The racial politics of Afropolitanism and Zukiswa Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg

ABSTRACT

While scholars have long taken Afropolitanism to task for its classism, its racial politics have largely been praised. Pushing against this (un)critical consensus, this article offers the first sustained analysis of the racial politics informing Achille Mbembe’s theory of Afropolitanism alongside Zukiswa Wanner’s novel London, Cape Town, Joburg (2014). Making visible how institutional racism continues to define the post-apartheid present, it shows that both authors differentially single out race for scrutiny and collude in mystifying white dominance in South Africa. Just as Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism are preoccupied with race but obfuscate racism, Wanner’s novel uses racialized drama as an important plot device yet stigmatizes the denunciation of white supremacy, while sharply critiquing homophobia, sexism, and xenophobia. In invoking race as central while relieving white people of responsibility for the racist status quo, these works display paradoxes that reveal an investment in silencing racism, paradoxes which this article lays bare.

KEYWORDS:

• Afropolitanism
• Achille Mbembe
• Zukiswa Wanner
• racism
• post-apartheid
• South Africa

This concept of Afropolitanism comes really from South Africa. I think that South Africa is […] a very rich laboratory for anyone who would like to think beyond the racial. (Mbembe 2016, 30)

The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. (Morrison 1992, 46)

Set between two continents and in three different metropolises, Zukiswa Wanner’s (2014b) novel London, Cape Town, Joburg embodies the cosmopolitan spirit that has come to inform many contemporary African novels which feature mobile middle-class Black characters. Symbolically opening in 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic election, the novel follows roughly 17 years in the lives of Germaine Spencer, a white British ceramist, and Martin O’Malley, an investment banker who is the son of an exiled Black South African mother and adoptive white Irish father.¹ Germaine and Martin fall in love in London, have a child, and then decide to move to South Africa because Martin, who experienced racial discrimination in England as a child, wants his son “to grow up among people who look more like him” (138). In the process, the novel trivializes racism in South Africa, while it provides sharp critiques of homophobia, sexism, and xenophobia. If we take cultural hybridity (Selasi 2005, n.p.) and the “movement, mobility, [and] circulation” (Mbembe 2016, 35) of African peoples as paradigmatic of Afropolitanism, then London, Cape Town, Joburg could be described as an Afropolitan novel. However, my intention in this article is not to label the work, but to show how Wanner’s novel and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Afropolitanism collude in relieving white people of responsibility for the racist status quo. It is not that South Africa is an ideal place “to think beyond the racial” (Mbembe 2016, 30), but that Mbembe’s Afropolitanism silences the fact of white dominance in South Africa and beyond, leaving us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power and, ultimately, the world we inhabit.

Both a discourse and a theory of identity, Afropolitanism has become ubiquitous in criticism on African literature, particularly anglophone African fiction. First conceptualized by Taiye Selasi (2005) to describe “the newest generation of African emigrants” (n.p.), the term “Afropolitan” has gained popularity thanks especially to Mbembe’s theorization of Afropolitanism as an allegedly progressive move away from Marxist and nativist approaches to the study of Africa. Many scholars have critiqued Afropolitanism for its classism and for privileging the perspectives of mobile African elites (see Eaton 2019, 7; Goyal 2021, 778; Ho 2021, 770; Musila 2016, 110). However, the incisive critique to which the theory has been subjected reaches an impasse when it comes to its racial politics, which have largely given rise to an unsettling critical consensus. In scholarly assessments of the theory, as Janice Ho (2021) writes,

the promises and pitfalls of Afropolitanism bifurcate on the lines of race and class: Afropolitanism’s racial politics is read as progressive for its articulation of hybrid and fluid identities, while its class politics is read as regressive in its obliviousness to the privileges that wealth confers and its commodification of culture. (771)

Its racial politics, then, are generally perceived to be redemptive features of Afropolitanism, rather than its Achilles’ heel.

Afropolitanism is often praised for destabilizing essentialist ideas of Africanness. Chielozona Eze (2014), for example, extols Afropolitanism for highlighting the transnational character of “African postcolonial identity” (241). Similarly, in her reading of Selasi’s (2013) Ghana Must Go, Aretha Phiri (2017) praises the Afropolitan novel, and indirectly Afropolitanism, for constructing “a fluid and mutable (contemporary Afrodiasporic subjectivity)” (153). More explicitly wedded to colourblindness is Sarah Balakrishnan’s (2017) extolment of Afropolitanism as a theory that steps “outside racial paradigms” and privileges a “post-racial universalism” (7, 8). These appraisals of Afropolitanism valuably emphasize that African identities are complex and multifaceted. However, in depicting the theory’s focus on hybridity, fluidity, and universalism as intrinsically progressive, they obscure the workings of racial power.

A noteworthy exception to the celebration of Afropolitanism’s racial politics is Tosin Gbogi’s (2022) latest article, which contends that Afropolitanism sells “fantasies as facts” as it reproduces the ideology of post-racialism and fails to grapple with xenophobia, neocolonialism, and the exclusionary politics of citizenship (3). Gbogi compellingly demonstrates that contemporary African poetry about migration challenges the racialized mythologies of Afropolitanism. However, Gbogi misses a chance to provide a close reading of Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism. Paying closer attention to these works could have revealed that, rather than speaking “imprecisely of race” (19), as Gbogi argues, Mbembe delegitimizes the critique of racism, as I will show in the second part of this article.

London, Cape Town, Joburg displays important ideological affinities with Mbembe’s Afropolitanism. Just as the theory is preoccupied with race yet obfuscates racism, the novel uses racialized drama as a plot device while it delegitimizes the denunciation of white supremacy. At the same time, Wanner’s work offers a counternarrative to Afropolitanism. In condemning xenophobia, it challenges Mbembe’s (2007, 29) romanticization of Johannesburg. Moving from London to Cape Town and concluding in Johannesburg, Wanner’s novel is emblematic of what Leon de Kock (2011) has called a “transnational turn” in South African writing (22). Still, it also firmly engages with the complexities of the local context, illustrating how Black South African fiction has not categorically reached a post-national era (see Rafapa 2014, 71). Despite its original contribution to South African literature, London, Cape Town, Joburg, which won the 2015 K. Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award, has received little critical attention. While Wanner’s novels have been described as “black chick lit” (Wanner 2021, n.p.; original italics), this categorization ignores the fact that the author has criticized the label, a label that speaks volumes about the limited boxes in which Black South African women’s writing is sometimes placed, and the privileged status that white writing and whiteness maintain in South Africa. After all, as Wanner (2021) has written, South Africa “does not have a literary category called white dick lit” (n.p.; original italics).

London, Cape Town, Joburg refrains from providing a spectacularized depiction of South African society. This makes sense as post-apartheid fiction has largely moved away from what Njabulo Ndebele ([1984] 1994) called “a highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation” (41) in pursuit of an engagement with the ordinary, viewed by Ndebele as necessary for a literature that takes up “the immense challenging responsibility to create a new society” (58). In Wanner’s opus, the moral gravity typically adopted towards racial matters in Black apartheid literature is abandoned in favour of a more humorous and often expressly satirical approach to race relations. London, Cape Town, Joburg is both a romance and tragicomedy, with its tone wavering between humorous satire and earnest social critique. However, as I will show, humour is not equally distributed in the novel as Wanner invites readers to laugh about racism, but maintains a grave, denunciatory, and even didactic tone when addressing other modes of oppression. In its reluctance to tackle white power, the novel resembles various other post-1994 South African novels by Black writers, such as Niq Mhlongo’s (2004) Dog Eat Dog and Kgebetli Moele’s (2006) Room 207, in which the unequivocal critique of white supremacy that shaped most Black literature during apartheid is no longer guaranteed (Milazzo 2016, 132).

The irony is that South Africa is far from being “a new society” in which the legacies of apartheid have been overcome, or a place in which whiteness, as Ndebele argues, “has lost its coherence, or credibility, or its power” (2010, 118). The 2012 Marikana massacre, in which South African police killed 34 and injured at least 78 striking Black miners who were demanding living wages, speaks powerfully to the ongoing realities of anti-Blackness and institutional racism in South Africa (Milazzo 2022, 17). Rather than improving, life expectancy for Black people decreased from 60 years in 1985 to 49 years in 2004 (Rooks and Oerlemans 2005, 1210). What is more, white people, who are less than 9 percent of the population, still own over 70 percent of the land (Majavu 2023, 217). These facts show that anti-Black racism, including in the form of the spectacular police violence of Marikana, remains ordinary in South Africa today.

One would be hard pressed, however, to find such statistics in Mbembe’s writings extolling Afropolitanism. Neither can one turn to London, Cape Town, Joburg for an engagement with South Africa that makes visible how racial conditions have, in various ways, worsened for the Black majority. Offering a socially situated reading of Wanner’s novel and Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism informed by Black radical thought and critical race theory, this article shows that both writers mystify the workings of racism in post-1994 South Africa. While my reading is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, it is deliberately committed to uncovering rhetorical and narrative mechanisms that obscure racial inequality. Contending with racial disavowal, in fact, provides valuable insights into the often contradictory racial politics of post-apartheid cultural productions. While ignoring racism remains the dominant modus operandi in literary studies, which considers the investigation of racism intrinsically prescriptive, extraneous to the discipline, or as implying “an unsavory sociological perspective” (Blake 2019, 308), my analytical method is informed by Toni Morrison’s (1992) insight that, “The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act” (46). Rather than being a neutral endeavour or a task for the sociologist, the “act of enforcing racelessness” (that is, of disavowing white supremacy), whether in scholarly or fictional work, demands the critical attention of the literary scholar. In invoking race as central while relieving white people of responsibility for the racist status quo, Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism and Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg display paradoxes that reveal an investment in silencing racism, paradoxes which this article lays bare.

Mbembe’s Afropolitanism and the disavowal of white supremacy

In “Afropolitanism”, Achille Mbembe (2007) contends that the study of Africa has been dominated by three paradigms: anti-colonial nationalism, Marxism, and Pan-Africanism. These frameworks, he argues, are no longer useful for understanding Africa, but rather “hinder the renewal of cultural criticism” (26). In opposition to these paradigms, Mbembe proposes Afropolitanism, which counterposes “mixing, blending and superimposing” against an emphasis on “raw racial difference” (27, 26). Mbembe thus erroneously assumes that discourses of mixture can transcend racial difference. In the process, he questions the racial solidarity advocated by Pan-Africanism and describes Afropolitanism as a framework that “refus[es] on principle any form of victim identity” (28–29), branding the critique of racism as an instance of victimization.

It is thus not surprising that many white critics have embraced Mbembe’s Afropolitanism, praising its rejection of “any identity built on exclusion or on victimhood” (Gädeke 2018, 499). This widespread approval is to be expected given that Mbembe frames Black resistance to racism as illegitimate, describing it as a case of “Africans’ resentment and their neurosis of victimization” (2001b, 16). As it turns out, Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg also insists that “no one does victimology like South Africans” (2014b, 231), stigmatizing the denunciation of racism in post-apartheid South Africa as unwarranted. These arguments give fuel to hegemonic white discourses which argue that, in present-day South Africa, Black people’s complaints about racism have no substance. In an article emblematic of such tactics of racial disavowal, for example, philosopher Pedro Tabensky (2016), while critiquing the South African movement for Africanization in academia, stigmatizes Black South Africans’ resistance to racism as a case of “dependency, where the aggrieved sees herself as a victim” and seeks “revenge” (10).

While this article is concerned centrally with Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism rather than his entire opus, racialized contradiction is noticeably widespread in his work. For example, in “Apartheid Futures and the Limits of Racial Reconciliation”, Mbembe also inveighs against “a form of black identity predicated on the idea of victimhood” (2015, 4; cf. Mbembe 2008, 7). Still, he recognizes that in post-apartheid South Africa the “pervasive material inequality between whites and blacks coexists with formal legal equality” (3; cf. 2008, 6). Mbembe nonetheless brands racial redress measures as instances of discrimination against white people (4). Appeals to Blackness, he argues, “were warranted when blacks were oppressed on account of their blackness”, but are unjustified today (15). Mbembe thus paradoxically both acknowledges that racial inequality persists in South Africa and contends that Black people are no longer racially oppressed. Elsewhere, Mbembe (2014) critiques the use of “nonracialism as a weapon to discredit any attempt to deracialise property, institutions and structures inherited from an odious past” (n.p.). This critique, however, is hypocritical as Mbembe himself delegitimizes racially remedial policies in South Africa, suggesting that they introduce “a degree of inequality” and are an expression of “racial self-hatred and self-loathing” (2015, 12, 15). Mbembe, then, actually reproduces colourblind logics that advantage white people and sustain the racist status quo.

The ideas developed in “Afropolitanism” have an earlier genealogy in Mbembe’s thought. In “African Modes of Self-Writing”, which examines intellectual trends in the study of Africa, Mbembe (2001b) already argues that race, geography, and tradition “constitute the prison within which the [African doxa] still struggles” (3). He writes that “the burden of metaphysics of difference” that characterizes some historicist perspectives on Africa is a “dead end” (2). The historicist emphasis on racial difference is framed as a burden here and not white supremacy itself as Mbembe is silent about racial inequality. Through an emphasis on what he terms “black racism” (17), Mbembe also suggests that Black people can be racist, conflating Black responses to racism with racism itself. Mbembe mystifies the fact that racism is not equivalent to prejudice but is rather, as Steve Biko (2002) writes, “discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of subjugation or maintaining subjugation” (25). In a country like South Africa, in which white people maintain social and economic power, accusations of racism against Black people, such as Mbembe’s, buttress the racist status quo. As he argues that Negritude and Pan-Africanism do not “challenge the fiction of race”, Mbembe presumes that challenging race as an idea is possible without dismantling institutional racism (2001b, 13). Moreover, Mbembe reproduces a discourse of liberal individualism which posits the struggles that African countries face as being not “the legacy of a history imposed upon Africans”, but the consequence of “free and autonomous choices” (6). He also reinscribes the myth of free choice in Necropolitics, in which he argues that “to belong to the nation is no longer merely an affair of origin but also of choice” (Mbembe 2019, 13). Such liberal ideology further obfuscates how racism shapes the politics of citizenship in South Africa and elsewhere.

The paradoxes of Afropolitanism are a logical consequence of its attempt to silence racism. Ironically, Mbembe (2001c) argues in “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism” that scholars of Africa have placed “too much emphasis on the themes of identity and difference or economic marginalization”, an emphasis that he deems objectionable (1). Elsewhere, too, Mbembe laments that “the central object of [African] discourse is identity” (2001b, 2). Yet Afropolitanism is precisely a theory of identity. Mbembe himself writes: “I shall show how current African identities are forged at the interface between cosmopolitanism and the values of autochthony” (4). Clearly, Mbembe (2007, 28) has no problem with producing a theory of African identity, as long as this identity is constructed as hybrid. This move assumes that hybridity can transcend race. Mbembe here reproduces the argument, previously made by Paul Gilroy (1993) in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, that discourses of hybridity “exceed racial discourse” (2). Both Gilroy and Mbembe assume that hybridity is disentangled from the racism that has produced it. In the process, Mbembe’s Afropolitanism repackages for an African context the idealization of hybridity that shaped cultural studies in the 1990s (Milazzo 2022, 125). The colonial violence that defines hybridity is thereby erased in furtherance of salvational ideologies of mixture.

Mbembe’s deployment of hybridity as a discourse that mystifies anti-Black racism is ironic given that in On the Postcolony he laments that Foucauldian and post-structuralist paradigms “problematize everything in terms of how identities are ‘invented’, ‘hybrid’, ‘fluid’, and ‘negotiated’” (2001a, 5). This manner of analysis, Mbembe argues, uses the pretext of “avoiding single-factor explanations of domination” to obfuscate “how discourses and representations have materiality” (5). However, this is precisely the problem with Mbembe’s theory of Afropolitanism, which posits hybridity as key to African identities while it suggests that racial power represents a simplistic and obsolete explanation for Africa’s problems.

In Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, which includes one of Mbembe’s (2021) most extensive engagements with Afropolitanism, the theory is presented as a teleological salvation, as a solution to scholarly approaches to Africa that highlight racism. Mbembe frames “Afropolitanism”, the title of the final chapter, as the way out (of race), arguing that “this version of cosmopolitanism foregrounds the ways in which Africans are identical to other humans” (178). If race is the prison, Afropolitanism will bring freedom in Mbembe’s understanding, even as the theory cannot free itself from the racism that it disavows. Afropolitanism, after all, is hostile to the acknowledgement that colonialism and slavery continue to shape African societies (Mbembe 2001b, 31). Mbembe thus renders invisible how slavery, as Calvin Warren (2016) writes, “exceeds the frame of the historical event that we are so eager to get over and indeed provides the condition of possibility for the liberal grammar of humanism that undergirds the compulsion to get over in the first place” (56). While Out of the Dark Night offers perceptive critiques of homophobia and sexism by arguing, for instance, “that the institutionalization of unjust gender systems and their reproduction in the law are a constitutive dimension of the masculinist state” (Mbembe 2021, 196), it minimizes the significance of white domination and structural racism for understanding present-day social dynamics in South Africa and beyond. In this way, it replicates the differential treatment of racism that informs Wanner’s latest novel, to which I now turn.

London, Cape Town, Joburg and its racialized paradoxes

The obfuscation of white supremacy in London, Cape Town, Joburg, too, is paradoxical as racialized drama is an important plot device while racism is trivialized in the work. From the start, race shapes even the most intimate relations in the novel. Immediately confronting the reader with tragedy, the novel opens as follows:

Zuko Spencer-O’Malley is dead. Dead via suicide. At the tender age of thirteen. My son is dead. And I failed to notice he was troubled. For three days I was too self-absorbed, so intent on changing the world that I couldn’t see the pain my child was going through. (Wanner 2014b, 2)

Devastated that her son Zuko did not mention her in his suicide note, which he addressed to his father, Germaine blames herself for Zuko’s omission. She wonders: “Was it not me who asked Gladness to teach me how to braid so I could cornrow his hair when he went through that hair-braiding phase? So why his bloody goddamn, Dear Papa?” (3–4; original emphasis). Germaine’s anxiety about having been excluded from her son’s suicide letter is immediately racialized. The reference to braiding Zuko’s hair into cornrows, which she learned from Zuko’s nanny Gladness, suggests that, as a white woman, Germaine believes that she has done her best in raising a Black child. Still, racialized anxiety assails her, and Germaine finds no peace (5). But although race is presented as a source of drama and anxiety from the beginning, the novel will proceed to mystify the reality of white dominance in post-1994 South Africa. In the process, Germaine’s understanding of herself as a woman “intent on changing the world” foreshadows the novel’s reproduction of a white saviour narrative.

London, Cape Town, Joburg places the critique of racism mainly in the mouth of untrustworthy, even despicable, characters. Martin’s older brother Liam frequently provides poignant, albeit ideologically inconsistent, critiques of racial inequality in South Africa. During a dinner, the two brothers have a heated discussion. Silencing racism, Martin argues that (Black) South Africans need to stop “looking back at the past” and “playing victims” (Wanner 2014b, 164), an argument that evokes Mbembe’s problematic critique of “the figure of the African as a victimized subject” (2001b, 10). Martin’s disavowal of racism is paradoxical given that, at his new job in Cape Town, he is treated like a token. Although he has a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, Martin believes that he was likely hired because of affirmative action policies, thus intimating that Black people have occupational advantages in South Africa (Wanner 2014b, 180). At the same time, the novel shows that Martin is not given the same opportunities as his white colleagues. Despite his experiences of racism, Martin, like the novel itself, nonetheless remains committed to non-racialism, suggesting that racism is ultimately a minor inconvenience for Black people. Liam criticizes Martin’s reproduction of colourblind logics, arguing: “We can’t talk of non-racialism when more than eighty per cent of the land is still owned by ten percent of the population” (163). Liam has a point, but his critique of non-racialism is undermined by the fact that readers are encouraged to agree with Martin rather than Liam, the villain of the story. Not only is Liam an aspiring politician through whom Wanner criticizes the African National Congress (ANC) that controls the South African government, but he is also a paedophile and sexual predator responsible for raping his nephew Zuko, who slashes his wrists after he finds this violation, and Martin’s unwillingness to take a stance against it, too much to bear. While through the “veil of silence that surrounds Liam’s history” the novel denounces the complicity that often enables rape (Dlamini 2021, 49), in attaching the denunciation of white privilege to Liam it delegitimizes the critique of racism.

In deploying racial conflict as a narrative tool that provides drama and suspense while obscuring white supremacy, London, Cape Town, Joburg is not unique among Wanner’s novels. The strategic usage of race to drive the narrative and concurrent silencing of racism also informs Wanner’s ([2006] 2018) debut The Madams, which narrates the vicissitudes of a trio of middle-class women representing South Africa’s main racial groups. The novel opens with the protagonist and narrator Thandi, who is a Black woman, deciding to hire a white maid to see how Lauren, her “liberal white friend and neighbour, who has a black maid, will react to this” (Wanner [2006] 2018, 11). Besides wanting to provoke her white friend, Thandi decides to hire a white maid because, she states, she would feel less guilty were she to get angry at her. Should the reader find this racist, Thandi contends, so be it: “there is [a racist] in all of us” (11). The novel thus detaches racism from white people and renders it a universal attribute, suggesting, as Mbembe does, that there is such a thing as “black racism” (2001b, 17). What is more, after a conflict between the three girlfriends, despite Lauren’s “inherent racism” (Wanner [2006] 2018, 24), it is Thandi who will “apologize profusely” to Lauren (84; original italics). In placing the onus for forgiveness on the back of a Black character, The Madams and various other post-apartheid novels by Black writers, such as Mongane Serote’s (2010) Revelations and C.A. Davids’s (2013) The Blacks of Cape Town, unwittingly signal that reconciliation is a one-way-street in South Africa (see Milazzo 2016).

While The Madams constructs a colourblind equivalence between the three protagonists by positing class as an equalizer, it does not treat patriarchy in the same way. It does not presume that sexism is irrelevant or goes both ways. Neither does Mbembe, who argues that Africa in the last three decades has witnessed a “widening [of] already existing inequalities between the sexes” (2021, 195). In The Madams, Thandi laments that women “are still expected to play the traditional roles to perfection” (Wanner [2006] 2018, 8). While sexism places limitations upon Thandi, racism apparently does not. Thandi and Nosizwe are not just unencumbered by structural racism. They are ostensibly advantaged in post-apartheid South Africa. According to Thandi, “the blacks” are “taking over everything in the country and giving all the jobs to their relatives” (54). That the unemployment rate is almost 50 percent for Black South Africans but only 10 percent for white South Africans does not concern Thandi (see Statistics South Africa 2022, 42, 43). Even as most South Africans live in poverty, she describes “a middle-class person” as being “an average South African” (Wanner [2006] 2018, 27). Like Mbembe, Wanner thus also suggests that Black people’s lives are mainly governed by “free and autonomous choices” (Mbembe 2001b, 6).

If The Madams and London, Cape Town, Joburg both mystify post-apartheid racial conditions, the latter novel goes as far as ridiculing the critique of white supremacy. Consider the satirical scene in which Derrick, a writer and actor, launches White: The Black Man’s Burden, a collection of essays whose precise content is left to the reader’s imagination. Rather than using the scene as an occasion for denouncing white domination in South Africa, the novel disavows such dominance. Derrick, just like Liam, invites scorn. Deniece, a friend of Germaine described as a “[w]omen’s rights activist” who is set up as a foil to the patriarch Derrick, describes him as a misogynist and “an arse of epic proportions” (Wanner 2014b, 256, 257). For Deniece, “most of the essays in [his book] are rubbish” (257). In fact, she attends the launch just so she can write a damning review of the book. When Derrick finally argues that “white women date black men because of apartheid and colonial guilt” (260), Deniece and Germaine storm out of the launch together in a symbolic bond of interracial sisterhood. Derrick’s views, the novel argues, are clearly “rubbish”.

If Derrick is a laughing stock, Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko is invoked almost as a slur in the novel. Wanner writes that Deniece’s Mail & Guardian review of Derrick’s book causes a furore, including “the criticism of the criticism by some Biko-quoting ‘revolutionary’, who claimed that Deniece was representative of the sell-out bourgeois black woman who is always trying to bring the black man down” (2014b, 261). The passage suggests that this “Biko-quoting” reader is a patriarch who is not to be trusted, and neither is Biko. When Liam argues that Martin is “so bloody forgiving” towards white South Africans, Martin responds that Liam would “have made a worthy comrade to Steve Biko” (165). This suggests that Biko’s ideas are comparable to those of Liam, a member of the ANC. Yet the non-racialism and neo-liberalism espoused by the ANC conflict with Biko’s radical demands for redress, which he articulates as follows:

The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country’s wealth. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday. (2002, 149)

Biko’s view of a democratic South Africa was prescient as the country today is indeed “run almost as of yesterday”. Even so, Wanner’s novel renders unthinkable Biko’s call for radical change.

While it delegitimizes Black radical visions of a free society, London, Cape Town, Joburg upholds the perspective of its white liberal protagonist Germaine, who is not held responsible for her exploitation of Black women. Since the novel is told from the first-person points of view of Germaine and Martin, who narrate the story in alternate chapters while six additional chapters consist of Zuko’s journal entries, Andrew Nyongesa (2023) argues that London, Cape Town, Joburg is a “polyphonic novel” that “depict[s] diverse philosophical standpoints” (105). Nyongesa assumes that the presence of multiple narrators in the novel translates into a multiplicity in political standpoints. The novel’s multiperspectivity may give the illusion that Wanner does “not use characters to express [her] views” and that the work is not “vulnerable to ideological bias” (110), but no novel is unbiased and Wanner’s clearly espouses Germaine’s liberal politics.

Even as Germaine is represented as someone who is conscious of the perils of white saviourism, she reproduces its pitfalls in ways that the novel sanctions. Germaine’s position as leader in a predominantly Black organization reminds us of Biko’s critique of white liberals, who “always knew what was good for the blacks and told them so” (2002, 20). Germaine, too, presumes to know what is good for Black people. When she arrives in Cape Town, she opens a pottery studio in the township, which she describes as “an income-generating project” for unemployed women (Wanner 2014b, 156). As Germaine argues that she “can’t pay anyone”, she frames the studio as a “collaboration” through which she “could teach some of the unemployed women to make some cups, mugs and teapots” (156). Germaine, in sum, wants to help. She first lets Nomawethu, a Black woman, lead the project because she does not “want to come across as a patronising white woman coming to the township” (170). It is Nomawethu who tells Germaine not to give money to beggars. When Germaine asks the women whom she is allegedly helping to contribute money for clay, she remembers that Nomawethu told her that she “shouldn’t dole out cash like [she] was the Department of Social Welfare” (177). Instead of critiquing Germaine for exploiting poor Black women, the novel authorizes this exploitation through a Black character. While the novel frames Germaine’s project as a generous attempt to help others, the enterprise ultimately benefits Germaine, who becomes “firmly established in the art world” (200) to the extent that one of her pieces sells for $35,000. The novel thus unwittingly signals that white saviourism depends on an exploitative relationship. However, it fails to condemn this reality as Germaine’s township project and her personal success are never problematized. Neither have critics writing on the novel, such as Meg Vandermerwe (2018), problematized it.

Wanner has been frank about her own affinity with Germaine. Asked about her experiences in writing from the perspective of a white woman, the author asserted:

I’m not sure that Germaine is really that much of an “other”. She is female as I am. Our social-political leanings are more or less the same. The major reason I wrote Germaine as I did was because I was actually trying to highlight our similarities rather than our differences. That it’s not utterly impossible that a white woman from England and a black woman from South Africa can be simpatico. (Wanner, quoted in Vandermerwe 2018, 101)

As Germaine’s political views are aligned with those of the author, it is not surprising that Germaine’s racial politics remain uncritiqued in the novel.

As London, Cape Town, Joburg reproduces a white saviour narrative, it dismisses individual acts of racism as irrelevant. In a key scene, Germaine and Martin host a braai (barbecue) to celebrate their son’s fourth birthday. Among the guests is Victoria, a white Portuguese expat, who continues to take pictures of the guests although she is repeatedly asked to stop. Referring to a fellow white woman, Victoria blurts out: “She was acting like the natives, uhm, blacks, er, Africans” (Wanner 2014b, 196). The only character who challenges Victoria’s racist statement is Liam, whose reaction is labelled as “combative” (196). In a move emblematic of the hushing of racism that characterizes the novel itself, Martin tries “to shut Liam and Noma up about white people and race” (197). After the party, Martin tells Germaine that he would “have liked to hear the end of [Victoria’s] story” (197), further trivializing Victoria’s racism.

In literally laughing off Victoria’s racism, the novel reproduces the trope of the “lovable racist” which, according to David Ikard (2017), strengthens white supremacy and depends on complicity for its reproduction:

The lovable-racist trope [ … ] encourages whites to see racism as a minor character flaw which does not ultimately compromise the moral integrity of the lovable racist. Logistically speaking, the lovable-racist trope requires black/brown complicity in white supremacist ideology to establish cultural legitimacy. That is, lovable racists must convey via black/brown embodied validation that their racism is largely harmless to black/brown folks and people of color in general. (9)

Victoria, like Lauren from The Madams, is portrayed as a “lovable racist”. The racism of these white characters is made to have little bearing on their relationships with Black people as they are presumed to be fundamentally lovable. In The Madams, Thandi and Nosizwe dislike Lauren’s hypocritical white liberalism, “yet interestingly enough this does not result in the termination of the friendship” (Vandermerwe 2018, 100). In both novels, main Black characters minimize racism as “a minor character flaw” that is “largely harmless to black/brown folks” (Ikard 2017, 9).

While London, Cape Town, Joburg laughs off racism, it does not treat other modes of oppression in the same way. Germaine and Martin shrug off Victoria’s racist remarks, but when Liam uses the homophobic epithet “fag”, Germaine gets “angry beyond reason” and kicks him out of the house (Wanner 2014b, 218). Following this incident, the novel contests homophobia through a didactic commentary as Germaine sits down with Zuko and teaches him that “the world is full of different people” (220). Liam ultimately apologizes for having used a homophobic epithet, while Victoria never apologizes for her racism. The novel thus replicates the differential treatment of homophobia and racism that informs Out of the Dark Night, in which Mbembe critiques the “repression of the homosexual relation” in Africa (2021, 194), yet fails to clearly denounce white supremacy.

The critique of patriarchy and gender-based violence is also loud and clear in London, Cape Town, Joburg. Within the context of the 2010 World Cup, Deniece and Germaine decide to perform a “South African version of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for the whole month” (Wanner 2014b, 316). Denouncing the pervasiveness of sexual violence in South Africa, Deniece argues that tourists should be made aware of “the ugly side” of South Africa, “the only country that is not at war that has the sort of rape statistics we have” (316). The novel makes clear that gender-based violence in South Africa is endemic. Mbembe, too, has exposed “a worsening of conflicts between the sexes and increased brutality in the relations between men and women” in the broader African context (2021, 196). The novel suggests that the monologue, titled My Vagina was My Township, is more effective if carried through a white woman’s body – apparently not because of white privilege, though, but to “bring a fresh angle to it” (Wanner 2014b, 317). In the process, the novel sanctions Germaine’s appropriation of Black women’s stories. To the question “Race or gender?”, Wanner’s novel answers that racial solidarity should not prevent Black women from denouncing Black men if they are abusers (269). In critiquing the categorical commitment to racial solidarity as potentially detrimental to Black women, the novel pushes against the Black Consciousness Movement’s understanding of “race as the chief and perhaps the sole oppressive force in South Africa for all Black people” (Gqola 2001, 136). Problematically, however, the novel argues for the primacy of gender over race in shaping living conditions for Black women in South Africa.

London, Cape Town, Joburg is also explicit and earnest in its denunciation of xenophobic violence. As it contests the myth that foreigners are “taking our jobs” (Wanner 2014b, 236), the novel draws sympathy towards violated African migrants in South Africa by delivering its denunciation through Zuko, who is plagued with nightmares about “a man getting burnt” (239; original italics). The novel asserts the paradoxical nature of the hostility against African foreigners in South Africa: when Zuko asks why Africans are getting beaten, Martin responds that Zuko, too, is an African (239). Just as Martin teaches Zuko that African foreigners are not the Other, so does the novel impart this lesson to the reader, who is exhorted to view xenophobia in South Africa as despicable and irrational.

By providing harrowing details about xenophobia, the novel finally parts ways with Mbembe, who romanticizes Johannesburg as “the centre of Afropolitanism par excellence” (2007, 29). The novel also challenges the negative associations of foreigners with “lawless zones” and a “criminal economy” that Mbembe (2021, 178) reproduces. However, it fails to make visible that xenophobia in South Africa is contingent on anti-Blackness, which, as Zamansele Nsele (2023) writes, “remains foundational and ubiquitous in undermining Black citizenship, contributing to Afrophobia’s conditions of possibility” (188). Nsele argues that the hostility against African migrants is a product of the same anti-Blackness that structures the South African state, which continues to relegate Black people – foreigners and citizens – to second-class status. Wanner’s novel both evokes and mystifies the racialized dimensions of xenophobia. The fact that xenophobia in South Africa is better described as Afrophobia, because the victims are exclusively Black, is placed in the mouth of Liam, who describes the attacks as “negrophobic” (Wanner 2014b, 235). Meanwhile, the novel silences the fact that white people in South Africa benefit the most from a xenophobia that excludes us. What the novel never does is ask readers to laugh about xenophobic violence. Instead, it condemns this violence in one of its most disturbing passages. Earnest social critique, then, is not absent in London, Cape Town, Joburg. It merely tends to privilege matters other than racism.

Conclusion: Beyond the racial?

Three decades after the official end of apartheid, South Africa remains the most racially unequal country in the world (Roy 2018, n.p.). Rather than losing socio-economic power, white people are collectively richer now than during apartheid, while Black people are poorer (Legassick 2007, 506). Black people continue to be subjected to pauperization, violence, and an abysmal life expectancy, while those of us who are white still possess “the natural passport to the exclusive pool of white privileges” (Biko 2002, 65). A misleading picture of the country thus emerges in Mbembe’s writings and interviews on Afropolitanism, which insist that post-apartheid South Africa represents “a very rich laboratory for anyone who would like to think beyond the racial” (2016, 30). This misrepresentation has certainly contributed to the popularity of Afropolitanism, which fits comfortably into an academic environment, and world at large, in which the disavowal of racism remains a constitutive feature of white supremacy (see Milazzo 2022).

The disavowal of white power has also come to inform a body of post-apartheid literature of which Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg is emblematic. It would be wrong to argue that the novel aims merely to entertain and that it refrains from engaging in critique. After all, as I have shown, the condemnation of homophobia, patriarchy, and xenophobia is not just explicit in Wanner’s work, but is underpinned by the kind of moral gravity and didacticism that shaped apartheid Black fiction, albeit in matters of race. In an interview on London, Cape Town, Joburg, Wanner makes clear that her fiction is animated by critical commitment, stating: “I love my non-fiction as well as the next person, but sometimes when I want a no holds barred critique of the country, it’s to fiction that I turn. Because fiction doesn’t worry about lawsuits” (2014a, n.p.). Wanner does not shy away from criticizing gender-based violence or the South African government in London, Cape Town, Joburg. Rather than being the product of a categorical refusal of political engagement, in sum, the commitment to non-racialism that informs Wanner’s novel and Mbembe’s theory is “itself a racial act” (Morrison 1992, 46). In singling out race for differential scrutiny while exculpating white people, London, Cape Town, Joburg and Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism sustain the white dominance that they disavow.

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Marzia Milazzo

Marzia Milazzo is an associate professor of English at the University of Johannesburg. Her book Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern University Press, 2022), which shows how white people disavow racism across national boundaries to maintain power, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures, won the 2023 Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award. Her articles have appeared in The Global South, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Current Writing, ARIEL, Cultural Studies, and other venues.

Notes

1. This article capitalizes “Black” while lowercasing “white” when referring to the respective racial groups, a practice that is now also followed by the Associated Press (Bauder 2020, n.p.). The intention thereby is to recognize Black people’s shared history of discrimination and struggle while rejecting the convention of capitalizing the racial category “white”, which has been adopted in white supremacist contexts.