Mapping an Emotional Landscape: Urban Anxiety in Johannesburg

The following excerpts are taken from an interview - on urban life in Johannesburg, anxieties, how apartheid shaped the city and on marginalised groups - with Cobus van Staden (CVS) and Nicky Falkof (NF), both based in Johannesburg.

NF: Why anxiety? Well, you can't analyze a political system without considering people's emotions to some extent. What are people afraid of? What do they desire? What identities are they imposing on themselves and on others? Who do they want to be close to? Who do they want to be far from? Emotion structures how we shop, which structures our economies. It underpins the physical ways in which cities are built. But we don't often think about Global South cities in these terms. We don't often grant people the agency and the inner life that we grant people in the Global North. 

If you consider media, cultural production, and literature, you might think about the kind of films that are made about a city like New York, where you have your deep, internal, canonical pieces of text that are all about how someone feels. And then you think of a city like Joburg, where you have films about Apartheid, films about post-Apartheid, films about violence, but never anything about people’s inner lives.

CVS: This is one of the reasons why we focus on anxiety rather than on fear, because anxiety is free-floating. We quote a prominent South African psychologist who calls anxiety "objectless." So you can be anxious about a particular issue, but you can also be anxious, very anxious, about not something specific at all—just a lot of different things—and some are defined and some are not. It is this anxious hum that underlies the experience of living in Joburg.
Because South Africa underwent apartheid, and Johannesburg was built according to apartheid ideas, there are buffer zones, highways, and empty stretches keeping people apart. The history of the city is written on its landscape. But the emotions that result from that history are not as well mapped. Mapping an emotional landscape ended up being our contribution to previous physical mappings done in Joburg.

CVS: Crime is a major reality in Johannesburg. It is a major structuring principle in how the city is built, how people build their houses, how they act in public. But the fear of crime is almost something different than the actual crime problem. When looking at crime statistics in South Africa, one realizes that poor people suffer disproportionately from crime. Crime for poor people is a daily, lived, physical experience. Whereas for more affluent people, the discourse around crime is huge, but they don't have as much of a daily experience of crime.

NF: From an intersectional perspective, crime is a huge issue in terms of gender. South African rates of gender-based violence (GBV) are off the scale. There are horrific stories weekly of women murdered, both by intimate partners and strangers. 

In the book, there are stories written by a young Black woman who traverses Johannesburg in highly precarious ways using public, mini bus taxis. These are dangerous, and young women are often seen as fair game by the drivers and to other men. Crime is, particularly for women, one of the most significant features of life in Johannesburg, because you are constantly hypervigilant. For working-class women much more so than middle-class women, and for women who take public transport much more so than for women who have private transport.

NF: For women, physically being on the streets feels quite dangerous. In Johannesburg, you hear stories of women sexually harassed or even assaulted at taxi ranks or other public spaces, and often it's “because their skirts are too short.”
It’s not just a case of women being easier targets, so it's easier to steal their handbags, or of stereotypes of ravaging sexuality. It's about discipline. There's something in the way that gendered crime manifests in the streets of Johannesburg that is about telling women where they belong and where they don't belong.
Some argue that part of this has to do with the disenfranchisement of a generation of South Africans who were left out of the supposed promises of apartheid when South Africa turned into a neoliberal state. Who do you take your frustration out on? Who's always at the bottom of the pack? It's Black women. I do think that is an oversimplification, but there is something significant in the way in which Black women are consistently disciplined.
We have a huge homelessness problem in the city, and there's a lot of begging. But the majority of these people are men. Where are all the destitute women? Why are they not on the streets? How are they surviving? A lot of women, particularly migrants, end up in very low-level, extremely low-paying prostitution jobs because they're not permitted to survive in other sectors of the city.

CVS: With regard to the LGBTQ community, many transgender migrants come to South Africa because it has constitutional protection for sexual minorities, which other African countries do not. In some ways, South Africa is a kind of promised land for LGTBQ people on the continent. And when one goes to Johannesburg Pride, in particular to Soweto Pride, you really feel that. You can really feel people who come from everywhere, from all of these rural places, and a lot of other countries, to make it to Joburg and you really do feel giddiness in terms of self-expression.
But of course, self-expression also makes one visible in public space, so it becomes a difficult trade-off. For trans people, many of them try and get to Cape Town, because Cape Town has an image of being more LGBTQ-friendly than Johannesburg. But frequently, these migrants end up falling victim to attempts by the South African state to stop migrants from coming to South Africa. The government can't legally stop people from applying for asylum, but it makes the asylum process as difficult as possible, including by forcing LGBTQ migrants already in Joburg to stay in the city.

NF: In South Africa, race talk and crime talk intersect, but race talk is also often quite overt. People are capable sometimes of speaking about race in quite straightforward ways because it is difficult to hide from it. Sara Ahmed makes this point when she talks about the way that scholars in the North write about the “invisibility” of whiteness. She argues, "Well, it might be invisible for you guys, but it's not invisible for us. Because we live with it every day." And because of the racial demographics in this country, it is a lot harder for white people to casually pretend that we’re benign.
In South Africa, the white middle class, although they do use crime as the placeholder for race, are potentially more cognizant of racial issues. That does leave some space for social change because people may be able to acknowledge the inherently racialized nature of their fears, which does not seem to be the case in the United States.

::: full interview: LINK

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photograph (taken in South Africa) by Paul Weinberg via