Routes and Rites to the City

Mobility, Diversity and Religious Space in Johannesburg

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Lorena Núñez, Peter Kankonde Bukasa, Bettina Malcomess, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Lorena Núñez, Peter Kankonde Bukasa, Bettina Malcomess

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137588890
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137588906
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This thought-provoking book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa. It analyses transnational and local migration in contemporary and historical perspective, along with movements of commodities, ideas, sounds and colours within the city. It re-theorizes urban 'super-diversity' as a plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups but also as the diverse processes through which religion produces urban space. The authors argue that while religion facilitates movement, belonging and aspiration in the city, it is complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control. Multi-authored and interdisciplinary, this edited collection deals with a wide variety of sites and religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism. Its original reading of post-apartheid Johannesburg advances global debates around religion, urbanization, migration and diversity,and will appeal to students and scholars working in these fields.

© The Author(s) 2016

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Lorena Núñez, Peter Kankonde Bukasa and Bettina Malcomess (eds.)Routes and Rites to the CityGlobal Diversities10.1057/978-1-137-58890-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Routes and Rites to the City: Introduction

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon¹ , Lorena Núñez², Peter Kankonde^{3, 4} and Bettina Malcomess⁵

(1)

African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

(2)

Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), Johannesburg, South Africa

(3)

Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany

(4)

African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

(5)

Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa

End Abstract

From top left: St Mary’s the Less Anglican Church, Rosettenville Synagogue, Rosettenville Catholic Church, Pure Fire Miracles Ministries International, Watchman Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Rosettenville Branch). Photographs by: Bettina Malcomess and Shogan Naidoo. 2014–2015

Overview

This book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg. By mobility, we refer to not only transnational and intra-national migration but also movements of commodities, ideas and forms, the traffic of objects, sounds and colours within the city. By taking this approach, we aim to re-theorize religion and urban super-diversity (Vertovec 2007, 2015a, b): here super-diversity is viewed not simply in terms of the plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups, but conceived in terms of the multiple movements and enclosures through which religion produces and permeates urban space . The relationship between religion, mobility and urbanization involves both temporal and spatial diversity and the shifting borders of spatial production, belonging and exclusion . This is a constant process of territorialization and de-territorialization of physical, aesthetic and symbolic forms of the city. We argue here that while religion allows for a sense of belonging and capacitates movement, freedom and aspiration in the city, it is also complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control.

In reading the city through the intersecting phenomena of religion and mobility , we aim to provide a reading of post-apartheid Johannesburg that has been widely neglected in the literature on the city, as well as engaging with and advancing global debates around religion, urbanization and diversity . Here we focus on Johannesburg in its singularity not only as a recently “post-apartheid ” city, with particular configurations of situated histories, but also as a case study of a city of the Global South or “near-South” (Simone 2014)—post-colonial cities characterized by extreme disparities and proximity both to capitalist urban development and to extreme instability. After the end of apartheid in 1994, Johannesburg remains a city characterized by high levels of social inequality , a post-colonial legacy, defined by highly diverse forms of mobility, social identity, economic strategies and collaborations. This approach is not in any way to deny the persistence of apartheid-era racial and class inequality in the city, nor the continual processes of marginalization and dispossession through post-apartheid capitalism : rather our aim is to trace how religious forms and mobilities produce and saturate the circulation of capital and labour, and the spatiality of the post-apartheid city. These are imbricated in intersecting forms of social and moral order , exchange, belonging and exclusion in the urban context. Hence, this volume explores the intricate cartography of religion in Johannesburg, covering a great diversity of practices and spaces. Here we draw on perspectives from religious history, anthropology, urbanism, aesthetics, critical theory, sociology and theology. Adding to the flourishing body of theory on religion, migration and urbanism, we show how the transnational dimensions of migration and religion are continually being territorialized and de-territorialized, and also the ways these processes operate within the city.

Whereas most recent volumes addressing religion, migration and urbanization (discussed below) have adopted a transnational comparative perspective, our approach focuses on a single city: Johannesburg. While this is a multi-authored volume, it was developed through a series of dialogues and collaborations hosted by the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand though including a diversity of scholars from different universities and insitutions, and funded by Max Planck’s Super-Diversity South Africa project. The process involved a transnational group of authors involving South Africans, Zimbabweans, a Congolese , two Scandinavians, a Chilean and a North American. However, the project was developed and situated within a University of the Global South and located within the site of study. Several of the authors collaborated with one another on research, and even those who have sole authored their pieces attended a series of conversations and workshops discussing material in progress—hence there are themes and arguments which recur across chapters, illuminating diverse dimensions of the city. In this sense, this volume is closer to what Susan Reynolds Whyte (2014) calls a “polygraph” rather than a typical edited collection. We argue that a case study of a single city viewed through multiple and transnational perspectives allows us to view the forms of mobility and diversity operating within and beyond the city. In this introduction, we will provide a broad background to the city of Johannesburg and situate this book’s theoretical and empirical engagements.

Diversity, Dispossession and Religion in Johannesburg

The city of Johannesburg was born in 1886 as a mining encampment, after the discovery of gold-bearing quartz.¹ From a piece of uitvalgrond or abandoned land in the middle of eight farms, public diggings were declared—an explosive moment giving rise over the century that followed to one of Africa’s largest metropolises. From all over the country and world, prospectors gathered in Johannesburg. While white prospectors competed over digs and fortunes, particularly with the onset of deep-level mining, continued processes of colonial dispossession ensured that there was cheap black labour to exploit: mining compounds were created. Johannesburg, initially under the control of the Afrikaner leader Paul Kruger became a key site in the inter-colonial war between the British and the Afrikaners, into which many black Africans were conscripted. In the early twentieth century, the demand for cheap labour led to migrant labour coming in, not only from all over the region but also from India and China.

The city from its outset was characterized by biblical references as “the new Babylon” and “new Nineveh”—defined as it was by illicit markets in liquor, crime and sex work, as well as the equally shadowy and speculative nature of gold prospecting (Van Onselen 2001, 3). Compelled by a sense of moral dissolution and decay, religious groups and institutions established themselves in the city. While mainline churches—Catholic , Presbyterian and Anglican along with Jewish synagogues—were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emergent religious forms linked to migrant labour were also a feature of the city’s earliest history. In particular, Christian Zionism was a form adopted from an American evangelical movement, the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church (CCAC) founded in Chicago in 1896, eventually establishing a Zion City, and drawing its following from marginalized urban populations. In 1904, proselytizers from Zion City came to Johannesburg to grant membership to a group of black South Africans. The Zionist movement spread across the country, being adapted and innovated into various urban and rural local forms, the largest of these being the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) established in 1925, with its headquarters Zion City Moria in Limpopo province (Comaroff 1985; Sundkler 1961; West 1975).

What is clear here is that a super-diversity of ethnic, national, racial and religious groups was a feature of Johannesburg from its early decades—but this diversity was highly stratified and characterized by exploitation and repeated dispossession. As Chipkin (1993, 195) notes with regard to the early migration into Johannesburg: “the growing tide of migration that took countrymen into the industrial towns of South Africa cannot be divorced from large-scale dispossession.” The history of Johannesburg in colonial and apartheid times was also one of intense dispossession. The first mass evictions in Johannesburg, as Keith Beavon (2004) has documented, were in 1904 and involved burning down the houses of an Indian community in the city, justified by the threat of bubonic plague. The 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act aimed to regulate black migration and residency in Johannesburg and laid the basis for apartheid-era urban segregation throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with mass evictions of black residents from the inner city to the urban peripheries. After 1948, apartheid-era legislation was to solidify the racial division of South Africa and its cities, and black workers had to live in townships like Soweto on the urban peripheries (Tomlison et al. 2003). The 1950s saw the mass removals of black communities in Sophiatown in the northwest of the city. While the period from the 1970s to 1980s saw continued evictions from inner-city areas, these slowed in the 1980s due to anti-eviction activism and legislation leading to increased multi-racial residence in inner-city areas (Beavon 2004; Marx and Rubin 2008; Winkler 2013). In the latter years of apartheid, while the government attempted to stop racial mixing and exclude black populations, civil society activism in Johannesburg managed to partially prevent evictions from the city (Winkler 2013). During the 1990s and 2000s, however, there was heightened mobility of white capital and residents from inner-city Johannesburg to previously whites-only suburbs, resulting in increased dereliction of inner-city infrastructures (Chipkin 2008; Zack et al. 2010). The post-apartheid city was to be reshaped substantially, not just by the breakdown of racially structured influx control but also by new patterns of migration. However, the role of religion in these changes has been substantially ignored—it is to this end that this volume aims to contribute.

Re-reading Post-apartheid Johannesburg

An indication of the lack of attention to religion in the study of the post-apartheid city is in the fact that the introduction of the Harrison et al.’s (2014) expansive edited volume Changing Space, Changing City: Johannesburg After Apartheid, in an exhaustive overview of the literature on the city, makes little mention of religion. Their volume does, however, contribute to redressing this absence, containing Winkler’s contribution on Hillbrow arguing that “credoscapes” formed by faith-based organizations of different denominations have been important in creating “nodes of hope, order and stability amid perceived chaos and decay” (Winkler 2014, 492), a narrative piece by Kuljian (2014) on migration and the Central Methodist Church and two pieces on the dynamism of Islam in Johannesburg (Dinath et al. 2014; Sadouni 2014) and drawing attention to the contemporary and historical dynamism of Islam in Johannesburg. Routes and Rites traverses some of the same spaces, though it is, however, the first volume to offer an explicit focus on religion in Johannesburg and a sustained engagement with its implications for theorizing urban spaces, mobilities and materialities—looking not only at issues of belonging and exclusion but also at the super-diverse forms and processes through which religion is enmeshed in urban life.

Much of the literature on post-apartheid Johannesburg has primarily been concerned with racial and class segregation, criminality and security, the expansion of private sector regeneration is shaping urban space or its architectural heritage and public memorials (see inter alia, Beall et al. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Routes and Rites to the City: Introduction
• 2. Valleys of Salt in the House of God: Religious Re-territorialisation and Urban Space
• 3. Migration and the Sacred in Greater Rosettenville, Johannesburg
• 4. “It’s Only the Glass Door, Which Breaks Every Day.” Layered Politics of (Dis)Order at the Central Methodist Mission
• 5. The Spirit of Hillbrow: Religion and the Ordering of Social Space in Inner-City Johannesburg
• 6. Remaking Religion, Rethinking Space: How South Asian and Somali Migrants Are Transforming Ethnically Bound Notions of Hinduism and Islam in Mayfair and Fordsburg
• 7. Enchanted Suburbanism: Fantasy, Fear and Suburbia in Johannesburg
• 8. Eyes to See and Ears to Hear: Negotiating Religion in Alexandra Township
• 9. A Man Spoke in Joubert Park: The Establishment of a Transnational Religious Movement in South Africa
• 10. Angels and Ancestors: Prophetic Diversity and Mobility in the City
• 11. (Un)Rest in Peace: The (Local) Burial of Foreign Migrants as a Contested Process of Place Making
• 12. Conclusion: Towards New Routes
• Backmatter