A Blasé Attitude: A Response to Michael Watts

Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe

I never milked a cow in my life. . . . Even a township hobo feels more like a city slicker than a plaas-japie. Real world. Fast life.

YFM deejay Sanza Tshabalala

One of the things that strikes us on reading Michael Watts’s comments on the special issue “Johannesburg—The Elusive Metropolis” (Public Culture 16 [fall 2003]) is not only the degree to which it is a view from the outside but also the extent to which his response displays a certain failure of the imagination.

This is not because “insiders” have a special purchase on what is going on here or on how this city—and the continent of which it is a part—should be read. Views from the outside may indeed illuminate what locals fail to see.

At the same time, outsiders speak from places and within paradigms that carry their own baggage. One result may be a failure to see when one’s own rules might not apply or when political, ideological, and hermeneutic certainty is not guaranteed. This may be in part why, despite the immediate “shock of recognition” Watts experiences, he fails to imagine what it might actually be like to live here in Johannesburg, in the midst of, and as full participants in, metropolitan modernity tout court. But these are the terms on which we interact with one another and with the world at large, whether we live in the townships, the squatter camps, or the suburbs.1

That we should assert this and employ a notion of sameness-as-worldliness to emphasize what we mean is seen by Watts as a failure to bear testimony to Africa’s difference constituted, in his view, by its slum life and chronic poverty.

The initial “shock,” for Watts, is “the extent to which Johannesburg has always aspired to, and now embodies, a distinctively modern aura.” Yet by the end of his piece, he is keen to reinsert the city into a more recognizable frame: “it is the slum that constitutes the defining feature of contemporary African metropolises,” he decides. Why should this be the case? Because, he tells us, “in some countries [in Africa] over 90 percent of urban residents live in slums.”2 But doesn’t this serve to confirm a dominant North American research mode for carving up the globe?

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Notes

1. A brilliant case of the townships’ permanent engagement with modernity and with the world at large is Hugh Masekela and D. Michael Cheers, Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela (New York: Crown, 2004).
2. Michael Watts, “Baudelaire over Berea, Simmel over Sandton?” in this issue.