Anxious Joburg

The inner lives of a global South city

Nicky Falkof, Cobus van Staden, Derek Hook, B Camminga, Mingwei Huang, Lebohang Masango, Joel Cabrita, Njogu Morgan, Aidan Mosselson, Khangelani Moyo, Renugan Raidoo, Baeletsi Tsatsi, Sisonke Msimang, Sarah Nuttall, Nicky Falkof, Cobus van Staden

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776146307
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global south city. Global south cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global north's anxieties about the south: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban?
Scholars, visual artists and storytellers all look at unexamined aspects of Johannesburg life. From peripheral settlements to the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city. It offers a rigorous, critical approach to Johannesburg revealing the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary life.
The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions from media studies, anthropology, religious studies, urban geography, migration studies and psychology. It will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to academic researchers concerned with Johannesburg, South Africa, cities and the global south. The mix of approaches will also draw a non-academic audience.

1 ‘We are all in this together’: Global Citizen, violence and anxiety in Johannesburg

Cobus van Staden

The genesis of this book lies in the fact that there is very little writing about anxiety in the global south. While anxiety is frequently expressed about the south (about population growth, or people moving north), the experience of being anxious in global south cities receives much less attention. However, beyond facilitating the expression of this experience, it is also important to show how these two are different but not discrete. Many global south anxieties relate to specific local realities, but others overlap with preoccupations in the north, albeit in unpredictable and oblique ways. In some cases we see transnational concern about the south colliding with, and heightening, the experience of anxiety in the south.

In this chapter I will focus on one such incident: the Global Citizen Festival, a star-studded music and philanthropic event that took place in Johannesburg in December 2018. In some respects the concert was a great success. It secured more than $7 billion in funding pledges for progressive causes and transfixed a stadium of music fans. However, it also caused an eruption of public violence outside the stadium, which significantly complicated its meaning. The subsequent controversy revealed much about Johannesburg’s specific anxieties, while raising wider questions about how the changing role of the state is affecting life in cities like Johannesburg. As I will argue, the Global Citizen incident was the site of a collision between the local and the global. Specifically, it reveals much about how the functionality of the state is being affected at the local and global levels simultaneously. Johannesburg becomes a useful example informing the experience of anxiety around systemic collapse and the infiltration of state structures by outside interests in cities around the world.

Global Citizen: What went down

On 2 December 2018, Johannesburg hosted the Global Citizen music festival. Global Citizen has become famous as an enterprise focused on galvanising volunteerism (mostly) in the global north, in order to facilitate social change (mostly) in the global south. The organisation partners with development agencies and NGOs, but its particular strength lies in instrumentalising celebrity and fandom in order to elicit funding pledges from governments and corporations. One of its key activities is arranging music festivals around the world, which become the occasion for high-profile funding announcements.

The 2018 show was the first Global Citizen event held in Africa. It featured some of South Africa’s most prominent musicians, many local and international celebrities and, most notably, an appearance by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. While both are popular in South Africa, Beyoncé enjoys particularly fervent fandom among young South Africans.

The event was held in the FNB Stadium in Soweto and was timed to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Nelson Mandela. Volunteerism has been promoted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation as a key to the Mandela legacy. This focus overlaps with that of Global Citizen, and the organisations share a tendency to promote brief bouts of popular volunteerism as a measure to deal with large systemic problems in the form of hashtagged multi-partner campaigns.

This co-branding also harked back to a South Africa still touched by the Mandela halo. It glossed over the twin facts that the ruling African National Congress is struggling to realign itself with Mandela-ism¹ against perceptions that the party is riven by infighting and riddled with corruption, and that many young people blame Mandela for favouring racial reconciliation over radical economic restructuring (Burke 2019). From the vantage point of the global north, it also evoked a time when South Africa still aligned itself explicitly with Western liberal humanism, before the Zuma era with its corruption and leaning towards Russia and China.

The news that Beyoncé and Jay-Z would headline the concert caused great excitement in South Africa, which was somewhat tempered by the fact that most of the tickets had been allocated to volunteers. Those who completed a certain number of ‘actions’ (mostly social media-based clicktivism) were entered into a raffle. Before the concert, the South African press ran gleeful accounts of fans who hadn’t got tickets deleting the Global Citizen app from their phones. One tweeted, ‘Fuck being a Global Citizen. I’m South African. Don’t care about famine in Yemen or some country with unsafe drinking water. I just wanted to see Beyoncé’ (Zeeman 2018a).

In the build-up to the concert, South African social media eagerly circulated any glimpse of the stars or their entourages (for example, see Thakurdin 2018a). The coverage generated ever-mounting rumours, including that Beyoncé would be joined onstage by Rihanna (Zeeman 2018b). A few days before the concert, there were reports that fans hoping to get tickets were performing 1200 volunteer actions per hour (Mjo 2018a). It was clear that the event would be a major logistical undertaking. Global Citizen and the Johannesburg metropolitan administration announced that the roads around the stadium would be closed to all drivers except those with tickets. The city would provide 166 Bus Rapid Transit System buses, 166 from the metropolitan bus service, 275 park-and-ride buses that would connect to remote parking areas and 100 Gautrain buses, which would transport attendees to the nearest station of the local light rail system, which is not yet connected to Soweto (Mjo 2018b). Minibus taxis would also provide transportation. Uber announced that it would eliminate surge pricing during the day and promised an ‘UberZONE – you can expect complimentary WiFi, charging stations and a supercool lounge area’ (Uber South Africa 2018).

The concert started at eleven in the morning. There were soon complaints that people were stuck in queues in the summer heat trying to get into the venue. The estimated final attendance was about 65 000. The programme was made up of a mix of local and international acts, interspersed with announcements of funding pledges from transnational corporations and European governments, as well as speeches by celebrities aimed at inspiring more volunteerism. These were presented by high-level representatives of Global Citizen’s NGO partners, local celebrities and several international ones, many of whom have long relationships with South Africa. They included the talk-show host Trevor Noah; Oprah Winfrey, who founded a celebrated high school for South African girls; and Naomi Campbell, who was rapidly memefied on Twitter for mispronouncing ‘amandla’.²

Beyoncé and Jay-Z appeared on stage at about ten that evening. By this time the concert had been going on for about nine hours. They played a full set, including several costume changes, ending around midnight. As the crowd started to file out of the stadium, the surrounding roads were soon completely blocked by traffic. The hundreds of buses that were supposed to take people to the station were late, with some only leaving for the Gautrain stations at three in the morning, long after the last train had departed (Mjo 2018b). According to some reports, the police blocked major roads to allow VIPs to leave first. This trapped the crowd in holding areas and caused massive traffic congestion. Afterwards there were also allegations that police were redeployed to provide VIP security, leaving the crowd unprotected (The Citizen 2018).

At the UberZONE, it soon became clear that the mobile phone network had broken down. The closest pick-up point with a cellphone signal was a service station about 3 km away. Concert-goers had no choice but to walk there in the dark. In widely circulated clips shot by CCTV cameras at the service station, one can see several hundred people waiting for rides. The crowd is agitated and groups and regroups as bands of men rush in, trying to steal bags and phones. In some cases, violent confrontations result, with concert-goers being shoved or dragged by several men at once. Shots ring out and people start fleeing. At one stage, a stampede seems imminent (the clips are embedded in several articles I cite in this chapter; see, for example, Levitt 2018a).

Eyewitness accounts posted on Twitter fleshed out the story told by the viral footage. Several mentioned women being targeted, thrown to the ground, dragged around or kicked. Some also reported seeing women with torn clothes or covered in blood. There were allegations that some women had suffered sexual assault. The eyewitnesses agree on a few points. They say groups of robbers worked together, and that they mostly grabbed phones and bags. They were armed, with many witnesses seeing people held at knife- or gunpoint and also hearing shots. While most of the witnesses described the chaos as happening outside the stadium, some also reported seeing or experiencing robberies inside. All the witnesses say there was little or no police presence either around the stadium or at the service station. Most say they saw no police at all, while one mentions seeing numerous people crowding around a single police car, begging the single officer inside to help them, even as he kept trying to leave. Eyewitnesses who saw police officers also allege that attacks happened in clear view of the police, and that appeals for help were ignored. This melee went on for a while – some witnesses described being trapped for close to five hours, while others walked an additional 2 km to get away from the violence (Selisho 2018; Kekana 2018; Mjo 2018c; 702 News 2018a; Mjo 2018d; Sithole and Dludla 2018). Meanwhile, because of the chaos, few Uber drivers were willing to enter the area, and despite earlier promises Uber activated surge pricing to attract more drivers. After braving attacks and waiting for hours, concert-goers were faced with Uber bills sometimes totalling in excess of $100. Uber later announced they would refund these charges (Levitt 2018b).

Discussions of the incident trended on Twitter for days. The stadium management blamed the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department for the lack of security at the venue, saying that police left after the last act, in contravention of a national event security plan approved by the national police commissioner (702 News 2018b; Gous 2018). Police spokespeople kept simply insisting that officers were on the scene, despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary (Levitt 2018a). When that triggered another barrage of social media criticism, they countered that the onus was on citizens to lay formal charges, complaining that only one case had been brought (Selisho 2018). Two days later, the minister of police, Bheki Cele, repeated the official denial of claims that there was a lack of police personnel on the ground, and blamed the chaos on a ‘total collapse’ of traffic management and the breakdown of the mobile phone signal, and suggested that aggrieved fans should contact the organisers of the event. He went on to say that 50 cases had been brought and 15 people had been arrested. The charges included three of assault, two of armed robbery, one of hijacking, and 24 of mobile phone theft (Evans 2018).

Meanwhile, journalists interviewed anonymous police, who said only junior officers were on site. They had been instructed to keep circulating around the venue in order to provide ‘visible policing only so people felt safe’, but when they were asked for assistance, no senior officers could grant approval, so they couldn’t leave their posts (Eyewitness News 2018). Two weeks later, seven suspects appeared in court – all undocumented immigrants (Sithole and Dludla 2018). None of the South African news media enquired why, of the large number of assailants, only non-South Africans were arrested.

The day after the incident, Global Citizen Africa tweeted, ‘After such an inspiring evening, we are saddened to hear the challenges people had while leaving the venue.’ This was followed by three more tweets, one of which encouraged victims to make statements to the police (@GblCtz, 3 December 2018).

The chaos and the city

Johannesburg wasn’t Global Citizen’s only debacle in 2018. In September, it held a concert in New York, which featured Janelle Monáe, Janet Jackson, Cardi B and The Weeknd. During the performance a crowd-control barrier collapsed. The sound was interpreted by some as gunshots, fuelled by the fact that the event took place on the first anniversary of a mass shooting in Las Vegas, USA. The resulting stampede caused several injuries, and it took a while to calm the crowd down, after which the concert continued (Aubrey 2018).

While this event suggests the wider psychological impact of the ongoing problem with mass shootings in the United States, I would argue that the Johannesburg incident reveals more about its city than this incident does about New York. Mass shootings are a national rather than a specifically New York problem, among other reasons because of New York State’s more restrictive gun laws (Reeping et al. 2019). In comparison, the aftermath of the Global Citizen Festival in Johannesburg reveals a set of factors, and correlations between those factors, that directly relate to anxiety in the city.

Firstly, much of the chaos was caused by breakdowns in the mobile phone and traffic systems linked to nested failures in management, from the event to the city to the national level. There is no way of keeping these specific failures separate from a wider national disillusionment with public institutions that has resulted from a combination of mismanagement and corruption. Electricity breakdowns resulting from failures by electricity parastatal Eskom are a notorious example.

Eskom is a vertically integrated state-owned company that generates almost all South Africa’s electricity. During the Zuma administration, Eskom became the site of massive corruption, part of a process that came to be known as state capture (Mondi 2018). This culminated in the implementation of planned rolling blackouts. Labelled ‘load shedding’, these rotate according to neighbourhood. Depending on where Eskom is in its cycle of dysfunction, load shedding can disappear for months, only to be suddenly reimposed out of the blue.

The result in Johannesburg has been a heightened awareness of how a single systemic breakdown can reverberate through the larger system. A badly timed bout of load shedding can knock out kilometres of traffic lights, instantly snarling the city in traffic. The same bout of load shedding can disrupt whole sections of the cellphone grid and affect the pumping of water at suburban substations. There is no real way of planning for these events, which means that the difference between an uneventful commute and sitting for hours in traffic with no way to contact home, and then arriving to dry taps, feels completely random. While the middle class³ has been particularly vocal in complaining about these breakdowns, they affect the poor in far more sever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• MAPPING ANXIETY IN GREATER Johanesburg
• Foreword
• Introduction: Traversing the anxious metropolis
• Taxi Diaries I: What are you doing in Joburg?
• 1 ‘We are all in this together’: Global Citizen, violence and anxiety in Johannesburg
• 2 ‘It’s not nice to be poor in Joburg’: Compensated relationships as social survival in the city
• 3 Driving, cycling and identity in Johannesburg
• Taxi Diaries II: Travelling while female
• 4 ‘The white centreline vanishes’: Fragility and anxiety in the elusive metropolis
• 5 Ugly noo-noos and suburban nightmares
• 6 The unruly in the anodyne: Nature in gated communities
• 7 The Chinatown back room: The afterlife of apartheid architectures
• 8 Shifting topographies of the anxious city
• 9 Photography and religion in anxious Joburg
• 10 Marooned: Seeking asylum as a transgender person in Johannesburg
• 11 Everyday urbanisms of fear in Johannesburg’s periphery: The case of Sol Plaatje settlement
• 12 Inner-city anxieties: Fear of crime, getting by and disconnected urban lives
• Taxi Diaries III: And now you are in Joburg
• Afterword: Urban atmospheres
• Contributors
• Index