African Modernity Research Articles

Critiquing Sub-Saharan Pan-Africanism through an Appraisal of Postcolonial African Modernity

Abstract What vision directs pan-Africanism and which developmental model does it support and promote? To answer this question, the article evaluates pan-Africanism within the demands of African modernity and locates the extent to which pan-Africanism meets the aspiration of African modernity. It argues that pan-Africanism has what amounts to a north-bound gaze and supports development imperialism, and shows that for this reason it is not properly grounded on African realities, the consequence of which is the weakness of African modernity. The article suggests a re-articulation of pan-Africanism through the ideology of pro-Africanism, which holds that autonomy and self-will are two cardinal principles that are fundamental to African self-definition but which pan-Africanism is not in a position to provide because it amounts to a subordination of African difference. It concludes that a redirection of the African vision in this direction is a worthier ideological alternative to pan-Africanism.

Gifts from Our Elders: African Artsand Visionary Art History

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

African Postmodernism: Its Moment, Nature and Content

ABSTRACTThe fulcrum of this article is its exposure of postcolonial African modernity as being both historically and philosophically, an anachronistic colonial modernity, or simply Afrocoloniality. I explicate this anachronism by pointing out that while the cultural and intellectual edifice of Afrocoloniality was built on a colonial European Modernism, whose epistemic infrastructure continues to be reconstructed by the Western postmodernist movement, the structure of this Afrocoloniality remains impervious to this reconstruction. A Status quaestionis arises from the fact that, historically, in its nascent form, this African modernity that we claim is an Afrocoloniality was facilitated by an anticolonial consciousness that embraced and generated a series of political categories and a political praxis, which, in turn, had to be trapped in the paradigms of European modernism, while this very European modernism was in a state of philosophic crisis. A recognition of this incongruity, I argue, constitutes a uniquely African postmodernist conceptual prism that can serve to appraise these politico-philosophical categories that have informed the conduct of the anti-colonial struggle and the resultant postcolonial milieu. This article therefore, makes a case for this Afro-postmodernism.

The afterlives of a successful revolution: Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue and Jaco van Schalkwyk’s The Alibi Club outside of the global novel

This article examines how two recent novels set in the USA but written by South African writers, Zakes Mda and Jaco van Schalkwyk, articulate a new circuitry of relationships across the Atlantic within the frame of cultural flows. This circuitry is not about the national, global, or the post-transitional, it is not about South African or American exceptionalism, but is rather about imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation that bring a post-liberation consciousness to global circuits that resonate with similar inequalities. I contend that the idea that things can be fought over and changed is so endemic to South African cultural life that it has become a sort of everyday common sense or an afterlife of a successful revolution, as the strength of civil society and grass roots political organizations and protests reveals in South Africa of the present. The afterlives of a successful revolution then allow for a recalibration of relationships where catastrophe and its effects are understood globally through writers like Mda and Van Schalkwyk. In this article, the novels under discussion reveal a changed relationship between South Africa and America through the ascension of new flows and circuits that place South African modernity at the center of representations of American trauma.

Carriers of mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup R colonized Eurasia and Australasia from a southeast Asia core area

BackgroundThe colonization of Eurasia and Australasia by African modern humans has been explained, nearly unanimously, as the result of a quick southern coastal dispersal route through the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and the Indochinese Peninsula, to reach Australia around 50 kya. The phylogeny and phylogeography of the major mitochondrial DNA Eurasian haplogroups M and N have played the main role in giving molecular genetics support to that scenario. However, using the same molecular tools, a northern route across central Asia has been invoked as an alternative that is more conciliatory with the fossil record of East Asia. Here, we assess as the Eurasian macrohaplogroup R fits in the northern path.ResultsHaplogroup U, with a founder age around 50 kya, is one of the oldest clades of macrohaplogroup R in western Asia. The main branches of U expanded in successive waves across West, Central and South Asia before the Last Glacial Maximum. All these dispersions had rather overlapping ranges. Some of them, as those of U6 and U3, reached North Africa. At the other end of Asia, in Wallacea, another branch of macrohaplogroup R, haplogroup P, also independently expanded in the area around 52 kya, in this case as isolated bursts geographically well structured, with autochthonous branches in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines.ConclusionsCoeval independently dispersals around 50 kya of the West Asia haplogroup U and the Wallacea haplogroup P, points to a halfway core area in southeast Asia as the most probable centre of expansion of macrohaplogroup R, what fits in the phylogeographic pattern of its ancestor, macrohaplogroup N, for which a northern route and a southeast Asian origin has been already proposed.

The Suit Is Mine: Skhothane and the Aesthetic of the African Modern

ABSTRACTLocalised in townships across South Africa’s Gauteng province, skhothane emerged during the early 2010s as a cult of status characterised by a style of flashy, branded dress. For izikhothane (the adherents of skhothane), surface is power. This emphasis on surface and visibility reveals much about the process of identity fabrication among township youth, positioning the trend not so much as a subculture but rather as a performative aesthetic existing in a continuum of style that includes, but is not limited to, pantsula, umswenko, and amakrwala cultural practices. This continuum might also be seen to function like technology, positioning the skhothane aesthetic as an intertext of recurrent sartorial quotation which can be used as a platform for imaginative speculation. Skhothane creates a highly visible entanglement with the ideation of the “African modern” (Nuttall and Mbembe. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), producing connections between township and late-capitalist metropolis that are not based on the historical one-way transfer of labour, but rather on complex interconnectivity between Johannesburg and its edges, the city and its inhabitants.

“Miriam’s Place”: South African jazz, conviviality and exile

Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves “to mediate, manage and contest” what he terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity.” His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the “pedestrian” as a chronotope to describe the “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different “chronotope”: that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement – including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the “global itinerary” of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with anti-apartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba’s memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba’s life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa – including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea’s controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré.

The Intersection of East Asian and African Modernities

This article identifies strands of literature across several disciplines that seek to explore the ideational impact of the proliferating linkages between East Asian and African societies. It argues that these debates could more fruitfully engage with one another if their common concern is understood to be the intersection of modernities—broadly defined as societal self-understandings that wish to provide answers to collective economic, political and epistemic problems. These discussions are well-placed to further explore these intersections by understanding how processes of policy transfer and policy assemblages link various East Asian and African modernities, while reflexive and transnational methodologies such as multi-sited ethnographies may provide innovative methodological tools. A case study of recent attempts to construct Chinese-inspired industrial parks across Ethiopia provides an example of intersecting modernities in practice.

New histories of education in South Africa: In conversation with Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's Schooling Muslims in Natal

New histories of education in South Africa:In conversation with Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's Schooling Muslims in Natal Daniel Magaziner (bio) The Orient Islamic Educational Institute opened its doors in 1960, near the Durban Botanic Gardens. Its building had been carefully designed to suit a preeminent institution of Islamic education for Natal's Indian community. 'A building is the image of the character of its builders', asserted AM Moolla, the prominent businessman who had chaired the Orient Institute's long quest to build its home. The building was indeed revealing. Its central and rightmost sections – housing the administration block and the school hall – demonstrate two essential aspects of mid-twentieth century South African modernism. The former is a modern edifice through and through: concrete and glass, a neat, well-proportioned box of strong verticals, framed with a flat, unornamented roof and a sunshade extending above street level. Indeed, the brise-soleil of recurring circles that adorns the school's entrance would not have looked out of place in a post-colonial Africa that was then building such structures with abandon. (See, for example, the similarly adorned administration block then under construction at the University of Nairobi.)1 But it was the low-slung hall, immediately adjacent to the administration block, that revealed the school's distinctly South African modernist credentials. Here, the roofline was rounded and less severe and the cement façade broken up by geometric patterns executed in brick. As Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen describe it in their marvelous new book, Schooling Muslims in Natal: identity, state and the Orient Islamic Institute, 'the dramatic frontage of the school hall was designed in a motif of stylized Kufic lettering […] "reproduced from Persian manuscripts"'. [End Page 61] The homage to classical Islamic antecedents was reinforced within the hall itself. Like the overall building, the hall boasted a state of the art AV system and fixtures, while also proudly proclaiming its sectarian and religious identity on its doors, above which 'a framed section of Ka'bah covering, bearing an inscription […] with rounded letters from the Qur'an' greeted students as they filed in for school functions (213). If this building revealed the character of its builders, then it was apparent who they were: proud Muslims, proud Indians, proud modernists, confident that in this artfully designed building future generations of the same would be prepared to face the challenges of their future. Which is what the apartheid government aspired for them as well. One of the conceits of apartheid modernism was that each community – whether Bantu, European or 'Asiatic' – needed to develop 'modernity' on its own terms.2 As the Natal administrator put it at the ceremony marking the Orient Institute's opening, the government and the community common purpose was 'to preserve intact, even if we add to, the legacy of the past' (185). Over the past few years, education historians have revealed how interwar South African educationists laid the groundwork for the apartheid education system by calling for the country's mission-derived education system to be 'adapted' to the needs of its various population groups. Building off of the work of George Armstrong and Booker T Washington in the American South, as well as experiments elsewhere in the colonial world, educational theorists argued that schools ought not to be homogenising machines, but instead tools with which different communities might preserve their unique 'cultural genius' amidst colonial modernity.3 Education for difference was largely abandoned in the wake of World War II, as restive colonised populations began to demand equivalence, not particularism, and only the rare African country pursued such a course in the wake of independence (here Senegal and Tanzania are notable). Yet as apartheid stretched into its second and third decades, its theorists and supporters kept the old dream of sectarian education alive.4 This story about African (and to some extent, white) education in South Africa is relatively well known. Vahed and Waetjen's rich and compelling study considers the Indian and Muslim variant of this story, while also doing so much more. My colleagues (see other reviews in the review forum section of this edition) have already noted that one of this book...

From Primitivism to Pan-Africanism: Remaking Modernist Aesthetics in Postcolonial Nigeria

From Primitivism to Pan-AfricanismRemaking Modernist Aesthetics in Postcolonial Nigeria Jesse Weaver Shipley National independence struggles across Africa, and the formerly colonized world, were accompanied by artistic revivals that linked local expressive styles to Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and global anticolonial movements. Artists and intellectuals reimagined an aesthetic that would refract new political identities and challenge simplistic, racialized dichotomies between European and African, West and non-West. They reassessed notions of the modern, the popular, and the traditional in calibrating racial, cultural, linguistic, and class-based affiliations in new national terms. In the years around Nigeria's independence from British rule in 1960, the city of Ibadan, just north of Lagos, was at the center of one such artistic movement aimed at shaping the cultural terms of a new political sovereignty. This was an unusual moment of creative collaboration among rising visual, performance, and literary artists working across various media and genres from poetry to novels to painting to theater to television. Many earned national and international recognition as they challenged aesthetic norms. The high modernists, novelist Chinua Achebe, poet Christopher Okigbo, and dramatist Wole Soyinka, played with and debated the formal aspects of language use (Okeke-Agulu, 2015, pp. 263–265). Yoruba painter Twins Seven-Seven and composer-director Duro Ladipo blurred lines between elite art and popular music and theater. Cosmopolitan academic artists, such as African American Jacob Lawrence, Guyanese Dennis Williams, Ghanaian Vincent Kofi, and Sudanese Ibrahim El Salahi, came to exhibit and work with inexperienced artists in Ibadan and the nearby town of Osogbo.1 The development of new modes of curation, criticism, [End Page 140] and analysis reframed and valued these practices. Artists and critics came from across Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe to work with this rising generation. Nigerians were particularly tuned into the global resonances of black expression; as Chinua Achebe recalls, he was listening intently as Ghana's leader Kwame Nkrumah, borrowing the terminology of early Pan-Africanist Edward Blyden, called for a new "African Personality" at Ghana's independence ceremony in 1957 (Okeke-Agulu, 2015, p. 93).2 The reflexive development of a field of artistic production, then, was intricately tied to the expansive transnational energies of the independence era, in which reshaping aesthetic and moral values seemed urgent in developing a national citizenry and a Pan-African polity. In some measure, the efflorescent collective of artists and critics around Ibadan and Osogbo was initiated by the arrival in Nigeria in 1950 of an unusual European couple. Ulli Beier, a German Jewish refugee from Palestine via London, came to teach at University College, Ibadan, and reinvented himself as an art impresario and critic, creating spaces for art and literature to flourish. His wife, Austrian expressionist artist Susanne Wenger, dedicated herself to rebuilding the sacred grove of Ọṣun in Osogbo. Their art and criticism were indicative of a restless, rebellious spirit that permeated a small segment of European artists and intellectuals who fled the devastation after World War II, seeking new meaning and authenticity. They came to Nigeria with notions of art shaped by a European modernism that fetishized the primitive as a source of true creativity untainted by urbanization, capitalism, and mechanized war. Like an earlier generation of primitivist artists, such as Paul Gauguin (1985), who went to Tahiti in 1891 to find rejuvenation from the exhaustions and alienations of modern life, Beier and Wenger aimed to leave behind the failures of Europe; aesthetics provided the language of this journey. They sought something authentic and meaningful in a romantic elsewhere framed against a nihilistic landscape of devastating violence and the collapse of imperial rule. But the Nigerian social, political, and artistic world they entered was far more complex than they had imagined. In this paper, I explore how a rising generation of artists and critics in Nigeria reinvented an African modernism from the fragments of the contradictory projects of racist colonial art pedagogy and European modernist primitivism. In some measure, Pan-African contemporary art developed by transforming colonial-era art education, turning objectified primitive creative essences into celebrations of individual expression and intent. I [End Page 141] examine how a misguided European primitivist search for authentic African culture became...

Review: Architecture of Independence: African Modernism

Architecture of Independence: African Modernism Vitra Design Museum Gallery, Weil am Rhein 20 February–31 May 2015 Graham Foundation, Chicago 29 January–16 April 2016 Maison de l'Architecture, Geneva 20 May–30 June 2016 Architecture of Independence: African Modernism was curated by Manuel Herz, with photography by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster. The exhibition's title situated the buildings displayed in the West African postcolonial period, spanning the decades from the end of World War II to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when all West African states attained self-rule or independence from colonial rule. This era was dominated by an architectural shift from the typical colonial “public works department” style to the International Style. This architectural movement was espoused in Africa mainly by groups of young expatriates, including a few indigenous architects whose Western training had been influenced by the design theories of Bauhaus pedagogues such as Walter Gropius, the manifestos of CIAM, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. In the tropical climate zone, which comprises much of Africa and Southeast Asia, this new version of the International Style was adapted to respond to the climatic concerns of these warmer regions; it became known as tropical modernism, a theme echoed in this exhibition's title. The exhibition was unusual in that it followed from the curator's similarly titled 2015 book.1 This edited volume gives a more comprehensive account of Herz's examination of African modernism, comprising a set of essays that support the book's pictorial content. The exhibition therefore provided a curated set of photographs and supporting exhibits from the more extensive material to be found in the book. The main exhibition, as mounted by the Graham Foundation, consisted of a series of curated pictures arranged by country across different rooms and floors of the foundation's building. Most of the photographs …

Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa

In the 1960s, Addis Ababa experienced a construction boom, spurred by its new international stature as the seat of both the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity. Working closely with Emperor Haile Selassie, expatriate architects played a major role in shaping the Ethiopian capital as a symbol of an African modernity in continuity with tradition. Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa examines how a distinct Ethiopian modernity was negotiated through various borrowings from the past, including Italian colonial planning, both at the scale of the individual building and at the scale of the city. Focusing on public buildings designed by Italian Eritrean Arturo Mezzedimi, French Henri Chomette, and the partnership of Israeli Zalman Enav and Ethiopian Michael Tedros, Ayala Levin critically explores how international architects confronted the challenges of mediating Haile Selassie's vision of an imperial modernity.

Basic Design and the Semiotics of Citizenship: Julian Beinart’s Educational Experiments and Research on Wall Decoration in Early 1960s Nigeria and South Africa

From 1961 to 1965, Julian Beinart, an architecture lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, embarked on a series of basic design workshops in Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya. Inspired by his MIT instructors Kevin Lynch and Gyorgy Kepes, Beinart was interested in the development of a new popular visual language, one that would mediate African societies’ transition to postcolonial modernity. Concurrently, Beinart documented and analyzed wall decorations made by the residents of the government-built houses of Western Native Township in Johannesburg. Home to black Africans who were subject to racial segregation and displacement policies that predated the apartheid regime, the Township’s residents faced another eviction in the early 1960s. By using photography, analytical drawings, and diagrammatic maps, Beinart created a counter-archive against the state, in which he interpreted the residents’ beautification and improvement of their houses as acts of resistance; an expression of civic pride where the urban poor performed citizenship under extreme social-economic duress. Analyzing the decorations as a system of communication that transcended ethnic traditions, Beinart used them as an “index of de-tribalization” that could set the ground for the creation of an African urban modernity.

African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence: Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia Edited by Manuel Herz with Ingrid Schröder, Hans Focketyn and Julia Jamrozik, photographs by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster Zurich: Park Books AG, 2015. 640 pp., 909 color and 54 b/w ill., 246 plans. €68, paper

June 01 2016 African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence: Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence: Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia Edited by ManuelHerz with IngridSchröder, HansFocketyn and JuliaJamrozik, photographs by IwanBaan and AlexiaWebsterZurich: Park Books AG, 2015. 640 pp., 909 color and 54 b/w ill., 246 plans. €68, paper Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2016 by the Regents of the University of California.2016 African Arts (2016) 49 (2): 94–95. https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_r_00294 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence: Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia. African Arts 2016; 49 (2): 94–95. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_r_00294 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search Manuel Herz and his team of researchers and photographers have put together a stunning collection of material on Africa's little-known modern architecture. The book's 640 pages covering Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia—countries chosen for practical, geographic, and architectural reasons—contain hundreds of photographs of the modernist office towers, schools, parks, private residences, and hotels that shot up throughout the continent during the buoyant era of independence. These structures were often constructed of minimally adorned industrial glass, steel, and concrete, yet adopted “African” inspired forms, patterns, and climatic considerations (especially an emphasis on shade and air circulation), resulting in a distinct physical record of the triumphs, contradictions, and disappointments of decolonization and independence. Herz's introduction, “The New Domain: Architecture at the Time of Liberation,” considers what scholars might learn from studying Africa's robust—yet quickly disappearing—modernist archive and considers what “independent” and “modern” mean in an African context. Drawing on the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Kumasi Realism 1951–2007: An African Modernism by Atta Kwami London: C. Hurst, 2013. 500 pp., 188 color ill., 17 b/w ill., 4 appendices, bibliography, notes, list of illustrations. £30.00, cloth

<b>Kumasi Realism 1951–2007: An African Modernism</b> by Atta Kwami London: C. Hurst, 2013. 500 pp., 188 color ill., 17 b/w ill., 4 appendices, bibliography, notes, list of illustrations. £30.00, cloth

MJC Echeruo: Occidentalism, Diaspora, Nationalist, and Transnationalist Trajectories of His African Modernism

Michael Chukwudalu Echeruo’s trajectories are broad and complex: poet, literary critic, and scholar, Echeruo is quite easily one of the most vital and one of the most accomplished of modern African literary theorists and practitioners. As a poet, Echeruo’s style is considered difficult and arcane, and it left most critics of modern African poetry, like Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, very distraught with what they discerned as “Hopkins disease.” His critical scholarship, far ranging and varied, moved from a very occidentalist sensibility to its final mooring in the Africa and the African diaspora, with which he has engaged in some of its most original and archival scholarship. This essay attempts to place Echeruo, whose intimidating work has the quality of grandeur, within the specific tradition of an African modernity. It also places in context the linkages that clarify the critical tensions within Echeruo’s artistic and critical production as a modernist thinker.

A Stochastic Model for the Interbreeding of Two Populations Continuously Sharing the Same Habitat.

We propose and solve a stochastic mathematical model of general applicability to interbreeding populations which share the same habitat. Resources are limited so that the total population size is fixed by environmental factors. Interbreeding occurs during all the time of coexistence until one of the two population disappears by a random fluctuation. None of the two populations has a selective advantage. We answer the following questions: How long the two populations coexist and how genetically similar they become before the extinction of one of the two? how much the genetic makeup of the surviving population changes by the contribution of the disappearing one? what it is the number of interbreeding events given the observed introgression of genetic material? The model was originally motivated by a paleoanthropological problem concerning the interbreeding of Neanderthals and African modern humans in Middle East which is responsible for the fraction of Neanderthal genes (1-4%) in present Eurasian population.

Framing interior: race, mobility and the image of home in South African modernity

This paper explores the depiction of dwellings in order to locate the emergence of a particular framing of the interior in South Africa. I suggest that in the first half of the twentieth century, images of domestic spaces pointed both to racially distinct interiors and racialised forms of interiority. As an aesthetic technology of the late nineteenth century, photography aided in the production of visual motifs that fixed the appearance of race in a new way, and located such an appearance in particular places. The visual intertwining of race and place – designating racially proper and improper places – was instrumental to apartheid’s attempt to curtail racial mixing and unregulated mobility. In contrast with the imposed movement engendered by migrant labour, I suggest that the figure of the interior becomes a privileged standpoint from which to view the triumph of race as a form of fixity in modern South Africa.

Intersecting Archives: Intertextuality and the Early West African Photographer

This paper examines practices of intertextuality in the dispersion of images by some selected early West African photographers1 who utilized dry plate technologies in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. There is a burgeoning literature on early African photographers but little attention has been devoted to their dialectical relations with each other or the modes of intertextuality that operated between photographers. Photography was at the center of the visual fabrication of localized West African modernities and imaginaries2 during the second half of the nineteenth century. The technology, initially patented and made publicly available in 1839 in France, was taken up in Africa from the 1840s onwards and offered innovative modes of representation (Szarkowski 1966:1–6, Rajchman 1988:88–117). Its points of entry into West Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, were multiple (Viditz-Ward 1987:510–18, Yarak 1995:9–11, Haney 2010:24–27), and initially images were mostly produced as single, unique daguerreotypes on a polished silvered surface, usually sealed under glass.3 The daguerreotype was, however, paralleled by the invention and publication of the calotype process in Britain by Henry Fox Talbot in 1841. This paper-based negative-positive process allowed for unlimited photographic reproduction. Despite these advantages, it did not initially have the commercial success of the daguerreotype.4 Photographic technologies were diverse, rapidly changing, and developed throughout the nineteenth century. Such innovations, whether temporary or long-lasting, were imported into West Africa shortly after their availability in European or American markets. The daguerreotype persisted in Africa until the end of the nineteenth century, as exemplified in an advertisement of the Sierra Leone Weekly News (1884) where Shadrack A. St. John (identified as a photographer of African descent by Viditz-Ward, 1987:512) offered an improved daguerreotype process as well as the subsequent Gelatine Instaneous (dry plate) process.5 The adoption and popularity of the wet collodion glass plate process (1851 onwards) was quickly adopted by professional photographers and contributed to the burgeoning of professional studios around the world (Pols 2002:11). Its dissemination and subsequent refinement as the dry glass plate process (1870s onwards) allowed for the widespread use of the negative transfer technology pioneered by Talbot with its capacity for faster speeds, sharper, clearer images, and unlimited multiple mechanical reproduction. Moreover, as Walter Benjamin famously noted (1968:211–44), this technological capacity meant that each individual production of a given image had the potential to be constituted within a range of differing contexts that transformed their significances. For professional photographers, in particular, this offered the possibility of developing an archive of images, each of which could be repeatedly sold to a range of clients to maximize earnings. Indeed, by 1893 the Gold Coast-born photographer Neils Walwin Holm, who had settled in Lagos Colony in 1886, identified some eighty professional and amateur photographers in West Africa who were using the dry plate photographic technology (Holm 1893b:211). Itinerant commercial European and African photographers travelled the shipping routes in search of patrons and to build up image stock, and in so doing developed numerous markets for photographic services among diverse West African communities. This was greatly aided by the innovation of regular steamship services from the United Kingdom to the Niger Delta region in 1852, with increased numbers of destination ports along the West African coast (Lynn 1992:421–25). With the importation of the newer photographic technologies of dry (and prior wet) plate photography and multiple image production, West African photographers,

The rhetorical devices for marketing and branding Johannesburg as a city: a critical review

Since the founding of the city of Johannesburg in 1886, the city has taken up the quest to project a modernist image whose meaning has an international reach and a local foundation. In this endeavor, its locational advantages, product (gold), ethnicity (African), race, and class (notwithstanding the interconnections of these factors) has been used as part of the branding narratives of the city. However, the use of these factors has been closely shaped by the political ideologies of the day. While the brand imaginary of the apartheid government was largely Euro-modernist and dependent on the use of locational, product, and racial influences, the post-apartheid vision has been Afromodern relying on the fusion of global and African images informed by ethnicity and class. Whereas the two governments had political systems that differ widely on ideological grounds, both have had to contend with the indelible influence of the global market in the production of the city's brand narratives. The paper traces the different trajectories of image/branding narratives of the city from its founding to the present. Consequently, it posits the theoretical argument that a global-African imaginary as a form of African modernity is the driving force for the branding of Johannesburg. The goal of the paper is not to assess the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns but to gain insights into the city's self-reflective efforts at re-imagining the city's identity as captured in branding texts through a critical and interpretive approach. The paper presents an Afro-modernity that is relational and inclusively intercultural but perverted by the hegemonic impact of neoliberal policy and its adverse articulations of globalization.