At first sight, the major cities in South Africa do not appear to have changed much over the last decade. Their physical layouts still reflect the apartheid planners’ obsession with fixity — of identities, of space — and with control of movement. Yet cities like Johannesburg and Durban have experienced profound changes. The diverse spaces of the city are today used in radically different ways and are imbued with a new set of meanings more related to the senses than to economic functions. A city like Johannesburg, as pointed out forcefully by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2004), has become the site of a radical heterogeneity and proliferating desires. Its new dynamism both reinvents the city’s founding moment of creativity and moral transgression during the gold boom of the late nineteenth century and indicates its emergence as a new, immensely creative African metropolis. The distinction between the erstwhile white centers of South Africa’s cities (clean, modern, and universal in aspiration) and the racially defined townships (designed as enclosed, stable, and quasi-domestic community spaces) have given way to what Mbembe and Nuttall call a new and radical “social velocity� (2004: 349). This essay focuses on how the kombi-taxi — the eight- to twelve-seat van — has emerged as one of the most effective and literal manifestations of such social velocity and a new form of movement and inhabitation of South Africa’s urban spaces.

The ethnographic focus of this essay is a formerly Indian township south of Durban. One of the general effects of the new urban dynamism is that the township has been transformed from a site of quasi-domestic stability and what Michael Herzfeld (1997) calls “cultural intimacy� to a properly urban space, marked by unpredictability, difference, and the incessant movement of anonymous bodies and signs.

This transformation of the township from an order of fixity and familiarity to one of eros and unknowability has produced major upheavals and anxieties. The formerly Indian townships are today pervaded by a profound sense of melancholia produced by the loss of an object that cannot be recognized and must remain repressed: the stability and intimacy of community life during apartheid. The melancholic “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him,� argues Freud (1989: 586). This nonrecognizability of the lost object leads, Freud argues, to self-reproaches and self-revilings. Freud (1989: 587) continues: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.� As we shall see, the condition of melancholia and loss pervades even the enjoyment of the new possibilities of the postapartheid city.