- Nkosi Gola -
What does it mean to be black in the city?
Cities in South Africa were built against black people, excluding them from being part of their spatial belonging. To this day, black people are still not welcomed in the evolving modern cities of Africa. This situation demands us to reflect and confront the question of exclusion: whether black colonially marked bodies might forge ways of belonging in the city’s spatial exclusion?
Black people live on the outskirts of the city, in the townships and unstructured communities called amatyotyombe (the shacks). Amatyotyombe is a forced spatial ex-inclusion (pretentious inclusion) for those damned and condemned from existence. It is the reality for those constantly facing destructive forces from nature, such as tornadoes, fires, storms, and floods. We have seen these expressions in places similar to Kliptown, Khayelitsha and many other so-called informal settlements. These assaults are not only pernicious but also sanctioned and normalised by the state apparatus so that townships become stepchildren of the city, existing only as abandoned and under-resourced infrastructure, far away from the city where black labour is constantly exploited.
Those who dwell in townships and ematyotyombeni often travel in packed buses and trains in search of economic freedom, but more so in search of belonging, or at least, in finding ways to cover up the insatiable demands of the city. The result is often transformed into malleable surplus value, which is to supply cheap labour and to be willingly exploited. The creation of cities has been through the cheap labour of black people; their sweat has become lubrication to sustain the racialised capital economic machine, and their memory of the city is always imagined in an exploitative manner.
The city has become a slaughterhouse for black workers. The tall buildings of Johannesburg and the piled hills of the mine dumps are all monuments of black exploitation. Both the wages and the blood of black people, as argued in James 5 and Genesis 4, respectively, are a cry from below the foundation of those piles of mine dumps and the foundation of those tall buildings. It rings true that these monuments, embodied in the very houses that white people occupy, carry deep memories of black pain; the enslavement and exploitative labour of black people in these monuments is the (re)production of white spatial imagination in South African cities.
A city under exploitative Black labour is white suburbia, which Black people leave behind only to return to their lives in the squalor of shacks. One wonders whether God’s vision of the city has had the absence of Black people in its design? What would it mean for Black people to imagine God’s inclusive vision of the city? Perhaps this question signals an answer through the reality of Christ’s persecuted death, a kind of death that echoes the ongoing systemic violence upon Black people in many cities. Jesus’ executed death happened in the city of Jerusalem by the politically powerful elites. How, then, should we think of the city about Black experience?
Just as Jesus’ death occurred in Golgotha outside the city walls of Jerusalem, so is the majority of black death occurring in the outskirts of the cities of Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria and Johannesburg, that is, in Khayelitsha, Umlazi, Alexandria and Hammanskraal townships. In the case of Jesus and the Jewish people, there has been a historical reading of the city’s
memory that was once a good place. In the Jewish imagination, the city carries some significant implications in the eschatological vision depicted in John’s account of Revelation (Rev.21:22). What would happen when the historical memory of the city has been assaulted, violated, and exploited to the point of death?
The city’s exclusion of Black people suddenly becomes nothing but a place of misery and pain. What would it mean, therefore, for Black people to pray for the city's end or death? Is there a place or a possible redemption for Black people to belong in the city? James Cone (2011) has considered this question in his writings, and contended that the cross is God’s critique of power. The cross, as the creation of power and as the humiliation of the powerless: can it successfully critique the power from which it was created? This question echoes not only the historical milieu of Christ’s political world but the history of the oppressed, because it also rings true to blackness or black people in their lived experience. Can townships or amatyotyombe be a critique of the same white power from which they were created?
The township is the creation of whiteness, where black people are continuously rendered killable. White racial imagination (i.e., whiteness) culminated into concrete realities in the creation of townships. Vuyani Vellem (2018) avers the ambiguity of township life, stating its paradoxical nature, just like the cross of Jesus Christ. The misery condition of those dwelling in shacks, constantly attempting different ways of being, different ways of belonging, or, at least, ways of being and belonging that trigger a response of resistance. Resistance from death, which is the struggle for liberation and an attempt to negate the damnation in order to explore and ground a possible redemption. The ambiguity is precisely in defying the primary experience of being negated, neglected, and abandoned. It is true that shack dwelling is a form of crucifixion, constantly dying.
The cross, therefore, onto-logically embodies potential liberative practices for those dammed and condemned by the city. We are still yet to discover black theological discourse in South Africa that carefully attends to the lived experience of those dwelling in the shacks. By way of concluding, I recast the following conjuncture: What might it possibly mean to do theology in (African) cities designed in the memory of the oppressed? Again, Vellem’s (2016) insightful reflection might assist in elucidating this inquiry; he states: “The proliferation of the zink forest (shack dwelling) is a prophetic call from the margins for the city to be designed in a liberative manner.” We still await the prophetic enunciation coming from the wilderness of the zink forest and the black township that will provide an eschatological vision of the end of Black misery.
In sum, the townships and amatyotyombe carry an enormous responsibility of becoming a prophetic call. A call for the city’s infused imagination that might engender societies without townships, societies without shack-dwellers. This is an invitation to God’s radical eschatological vision of the city that might end the world - city - as we know it. The account of this radical eschatological vision would resonate in our Eucharistic practices - in the tortured Body of Christ - as we participate in the call to “Do this in remembrance of Christ” (Luke 22:19-20), a re-membering that calls us to be members of Christ’s fractured and fragmented body.
References Cone, J.H., 2011. The cross and the lynching tree. Orbis books. Vellem, V.S., 2018. The spiritual dimension of embracing the cross. International Review of Mission Vellem, V., 2016. Epistemological dialogue as prophetic: A black theological perspective on the land issue. Scriptura: Journal for Contextual Hermeneutics in Southern Africa
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