top.’” Mail & Guardian 12 June. Accessed 23 October 2018. https://mg.co.za/article/2015-06-11-xenophobia-starts-at-the-top. Jacobs, Sean. 2012. “Akin Omotoso’s Country.” Africa Is a Country 25 May. Accessed 19 August 2018. https://africasacountry.com/2012/05/akin-omotosos-country. James-Cyrus, Sarah. 2012. “Review: Man on Ground.” Flavourmag 1 June. Accessed 19 August 2018. www.flavourmag.co.uk/review-man-on-ground/. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen. Jeynes, Karen. 2016. “Factsheet: Detention and Deportation of Undocumented Migrants in South Africa at the Lindela Repatriation Centre.” Africa Check 17 August. Accessed 27 June 2018. https://africacheck.org/factsheets/lindela-repatriation-centre-migrants/. Kikamba, Simao. 2005. Going Home. Cape Town: Kwela. Landau, Loren. 2011. “Introducing the Demons.” In Exorcising the Demons within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa. Edited by Loren Landau. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1–25. ———. 2011. “Postscript: Positive Values and the Politics of Outsiderness.” In Exorcising the Demons within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa. Edited by Loren Landau. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 226–236. ———. 2012. “Hospitality without Hosts: Mobility and Communities in Africa’s Urban Estuaries.” Seminar presented at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, Johannesburg 19 March. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/ seminar/Landau2012.pdf. ———. 2018. “Friendship Fears and Communities of Convenience in Africa’s Urban Estuaries: Connection as Measure of Urban Condition.” Urban Studies 55 (3): 505–521. ———. 2018. “Xenophobia in South Africa: Why It’s Time to Unsettle Narratives about Migrants.” The Conversation 6 September. Accessed 15 October 2018. https:// theconversation.com/xenophobia-in-south-africa-why-its-time-to-unsettle-narrativesabout-migrants-102616. Landau, Loren and Tanya Pampalone. 2018. I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Magubane, Khulekani. 2015. “Reveal Trade Secrets, Minister Tells Foreigners,” Business Day 28 January. Accessed 19 July 2018. www.pressreader.com/south-africa/ business-day/20150128/281496454689189. Maseko, Zola. 1997. The Foreigner. Paris: Dominant 7.

Reframing the rainbow 117 Matabane, Khalo. 2005. Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon. Johannesburg: Matabane Filmworks. Matlwa, Kopano. 2016. Period Pain. Johannesburg: Jacana. Matsinhe, David Mario. 2011. “Africa’s Fear of Itself: The Ideology of Makwerekwere in South Africa.” Third World Quarterly 32 (2): 295–313. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. “Scrap the Borders That Divide Africa.” Mail & Guardian 17 March. Accessed 10 August 2018. https://mg.co.za/article/2017-03-17-00-scrap-the-bordersthat-divide-africans. Meny-Gilbert, Sarah and Sintha Chiumia. 2016. “Where Do South African International Migrants Come From?” Accessed 30 June 2018. https://africacheck.org/factsheets/ geography-migration/. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2006. Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. 2nd Edition. Verona: Ombre Corte. Mezzadra, Sandro, Achille Mbembe and Juan Obarrio. 2016. “Global Borders and Emerging Formations of Racism in the Contemporary World.” 29 June. Accessed 11 August 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ialoJSjjA_I. Moraka, Tumi. 2008. Nowhere Else to Go. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism. Mpe, Phaswane. 2001. Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Msimang, Sisonke. 2014. “Belonging: Why South Afircans Refuse to Let Africa in.” Africa Is a Country 22 October. Accessed 9 August 2018. https://oromianeconomist. com/2015/04/20/belonging-why-south-africans-refuse-to-let-africa-in/. Mthiyane, Omelga and Riaan Hendricks. 2008. Baraka. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism. Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe. 2017. “Africa’s Global City? The Hipsterification of Johannesburg.” New Left Review 108 (November–December): 75–86. ———. 2011. “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy: A Theory of Belonging, not ‘Belongings,’ in the New South Africa.” Comparative Literature 63 (1): 64–85. Negri, Antonio. 2012. Inventare il comune. Rome: DeriveApprodi. Neocosmos, Michael. 2010. From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners”: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 2nd Edition. Codesria: Dakar. ———. 2010. “South African Citizens Swept along by Politics of Fear.” Cape Times 3 June. Accessed 20 July 2018. abahlali.org/node/6784/. Nyamnjoh, Francis. 2006. Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. Dakar: Codesria. Ojang, Okepne, Kyle O’Donoghue and Miki Redelinghuys. 2008. Congo My Foot. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism. Omotoso, Akin. 2003. God Is African. Johannesburg: Tranxafrica Film and TV. ———. 2011. Man on Ground. Johannesburg: T.O.M. Pictures. Orderson, Kurt. 2018. Not in My Neighbourhood. Cape Town: Azania Rizing Productions. Pinnock, Patricia Schonstein. 2000. Skyline. Cape Town: David Philip. Quebeka, Jahmil. 2011. A Small Town Called Descent. Johannesburg: Moments Entertainment. SAMP (Southern African Migration Programme). 2008. The Perfect Storm: The Realities of Xenophobia in Contemporary South Africa. Waterloo: SAMP Migration Policy Series No. 50. Sekhotho, Katleho. 2017. “Zuma: I Doubt South Africans Are Xenophobic.” Eyewitness News 24 February. Accessed 25 July 2018. https://ewn.co.za/2017/02/24/zuma-i-doubtsouth-africans-are-xenophobic. Spitz, Andy. 2008. Angels on Our Shoulders. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism.

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———. 2017. Voetsek! Us? Brothers? Johannesburg: Left-Eye Productions. Statistics South Africa. 2015. Census 2011: Migration Dynamics in South Africa. Accessed 30 June 2018. www.statssa.gov.za/publications/Report-03-01-79/Report-03-01-792011. pdf. Steinberg, Johnny. 2014. A Man of Good Hope. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Strauss, Helene. 2011.“Cinema of Social Recuperation: Xenophobic Violence and Migrant Subjectivity in Contemporary South Africa.” Subjectivity 4: 103–120. Timeslive. 2017. “You Are Fuelling Xenophobia, SAHRC Warns Deputy Police Minister.” 17 July. Accessed 19 July 2018. www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-07-17-you-arefuelling-xenophobia-sahrc-warns-deputy-police-minister/. Turken, Danny. 2008. Affectionately Known as Alex. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism. Ugah, Adze. 2008. The Burning Man: Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave. South Africa: Filmmakers Against Racism. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1948. www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-humanrights/. Accessed 23 October 2018. Vandermerwe, Meg. 2013. Zebra Crossing. Cape Town: Umuzi. Werbner, Pnina and Nira Yuval Davis, eds. 1999. Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books. Worby, Eric, Shireen Hassim and Tawana Kupe. 2008. “Introduction.” In Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa. Edited by Shireen Hassim, Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1–25.

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The story told in this chapter is stitched together from media representations and artistic interventions that take us from “the murder fields of Marikana”1 to the birth of #RhodesMustFall at the University of Cape Town (UCT) three years later. I start with a photograph by City Press photojournalist Leon Sadiki that captures “the man in the green blanket” surrounded by striking miners near Wonderkop, on the outskirts of the small town of Marikana in the North West Province of South Africa, just a few hours before 34 of them were shot down by police on 16 August 2012 (Figure 6.1). This image, or part of it, would become one of the most frequently reproduced representations of the massacre: a young man in a bright green blanket, his right arm stretched and ending in a clenched fist, lowered spear in his left hand, as he incites his comrades. His name was Mgcineni Noki – aka Mambush – a rock drill operator with no official rank aged 30, hailing from the Eastern Cape village of Thwalikhulu, where he was born on 2 February 1982.2 He was one of the leaders of the miners who had downed tools on 10 August 2012 to demand a living wage of 12,500 rands (about 800 euros/950 US dollars) per month. The item of clothing with which he would become identified had been given to him by a fellow striker the day before the massacre,3 when Mambush fell dead in it with multiple bullet wounds in his body. These included “a bullet wound to the head,” as well as “gunshot wounds in the left side of his face and neck, right thigh, buttocks, right calf and left leg.”4 The massacre was the culmination of a concerted effort by the transnational mining corporation Lonmin and the South African government to break an unprotected strike during which the miners had taken on both their employer and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). As it turned out, “the workers fought on, until, on 18 September, they agreed on a settlement that secured them victory.”5 But it was a victory that came at an unbearably high human cost. The name of the small town where the massacre took place has become a periodisation marker that places South Africa in what we may call the post-Marikana period, the aftermath of an event that represents the lowest point in post-apartheid South African history. In Murder at Small Koppie: The Real History of the Marikana Massacre (2016), Greg Marinovich recalls: As much as thirty-year-old Mambush had been the miners’ leader before his death, so he became the strike’s martyr afterwards. When thousands of

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Figure 6.1 The man in the green blanket. Source: Photograph by Leon Sadiki.

strikers marched on Karee 3 shaft three weeks after his death, they carried photocopies of Noki’s photograph with them. He became the face of their struggle.6 This chapter tells the story of how Mgcineni Noki became the man in the green blanket: an image of the struggle not only of the striking miners of Marikana but also for decolonisation.7

The man in the green blanket In the reproductions and recontextualisations by different media and artists, the image of the man in the green blanket has been elevated to the level of what Roland Barthes calls “myth”: a “metalanguage,” or “second-order semiological system” wherein that “which is a sign (namely the association total of a concept and an image) in the first system becomes a mere signifier.”8 Myth creates its signifying system by associating the sign with other signs and contexts. When it enters the language of myth, a picture no longer speaks only of the event or individuals it portrays. It takes on and expresses discourses and concepts: it becomes a “language object” endowed with its own signifying function.9 With the man in the green blanket, we have a politicisation of this type of speech through the creation of a “counter myth”:10 a message that goes against the grain of dominant narratives and ideological rationalisations.

Signs of the times 121 In Sadiki’s photograph, we encounter Mambush and the striking platinum miners at a critical moment in time.11 Mambush is inciting the other workers in the arid winter fields of Marikana. But this is not a rally. He is not in front of his comrades. We see him standing among the striking miners while facing the camera. The point of view of the eye-level camera angle is that of what they have in front of them. We are looking at the miners, most of whom are looking in our direction. They are sitting on the ground, presumably waiting for something to happen. They look serious, nobody is smiling, but their posture is relatively relaxed. Mambush, the only person standing, is at the centre of the picture. If the other characters can be compared to a chorus, he is the coryphaeus who captures our attention with his visually striking green blanket brightened by the winter sunlight. In Stuart Hall’s words, “Many meanings [. . .] are potential within [a] photo. But there is no one, true meaning. Meaning ‘floats.’ It cannot be fixed. However, attempting to ‘fix’ it is the work of representational practice.”12 The picture of Mambush in his green blanket is a richly polysemic image that resists easy fixing. Multiple meanings can be attached to it. It lends itself to be seen as connotatively signifying, in the first place, vulnerability. The blanket is a simple item of clothing, what homeless people wear to protect themselves from the elements. But it was not much protection in the battlefields of Marikana, when facing gun-toting policemen, armoured vehicles and the military might of the South Africa state. The green blanket is thus an index of defiance and courage. And it can also be read as a signifier of identity: a blanket is worn by African people of various ethnonational backgrounds, especially in rural areas, during initiation ceremonies and other ritual activities.13 Another crucial signifying element of the picture – that has not only been underscored but also amplified in its reproductions – is the singularity of the figure at the centre of it: the man in the green blanket. In the original photograph, Mambush is surrounded by fellow striking miners, who in semiotic terms can be variously described as actants, adjuvants and participants.14 They support Mambush and are part of the events narrated by the photograph. The picture’s subject of enunciation is plural. Although Mambush is at the centre of the image and the only man standing, the sitting miners performatively give meaning to the photograph. As we will see, they have been erased from many of the reproductions of the image. But they are indelible. They remain part of the picture as a ghostly presence even when we see the man in the green blanket on his own. For the meaning of the image is to be found in their collective presence and struggle. Even when the image of the man in the green blanket is decontextualised, it is never that of an individual hero. He is a strike leader, a singularity that is inextricably part of a collective. I borrow the term singularity from the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who deploy it in their theorisation of the form of political subjectivity they name the multitude. The multitude is constituted by a multiplicity of intersecting singularities. It represents an alternative to conceptions of social and political subjectivity that erase difference: “The multitude [. . .] is not unified but remains plural and multiple. [. . .] The multitude is composed of a set of singularities – and by singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced

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to sameness, a difference that remains different.”15 In our context, an emphasis on singularity is discursively and politically productive because it unsettles the dominant narrative that was produced by the government and amplified by mainstream media in response to the events of 16 August 2012. This narrative was defined by a modality of representation that erased the multiplicity of desires, motivations, needs, passions and drives that had led the miners to join a struggle that constituted their collective subjectivity. Immediately after the massacre, the striking miners were presented “as an unruly and dangerous mob who needed to be controlled and contained.”16 Their voices were silenced. As Jane Duncan shows in her study of the early press coverage of the massacre: only one miner was quoted on what actually happened during the massacre, and he said the police shot first. Most miners were interviewed in relation to the stories alleging that the miners had used muti [traditional African medicine] to defend themselves against the police’s bullets, as well as the miners’ working and living conditions.17 While acknowledging the excessive use of force by the police, and in particular the dangers with the use of live ammunition – which would have been exceedingly difficult to deny – the various versions of this narrative still managed to blame what, shortly after the event, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) general secretary Frans Baleni described as the “dark forces who can mislead our members, make them to believe that they’ve got extra power to make their life to be different overnight.”18 The striking miners were consistently portrayed as backward traditionalist men misled by opportunists and reactionary forces. South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande, for instance, called for an investigation into the: essentially backward beliefs and practices amongst sections of the working class. [. . .] Just how does a sangoma [traditional healer] is [sic] today still able to convince sections of the working class that bullets turn into water if you have used “intelezi” [traditional plant medicine], is something that we should no longer be talking about in a hush hush manner but should openly engage, albeit sensitively.19 In the same vein, a police spokesperson claimed in an interview: “we were dealing with people who looked possessed, or believed the bullets would not work on them.”20 This discursive strategy rationalised the massacre by othering the miners and presenting them as naïve and credulous men who had been misled by “sangomas” and “turned into automatons by the muti, lulled by their own superstition into believing that they were invulnerable to police bullets.”21 In addition, early reporting attributed the conflict to inter-union rivalry between the NUM and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). In line with this

Signs of the times 123 interpretation, journalists “seemed to assume that including union voices was sufficient to ‘cover’ the workers’ voices,”22 whose actions could be explained by reference to the role played “by a rogue union, or by agitators, or by political troublemakers.”23 This same erasure is replicated in the report compiled by the Farlam Commission of Inquiry that was released to the President of South Africa on 31 March 2015 and to the public on 25 June 2015. The report’s findings are based on the notion of “common intent,” whereby the miners are construed as a homogeneous, monolithic entity. As Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa director Stuart Wilson underscored immediately after the release of the report: the report tends to treat both the living and the dead – especially the miners – in a highly generalised way. Intentions and motives are assigned to groups of people, not individuals. [. . .] What Judge Farlam offers is an unsatisfactory narrative of faceless crowds and poorly-judged decisions, where responsibility, if it is apportioned at all, is doled out in the abstract.24 Against this backdrop, the image of Mambush, the man in the green blanket, and its elevation to counter myth function as a counter discourse, a rediscovery of singularity that troubles the mainstream othering, dehumanising and homogenising narratives that followed the massacre and blamed its victims for it.

The making of the man in the green blanket Even though he was not among the rock drill operators who initiated the strike, Mambush had already burst onto the scene during the week before the massacre. He was elected on the strike committee on 12 August and can be seen in Rehad Desai’s multi-award-winning documentary Miners Shot Down (2014) as he negotiates with General Mpembe, the Deputy Commissioner of the North West province, on Monday 13 August.25 The phrase “the man in the green blanket” was first used on 17 August 2012, the day after the massacre, in an article published in the Johannesburg daily newspaper The Star titled “The Man in the Green Blanket Is Forever Silenced.”26 The piece tells the story of how the author, for whom Mambush had acted as a contact, found his dead body lying in the bloody fields of Marikana: He never wanted me to know his name. His name did not matter in that hostile situation. I could easily spot him from a distance in his trademark green blanket. It was the bright-coloured blanket that grabbed my attention as I neared an area in front of a kraal where several men lay strewn on the ground – either dead or badly injured. I turned to a colleague and said the blanket looked like my contact’s trademark drape. I walked closer. It was him. He was lying face down. Fresh blood trickled from his head.27

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Mambush reappeared the following month in another article also published in The Star and written by Poloko Tau, who had followed his dead body on its journey back to Mambush’s village, where it was brought to be buried by fellow mineworkers: Atop the rolling mountains covered in green shrubbery in the Thwalikhulu section of Mqanduli in the Eastern Cape, the weekend saw low-tempo, sad songs pouring out of grieving souls. In a hut nearby, a group of crestfallen women surrounded his widow, their tired eyes fixed on the coffin next to her. A coffin holding a bullet-riddled body. Outside, a group of men mournfully sang Ingwenyama ise khaya. Softly clapping their hands, they huddled into a squatting position. These were some of the striking Lonmin mineworkers who had come to bid farewell to the man they regarded a hero and symbol of bravery, as borne out by their song, which means “the lion is now home.”28 The words of the article were later laid out as a poem – “The Man in the Green Blanket” – by Allan Kolski Horwitz (2013).29 And in 2014 aaliyah sanKara uploaded a video poem to YouTube where the words, slightly altered to “the man with the green blanket,” are spoken while the opening image of Sadiki’s photograph fades into everyday images of Mambush and other workers. Here is the beginning of the poem: The man with the green blanket never suspected that the green weave resting on his shoulder would have to shield him from more than just the cold/The man whose green blanket served as no invisibility cloak when they shot fourteen times over and split his soul like they once sliced South Africa/Mambush he was called uncle and father the leader the commander future rock driller underground hard labour/Who never saw enough of the sun to have dreams of running water some clear path to lead to his dear child’s bright future not as a slave but as a master.30 But it is in visual representations and recontextualisations that the image of the man in the green blanket has been most creatively resignified. One cannot not start here with poet and sculptor Pitika Ntuli’s exhibition “Marikana Hill to Constitution Hill” (2013–2015). In a symbolically charged gesture, this exhibition (Figure 6.2) brought the Marikana massacre to the site that perhaps more than any other represents the ideals and aspirations that accompanied the transition from the regime of apartheid to the new democratic dispensation: amidst the buildings that celebrate the 1996 South African Constitution. In the official speech that launched the exhibition, Tinyiko Sam Maluleke pointed to the strident juxtaposition of meanings created by this setting: “the connection between Constitution Hill and the hill on which the men of Marikana fell. The one hill is a hill of shame while the other is the hill of justice.”31 The exhibition displayed human figures made of simple everyday objects and discarded materials – stones, recycled hoes,

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Figure 6.2 Pitika Ntuli, “Marikana Hill to Constitution Hill” exhibition. Source: Photograph by Pitika Ntuli.

corrugated iron, wheelbarrows, spades, seating pipes, old chairs, wheel pinions, shafts and computer motherboards: This is an exhibition of sculptures about discarded people. The sculptures are built with discarded, derelict materials formally used in or as tools – useless tools used to depict “useless” people who are in fact treated as if they were worthless tools. Yet the sculptures display these people rising through and in the abandoned debris of modern and not-so-modern tools and cultures to assert their humanity.32 Among the sculptures, there was the visually arresting man in green blanket made of a metal structure covered with a piece of corrugated iron, which adds an

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additional layer of meaning to the subject it represents by referencing the material shack dwellers use to build themselves a home in township backyards and informal settlements. The figure is simple yet dramatic, with the corrugated iron reproducing the plasticity of the green blanket and the metal structure on the pedestal capped by what looks like a helmet. By relating “Marikana Hill” to “Constitution Hill,” the exhibition recontextualised the massacre in a historical constellation that linked it to an era whose end the 1996 Constitution was supposed to have signalled. In Pitika Ntuli’s words, “I think what hit us the most as a society is that we thought the era of mass killings was over with apartheid. To have our own democratic government allowing this to happen is shocking.”33 At the launch of the exhibition, Maluleke outlined this long history by reminding his audience of the chronology of South African state massacres: Sharpeville (21 March 1960), Soweto (starting 16 June 1976), Boipatong (17 June 1992), Bisho (7 September 1992), Marikana (16 August 2012). He then asked about the meaning of the reappearance of this type of event, which brought back the darkest days of South Africa’s history, in the post-apartheid period: “If the democratic dispensation has not cured us from our rites of blood, what will?”34

From Marikana to #RhodesMustFall The recent debate about decolonisation, which was initially sparked by the successful campaign for the removal of the statue of British arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the upper campus of the University of Cape Town in 2015, provides an alternative way of framing the question. The removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was not an isolated event. It marked the beginning of a wave of struggles led by students and outsourced workers at South African universities that continued well into 2016. Identified by a number of hashtags, among which the most prominent were #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, these struggles won important victories, including the removal of the statue, the cancellation of planned university fee increases for 2016 and commitments from several university administrations to decolonise the curriculum and insource cleaning and other subcontracted staff within an agreed period of time.35 In the words of a statement issued by the University of Cape Town #RhodesMustFall collective, the “decolonial mandate” that led to the “focus on Cecil John Rhodes as a central symbolic figure of the legacy of colonialism” in 2015 points to the fact that 1994 did not erase the legacy of colonialism and apartheid. The South African transition to democracy did not usher in a new “postcolonial” era, but rather one in which the legacy of the colonial past and apartheid continues to make its presence felt in neocolonial “material and ideological realities [. . .] related to that very legacy.”36 In other words, the question has to do with temporality. It is the question asked by writer and activist Leigh-Ann Naidoo in her 2016 Ruth First memorial lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: “What time is it?” “Yet,” she adds, “to tell the time is a complex matter in this society. We are, to some degree, post-apartheid, but in many ways not at all. We are living in a democracy that is at the same time violently, pathologically unequal.”37

Signs of the times 127 The student movements of 2015 and 2016 started with the demand to remove the symbol of racism and colonialism represented by the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at UCT, and from there expanded the meaning of decolonisation to develop a comprehensive critique of the structure of contemporary South African society: In 2015 students were resisting the commodification of education by calling for free, quality, decolonised education and expressing dissatisfaction with the rate and depth of change two decades after South Africa’s democratisation. Youth were critiquing institutional racism and the racialized oppression that have persisted across South Africa, making it arguably the most unequal country in the world currently.38 The call for decolonisation by “fallist” movements went beyond the “surfacelevel cosmetic changes” associated with the idea of transformation, which at South African historically white universities had accompanied the slow change of demographics and inclusion of Black academics and more African content since 1994. Instead, it called “for the deeper structural change of the university as an institution, issuing from concerns with staff demographics, Euro-centric curricula, institutional racism and other forms of oppression such as patriarchy and homophobia.”39 It is a call whose meaning inhabits temporalities that transcend the immediacy of party and institutional politics. It is inserted in the longue durée of the history that starts with centuries of colonial occupation, traverses the almost 50 years of institutionalised apartheid (1948–1994), and then lands us in the still incomplete transition to a society free of the inequalities and of the structures of oppression, domination and discrimination inherited from this long history. For decolonial scholar Ramón Grosfoguel, “One of the most powerful myths of the twentieth century was the notion that the elimination of colonial administrations amounted to the decolonization of the world. This led to the myth of a ‘postcolonial world.’”40 It is the shattering of this myth that links the Marikana massacre to #RhodesMustFall. As Joseph Mathunjwa, the President of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), said in an interview he gave after an address at the University of Cape Town in August 2015: “You must recall that when the miners were striking in 2012, they were looking to undo the legacy of Cecil John Rhodes. So, it is natural that they will support the actions of the RhodesMustFall movement.”41 This link also brings us back to the man in the green blanket. One version of the image of Mambush draped in his trademark item of clothing is the stencil titled “Remember Marikana” that was produced by the Tokolos Stencils Collective, who take their name from “the Tokoloshe, Tikoloshe or Tokolos (in slang),” a “dwarf-like creature of Xhosa and Zulu mythology that is said to be conjured up by sangomas (traditional healers) usually out of jealousy or anger.”42 Singled out and separated from the striking workers who surround him in the original photograph, the man in the green blanket is here turned into the embodiment of the memory of their collective struggle (Figure 6.3). The stencil, described by the Tokolos Stencils Collective as a “catalyst for the recovery of historical memory of

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Figure 6.3 “Remember Marikana” stencil by Tokolos Stencils Collective. Source: Photo taken by the author in 2014.

the recent past,”43 has been spray-painted on walls, monuments and public buildings from Cape Town to Johannesburg. In May 2014, on the eve of a debate on the merits of keeping or removing Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, the stencil appeared on its pedestal.44 Erected on the stairs that lead to the upper campus, the statue placed Rhodes in thinker pose looking north, at the continent he had famously dreamt of conquering from the Cape to Cairo. Its presence there was a reminder both of the legacy of colonialism and of how the university – whose facilities were moved in 1928 to land donated by Rhodes, the founder of the De Beers mining company – is implicated in it. How the statue’s permanence in a prime location at the historically white University of Cape Town constellated past and present was thrown into relief by the protest action that would become identified with the birth of #RhodesMustFall: when UCT student “Chumani Maxwele threw faecal matter he had collected from bucket toilets in Khayelitsha onto the visage of the now infamous statue of Cecil John Rhodes in an effort to highlight the uncomfortable realities of degradation and oppression.”45 The action referenced the “poo protests” that had previously taken place in Cape Town, where township and informal settlement dwellers from around the city had thrown faeces at public buildings to draw

Signs of the times 129 attention to poor sanitation facilities and lack of service delivery in their areas. By bringing human excrement from the historically Black township of Khayelitsha to the affluent and historically white suburb of Rondebosch, where UCT is located, Maxwele crossed the racial and social divides that continue to define the city’s human geography. He thus staged the conflict between two worlds that in South Africa’s daily life remain largely segregated. The #RhodesMustFall campaign and, before it, the appearance of the “Remember Marikana” stencil on the pedestal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes remind us of how monuments become sites of conflict at moments of political disjuncture.46 In this case, the disjuncture lies in the persistence of colonial and neocolonial structures of inequality in a postcolonial and post-apartheid society still in need to be decolonised. This is the disjuncture that Nelson Maldonado-Torres and other decolonial thinkers have named “coloniality,” a term that “refers to a logic, metaphysics, ontology, and a matrix of power that can continue existing after formal independence and desegregation.” To the persistence of coloniality, the project of decoloniality opposes “the production of counter-discourses, counterknowledges, counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world.”47 It is in such a process of dismantling that the Tokolos Stencils Collective imagined its “Remember Marikana” intervention to participate: using the memory of Marikana to fight, like Mambush, to get rid of this white supremacist capitalist society we live in. Art can use Marikana to champion movements that aspire to rid our country of colonialism and white privilege once and for all.48 Many others have used and appropriated the image of “the man of the green blanket.” It was turned into a stylised green silhouette for the posters and T-shirts used as publicity material for Aubrey Sekhabi’s Marikana – The Musical (2014), which has been rightly critiqued for its failure “to render Noki and the miners beyond dangerous, dancing and muti-charged black men.”49 And several political campaigns and organisations have utilised the image for mobilising and solidarity work linked to Marikana: from the spray-painted reproduction that popped up all over Johannesburg for the 2015 Amandla.mobi campaign “Send a message of solidarity to the widows of Marikana” to the reproduction of Leon Sadiki’s original picture next to the phrase “It is better to die for a cause than to die for nothing” of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union Marikana commemoration day banners.50 But there is an image that has been circulated and reproduced on social media and the World Wide Web, where I found it, with which I want to conclude. It superimposes Mambush on the African continent (Figure 6.4): his feet are in South Africa; the spear cuts across the southern part of the continent; the right arm with the clenched fist is stretched over the Sahel, north of the Gulf of Guinea; and the slightly inclined head and left shoulder point north-west, parallel to the coast along the Red Sea. The continent is painted black, with a red star over the

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Figure 6.4 The man in the green blanket.

Sahara Desert. The binaries, dualities and paradoxes so often associated with the signifier Africa are here resignified by the counterpoint of meanings produced by its juxtaposition with the tragedy and heroism that the figure of Mambush simultaneously represents. On 3 December 2011, The Economist published “The Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising” feature article, complete with a picture of a boy flying an Africashaped multi-coloured kite in the blue sky. The article starts with a description of the busy Onitsha market in southern Nigeria – a celebration of unfettered consumerism in a land of plenty where every day is like “Christmas-shopping season” and the “shops are stacked six feet high with goods,” while “the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople.” The article goes on to tell the reader about the fastest-growing middle class on the planet, the soaring rate of foreign investment, prospective economic growth comparable to Asia, and

Signs of the times 131 Africa’s 600 million cell phone users. To be sure, it also mentions corruption, bad governance and persistent “drought and famine” in parts of the continent, together with the worsening of the climate, “deforestation and desertification.”51 But the underlying message is clear. It is encapsulated by the title of the last section of the article, “More trade than aid.” Kevin Bloom and Richard Poplak note that this kind of discourse: Introduced a select Western audience to facts that Chinese or Indian players would have found almost too obvious to mention: Africa wasn’t a basket case in need of aid and development initiatives, but rather a massive and growing market in need of servicing. And while this began to change perceptions outside of Africa, the matter of what Africans thought, or of how these categories applied to any human being’s lived experience, went largely without comment.52 Against this backdrop, where the statistical abstractions of the market logic replace developmental paternalism in silencing African voices and erasing other ways of being in the world, it is a radically different kind of uprising that the juxtaposition of the image of the man in the green blanket – armed with spear and clenched fist – with the African continent evokes.

Conclusion Inserted in a political sequence that stretches back to the liberation struggle, the Marikana massacre seems to come straight out of some of the passages about “the pitfalls of national consciousness” in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where the postcolonial elite, acting as intermediary for transnational capital and unable to “rationalize popular action,” brings about such a high level of “exploitation and such contempt for the state” that it “inevitably gives rise to discontent among the mass of the people. It is in these conditions that the regime becomes harsher.”53 As Richard Pithouse wrote in 2014: “Marikana” is now the name of land occupations around the country, as well as a workers’ rebellion, a massacre and an extraordinary strike. And from the platinum belt around Rustenburg to the shacklands of Durban and beyond, people are increasingly putting their primary political investment in their own resilience. New forces are stirring. Elite nationalism is beginning to lose its hold on an increasing militant citizenry. [. . .] The deal that carried us through the last 20 years is up.54 These words ring even truer now, amidst the deceptive calm that has followed the ructions and confusion of the Jacob Zuma era, when increasingly large cracks continue to show in the post-apartheid compromise.55 Perhaps the most urgent questions thrown up by the recent upheavals are what modes of political subjectivity are being set loose by the fracturing of the 1994 settlement, and whether

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they will be able to build and sustain movements capable of bringing the socioeconomic change demanded by the striking miners of Marikana, as well as by the almost daily protests in South Africa’s townships and informal settlements. But the Marikana massacre is not just a South African story. Lonmin plc, the mining company that employed the workers killed by South African police, is a multinational corporation headquartered in London and listed on the London stock exchange whose presence in southern Africa goes back to when it was incorporated in the United Kingdom on 13 May 1909 as the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited. South Africa is home to 80% of the world’s known platinum reserves. The small town of Marikana is part of its platinum belt, which stretches from the North West, Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces all the way up to Limpopo.56 Its geographical location is thus both “local” and “global”: it is inserted in the transnational circuits of capital that delineate the geopolitical economy of mineral-resource extraction. This reminds us once more that global integration does not manifest itself as a homogeneous embeddedness in the processes of “globalisation,” nor as the unidirectional migration movement towards the global north evoked by the refugee and migrant crises that saturate western media and discourses. It is constituted by complex relations of inequality, exploitation, power, struggle and resistance, as well as by multidirectional flows and hops such as those that continue to bring western-based and, increasingly, eastern-based multinationals to the rich mineral enclaves and natural resources of sub-Saharan Africa.57 It thus seems appropriate to bring this book to a close by letting the gaze that emanates from my final picture haunt the south-north border.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I borrow this phrase from Marinovich, “The Murder Fields of Marikana.” Saba, “The Man in the Green Blanket,” loc. 445–450. Ibid., loc. 645. Ibid., loc. 427. Alexander, “Analysis and Conclusion,” 195. Marinovich, Murder at Small Koppie, 211. In the rest of the chapter I will call him Mambush. This is the name by which his comrades knew him, and the name associated with the image of the man in the green blanket. It comes from the nickname of a soccer player Mambush admired, Daniel Mambush Mudau. 8 Barthes, Mythologies, 223. 9 Ibid., 224. 10 Reid, “Myth and Stereotype,” 101. Barthes defines myth “in a bourgeois society” as “depoliticized speech.” By this Barthes refers to how the language of myth gives the “things” it signifies – such as national myths or the lifestyles and values that become associated with certain consumer goods – “a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” In other words, for Barthes myth is a simplifying language that depoliticises speech by reducing or eliminating socio-historical complexities and contradictions – vis-à-vis an understanding of the “political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world” (Mythologies, 255–256). Emphases in original.

Signs of the times 133 11 On the photograph as an encounter, see Azoulay, “What Is a Photograph?” 12 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” 218. 13 Over the last few years, I have discussed this photograph with Honours students in my Communication, Media and Society class at the University of Johannesburg. South African students often insist on the connotative link between the way Mambush wears the blanket and African identity and leadership. Some of the discussion can be found here: https://twitter.com/CMS2A11. 14 See Greimas, Structural Semantics. 15 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 99. Emphasis in original. 16 Sinwell, Lekgowa, Mmope and Xezwi, “Introduction,” 3. 17 Duncan, The Rise of the Securocrats, 182. 18 Baleni, “Baleni on Lonmin Killings and Violence (20 August).” 19 Nzimande, “Our Condolences and Symphaties.” 20 Quoted in Duncan, The Rise of the Securocrats, 191. 21 Ibid., 191. 22 Ibid., 187. 23 Brown, South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens, 12. 24 Wilson, “Judge Farlam’s Accidental Massacre.” 25 Sinwell and Mbatha, The Spirit of Marikana, 9 and 42–43. 26 There is no byline on the article, while the picture and caption that accompany it are attributed to Tiro Ramathlatse. 27 The Star. 2012. “The Man in the Green Blanket Is Forever Silenced.” 28 Tau, “‘The Man in the Green Blanket’ Mourned.” 29 Horwitz, “The Man in the Green Blanket.” 30 sanKara “The Man with the Green Blanket.” 31 Maluleke, “The Marikana Massacre.” 32 Ibid. 33 Ntuli, quoted in Motau, “Artists Lament Miners’ Tragedy.” 34 Maluleke, “The Marikana Massacre.” 35 See Frassinelli, “Hashtags.” 36 #RhodesMustFall, “Right of Response.” 37 Naidoo, “Hallucinations.” Emphases in original. 38 Naidoo, “Contemporary Student Politics in South Africa,” 180. 39 Ibid., 182–183. 40 Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy,” 14. 41 Mathunjwa, quoted in African News Agency, “Pressure on UCT over Lonmin Connection.” 42 Tokolos Stencils Collective, “We Send Our Tokoloshe to Battle.” 43 Tokolos Stencils Collective in Kagablog, “Tokolos Stencils on Art and Politics.” 44 Knoetze, “‘Tokoloshes’ Vandalise Rhodes Statue.” 45 #RhodesMustFall, “Right of Response.” 46 See Mitchell, “Monuments, Memorials and the Politics of Memory.” 47 Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” 10. Maldonado-Torres produced these theses, which are dedicated “To fallists and decolonialists in South Africa and everywhere,” after a three-month stay in South Africa from January to the end of March of 2016. 48 Tokolos Stencils Collective, in Kagablog, “Tokolos Stencils on Art and Politics.” 49 See Nduka Mntambo’s excellent review of the 2017 production at The South African State Theatre in Pretoria, “How ‘Marikana: the Musical’ Has Contributed to Cultural Amnesia.” 50 See Frassinelli, “The Man in the Green Blanket.” 51 The Economist, “The Hopeful Continent.” 52 Bloom and Poplak, Continental Shift, 25–26. Emphasis in original. 53 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 149 and 174. 54 Pithouse, Writing the Decline, 144–145.

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55 For a commentary that captures the structure of feelings that accompanied the twilight of the Zuma era, see Chigumadzi, “Behind the Comparison of Zuma’s South Africa and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.” Chigumadzi argues that “What we are witnessing now in South Africa is not so much a matter of an exceptional, corrupt president as the surfacing of contradictions that were inherent in the negotiated settlement. The longer these stay unresolved, and subject to cynical manipulation, the worse the consequences could be.” 56 Saul and Bond, South Africa, 215. 57 See Bond, Looting Africa; and Ferguson, Global Shadows, especially 42–48 and 194–210. Ferguson suggests that we replace the metaphor of the “flow” for describing Africa’s experience of globalisation with that of the “hop,” so as to underscore its unevenness: “as the contemporary African material shows so vividly, the ‘global’ does not ‘flow’; thereby connecting and watering contiguous spaces; it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved points in the network while excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie between the points” (Ferguson, Global shadows, 47).

Bibliography African News Agency. 2015. “Pressure on UCT over Lonmin Connection.” Cape Times August 20. Accessed 26 October 2016. www.iol.co.za/capetimes/pressure-on-uct-overlonmin-connection-1903238. Alexander, Peter. 2012. “Analysis and Conclusion.” In Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. Edited by Peter Alexander, Botsang Mmope, Thapelo Lekgowa, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi. Johannesburg: Jacana, 169–195. Azoulay, Ariella. 2010. “What Is a Photograph? What Is Photography?” Philosophy of Photography 1 (1): 9–13. Baleni, Frans. 2012. “Baleni on Lonmin Killings and Violence (20 August).” Accessed 29 April 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eLzskhdYwY. Barthes, Roland. 2012. Mythologies. Translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Bloom, Kevin and Richard Poplak. 2016. Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Bond, Patrick. 2006. Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Brown, Julian. 2015. South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics. Johannesburg: Jacana. Chigumadzi, Panashe. 2017. “Behind the Comparison of Zuma’s South Africa and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.” The New York Times 27 April. Accessed 17 May 2017. www. nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/behind-the-comparison-of-zumas-south-africa-andmugabes-zimbabwe.html?_r=0. Desai, Rehad. 2014. Miners Shot Down. Johannesburg: Uhuru Productions. Duncan, Jane. 2014. The Rise of the Securocrats: The Case of South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana. The Economist. 2011. “The Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising.” 3 December. Accessed 15 April 2018. www.economist.com/node/21541015. Fanon, Frantz. 1965 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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———. 2016b. “Hallucinations.” Ruth First Memorial Lecture, University of the Witwatersrand. Accessed 5 April 2019. http://witsvuvuzela.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ Hallucinations_RUTHFIRST_August2016_FINAL.pdf. Nzimande, Blade. 2012. “Our Condolences and Sympathies to the Marikana and Pomeroy Victims.” Umsebenzi 23 August. Accessed 15 December 2015. www.sacp.org.za/main. php?ID=3724. Pithouse, Richard. 2016. Writing the Decline: On the Struggle for South Africa’s Democracy. Johannesburg: Jacana. Reid, Julie. 2013. “Myth and Stereotype.” In Looking at Media: An Introduction to Visual Studies. Edited by Julie Reid. Cape Town: Pearson, 91–107. #RhodesMustFall. 2015. “Right of Response: #RhodesMustFall: Careful, Rebecca Hodes, Your Colour Is Showing.” Daily Maverick 25 August. Accessed 25 October 2016. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-08-25-right-of-response-rhodesmustfall-care ful-rebecca-hodes-your-colour-is-showing/#.WA7n_yRU57h. Saba, Anthandiwe. 2013. “The Man in the Green Blanket.” In We Are Going to Kill Each Other Today: The Marikana Story. Edited by Thanduxolo Jika, Lucas Ledwaba, Sebabatso Mosamo, Athandiwe Saba and Felix Dlangamandla. Cape Town: Tafelberg, loc. 427–668 Kindle. sanKara, aaliyah. 2014. “The Man with the Green Blanket.” Accessed 2 November 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lUjapnL6Ds. Saul, John and Patrick Bond. 2014. South Africa: The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana. Johannesburg: Jacana. Sinwell, Luke, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope and Bongani Xezwi. 2012. “Introduction: Encounters in Marikana.” In Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. Edited by Peter Alexander, Botsang Mmope, Thapelo Lekgowa, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi. Johannesburg: Jacana, 1–14. Sinwell, Luke and Siphiwe Mbatha. 2016. The Spirit of Marikana: The Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa. London: Pluto Press. The Star. 2012. “The Man in the Green Blanket Is Forever Silenced.” 17 August. Accessed 20 October 2016. www.iol.co.za/the-star/the-man-in-the-green-blanket-is-forever-silenced1364499. Tau, Poloko. 2012. “‘The Man in the Green Blanket’ Mourned.” The Star 10 September. Accessed 20 October 2016. www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/man-in-the-green-blanketmourned-1379101. Tokolos Stencils Collective. 2014. “We Send Our Tokoloshe to Battle with Those Trying to Make Us Forget the Atrocities of Marikana.” Africa Is a Country 20 January. Accessed 26 October 2016. https://africasacountry.com/2014/01/we-send-our-tokoloshe-to-battlewith-those-trying-to-make-us-forget-the-atrocities-of-marikana/. Wilson, Stuart. 2015. “Judge Farlam’s Accidental Massacre.” Daily Maverick 26 June. Accessed 15 December 2016. www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2015-06-26judge-farlams-accidental-massacre/.

Index

Abani, Chris 70, 72 Accra 9 Achebe, Chinua 54, 78 Addis Ababa 8 Adenekan, Shola 70 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 18, 68–69, 72 Affectionately Known as Alex (Turken) 100 Afolabi, Segun 72 Africa 1–5, 10, 11, 15, 18–19, 33–35, 37, 51, 78, 129–131, 134; media representations of 2–3, 64n13, 69; migration in 5–6; rising 2–4, 19, 130–131; sub-Saharan 6, 11, 33, 132; see also postcolonial “Africa’s Hopeful Economies: The Sun Shines Bright” 3 Africa Is a Country 11, 75, 105 African: Academy Movie Awards 105; American English 80–81; cinemas 18, 35, 38, 45n39, 51–52, 54, 64, 64n13, 65n22; cities 6, 9, 18, 34, 39, 43, 114n89; cultural production 54, 65n22; feminism 57–58; languages 12–13, 15, 51–52, 64n47, 83n20; literature 18, 68–75; middle class 3; migrants 78–81, 89–96, 101, 105, 110nn27–28; Renaissance 8, 88, 93, 114n54; urban poor 6; Writers Series 72; see also border(s); digital media; postcolonial African National Congress 59, 91 “African Writing Blurs into ‘World’ Literature” (Ojwang and Titlestad) 72 African Union 8 Afrophobia 19, 93 Afropolitanism 11, 23n76 Agamben, Giorgio 47n60 Agenda 2063 8 Ahmed, Sarah 107 Ajayi, Dami 70 Alive in Joburg (Blomkamp) 46n53

America 3, 78–80; North 91 American: accent 78; global ascendancy 31; culture 31; society 80 Americanah (Adichie) 69, 72 Angels on Our Shoulders (Spitz) 100, 106 Angola 37, 89 Ansah, Kwaw 54 Antonius, George 32 Anzaldua, Gloria 13 Appadurai, Arjun 9 Apter, Emily 65n29 Asiwaju, Anthony Ijaola 22n50 Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) 122, 127, 129 Australia 1, 2, 7 Avatar (Cameron) 39–40 Bady, Aaron 75 Baleni, Frans 122 Balibar, Étienne 2, 6 Balogun, Ola 54 Baraka (Mthiyane and Hendricks) 100, 106 Barthes, Roland 120, 132n10 Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, The, (Mengestu) 70 Berlin Conference 7–8 Berlin Wall 6–7 Beyoncé 68 Bhabha, Homi 12 Black Consciousness Movement 23n59 Black Orpheus 72 Blaut, Jim 32 Bloch, Ernst 53, 63 Blomkamp, Neill 18, 35, 39, 43, 46n52, 100 Bloom, Kevin 33, 131 border(s) 1–2, 5–12, 16, 71, 75–77, 80, 82, 104, 107–109; African 1, 5, 7–9, 22n50; and African literature 71–75;

138

Index

communities 13; crossings 18, 75–77, 79; figure of 71, 76–77; linguistic 1, 81; media representations of 2; and migration 5–7, 11–12; sociocultural 57, 60; South African 7, 51, 89, 91, 93, 99, 104; southern European 1, 4–5, 7; southnorth 2, 4–5, 17, 19, 132; studies 7; thinking 13–14; US-Mexico 1, 7; walls 1, 20n3; see also translation Border as Method (Mezzadra and Neilson) 10, 76 bordering 1, 7, 16, 18, 22n47, 23n52, 71 Botswana 77, 89 Bourdieu, Pierre 9 #BringBackOurGirls 10 Brown, Andrew 99 Bulawayo, NoViolet 18, 69, 71–72, 74, 83n20 Burning Man, The (Ugah) 100, 106 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu 90 Caine Prize for African Writing, The 71–73 Cameron, James 39 Cape Times 92 Cape Town 9, 46n54, 90, 111n37, 119, 128; Khayelitsha 128–129; Rondebosch 129 capitalism 3, 53; global 4, 10, 61, 76, 82; multinational 41; neoliberal 18; oil 39 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4, 53 Chigumadzi, Panashe 134n55 Chikwava, Brian 72 Chimurenga 72 China 4, 22n40, 34, 45n25 Cisse, Soulemayne 51, 54 Citizen, The 92 Citizen and Subject (Mamdani) 8 citizenship 4, 9, 11, 14, 19, 41, 81, 88, 92–93, 96–99, 102, 109, 110n1, 110n28, 113n58, 113–14n64 City Press 119 Cold War 7, 31 Cole, Teju 11, 68–70, 72, 74, 82–83n6 coloniality 4, 13, 14, 21n22, 129 Comaroff, Jean and John 34, 39, 45n29, 45n30, 45n35 comparative media studies 16–17 Congo My Foot (Ojang, O’Donoghue, Redelinghuys) 100, 106 Continental Shift (Bloom and Poplak) 33 Contrast 72 cultural and media studies 17 Cultural Time Zones 9–10 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 17, 31–33, 44

Damrosch, David 73 “Danger of a Single Story, The” (Adichie) 68 Dangote, Aliko 3 Dar es Salaam 6 Davis, Mike 34 decolonial thinking 13–14, 127, 129 decolonisation 4–5, 13, 88, 120, 126–127 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 35, 38 Derrida, Jacques 63–64 Desai, Rehad 100, 123 Diawara, Mantia 51 digital divide 11, 70–71 digital media 10–11, 13, 17–18, 45n39, 68–71, 80, 82n6, 83n18, 85n61, 129–130; and African literature 70–71, 83n25 Dima, Mashudu Rubson 56 District 9 (Blomkamp) 18, 35, 39–44 Divided (Marshall) 20 Dornford-May, Mark 51 Drum 72 Dubliners (Joyce) 73 Du Bois, W.E.B 13, 84n57 Duncan, Jane 122 Dying Colonialism, A (Fanon) 98–99 Eastern Cape 119 Economist, The 2–3, 33, 130–131 Elelwani (wa Luruli) 18, 51–65 Elysium (Blomkamp) 43 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 32–33 Euro–America 35, 45n30 Euro-American: historical narrative 7; social and cultural theory 32 Europe 1–8, 18, 21n22, 21n33, 32; and Africa trade 33, 34, 37, 91, 97 European: Algeria’s minority 99; colonialists 78; culture 31; passport holders 111n38; Union 7 Everyday Is for the Thief (Cole) 69 Fanon, Frantz 21n33, 23n56, 98–99, 113n61, 113n63, 131 Farlam Commission of Inquiry 123 #FeesMustFall 10, 88, 126 Ferguson, James 134n57 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 73 First World War 7 Five Fingers for Marseilles (Matthews) 39 “***Flawless” (Beyoncé) 68

Index Folarin, Tope 71–72 Foreigner, The (Maseko) 100 Fragile States Index (formerly Failed States Index) 38 Freedom Charter 91, 98, 114n64 Garuba, Harry 54, 63 Gauteng 90, 92, 95, 110n22, 132 General Mpembe 123 Ghana 7, 44n20, 79, 92 Ghana Must Go (Selasi) 72 Gibson, Nigel 94 Gilroy, Paul 79 globalisation 3–5, 7, 14, 53, 132, 143n57 Go Home or Die Here (Worby, Hassim and Kupe) 111n39 Going Home (Kikamba) 99 Gqola, Pumla Dineo 111n38 Gramsci, Antonio 24n80 Grosfoguel, Ramon 127 Habila, Helon 72 Hall, Stuart 121 Hardt, Michael 32, 33, 121 Harris, Ashleigh 73–74 Harrow, Kenneth 51 Hart, Gillian 91–92 Harvey, David 45n25 Hassim, Shireen 111n39 Hayles, Katherine 17 Helgesson, Stefan 43 Hendricks, Riaan 106 Himmelman, Natasha 23n76 “Hitting Budapest” (Bulawayo) 71 “Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising, The” 2, 19, 130–131 Horwitz, Allan Kolski 124 “How to Write about Africa” (Wainaina) 69 “Imagined Boundaries and Borders” (Yuval-Davis and Stoeltzer) 20n5 imperialism 3, 4, 14, 18 India 4, 33 Insiders and Outsiders (Nyamnjoh) 20n5 Irr, Caren 79–80 Isaacs, Camille 85n61 Isegawa, Moses 72 Israel 1, 23n60 Italy 5 Jacobs, Sean 105 James, C.L.R 32

139

Jerusalema (Ziman) 38 Johannesburg 6, 9–10, 23n6, 35, 39–41, 45 , 47 n56, 77, 89–92, 95, 100, 101, 104 – 106, 108, 111n37, 123, 126, 128 – 129; Alexandra 92; Constitution Hill 95, 124–125; East Rand 104; Hillbrow 100–104; Soweto 40, 90, 126 Joshua, TB 10 Joyce, James 73 Jungle Fever (Lee) 52 KaeKazim, Hakeem 105 Kant, Immanuel 15 Kaschula, Russell 70, 83n16 Khanna, Parag 20n4 Kikamba, Simao 99 Kinshasa 6, 34, 35–39, 43, 46n42 Known and Strange Things (Cole) 82–83n6 #Kony12 10 K’Oyuga, McOdindo Redscar 70 Kunene, Vusi 61 Kupe, Tawana 111n39 Kurdi, Alain 5 Kwani 72 Lagos 6, 9, 34, 44n24, 69, 74 Landau, Loren 9, 93, 98, 100, 111n33, 112n41 Lee, Spike 52 Lesotho 89, 111n33 Limpopo 51, 52, 54, 55, 132 Lojede, Fabian Adeoye 105 Lonmin 119, 124, 132 Luanda 6 Mad Max (Miller) 38 Madagascar 89 Mail & Guardian 72 Makause 95, 100 Malawi 89 Malcolm X (Lee) 52 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 129, 133n47 Maluleke, Tinyiko Sam 124 Mama, Amina 58 Mambéty, Djibril Diop 54 Mambush (Mgcineni Noki) 19, 120, 121, 123–124, 127, 129–130, 132, 132n7, 133n13 Mamdani, Mamhood 8, 13, 96 Mandela, Nelson 53, 56, 57, 92 man in the green blanket, the 19, 119, 123, 124

140

Index

“Man in the Green Blanket Is Forever Silenced, The” 123 Man of Good Hope, A (Steinberg) 100 Man on Ground (Omotoso) 19, 100, 104–109 Marikana 119, 123–124, 126, 129, 131–132 “Marikana Hill to Constitution Hill” (Ntuli) 124–126 Marikana – The Musical (Sekhabi) 129 Marinovich, Greg 119 Marx, Karl 3, 20n16 Marxism 13–14, 21n22 Masebe, Florence 52 Matabane, Khalo 100 Mathunjwa, Joseph 127 Maumela, Titus 53, 54 Mauritius 89 Maxwele, Chumani 128, 129 Mazibuko, Buyi 108 Mbeki, Thabo 88, 95, 112n41 Mbembe, Achille 53, 98, 113n59 Mboti, Nyasha 23n52, 65n17 media 16–17, 119–120, 122; convergence 16, 68; crossing(s) 16–17, 68–71, 99; trans 17, 70; see also Africa, migration in; border(s); South African(s) Mediterranean Sea 5–7 Meisie (Roodt) 51 Mengestu, Dinaw 70 Mexico 1, 7; City 43, 56n44 Mezzadra, Sandro 10, 21n17, 76, 104 Middle-East 5–6 Mignolo, Walter 13–14, 21n22 migration 5–8, 17–18, 71, 74–82, 93–94, 97–100; autonomy of 23n78; narratives of 69; western media representations of 5, 132; see also Africa Miners Shot Down (Desai) 123 “Miracle” (Folarin) 71–72 Mistry, Jyoti 52–53, 59 Mkongi, Bongani 90 Mnisi, Nonhlanhla 60 Mntambo, Nduka 133n49 Moeti, Sammy 60 Mokoena, Fana 105 Mona Lisa 69 Moraka, Tumi 100 Mozambique 7, 44n20, 89, 106 Mpe, Phaswane 19, 99, 100, 105, 108 Mpumalanga 132 Msimang, Sisonke 88, 109–110n1 Msipha, Prudence 59

Mthiyane, Omelga 106 Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ 74 Mupotsa, Danai 58 Murder at Small Koppie (Marinovich) 119 Musila, Grace 23n76 Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe 9, 23n74, 98, 111n33 Naidoo, Leigh-Ann 126 Nairobi 9 Namibia 89 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 119, 122 Ndebele, Makhaola 108 Negri, Antonio 32, 33, 109, 121 Negrophobia 19 Neilson, Brett 10, 76 Neocosmos, Michael 92–93, 96, 98, 110n28, 112n46, 112–113n58, 113–114n64 Neshahe, Mutodi 61 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 12, 13, 15, 68, 70, 83n6; cyborality 68 Nhamuave, Ernesto Alfabeto 106 Nigeria(n) 45n26, 69, 89, 130; characters 47n55, 64, 102, 104–105, 109; crime stories 45n39; criminals and drug dealers 90, 93; immigrants 41, 91; prostitutes 42 Nnaemeka, Obioma 58 Nollywood 35, 45n39, 51, 54 North-West Province 19, 119, 123 Not in My Neighborhood (Orderson) 111n37 Ntuli, Pitika 124–126 Nyamnjoh, Francis 20n5, 112n56 Nzimande, Blade 122 O’Donoghue, Kyle 106 Ojang, Okepne 100, 106 Ojwang, Dan 72, 73, 83n24 Omotoso, Akin 19, 100, 104, 105, 107, 108 Open City (Cole) 69, 70, 72 Orderson, Kurt 111n37 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 7–8 Orientalism (Said) 31 Osu, David Ishaya 70 Ouedraogo, Idrissa 51, 54 Pampalone, Tanya 100 Pan-Africanism 22n50, 88, 92–93 Palestine 23n60 “Part-time Africans” (Musila) 23n76 Period Pain (Matlwa) 99

Index Petersen, Kirsten Holst 57 Pinnock Schonstein, Patricia 99 Pithouse, Richard 131 “Politics of Translation, The” (Ngũgĩ) 12 Poplak, Richard 33, 131 postcolonial: Africa 7–8, 15, 32, 98; African states 13, 38; capitalism 82; critique 4; elites 99, 131; melancholia 59; migrants 12; movements 32; theory 12, 15, 32, 58; world 2, 4, 127 Prabhu, Anjali 64n13 Présence Africaine 72 Pressman, Jessica 17 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 24n80 Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty) 4 Quayson, Ato 47n55 Quebeka, Jahmil 100 Quiet Violence of Dreams, The (Duiker) 99 Ralinala, Johannes 56 Rasalanavho, Elsie 61 Redelinghuys, Miki 106 Refuge (Brown) 99 “Remember Marikana” (Tokolos Stencils Collective) 127–129 Rhodes, Cecil John 126–129 #RhodesMustFall 10, 88, 119, 126–129 Roodt, Darrell 51 Sadiki, Leon 120–121 Said, Edward 17, 18, 31–33, 35, 44 Sakai, Naoki 13, 14–16, 22n47, 57, 65n41, 81; heterolingual address 14–16, 81; homolingual address 14–15, 81 sanKara, aaliyah 124 Sekhabi, Aubrey 129 Selasi, Taiye 72 Sembène, Ousmane 54n13 Sese Seko, Mobutu 35 Seychelles 8, 89 Sithole, Lulana 95 Skyline (Pinnock) 99 A Small Town Called Descent (Jahmil) 100 Souls of Black Folks, The (Du Bois) 84n57 south 2; European 2; global 2–4, 10 South Africa 4, 9, 18–19, 23n52, 41, 43, 46nn52–54, 51–52, 54–55, 57–59, 92, 103–106, 119–132, 134n55; postapartheid 88, 92, 95, 99–100, 108, 119 South African(s): Bantustans 93; Black 9, 19, 23n59, 43, 46n54, 93–94, 109–110n1, 129; cinema 40, 51–52,

141

100; cities 92, 94, 101; citizens 92–94, 97, 06; Communist Party (SACP) 122; Constitution 19, 91, 96, 98. 99, 110n22, 112n46, 124; exceptionalism 93, 96, 109–110n1; government 119; history 126; Human Rights Commission 90; inequalities 97; media 89; nationalism 92; public discourse 93–94; public sphere 90; state 91, 96, 98, 121; state massacres 126; universities 126–127; urban poor 94; White paper on International Migration 97–98, 112n52, 56; see also border(s) southern Africa 6, 9, 15, 132 Southern African Development Community (SADC) 89 Soyinka, Wole 8 Spitz, Andy 95, 100, 106 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 12, 65n29 Star, The 92, 123, 124 Steinberg, Johnny 100 Strauss, Helene 106 Structural Adjustment Programmes 4 Suitcase Stories (Cacherty, Glynis) 100 Szeman, Imre 39 Tanzania 89 Tau, Poloko 124 Tchouaffe, Olivier J 45n39 Theory from the South (Comaroffs) 34–35 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 54, 78 Titlestad, Michael 72, 73, 83n24 Tokolos Stencils Collective) 127–129 Torres, Nelson-Maldonado 129 Train of Salt and Sugar, The (Azevedo) 45 Transition 72 translation 1, 12–16, 55–57; and the border 1–2, 14–15; cultural 54–57, 60; double 14; living in 78–82; and the nation-state 14–16; the politics of 12; positionality of the translator 15, 57; as a theoretical concept 65n41; and untranslatability 54–57, 60 Treffry-Goatley, Lisa 83n24 Trump, Donald 1 Tshele, Elizabeth Zandile 71 Tshwane 112n41 Turken, Danny 100 Tutu, Desmond 88 Two Camps (Desai, Rehad) 100 U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Dornford-May) 51 Ugah, Adze 100, 106

142

Index

Ulysses (Joyce) 73 United Kingdom 4, 89, 132 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) 89 United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) 33 United States 1, 4, 6, 18, 31, 33, 54, 57, 69, 71, 73–79, 81 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 5, 98 University of Cape Town (UCT) 25, 119, 126–128 University of Johannesburg 133n13 University of the Witwatersrand 72, 94, 101, 126 urban: African 18, 35, 38–40, 42–43, 45n29; enclaves 9; growth 6, 17–18, 22n39, 34–35, 40; poor 6, 94; rural divide 6, 18, 94; southern 9; uprisings 5 Van Riebeeck Jan 23n52 Van Veuren, Mocke 47n64 Venda 18, 51–55, 57–62 Virgin of Flames, The (Abani) 70, 72 Viva Riva! (Wa Munga) 18, 35–40, 43–44 Voetsek! Us? Brothers? (Spitz) 95, 100, 110n27 Wainaina, Binyawanga 18, 69 Walker, Cherryl 59 Wa Luruli, Ntshavheni 18, 51, 52 Wa Munga, Djo Tunda 18, 36, 43 Washington Consensus 4 Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe) 19, 99–104, 105, 108–109

We Need New Names (Bulawayo) 18, 69, 71–73, 75–82, 109 “We Should All Be Feminists” (Adichie) 68 West Bank 1 Western Cape 126 “Who Is (South) African?” (Mboti) 23n52 Why We’re Living in the Age of Walls (Marshall) 20n3 Williams, Pumla 110n22 Wilson, Stuart 123 Winfrey, Oprah 3 Worby, Eric 111n39 World Cup (soccer) 19, 68–69, 92, 100–101 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 99, 131 Wright, Richard 13 xenophobia 19, 34, 89–96, 99–109, 111n33, 34, 112n41, 113–114n64 Yaaba (Ouedraogo) 51 Yeelen (Cisse) 51 Yesterday (Roodt) 51 Zambia 89 Zebra Crossing (Vandermerwe, Meg) 99 Zimbabwe 7, 38, 51, 71–72, 75, 84n35, 89, 95 Ziqubu, Tshishiwe 105 Zulu, Lindiwe 90 Zuma, Jacob 59, 112n41, 131, 134n55 Zwaziland 89, 111n33 Zwelithini, Goodwill 90