"Writing the World from an African Metropolis"
from Public Culture 16.3 (2004)
by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall
I really enjoyed this article because Mbembe and Nuttall give a historical overview of urban theories and conceptions about African urban development. They point out that "the social" is still understood "as a matter of order and contract rather than as the locus of experiment and artifice" (349). This is an idea that goes beyond their South African example. I feel that most people see society, and especially the urban society, as order.
Although I feel that the social can rightly be seen as a "contract," I like the addition of experiment and artifice to the discussion is very productive. I was definitely confused as to why "order and contract" were placed in opposition to "experiment and artifice" -- I don't see those two sets as mutually exclusive. However, this is one issue with reading just introductions.
Mbembe and Nutall's main drive is to look at Africa beyond the tropes of "difference" and "uniqueness," as anthropology and development studies do (350). They write: "Though the work of difference has performed important functions in the scholarly practice that sought to undercut imperial paradigms, it is clearly time, in the case of Africa, to revisit the frontiers of commonality and the potential of sameness-as-worldiness. This is a far cry from a proposition that would aim at rehabilitating facile assumptions about universality and practicality" (351).
The dynamic of sameness and otherness naturally plays out in all of the texts that we are reading. My Son's Story and Country of My Skull both show characters who have to negotiate the changing definitions of otherness and sameness. I can't help but wonder how Mpe's novel addresses these issues. An example of this issue happens right at the beginning of Welcome to Our Hillbrow, when the narrator talks about the homeless man being wheeled away: "In the five years you had known him, you had become friends without ever saying anything to each other, except for the mutually warm greetings" (16). This is contrasted with the sense of alienation on the next page when the narrator talks about Bafana Bafana's defeat: "You often accused him of being a hypocrite, because his vocal support for black non-South African teams, whenever they played against European clubs, contrasted so glaringly with his prejudice towards black foreigners the rest of the time" (17). I think this is very important in the context of an urban setting. In Hillbrow, experiment and artifice happens at the level of nationality and economics (the foreigners "stealing" jobs); however, there is still a certain order and contract (like with the homeless man). It would be really interesting to apply Mbembe & Nuttall's ideas through the course of the novel and see what this amounts to in Mpe's message.