In this chapter, I address quotidian performance as a means of engaging with, and performatively contesting, post-apartheid cityscapes, as well as the neo-colonial modes of social organisation, political visibility and power that the cosmopolitan modern city produces and contains. I specifically look to the appropriation of everyday public spaces by congregants of iBandla lamaNazaretha (the Nazareth Baptist Church) and how this practice of de-and re-territorialising the post-colonial/post-apartheid city works to lay bare the neo-liberal investments instantiated in its dominant rhythms while, at the same time, reclaiming the city as the site of a syncretic African modernity that emerges and moves ‘betwixt and between’ formal institutions and structures of colonial power.

Human ‘progress’ into modernity is commonly perceived to have begun in the metropolis of Western Europe with the Enlightenment, spreading outwards from there to non-European worlds that, in this view, but for Europeans’ noble, civilising zeal, would have remained stuck in their backward traditions and beliefs. This Eurocentric centre/periphery model and its associated ‘ideology of European diffusionism’, as Jonardon Ganeri calls it,territorialises Western Europe as the centre of the ‘modern world’. It produces a universalising vision of progress animated by the ‘theories, norms, historical experiences, utopic fantasies, and ideological commitments’ of Western European society.According to Holly Wardlow, not only does this perspective wrongly assume that there was a ‘seamless consensus on what so-called Western modernity is or was’ in the first place,but it also makes it all but impossible to conceive of the same advancements that are seen to have been post-Enlightenment Europe’s singular inheritance to the (now, late-capitalist) modern world as having been possible elsewhere and at other times in other societies.

This Eurocentric conception of modernity does not describe the world as it is, as much as it offers a self-reifying vision of it that Michel-Rolph Trouillot says ‘comes to us loaded with aesthetic and stylistic sensibilities, religious and philosophical persuasions; cultural assumptions that range from what it means to be a human being to the proper relationship between humans and the natural world; and ideological choices that range from the nature of the political to its possibilities of transformation’.Such a vision is always socially, culturally and politically prescriptive, inasmuch as it will ‘always suggest, even if implicitly, a correct state of affairs – what is good, what is just, what is desirable – not only what is, but what should be’.