iRhanga is a township alleyway – a transitional space, a liminal space. It is a narrow, often makeshift corridor between homes, separating shacks, houses and streets, often seen as a place of danger – a public space to run through, not linger. But iRhanga is also a space of individual and shared experiences that prioritise aliveness – a space people pass through daily on their way to work, church and soccer practice, a place where young lovers meet to escape the tight confines of small homes that offer no privacy and where neighbours might encounter one another to share news and gossip. We can interpret iRhanga, therefore, as a public space that is inscribed with both inherited violence and human relations of love, family, connection, progress, development, happiness and dignity. iRhanga forms part of the social landscape of the everyday, which is not just about dying, but is also about living, dancing and playing.

It is this tension – between the potential for harm, on the one hand, and emergence, on the other, between an expedient alleyway and, in the absence of public gathering spaces, a communal space – that renders iRhanga a vital concept to reckon with in public art discourse in South Africa. In the face of the precarity that iRhanga holds, the necessity and capacity to imagine self differently, to reinscribe humanity, is all the more radical, all the more urgent. This is the generative paradox at the heart of this chapter, which I use as a tool to reimagine unchanged perceptions of townships, blackness and black creative practices and to critique the spatial politics that limit how each of these is imagined, engaged and defined.

I introduce iRhanga as a public space and as a theoretical framework, firstly, to understand how black people engage with the public sphere and, second, to think through how iiRhanga can potentially allow space for Black Radical Imagination. Focusing on memory, spatial temporality and a love ethic, I discuss the ways in which public interventions and live art practices recuperate iRhanga as a public space for Black Radical Imagination. I am interested in how public interventions and live art practices, read against iRhanga as a physical and metaphorical space, uncover what I am terming ‘possible narratives’ and ‘narratives of possibility’ on account of how black people have been able to transform spaces to resemble the practices or interactions of emarhangeni.