Im Vorlauf des World Cups 2010 in Südafrika schreibt die in London lebende Soziologin Dr. Natascha Müller-Hirth für Munitionen über Johannesburg, Hoffnungen und Versprechungen, die WM des Protests, den südafrikanischen Staatspräsidenten Jacob Zuma und weitere Ein- und Ausblicke im Land des WM-Gastgebers. Natascha Müller-Hirth hat in Südafrika gelebt und gearbeitet und vor allem Johannesburg hat einen speziellen Platz in ihrem Herzen eingenommen. Nicht wegen der Schönheit der Stadt (denn sie ist es nicht), sondern ihrer atemberaubenden Schnellebigkeit. In ihrer akademischen Arbeit beschäftigt sie sich mit südafrikanischer Politik nach dem demokratischen Übergang. Normalerweise meidet sie Fußball, doch bei dieser WM unterstützt sie - natürlich - die “Bafana Bafana”. Und bringt uns in vier Artikeln ihr Südafrika näher.

The city of gold
Egoli – the city of gold – as Jo’burg is also known, is regularly proclaimed one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The crime statistics that have worried potential investors and World Cup visitors so much need to be seen in this above context of entrenched and deepening inequalities, massive job losses and rising poverty. The city is a place of immense contradictions, where many of the problems at the heart of Post-Apartheid development are extremely visible.

But then there is the city’s constant sense of emergency, its palpable energy and the way everything seems in flux, on edge. Was it Christopher Hope that wrote that Jo’burg has more energy in its tiniest suburb than entire other cities? That there is a strange urgency to people’s partying in Jozi, as though a disaster is about to happen and there isn’t much time left. I think of this as the gold rush mentality. Jo’burg was founded in 1886 when gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, and only 9 years later the gold fields were producing 27% of the world’s gold, supporting a population of 100,000 from all over Southern Africa and the world. The ever-expanding city quickly became the most cosmopolitan in Africa, containing a huge cultural mix and giving it this special energy that it retains until today where it still attracts all kinds of people seeking to make their fortunes.

But the city does not just retain the character of the gold rush; its geography continues to reflect colonial and Apartheid residential segregation. Back then, racial mixing was considered dangerous, black neighbourhoods were constructed both as sites of degeneration and disease and of political mobilisation and resistance. Still, the Apartheid regime needed a constant supply of cheap labour near Johannesburg’s Central Business District and its residential neighbourhoods. The townships in and around Johannesburg are a result of this ‘dilemma’ of Apartheid urbanisation. Soccer City, where the World Cup final will take place, is in Soweto, itself a huge township south-west of the city centre.

The binaries of the neoliberal gold rush
These geographies of segregation have not vanished but have been further augmented by the second, the neo-liberal, gold-rush of the 1990s. A striking image people sometimes evoke is the contrast of Sandton’s world class glitzy malls, skyscrapers and office blocks with the neighbouring Alexandra, an overcrowded and impoverished township with a considerable percentage of informal settlements, poor services and exposure to flooding.

These binary oppositions can distract from the fact that considerable progress is made by the Government in terms of housing and improving of access to services. But it is also true that these steps have been contradicted by the adoption of cost-recovery measures for service provisions, leaving township residents unable to pay water, electricity or rent. Like the rest of South Africa, Johannesburg remains deeply unequal and exclusionary 16 years after the country’s transition to democracy. As I’ll write in my next post, the funding allocated to building stadia and infrastructure associated with the World Cup has been taken from public funds destined for basic service provision and housing for the poorest citizens. So World Cup’s legacy may be a society whose essential contradictions, so plain to see from the vantage point of Constitution Hill, will be even greater.