Reflections on Identity in Four African Cities

Reflections on Identity in Four African Cities Lome Edited by Libreville Simon Bekker & Anne Leildé Johannesburg Cape Town Simon Bekker and Anne Leildé (eds.) First published in 2006 by African Minds. www.africanminds.co.za (c) 2006 Simon Bekker & Anne Leildé All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-920051-40-6 Edited, designed and typeset by Compress www.compress.co.za Distributed by Oneworldbooks [email protected] www.oneworldbooks.com Contents Preface and acknowledgements v 1. Introduction 1 Simon Bekker Part 1: Social identity: Construction, research and analysis 2. Identity studies in Africa: Notes on theory and method 11 Charles Puttergill & Anne Leildé Part 2: Profiles of four cities 3. Cape Town and Johannesburg 25 Izak van der Merwe & Arlene Davids 4. Demographic profiles of Libreville and Lomé 45 Hugues Steve Ndinga-Koumba Binza Part 3: Space and identity 5. Space and identity: Thinking through some South African examples 53 Philippe Gervais-Lambony 6. Domestic workers, job access, and work identities in Cape Town and Johannesburg 97 Claire Bénit & Marianne Morange 7. When shacks ain’t chic! Planning for ‘difference’ in post-apartheid Cape Town 97 Steven Robins Part 4: Class, race, language and identity 8. Discourses on a changing urban environment: Reflections of middle-class white people in Johannesburg 121 Charles Puttergill 9. Class, race, and language in Cape Town and Johannesburg 145 Simon Bekker & Anne Leildé 10. The importance of language identities to black residents of Cape Town and Johannesburg 171 Robert Mongwe 11. The importance of language identities in Lomé and Libreville 189 Simon Bekker & Anne Leildé Part 5: The African continent 12. What is an African? Narratives from urban South Africa, Gabon and Togo 207 Anne Leildé References 225 List of contributors 242 Index 243 Preface and acknowledgements This book arose out of an international three-year collaborative programme launched in 2001 and funded by South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF) and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The research programme was coordinated in South Africa within the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch and in France within the Centre d’Etudes d’Afrique Noire (CEAN) at the University of Bordeaux IV. Fieldwork on local government issues and on the construction of urban identities in selected African cities was conducted by researchers from France, from South Africa, and from a number of other African countries. The programme culminated in a conference organised in Stellenbosch during the first half of 2004, which was attended by researchers from France, Gabon, South Africa, and Togo. Eighteen papers were presented, five by graduate students. The editors of this book selected a number of these papers and authors were requested to finalise these for publication. The editors also approached one author who had not attended the conference to contribute a chapter. Other conference papers were selected for a book currently being published, which is edited by Laurent Fourchard of CEAN and entitled Des Villes sans Gouvernement? Etat, Gouvernement Local et Acteurs privés en Afrique au Sud du Sahara (Karthala, coll. Afrique Politique, Paris). This work addresses local government themes in a number of African cities. In a collaborative international research programme of this nature, credit and thanks need to be given to many. Research was carried out in Johannesburg, in Libreville, and in Lomé as well as in Cape Town. Workshops were organised for researchers and graduate students in Stellenbosch and in Bordeaux. Draft research papers were presented at a number of conferences. In deeply appreciating the support and assistance from the many people involved in these activities, I would like to single out for personal thanks four participants who enabled the programme to undertake work and exchanges beyond South Africa: Tamasse vi Preface & Acknowledgements Danioue from the University of Lomé in Togo, Anaclé Bissielo and Fidele Nze Nguema from Omar Bongo University in Gabon, and Dominique Darbon from CEAN in Bordeaux, France. The editors would like to express their gratitude to both the NRF and the CNRS for financial backing without which this publication would not have been possible. Thanks are also due to the University of Stellenbosch for contributing additional funds to enable relevant research to be completed. Opinions expressed by authors are not necessarily shared by these funding bodies. Simon Bekker Stellenbosch August 2006 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Simon Bekker The Office of the South African Presidency was recently tasked to assess how well South Africa as ‘a nation in the making’ was doing in moving from its apartheid past ‘towards non-racialism, equity and unity in diversity’. The method they used was to gather and interpret information and trends in four life domains: material conditions, social mobility, primary organisations (such as family and household), and collective identities. It is significant that the fourth domain – collective identities – has been included with the three others - domains that have become traditional if not classical themes in establishing the ‘health’ of a nation. It would appear that the career of identity politics and of identity studies has turned out to be a success, at least in terms of state recognition of their importance. The discussion document that has been produced within this fourth life domain, A Nation in the Making, drew the following conclusions: South Africans evince a strong sense of national identity … However … diversity … in terms of race, class and nationality/language [remains] … strong. While race and nationality/language seem to be receding as primary forms of self-definition, class identity seems to be on the ascendance. (Republic of South Africa, 2006: 97) These generalisations offer an appropriate way to introduce the chapters of this book. Analyses within these chapters in fact may even be used to test the extent to which such claims ring true, in what everyone knows is a much more complex and shifting terrain of shared meanings than can ever be captured by such generalisations. Before such an appraisal, why have identity studies and the politics of identity become so popular? And what is the relevance of locating them within an African urban context? Sometime around 1989 the world changed. The Soviet Union dissolved, an event which spawned an array of new states in its former empire. A host of newly-elected governments professing to Western democratic 2 Simon Bekker constitutional principles became established in that and other parts of the globe, creating – at least within constitutional theory – new rights and freedoms for millions of new citizens. Market-friendly rules came to hold sway over the global economy, binding governments, economic institutions, and individuals into an increasingly complex, though deeply unequal, web of interdependence. Swelling migration streams across national borders are but one visible consequence of these changes. Intimately related to this shift, at roughly the same time, fundamental changes in local politics also emerged. Whereas policies of modernisation, whether Marxist or liberal in conception, had held local communities captive in the iron grids of class and homogenising national ideologies embedded as they were within the three world blocs of West, East, and Third World, this geopolitical shift offered opportunities to new and old citizens alike publicly to declare identities they considered they shared with others. Belonging to a democratic nation-state, in their view, no longer implied having to supplant sub-national identities with a dominant national identity. Accordingly, most national governments across the globe, both new and old, were faced with an increasing number of claims from sub-national groups for recognition and for equity – for treatment of their group identity as different from those of the rest of the nation. The more frequent such claims became, the more visible opportunities for cultural mobilisation became in the global community and to those within that community who aspired or planned to mobilise along similar lines. Global mass communications fuelled this demonstration effect, both in its benign form of peaceful cultural pluralism in democratic settings and in its destructive guise of threats and acts of violence intended to force the hands of national governments or of supra-national authorities. In short, democratic governments in the early twenty-first century, while facing the perennial problems within their societies of poverty and growth, welfare and order, are confronted with two new challenges: the increasing loss of sovereignty to new regional and global authorities and the politics of identity, which require reconciling the building and elaboration of a nation with acquiescence to different citizens’ demands for recognition of communal identity – in Crawford Young’s words, the reconciling of democratic governance with cultural pluralism (Young, 1993: 19). This viewpoint suggests that the focus of identity studies in the developing world ought to be on the national question, on the extent to which governments succeed in their quest for reconciliation and the extent to which those in civil society acquiesce to, or resist, nation-building strategies. A scan of recent studies related to collective identities in South Africa is instructive in this regard (Leildé, 2006). Before the early 1990s, under the shadow of apartheid,

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