Reflections on Identity in Four African Cities

Simon Bekker, Anne Leilde

Description

Identity has become the watchword of our times. In sub-Saharan Africa, this certainly appears to be true and for particular reasons. Africa is urbanising rapidly, cross-border migration streams are swelling and globalising influences sweep across the continent. Africa is also facing up to the challenge of nurturing emergent democracies in which citizens often feel torn between older traditional and newer national loyalties. Accordingly, collective identities are deeply coloured by recent urban as well as international experience and are squarely located within identity politics where reconciliation is required between state nation-building strategies and sub-national affiliations. They are also fundamentally shaped by the growing inequality and the poverty found on this continent. These themes are explored by an international set of scholars in two South African and two Francophone cities. The relative importance to urban residents of race, class and ethnicity but also of work, space and language are compared in these cities. This volume also includes a chapter investigating the emergence of a continental African identity. A recent report of the Office of the South African President claims that a strong national identity is emerging among its citizens, and that race and ethnicity are waning whilst a class identity is in the ascendance. The evidence and analyses within this volume serve to gauge the extent to which such claims ring true, in what everyone knows is a much more complex and shifting terrain of shared meanings than can ever be captured by such generalisations.

Sujets

• African Studies

Informations

• Publié par: African Minds
• Date de parution: 29 décembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781920355876
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Refections on Identity
in Four
African
Cities Lome
Edited by
Libreville
Simon Bekker & Anne Leildé
Johannesburg
Cape Town
Simon Bekker and Anne Leildé (eds.)Ebook ISBNs:
Ebrary 978-1-920355-85-2
MyiLibrary 978-1-920355-86-9
Adobe Digital Edition 978-1-920355-87-6
First published in 2006 by African Minds.
www.africanminds.co.za
(c) 2006 Simon Bekker & Anne Leildé
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-920051-40-6
Edited, designed and typeset by Compress
www.compress.co.za
Distributed by Oneworldbooks
[e-mail]
www.oneworldbooks.comContents
Preface and acknowledgements v
1. Introduction 1
SimonBekker
Part1:Socialidentity:Construction,researchandanalysis
2. Identity studies in Africa: Notes on theory and method 11
CharlesPuttergill&AnneLeildé
Part2:Proflesoffourcities
3. Cape Town and Johannesburg 25
IzakvanderMerwe&ArleneDavids
4. Demographic profles of Libreville and Lomé 45
HuguesSteveNdinga-KoumbaBinza
Part3:Spaceandidentity
5. Space and identity: Tinking through some South African examples 53
PhilippeGervais-Lambony 6. Domestic workers, job access, and work identities in Cape Town and
Johannesburg 97
ClaireBénit&MarianneMorange
7. When shacks ain’t chic! Planning for ‘diference’ in post-apartheid
Cape Town 97
StevenRobins
Part4:Class,race,languageandidentity
8. Di scourses on a changing urban environment: Refections of middle-class
white people in Johannesburg 121
CharlesPuttergill
9. Class, race, and language in Cape Town and Johannesburg 145
SimonBekker&AnneLeildé
10. Te importance of language identities to black residents of Cape Town and
Johannesburg 171
RobertMongwe
11. Te importance of language identities in Lomé and Libreville 189
SimonBekker&AnneLeildé
Part5:TeAfricancontinent

12. What is an African? Narratives from urban South Africa, Gabon
and Togo 207
AnneLeildé
References 225
List of contributors 242
Index 243Preface and acknowledgements
Tis book arose out of an international three-year collaborative programme
launched in 2001 and funded by South Africa’s National Research Foundation
(NRF) and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifque (CNRS). Te
research programme was coordinated in South Africa within the Department
of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch and in
France within the Centre d’Etudes d’Afrique Noire (CEAN) at the University of
Bordeaux IV. Fieldwork on local government issues and on the construction of
urban identities in selected African cities was conducted by researchers from
France, from South Africa, and from a number of other African countries. Te
programme culminated in a conference organised in Stellenbosch during the frst
half of 2004, which was attended by researchers from France, Gabon, South Africa,
and Togo. Eighteen papers were presented, fve by graduate students.
Te editors of this book selected a number of these papers and authors were
requested to fnalise these for publication. Te editors also approached one author
who had not attended the conference to contribute a chapter. Other conference
papers were selected for a book currently being published, which is edited by
Laurent Fourchard of CEAN and entiDtleesd Villes sans Gouvernement? Etat,
Gouvernement Local et Acteurs privés en Afriqueau Sud du Sahara (Karthala,
coll. Afrique Politique, Paris). Tis work addresses local government themes in a
number of African cities.
In a collaborative international research programme of this nature, credit and
thanks need to be given to many. Research was carried out in Johannesburg,
in Libreville, and in Lomé as well as in Cape Town. Workshops were organised
for researchers and graduate students in Stellenbosch and in Bordeaux. Draf
research papers were presented at a number of conferences. In deeply appreciating
the support and assistance from the many people involved in these activities, I
would like to single out for personal thanks four participants who enabled the
programme to undertake work and exchanges beyond South Africa: Tamasse vi Preface & Acknowledgements
Danioue from the University of Lomé in Togo, Anaclé Bissielo and Fidele Nze
Nguema from Omar Bongo University in Gabon, and Dominique Darbon from
CEAN in Bordeaux, France.
Te editors would like to express their gratitude to both the NRF and the CNRS
for fnancial backing without which this publication would not have been possible.
Tanks are also due to the University of Stellenbosch for contributing additional
funds to enable relevant research to be completed. Opinions expressed by authors
are not necessarily shared by these funding bodies.
SimonBekker
Stellenbosch
August2006Chapter 1
Introduction
Simon Bekker
Te Ofce of the Souath fricapn residency was recently tasked to assess how well
South a frica as ‘a nation in the making’ was doing in moving from its apartheid
past ‘towards non-racialism, equity and unity in diversity’. Te method they used
was to gather and interpret information and trends in four life domains: material
conditions, social mobility, primary organisations (such as family and household),
and collective identities. It is signifcant that the fourth domain – collective
identities – has been included with the three others - domains that have become
traditional if not classical themes in establishing the ‘health’ of a nation. It would
appear that the career of identity politics and of identity studies has turned out
to be a success, at least in terms of state recognition of their importance. Te
discussion document that has been produced within this fourth life A domain,
Nation in the Making, drew the following conclusions:
South africans evince a strong sense of national identiotwy … ever … dih versity …
in terms of race, class and nationality/language [remains] … strong. While race and
nationality/language seem to be receding as primary forms of self-defnition, class
identity seems to be on the ascendance ep. (urblic of South f arica, 2006: 97)
Tese generalisations ofer an appropriate way to introduce the chapters of this
book. a nalyses within these chapters in fact may even be used to test the extent
to which such claims ring true, in what everyone knows is a much more complex
and shifing terrain of shared meanings than can ever be captured by such
generalisations.
Before such an appraisal, why have identity studies and the politics of identity
become so popular? a nd what is the relevance of locating them within an
a frican urban context? Sometime around 1989 the world changed. Te Soviet
Union dissolved, an event which spawned an array of new states in its former
empire. a host of newly-elected governments professing to Western democratic 2 Simon Bekker
constitutional principles became established in that and other parts of the globe,
creating – at least within constitutional theory – new rights and freedoms for
millions of new citizens. Market-friendly rules came to hold sway over the global
economy, binding governments, economic institutions, and individuals into an
increasingly complex, though deeply unequal, web of interdependence.
Swelling migration streams across national borders are but one visible
consequence of these changes. Intimately related to this shif, at roughly the
same time, fundamental changes in local politics also emerged. Whereas
policies of modernisation, whether Marxist or liberal in conception, had held
local communities captive in the iron grids of class and homogenising national
ideologies embedded as they were within the three world blocs of eaWst, esat, nd
Tird World, this geopolitical shif ofered opportunities to new and old citizens
alike publicly to declare identities they considered they shared with others.
Belonging to a democratic nation-state, in their view, no longer implied having to
supplant sub-national identities with a dominant national iden a ccotityr. dingly,
most national governments across the globe, both new and old, were faced with
an increasing number of claims from sub-national groups for recognition and for
equity – for treatment of their group identity as diferent from those of the rest of
the nation. Te more frequent such claims became, the more visible opportunities
for cultural mobilisation became in the global community and to those within
that community who aspired or planned to mobilise along similar lines. Global
mass communications fuelled this demonstration efect, both in its benign form
of peaceful cultural pluralism in democratic settings and in its destructive guise of
threats and acts of violence intended to force the hands of national governments
or of supra-national authorities. In short, democratic governments in the early
twenty-frst century, while facing the perennial problems within their societies of
poverty and growth, welfare and order, are confronted with two new challenges:
the increasing loss of sovereignty to new regiona