Johannesburg Zoologica: Reading the Afropolis Through the Eyes of Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City

Abstract

IntroductionIN 2010, WHEN LAUREN BEUKES' ZOO CITY1 WAS PUBLISHED, Johannesburg's city authorities were promoting continent's premiere and most prosperous Afropolis as a 'World Class City in Africa'. The epithet coincided with an international campaign to promote South Africa as a country where impossible was perfectly possible. In particular, this referred to country's capacity to host Soccer World Cup in 2010, and in general it referred to South Africa's peaceful transition from apartheid to a fully functioning democracy during 1990s.In parts of South Africa, simmering tensions between unemployed black South Africans and hundreds of thousands of foreign economic and political migrants and refugees exploded. In horrific xenophobic attacks during 2009, violence against Africans from rest of continent was justified as though South Africans were one species and Africans another. These attacks were often based on visible distinctions such as facial structure, skin colour, and placement of smallpox vaccination scars which differed depending on whether colonial authorities who introduced smallpox vaccina- tions were British, French, or Portuguese. While inter-ethnic tension certainly existed in pre-colonial times, colonialism and apartheid's race-based ideologies served to entrench these attitudes even further. In a post-apartheid transitional period, these differences bubbled to surface in equally crude visual registers.This essay considers Zoo City's alternative reading of Johannesburg - a reading that imposes itself on readings of metropolis that city authorities so hoped for during 2010. The novel is set in a near-future 2011 and provides a view counter to often self-congratulatory perspective presented to tourists by city's establishment. The novel writes back to empire, apartheid, and present regime. It brings wildlife experience, so effectively promoted by tourism agencies, into very heart of city, and, in so doing, author also comments on default notions of Africa and its muchvaunted 'wilderness safaris', city, and occult. Beukes creates a world that is both intimately familiar to Jo'burgers and quite defamiliarizing at same time. As speculative fiction, Zoo City falls firmly into new and dynamic genre of post-national fantasy - a genre that is obtaining increasing currency in former colonial territories such as India, Africa, and South American nations.In both postcolonial and speculative fiction, vision of future is central to how Other will be embodied in time, place, and space. Raja and Nandi maintain:The connection between science fiction and postcolonial studies is almost natural: both these fields are deeply concerned with questions of temporality, space, and existence. Central also to both these fields of study are questions of other - human, machine, cyborg - and nature of multiple narratives of history and utopias and dystopias of future.2In Lauren Beukes' novel, another dimension of future is added to binaries of utopia and dystopia and notion of good versus evil with introduction of a zootopia.Zoo City, NovelA zootopia is a morally far more ambiguous dystopian phenomenon where people across world who have been involved in death of humans are paired with physically manifested animal familiars in an aposymbiotic relationship.3 They are known as or zoos. By using a near-future zootopic Johannesburg as a setting, and by placing animalled characters firmly in realm of speculative Other, Beukes addresses issues of difference, dispossession, dystopia, crime, and cruelty that continue to dominate psyche of nation despite upbeat nature of South Africa's media advertising. a city like any other, is constantly being written and rewritten in literature: Writing city, particularly writing city of Johannesburg, Anne Putter proposes, is like utilizing subject matter and everyday life of city as an 'idea': a means of expressing societal concerns and considering the matter of willed mobility and in post-apartheid/transitional period of South Africa as opposed to forced migration of apartheid era. …