Reflections on Black African Subjectivity and Rethinking Johannesburg as a Postcolonial and Diaspora City

Abstract

A postcolonial and decolonial study of Johannesburg, South Africa vis-à-vis black South Africans and black African immigrants that occupy mostly its margins in townships and inner city ghettoes, is important to reveal its absurdity and pain as a diaspora. Characterising Johannesburg as an African city, has tended to ideologically hide a history of capitalist exploitation and pain for both South African citizens and Africans immigrants who, due to unequal distribution of opportunities in the global economy, consider living in the continent's richest city close to living a ‘good life'. The idea of an ‘African Diaspora' on African soil has been denounced for its subtle suggestion that there are spaces where Africans can be aliens on African soil (Mbembe, 2015). The African Diaspora in South Africa is therefore seen as arising out of a painful history of colonisation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The reality of an African Diaspora in Johannesburg, South Africa's commercial capital, as characterised by xenophobia, on one hand; and cultural creolisation, on another, has, however, largely not been interrogated. As an experiment in decolonial political economy studies, this presentation aims to ask questions around the ways in which Johannesburg is a postcolonial city, where the racist inequitable, apartheid spatial malice survives under neoliberal globalisation, and what this means for the black African population, both African migrants and South African citizens. Using the concept of sub-imperialism (Bond, 2013), I seek to locate the migrations from the rest of Africa to South Africa in the context of global migrations that have been traced back to colonialism and European conquest of the rest of the world (Nicholson and Sheller, 2016). I argue that xenophobia, which is mostly Afrophobia (Warner and Finchilescu, 2003: 36; Nicholson and Sheller, 2016: 5), covers up the fact that similar to the apartheid era, where they were mostly restricted to the Bantustans (Biko, 2017:88), under neoliberal globalisation the fate of South African citizens is not different from that of African migrants. Johannesburg is a Diaspora for all black Africans, a place they come to for work and better opportunities. It is a fate of exploitation and violence. The presentation uses a combination of textual and ethnographic methods. A close study of the media, other literature and observation and qualitative interviews with both African migrants and South African local citizens in Hillbrow, an inner-city suburb in Johannesburg, is used to collect data. The collected data is then subjected to a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Titscher, Meyer, Wodak and Vetter, 2000) to make sense of black African subjectivity in Johannesburg in the postcolonial moment.