Johannesburg and the city-region

This volume is an exploration of the extraordinary spatial changes in the city of Johannesburg in the period after the ending of apartheid. It builds upon an already flourishing literature on Johannesburg, offering as its principal contribution a balanced perspective that connects systematic, empirically grounded analyses of material trends with readings of the city's ‘subjectivities’ – the character of its fast-mutating neighbourhoods and the identities being forged in its diversity of places.

The volume focuses primarily on the area governed by the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, and uses data that are largely delineated by the municipal boundary. The analysis is, however, not rigidly restricted to the arbitrary edge of the city's administrative boundaries. Where appropriate, it extends to near-Johannesburg areas along what has historically been known as the Witwatersrand, the stretch of urban settlements along the old gold-mining belt. More importantly, the volume explicitly situates the development of Johannesburg within the changes under way across the broader metropolitan region of which it is a part, now commonly known as the Gauteng city-region.

The wider city-region also includes the Metropolitan Municipality of Tshwane, anchored on Pretoria, which has historically been the centre of government in South Africa, and a string of smaller cities and towns around Johannesburg which form an arc of mining and industrial activity. While this volume directs its major focus to Johannesburg, it does also emphasise the relationship of this city to these other areas, and the writing of the volume is being supplemented by work under way on the other components of the city-region. Plates 1 and 2 provide a spatial context for many of the places and cities mentioned in this volume.

Why Johannesburg?

A focus on Johannesburg is arguably important for at least two reasons. First, Johannesburg is the dynamo within the national economy and has a commanding position in the national social imagination for this reason. Scholarly attention to this city will, hopefully, inform policy development that is responsive to this reality.

For Johannesburg, the spatial changes under way have much to do with the city's primacy in the national space economy. It is a city with a vibrant private sector that is driving spatial development in a complex relationship with the regulatory frameworks and spatial policies of government. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate the significance of the city and city-region economy.

A key objective of Johannesburg's strategic spatial planning has been to promote more compact development, limiting growth on the urban periphery. However, there has been considerable pressure for growth close to and beyond Johannesburg's defined urban development boundary (UDB), and in adjacent municipalities. Some 56 per cent of major land-use conversions from open space to other uses in Johannesburg and the area 5 km around it over the 2004–2007 period occurred within neighbouring municipalities, and significant development took place in areas close to, but still inside of, Johannesburg's UDB, especially in the north and north-west (see Figure 20.1). These trends suggest that Johannesburg increasingly needs to be seen in a broader city-region context. However, growth on Johannesburg's periphery and beyond is not merely a question of continuous incremental expansion in search of cheaper land. Rather, dynamics are complex and variable across areas, and processes of growth have been highly contested (Chipkin 2012).

However, unlike other work that has focused on the periphery, particularly the northwestern edge of the city and the newly constituted ‘political relationship’ between the state and communal forms of ownership offered by sectional title units and cluster houses (Chipkin 2012), in this chapter we focus on patterns of growth in specific parts of the north-west since the 1990s, explaining the various drivers and dynamics of change. We consider the differing objectives and intentions of the City of Johannesburg and its neighbouring municipality of Mogale City, as well as of provincial authorities; the role of formal regulatory and legal processes, and of more informal political processes; the pressures by different groups of developers to allow growth beyond the UDB; the influence of environmental groups and existing residents in constraining development; responses to the growth of informal settlements; and the diverse visions for development in the area.

We begin by providing an overview of development trends in the area, and then move in an arc from west to east, discussing the cases of Ruimsig, where the UDB itself has been a focus of contestation; the broader Muldersdrift area, including the Cradle of Humankind and informal and housing areas within Johannesburg, where conflicts have centred around tourism-development-conservation-nimbyism axes; and the planning for large-scale development in Lanseria.

By the time Johannesburg was a mere 40 years old it was being hailed as a ‘world city’ (MacDonald 1926: 9). By 1936 when it celebrated its 50th ‘birthday’ the accolade was even more appropriate. In large measure its status was promoted by the sophistication of its central business district, or CBD, one that had largely been rebuilt following the massive investment that had flowed into it after December 1932 when South Africa abandoned the gold standard in favour of a market price for the precious metal (Hobart Houghton and Dagut 1973). Notwithstanding some early signs of decentralisation to the suburbs in 1959 (Lauf 1959), the CBD was still the paramount location for business in the tower-block phase that characterised the 1970s. At the time few people would have thought that the decision to build a large but isolated mall and office tower called Sandton City on a piece of open veld in a neighbouring and infant municipality called Sandton would constitute a real threat to Johannesburg's CBD. Certainly no one could have conceived that, just three decades later, Sandton City would have grown and attracted so many additional businesses as to become effectively the new CBD of the greatly enlarged unicity of Johannesburg. Indeed, by virtue of this status, Sandton Central is arguably the premier business district on the African continent (Beavon 2004; CDE 2002). The building of Sandton City has been identified as the single most important development in marking ‘the beginning of the end for the [Johannesburg] CBD’ (Daniels 2000).

The decline of the old CBD and the spread of office nodes in the wake of the everwidening fan of major malls in Johannesburg's northern suburbs have been the focus of attention elsewhere (Beavon 2000a, 2004, 2005; Beavon and Larsen 1998; Goga 2003; Tomlinson 1999; Tomlinson and Larsen 2003). Yet very little is known about the way in which the Sandton node developed and grew and, in theoretical terms, became for a brief moment another example, and probably the first South African one, of what has been identified in the USA as an ‘edge city’ (Badenhorst 2002; Garreau 1991). Consequently, in this chapter we focus on these two aspects, that is: the emergence and development of the Sandton business node, as well as its present character, extent and status.

There is a misperception that whatever is indigenous in African culture is ‘made in the village’ and then hybridised in the urban or industrial workplace. In this view, migrant labour has led to an attrition of an authentic culture. Deeper research has shown, however, that whatever might be identified as ‘African culture’ in southern Africa is as much a product of road and rail, the transport depot, the administrative and recruitment camp, the hostel, the tavern and the shanties as it is of any idealised rural setting. Such ‘cultures of mobility’ include well-established genres of musical poetry, folk narration and dance that express experience over migrancy's long history. Such genres represent a building up of performative repertoires as responses to working men and women's lives lived on the move. Centring on the sung poetry of Lesotho migrants, this chapter presents and analyses such repertoires not only as cultural archive, but as action; not simply something migrants know, but something they do.

Musical migrations

From the earliest history of migrant labour, returning workers brought with them the experiences and the conceptual and material artefacts of colonial life. Among these were ‘trade-store’ musical instruments such as the concertina, violin and guitar, popular both on farms and in towns in the Cape with troubadours of all races. Fascinated youngsters in the villages produced their own home-made versions. The importance of music to migrants is expressed in a well-known folk story about the concertina or ‘squash-box’. According to this account, Basotho men first adopted the German or Italian concertina as a means of producing the choral ground and responses to their own solo poetic singing on the trek to the workplace. On the long migrations by foot, often in rain or winter cold, the concertina was played close to the chest under the uniform woollen blanket worn by Basotho, pumping out warmth as well as musical accompaniment to the migrants’ long rhythmic strides and lyric vocal passages.

Prior to these importations, however, not only Sesotho but all Bantu language music had been primarily vocal, with an emphasis equally upon musical and poetic features: a sung literature, or ‘auriture’.

Kliptown, located 25 km south-west of the Johannesburg city centre and today part of the township of Soweto, is best known in South African history as the site where the Freedom Charter was signed at the 1955 Congress of the People. The Freedom Charter became a seminal document of the liberation movement, outlining in ten clauses a vision for a future socialist democracy. When the apartheid regime collapsed in the 1990s, it seemed obvious that the site where this event had taken place should be officially commemorated along with many other sites, stories and public memories connected to the anti-apartheid struggle. But Kliptown is also a unique settlement with a multilayered spatial, political and social history. The act of commemoration and its accompanying development agenda is one of several imprints of a planning framework on Kliptown. Each planning intervention has been stymied by the disjuncture between the interventions of the state and the perceptions and needs of the local community. In this chapter we look at some of those complexities, tracing a century of state spatial interventions in Kliptown. We draw on archival research into the history and development of Kliptown, in-depth interviews conducted for research into the area's history and local responses to planning efforts and developments, as well as details and reviews of these urban planning frameworks. We have been involved independently of each other in Kliptown as researchers, academics and architects.

‘Back ends of nothing’

In every respect, Kliptown is a place of defiance shrouded in territorial mystery. According to one estimate, up to 45 000 people live in the area. Yet, at an official level, Kliptown has only recently begun to exist. For a long time Kliptown was not mapped on municipal cadastral records but was demarcated as pieces of the Klipspruit and Klipriviersoog farms, tucked away at the south-eastern edge of Soweto. This rural label disguised the urban reality of shacks interspersed with brick houses in a ramshackle sprawl of settlements with unique identities and histories, captured in their evocative names: Vaalkamers, Geelkamers, Paddavlei, Tamatievlei. The informal settlements run into the surrounding formal townships of Pimville to the north; Dlamini, Chiawelo and Moroka to the west; and Eldorado Park to the east. There, Kliptown found a footing in ‘the leftover, back ends of nothing’, as described by one town planner.

The Gauteng city-region covers the whole of Gauteng province as well as outlying economic centres and apartheid-induced displaced urbanisation in at least four neighbouring provinces. Johannesburg is the beating heart of the economic powerhouse that is the city-region, which generates over 40 per cent of national GDP. In this chapter I argue that Johannesburg needs to be understood within its broader socio-economic context, that of the Gauteng city-region. A focus on poverty and inequality shows that Johannesburg fares well when compared to other parts of the city-region, but also highlights the inequalities within the city itself, and their relative severity. Spatially understood, relative deprivation may be a better measure for understanding need, provision and protest (the context in which much writing and activism around poverty is located) in Johannesburg than national measures of absolute poverty, given the relative affluence of the Gauteng city-region and the extent of basic needs that have been met since 1994. I then briefly analyse the way in which the City of Johannesburg has attempted to use a multiple deprivation index to allow spatial targeting of ‘the poor’, and suggest that if this were combined with a more nuanced approach that includes value and attitude data about people's ‘headspace’ (unattainable from Census data, for obvious reasons), the targeting may be more effective. Finally, I argue that post-apartheid Johannesburg – like the city-region it sits in – is far from static. Class formation, population movement, spatial growth and shrinkage are occurring apace (though the pace is, predictably, politically contested). Empty spaces can be filled with shacks seemingly overnight, as Gauteng's population continues to grow at 2.6 per cent per annum in a country where birth rates are dropping; but can empty just as fast (GCRO 2011a). However, all these processes – urbanisation, class formation and so on – are dogged by the persistence of apartheid's racially segregated townships, post-apartheid's (equally racially segregated) inner-city slums, and new (similarly profiled) informal settlements that have emerged and spread post-apartheid. The new geography has done little to uproot apartheid geography.

Introduction

During the 1970s, the National Party set in motion its plans for the creation and then consolidation of the Bophuthatswana homeland on the basis that its black inhabitants were culturally and politically homogeneous. All the land comprising the western Transvaal bushveld and the former Bechuanaland reserves was to be incorporated into the nascent ‘state’. Apart from a few urban nodes, such as some townships around Pretoria and Brits, the homeland comprised predominantly rural people. This chapter examines how the occupants of Bophuthatswana were affected by and reacted to this development. From the outset, the period witnessed a good deal of civil conflict between the various African communities occupying the area and the Bophuthatswana state, as well as internal disputes within several merafe.

Like all the homelands, Bophuthatswana was created on the platform of what the government interpreted as ‘traditional’ leadership. Through elections, political parties and a presumed democratic process, the homelands were provided with the illusion of independence. As indicated in Chapter Four, like his father before him, Lucas Mangope was the government's preferred candidate to lead the Tswana people to independence and had been to some extent groomed to take over. This meant that he had to establish dominance over those rivals whom he saw as a threat to his authority. It was ‘a particularly sore point with Mangope, as his own traditional authority over others was widely refuted, and he depended to a large extent on the support of the South African state’. One of those who contested the elections to the Tswana Territorial Authority, the precursor to the Bophuthatswana Legislative Assembly, was the Kgatla kgosi, Tidimane Pilane. Pilane's conception of a Tswana homeland was that it should at a later stage amalgamate with other homelands. He claimed that his party, the National Seoposengwe Party, stood for African, as opposed to narrowly Tswana, unity, and espoused a form of ‘federalism’. The National Seoposengwe Party wanted a full referendum to gauge the support for independence. In contrast, Mangope's Bophuthatswana National Party ‘embraced a far narrower ethnic and chiefly constituency’.

Days before the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation in Beijing in July 2012, the Mail & Guardian carried a story about a ‘new form of colonialism’. Warning readers about labour law violations and the exploitation of Africa's resources, author Paula Akugizibwe noted: ‘The boom of China in Africa is proving to be one of the most striking developments of twenty-first-century geopolitics’. But what the article did not say – and what has been largely forgotten in the South African imagination – is that there were equally dramatic headlines about the Chinese in South Africa slightly more than 100 years before. In the first years of the twentieth century, however, they signalled the geopolitics of an expanding British-South Africa ‘labour empire,’ as the SS Tweeddale docked at Port Natal (Durban) in July 1904, with a shipload of contracted Chinese labourers destined for the gold mines of the Transvaal.

The sudden influx of Chinese labour in 1904 was the beginning of a six-year ‘experiment’ in saving the white mining industry's cheap labour economy. As lowwage black labour from South Africa and Portuguese East Africa became less reliable and gold production levels dropped, mine-owners looked to China, where drought, floods and the Boxer Rebellion had driven unemployment rates to unprecedented levels. With the new Milner government's support for the mining industry, the Chamber of Mines capitalised on British networks and administration in China to set up a vast system to import Chinese labour.

Chinese men who were successfully recruited arrived into a world that was racist, violent and exploitative. The very ordinance that legislated their recruitment outlined a range of restrictive employment conditions. These included preventing Chinese miners from leaving the compound without a permit and for more than 48 hours; the exclusion of Chinese labourers from all skilled work and an absolute restriction on trading or owning any property. While sources from the Chinese miners themselves are quite limited, it is clear from the records of the Chamber of Mines that the conditions of employment were unbearable for many. Gary Kynoch quotes figures from the first four years of the Chinese mining presence, showing that there were ‘145 murders, 124 suicides, 28 state executions, 17 killed during the commission of “outrages” – crimes committed off mine premises – and 268 deaths directly related to opium use’.

Although the distance involved in the artist Tito Zungu's journey between work and home was relatively short, compared to the trans-country journeys travelled by many mineworkers, for example, his life was nonetheless defined by South Africa's migrant labour system. His experience therefore overlaps with that of many others. However, Zungu created an art form arising out of his experience that is unique. His renowned, hand-embellished envelopes can be seen as powerful symbols of the journey between rural homestead and urban centre. The envelopes were originally made as literal containers of letters, mechanisms for communicating with correspondents far away. After his work was introduced to the art market, the envelopes came instead to be regarded as artworks, ending their journey as highly sought-after objects in collections around the world.

In 1999, shortly before his death in January 2000, Wits Art Museum (WAM, then the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries) approved the purchase of a collection of 46 envelopes, 4 drawings and a diary from the artist. This collection forms part of the Standard Bank African Art Collection holdings of Zungu's works at WAM, the other items being two drawings that were acquired by the university in 1987. The envelopes have discernibly been sent through the mail; they are franked and creased, the texture worn so soft it resembles fabric, rather than crisp paper. Many have suffered losses from insect damage and some are stained from contact with liquid. All show evidence of wear and tear from having been extensively handled. All have been carefully slit open on one short side to extract the contents; none have had their flaps torn open. The backs of a few have been used for apparently unrelated calculations or scrawls. In addition to the address and postage stamp, 25 of the envelopes, more than half, have meticulous ballpoint pen images of aeroplanes drawn across their front surfaces. There are other images too: a complex image of a ship filling the envelope, a radio, two depict homesteads, others include flowers, foliage or geometric shapes. On many, embellished words and letters form part of the design. Eight envelopes have no drawings at all and do not appear to have been created by the artist.

Novel spaces

This last chapter considers the multifaceted visions of Islam produced in recent South African drama, poetry, fiction, film and memoir. The texts I explore below amplify areas of complexity and subversiveness already present in performances of self, food practices and oral narratives (as discussed in previous chapters). They radically reimagine Muslim presence in South Africa.

As part of the great flowering of culture in the post-apartheid period, artists and writers have re-envisioned Muslim life. Such experiments are evident in recognised genres such as theatre, film, music, literature and visual art, and also through newer avenues such as slam poetry, blogs, listserves, standup comedy, performance collectives and self-published novels and poetry. Many writers straddle both spaces, producing prize-winning publications and simultaneously charting new pathways for disseminating their work, including the playwright and poet Malika Ndlovu, the activist and slam poet Mphutlane wa Bofelo, the poet, essayist and blogger Rustum Kozain, the actor and comedian Riaad Moosa (who starred in the recent film Material), and Shabbir Banoobhai, the author of several influential poetry collections, who has more recently self-published new anthologies and a novel titled Heretic. In 2009, the activist group The Inner Circle published Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives, a ground-breaking collection of autobiographical writing by members of lesbian, gay and transgender Muslims. Memoir has long been a radical form in which to portray dissident visions of Muslim life, as is demonstrated in Zackie Achmat's riveting memoir about his life as a gay Muslim man in Defiant Desire (1994). Achmat also has a significant profile on Facebook, where he publishes essays that continue this intersection of confession and politics.

Political memoirs have provided nuanced visions of political activism, filling an important absence. The 2003 memoir Our Generation by the activist and journalist Zubeida Jaffer is a supple account of the role of Muslims in the anti-apartheid struggle, and includes the political, intimate and religious aspects of her life. Our Generation attends to Jaffer's role as an activist and mother who was imprisoned and tortured by the apartheid government. She shares her doubts as well as the resoluteness of her faith during the struggle against political injustice.

INTRODUCTION

During the years 1900 to 1940, many of the African chiefdoms in the bushveld were struck by dissension and what one historian, Graeme Simpson, has termed ‘crises of control’. The causes lay partly in past events, and partly through much closer involvement and engagement by these communities with the colonial world in which they lived and worked. More specifically, disputes over land acquisition and other material interests resulted in conflict, either among ruling factions or between the dikgosi and their followers, often united in opposition to the chieftainship in a ‘popular’ alliance. The other common feature of these conflicts was that they had a distinctly ethnic character as they were between opposing ethnic factions which mobilised support by appealing to ethnic sentiment and affiliation. Thus while ethnicity was the glue that kept the disparate factions of these communities together in the latter years of the nineteenth century, it increasingly became contested and a source of division in the first half of the twentieth. Nevertheless, despite internal dissent and division, all of the baTswana in the bushveld of the western Transvaal managed to adapt to changing circumstances. It was a difficult period of colonial intervention when chiefs were expected to cooperate with the state by implementing new administrative and bureaucratic tasks, but these black communities nevertheless managed to retain quite considerable economic and political independence and were not merely victims of the colonial state and the growing capitalist economy of South Africa.

What is also striking about these dissentions and divisions is that, in various forms, they prefigure the schisms and disharmony between commoners and traditional leaders and between different factions of chiefly families that struck many of the bushveld merafe in the early years of the twenty-first century, as the final chapter in this volume will relate.

The division of the baHurutshe

Moiloa, who had unified the merafe in the nineteenth century, was followed as chief of the Moiloa faction at Dinokana by Ikalafeng. When Ikalafeng died in 1893, his heir, Pogiso, was a minor, and Ikalafeng's brother Israel assumed control. In 1906 the government decided to instate Pogiso – but Israel opposed the appointment. The boy was only eleven years old, and Israel therefore felt he himself should continue as regent (such practices were common in Tswana societies and often the cause of schisms).