Customizing post-apartheid Johannesburg: the dialectic of errancy in Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema

ABSTRACT

In post-apartheid inner-Johannesburg, the built environment reflects a city no longer wrenched apart by race, but by socio-economic stratification. Even as the city is refurbished for global appeal through gentrification, the rich-poor tussle among black urban dwellers motivates peculiar spatial practices which, while illustrating embedded urban pressures, produce new urban rationalities. Among these practices is hijacking of white-owned buildings in Hillbrow, a practice that impacts theorization of the ways in which black urban dwellers have customized Johannesburg post-1994. Through close reading of Ralph Ziman’s Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, this article theorizes building hijacking as a curious case of sprouting city-making practices. Terming this aggressive do-it-yourself approach to urbanism as errancy, the article argues that such customization of the city usefully illustrates not only the annexation of post-apartheid Johannesburg, but the peculiarity of changing perceptions of freedom among black urban residents..

KEYWORDS:

• Errancy
• building hijacking
• Jerusalema
• customizing Hillbrow
• global south urbanism
• gentrification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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³ Simone, “Pirate Towns.”

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⁵ Lahoud, “Introduction: Post-Traumatic Urbanism,” 16.

⁶ Murray, City of Extremes, 6.

⁷ Harrison, et al., South Africa’s Spatial Development, 3.

⁸ Cartwright and Marrengane, “Urban Governance and Turning African Cities Around.”

⁹ Bähr and Jürgens, “Johannesburg: Life after Apartheid,” 186.

¹⁰ Bremner, “Reinventing the Johannesburg Inner City.”

¹¹ Morris, Bleakness and Light.

¹² Landman and Badenhorst, “Gated communities and spatial transformation in Greater Johannesburg,” 216.

¹³ Cartwright and Marrengane, “Urban Governance and Turning African Cities Around,” 14.

¹⁴ Winkler, “Why Won’t Downtown Johannesburg ‘Regenerate’?” 309.

¹⁵ Cartwright and Marrengane, “Urban Governance and Turning African Cities Around,” 14.

¹⁶ Pieterse, “Urban Governance and Spatial Transformation Ambitions in Johannesburg,” 30.

¹⁷ City of Johannesburg (CoJ), Inner City Regeneration Strategy (ICRS); Inner City Regeneration Charter.

¹⁸ Herbert and Murray, “Building from Scratch” 472.

¹⁹ Nevin, “Instant Mutuality.”

²⁰ West-Pavlov, “Inside Out – The New Literary Geographies of the Post-Apartheid City,” 16.

²¹ Wilhelm-Solomon “Dispossessed Vigils,” 139.

²² Silverman and Zack, “Land Use Management and Democratic Governance,” 67–70.

²³ Pieterse, “Grasping the Unknowable,” 9.

²⁴ Ibid., 10.

²⁵ Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City, 98.

²⁶ Ratele, “The Singularity of the Post-apartheid Black Condition.”

²⁷ Murray, Taming the Disorderly City.

²⁸ Murray, City of Extremes, 329.

²⁹ Wilhelm-Solomon, “Dispossessed Vigils,” 141.

³⁰ Murray, Taming the Disorderly City, 1.

³¹ Barber, Projected Cities, 13.

³² Murray, City of Extremes, 326.

³³ Bähr and Jürgens, “Johannesburg: Life after Apartheid,” 175.

³⁴ Winkler, “Why Won’t Downtown Johannesburg ‘Regenerate’?.”

³⁵ Nyamnjoh, Insiders and Outsiders.

³⁶ Woods, “Reading Urban Spaces in African Texts,” 101.

³⁷ Morris, Bleakness and Light.

³⁸ Kruger, “‘Africa Thina’? Xenophobic and Cosmopolitan Agency,” 251.

³⁹ Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City, 156.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 165.

⁴¹ Kruger, “Filming the Edgy City,” 142.

⁴² Ibid., 143.

⁴³ Milstein, “Nation-Building Through Film,” 182.

⁴⁴ Marx, “At the End of the Rainbow,” 261.

⁴⁵ Khan, “Representations of Crime, Power and Social Decay,” 212.

⁴⁶ Wilson, “Gangster’s Paradise?” 458.

⁴⁷ Herman, “Begging for Change”, 18.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 19.

⁴⁹ Kruger, “Filming the Edgy City.”

⁵⁰ Herbert and Murray, “Building from Scratch,” 472.

⁵¹ Silverman and Zack, “Land Use Management and Democratic Governance,” 11.

⁵² Pieterse, “Grasping the Unknowable,” 5.

⁵³ Harrison, et al., Changing Space, Changing City.

⁵⁴ Silverman and Zack, “Land Use Management and Democratic Governance,” 62–79.

⁵⁵ Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xvi.

⁵⁶ Youngquist “Accidental Histories,” 221.

⁵⁷ Pieterse, “Grasping the Unknowable,” 13.

⁵⁸ Nuttall and Mbembe, “Afropolis: From Johannesburg,” 282.

⁵⁹ Guelke, Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 87; Ogura, “Urbanization and Apartheid in South Africa.”

⁶⁰ Guelke, Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 28.

⁶¹ Seekings, “Race, Class and Inequality in the South African City.”

⁶² Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xvi.

⁶³ Ibid., 15.

⁶⁴ Schneider-Sliwa, “Global and Local Forces in Cities Undergoing Political Change,” 6.

⁶⁵ Seekings and Nattrass, Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa, 4.

⁶⁶ Harrison, South Africa’s spatial Development; Arnold, The New South Africa, 16.

⁶⁷ Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” 411.

⁶⁸ Murray, City of Extremes, 332.

⁶⁹ Wright, “Mutant City.”

⁷⁰ Glissant, Poetics of Relation.

⁷¹ Domingo, South Africa, 97; Mncadi and Citabatwa, “Justice, Safety and Correction: An Urban Indigenous Model?” 26–27.

⁷² de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xii.

⁷³ Murray, City of Extremes, 329.

⁷⁴ Foster, “From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence,” 176.

⁷⁵ Wilhelm-Solomon, “Dispossessed Vigils,” 135.

⁷⁶ Murray, City of Extremes, 5.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 7.

⁷⁸ Oldfield, “Critical Urbanism,” 7.

⁷⁹ Brenner, “What is Critical Urban Theory?” 198.

⁸⁰ Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, xv.

⁸¹ Landman and Badenhorst, “Gated Communities and Spatial transformation in Greater Johannesburg,” 215.

⁸² See Jerusalema – breaking new ground in South African Cinema at: http://crimebeat.book.co.za/blog/2008/09/03/cine-crime-barry-ronge-reviews-the-groundbreaking-jerusalema/.

⁸³ Ellin, Post Modern Urbanism.

⁸⁴ Khan, “Representations of Crime, Power and Social Decay,” 210–11.

⁸⁵ Pieterse, City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development, 1.

⁸⁶ Gotz and AbdouMaliq, “On Belonging and Becoming in African cities.”

⁸⁷ Pieterse and Owens, Johannesburg: Confronting Spatial Inequality, 2.

⁸⁸ Parnell, “Conceptualizing the Built Environment,” 433.

⁸⁹ Pieterse, “Urban Governance and Spatial Transformation Ambitions in Johannesburg.”

⁹⁰ Bähr and Jürgens, “Johannesburg: Life after Apartheid,” 175.

⁹¹ Woods, “Reading Urban Spaces in African texts.”

⁹² Brenner, “What is critical urban theory?,” 204.

⁹³ Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, xxii.

⁹⁴ Cartwright and Marrengane, “Urban Governance and Turning African Cities Around.”

⁹⁵ Madlalate, “(In)Equality at the Intersection of Race and Space in Johannesburg,” 485.

⁹⁶ Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, 151.

⁹⁷ City of Johannesburg (CoJ), Spatial Development Framework 2040, 36.

⁹⁸ Pieterse, “Urban Governance and Spatial Transformation Ambitions in Johannesburg,” 22.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Addamms Songe Mututa

Addamms Songe Mututa is a Southern Urbanism Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. He graduated with a joint PhD in African cinema and cities at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He holds a Master of Art degree in Theatre Arts and Film Technology from Kenyatta University, Nairobi; and a Bachelor of Creative Arts degree from Moi University, Eldoret. Broadly, he researches on cinema cultures of Southern Urbanism, with keen interest in African urbanism, urban theories, African cities and citizenship.