Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis by Mbembe and Nuttall

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008) is the volume with which the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe and the South African literary critic Sarah Nuttall, then at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, proposed reading Johannesburg not as a case of underdevelopment or surviving apartheid but as a modern African metropolis entitled to produce theory about itself. Their thesis is that South Africa's largest city, born of the gold rush in 1886 and marked by decades of segregation, is as modern, cosmopolitan and contradictory as any other, and that understanding it requires abandoning the categories that reduce it to an exception.

Writing the world from an African metropolis

The book grew out of a special issue of the journal Public Culture in 2004 and gathers essays by historians, planners, writers and artists. Its polemical starting point is a critique of African urban studies that see only crisis, informality and lack, and of urban theory that draws its concepts from Paris, New York or Los Angeles and applies them to Africa as a measure of what is missing. Mbembe and Nuttall call for writing the world from an African metropolis, in line with Jennifer Robinson's proposal of ordinary cities, and for showing that Johannesburg has been from its origin a laboratory of modernity: industrial mining, mass migration, consumption, architecture, popular culture.

Surface, underground and edges: the layers of Johannesburg

The essays move through the city's layers. The surface of shopping malls, the gated northern suburbs and car culture, where a modernity of consumption crossing races and classes is staged. The underground of the mines, with their tunnels and mountains of tailings, which explains the shape and wealth of the city and the exploitation of the Black migrant labour that sustained it. And the edges: Soweto, Alexandra, Hillbrow, the districts where apartheid confined the majority and where the post-1994 city produces at once violence, xenophobia toward African migrants and an intense cultural life, from kwaito to literature.

Afropolitanism and the city imagined by its inhabitants

Mbembe contributes the concept of Afropolitanism, a form of African belonging open to the world, made of circulation, mixture and appropriation, which Johannesburg embodies with its migrants from across the continent, its languages and its styles. Nuttall, for her part, reads the city through its texts and images, from advertising to the novel, to show how inhabitants themselves imagine and remake their metropolis. Both insist that Johannesburg is elusive because it escapes fixed narratives, that of apartheid, of transition, of crisis, and demands a reading attentive to what changes and what repeats.

Critiques and the book's place in Southern urban theory

The book was contested from the start. Critics such as Ananya Roy and scholars of South African inequality reproached Mbembe and Nuttall for an emphasis on cultural surface and consumption that left extreme poverty, unemployment and the persistence of apartheid geography in the background, when Johannesburg remains one of the most segregated cities in the world. The editors replied that their aim was not to deny that inequality but to refuse that it be the only thing that can be said about an African city.

For urban studies, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis marked a turn. Alongside AbdouMaliq Simone and Jennifer Robinson, it belongs to the effort to produce urban theory from the South and to treat African cities as sources of knowledge rather than problems. Its lesson is that a metropolis is understood by reading at once its surface and its underground, its centre and its edges, and by listening to how those who inhabit it imagine it, because no city lets itself be fully captured by those who look at it from outside.