Whose Hillbrow? Xenophobia and the Urban Space in the ‘New’ South Africa
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Whose Hillbrow? Xenophobia and the Urban Space in the ‘New’ South Africa JOCHEN PETZOLD CCORDING TO JO BEALL ET AL., Johannesburg is a mirror of South Africa’s broader urban future;1 hence, it is an ideal location for exam- A ining the contested community of the ‘New’ South Africa, a commu- nity that still has to deal with the multiple legacies of the apartheid years and in which, in the analysis of Michael Green, the issue of “delivery [...] be it in terms of services, employment, health, housing, land, water, education or any number of other issues” has become the focal point of “contestation between and even within all levels of party politics.”2 Thus it is perhaps no surprise that two South African novels, both published in 2001, should be set in Hillbrow and explore its urban space: Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s The Restless Supermarket and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.3 The setting is fitting, because if Johannesburg is to be seen as “the crucible of a new national culture,” as Meg Samuelson suggests,4 then Hillbrow, a residential area located about half a mile to the north of Johannesburg’s Central Business 1 See Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw & Susan Parnell, “Local Government, Poverty Reduction and Inequality in Johannesburg,” Environment and Urbanization 12.1 (2000): 107–22. 2 Michael Green, “The Future in the Post: Utopia and the Fiction of the New South Africa,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 55.1 (2007): 69. 3 Ivan Vladislaviǰ, born in 1957, is among South Africa’s more prominent writers and commen- tators; he has published a number of short stories and novels since the 1980s. Phaswane Mpe, born in 1970, was one of the most critically acclaimed ‘new voices’ of post-apartheid South Africa, a voice silenced by his premature death in 2004. See Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper & Craig MacKenzie, The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945 (New York: Columbia UP, 2010): 141, 196–97; Ivan Vladislaviǰ, The Restless Supermarket (2001; Cape Town: David Philip, 2006); Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 2001). Further page references to both novels are in the main text. 4 Meg Samuelson, “The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera,” African Identities 5.2 (2007): 247. 172 JOACHIM P ETZOLD District, can be described as a steam-cooker version of South Africa’s cities in which the sheer population density and the mixture of ethnic backgrounds fuels and accelerates developments. Consisting almost exclusively of high-rise buildings, Hillbrow is said to be the most densely populated area in the South- ern Hemisphere:5 it is estimated that around the turn of the millennium more than 80,000 people lived in Hillbrow – an area of less than one square kilo- metre.6 But Hillbrow is more than just an extremely densely populated area. As Alan Morris points out, historically the “predominance of young people, many of them single, meant that it has always been a lively neighbourhood with a bustling night-life”; furthermore, it “was one of the first neighbourhoods to be- come racially diverse in spite of the Group Areas Act of 1950.”7 But what may have been seen as exciting in the 1980s is now frequently described as a menace: according to Michael Green, by “the 1990s Hillbrow was considered either a sophisticated melting pot of culture, class, and ethnicity or a decaying cityscape of violent crime, drugs, prostitution, and AIDS,” suggesting two possible ex- tremes for future developments in the ‘Rainbow Nation’.8 Hence, it is not surprising that both Vladislaviǰ and Mpe should choose Hill- brow as the setting for novels concerned with the issue of belonging, and in fact the two novels share an interesting number of features inviting comparative discussion: both were published in 2001 and are set roughly at the same time, during or shortly after the transition period to the ‘New’ South Africa: i.e. the period between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the first democratic elections, held in 1994; both novels feature main characters who write a fictional text that can, to some extent, be read as an instance of mise-en-abîme, in that these inner-fictional texts repeat and comment on major topics of the novels themselves; and, finally, in both novels the concept of xenophobia plays an important role – although its targets are different. In the following, I will argue that in both novels the setting is foregrounded as an urban space and that this urban space is marked by xenophobia. I will show that while xenophobia influences – or even determines – the lives of the main characters in both novels, it is on the level of the characters that the politics of the two novels can 5 Keith Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria: U of South Africa P, 2004): 156. 6 See Ted Legget, “A Den of Iniquity? Inside Hillbrow’s Residential Hotels,” SA Crime Quarterly 2.4 (2002), http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/CrimeQ/No.2/4Leggett.html (accessed 3 January 2011). 7 Alan Morris, “Race Relation and Racism in a Racially Diverse Inner City Neighbourhood: A Case Study of Hillbrow, Johannesburg,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25.4 (1999): 671, 667. 8 Michael Green, “Translating the Nation: Phaswane Mpe and the Fiction of Post-Apartheid,” Scrutiny 2 10.1 (2005): 5..