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Book Reviews

Women and Politics in Southern Africa

Gisela Geisler, Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: NegotiatingAutonomy, Incorporation and Representation (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004),241 pp., £19.95 paperback, ISBN 91-7106-515-6

Never again will I bemoan the lack of a useful, politically-focused, text from which to teach gender

politics in Africa. Not that this is ‘only’ a textbook. But there is a section in my course outlines entitled

‘gender’ that includes development and anthropology, lots of history and the occasional article on

politics (mostly from West Africa!). To my shame, I have yet to come up with a plausible and

convincing lecture based on this random assortment. This book, however, will greatly facilitate analytic

thinking about gender and politics.

Gisela Geisler gives us seven chapters, six of which focus on key aspects or forms of women’s

politics in Southern Africa. Her introductory chapter surveys the literature and issues competently,

charting a more-or-less chronological trajectory of women’s involvement in politics. Particular themes

are identified: the process whereby governments ‘co-opted’ women into uncritical praise-singers, the

women who chose to ‘opt-out’ of formal politics for various forms of associational life, and their

subsequent ‘opting back in’ as women became particularly involved in the democratisation movements

of the 1990s, with differing levels of success.

The book takes off, however, with two chapters on liberation wars, one on women in liberation

movements ‘fighting men’s wars’ and one on women’s liberation within the broader context of

liberation, a case study of the South African women’s movement before 1990 and during the transition

period before 1994. From this base we move to the post-colonial. Here we get a classic account of ‘the

women’s league syndrome’ (Chapter 4); the ‘ambitious but marginalised’ women’s desks and ministries

(Chapter 5); women’s movements (Chapter 6); and women politicians ‘struggling on all fronts’ (Chapter

7). Geographically, the focus is mainly on Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.

There are many strengths to this work, although also a few unfortunate omissions. Geisler’s main

success is in articulating the political implications of the gap in comprehension, interests and

communication between the professional, middle-class women of urban Africa and the poor majority in

both rural and urban settings. She is also adept at exploring the articulation of this divide within the

women’s movements, captured in South African debates as the ‘motherists’ against the ‘feminists’ (p. 79).

She engages with the distrust and dislike that these tensions generate, and the efforts to circumvent them,

problematising simple or straightforward accounts of ‘women’ and ‘politics’ in southern Africa.

The material on nationalist movements and liberation war mobilisation is well synthesised.

The voices of women from Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia reflecting on the space for sexual freedom, the

freedom to move ‘around with men’ and ‘on business’ (p. 45), capture these times poignantly.

This chapter also brings out the hypocrisy of movements joined by young women who wanted to fight,

but all too often pushing them into ‘support’ roles. However, comparison with the Eritrean People’s

Liberation Front, where considerable numbers of women were in the trenches, might have worked better

than the Ethiopian Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Of the countries under consideration, Zambia is the only one to have experienced a post-

independence regime change. A definite strength here is Geisler’s discussion of women’s representation,

power and organisation under both the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and the Movement

for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), which strengthens the analysis markedly. Geisler’s account of the

UNIP women’s league as ‘self-appointed custodians of morality’ (p. 94) would be hilarious if it wasn’t

really rather sad. The comparisons with Zimbabwe and Botswana are also instructive. As Geisler notes,

despite Zimbabwe’s Marxist-inspired liberation struggle, which promoted gender equality, post-

independence, the ‘ZANU(PF) airport women’ resemble Zambia’s ‘chitenge-clad conservative women’

ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/06/010179-19q 2006 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070500493894

Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 32, Number 1, March 2006

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more than a little (pp. 104–5). It is striking, but perhaps unsurprising, that the South African women

returning home after 1990 consciously tried to avoid the mistakes made in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Given the richness and breadth of the text, it may be unfair for me to over-emphasize the next point,

but, it is unfortunate that limited attention is given to post-1995 publications and events in Zimbabwe.

Neither Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi’s For Better or for Worse (2000) nor Tanya Lyon’s Guns and

Guerrilla Girls (2004), both studies of women in ZANLA, are mentioned. Much of the excitement of

changes in the women’s non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector are also omitted. For example,

the attack on Zimbabwe’s oldest ‘indigenous’ women’s NGO (founded in 1932 by Vera Mangwende),

and the success of these women in getting the new Act to control NGOs declared unconstitutional. This

would have been an excellent addition to the fascinating account of Namibian and Zambian NGOs in

Chapter 6. With distinct similarity to Botswana’s experiences, women’s NGOs in Zimbabwe formed a

coalition to campaign against laws restricting citizenship to foreign born husbands of Zimbabwean

women and the Government’s draft constitution. And, although fewer women were elected to

parliament in 2000, they did include a number of women’s activists. During that parliament, NGOs and

women MPs mobilised an outrageously public campaign for lower cost sanitary products.

Two final complaints, which are aimed more at the publisher than the author. First, the text is mainly

referenced with in-text citations, but also has footnotes, referencing interviews, newspaper articles, and

sources cited within other sources. This means that having looked down to the footnote you still have to

leaf to the bibliography to find the reference. This is unnecessary and cumbersome. Second, given that

the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet frequently publishes authors for whom English is not a first language,

writing about countries where English is not an indigenous language, some mistakes are understandable.

A few sentences here have words missing, or are confusingly constructed. The Nambian Women’s

Voice must have been founded before 1997! (p. 146). More worrying, though, are the misspellings and

inconsistent spellings of authors’ and prominent actors’ names: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela becomes

Madizikela-Mandela; Kathy Bond-Stewart becomes Bond-Steward and Ruth Khama becomes Kharma!

Sara Rich Dorman

University of Edinburgh

Women and the TRC in South Africa

Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission inSouth Africa (London, Pluto Press, 2003), viii þ206 pp., £15.99 paperback, ISBN 0-7453-1891-6

Bearing Witness is an intellectually and emotionally gripping analysis of the process of arriving at truth

and reconciliation in South Africa. Ross challenges the rights-based approach of the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission, which formulated the role of women in apartheid’s history largely as

victims. Initially using an overview of submissions made to the commission and then focusing on the

case of Zwelethemba, a Boland township, Ross employs an ethnographic approach in an effort to

question constructed notions of women, victim and violence. The book is clearly structured and the

scene setting effective – although a map illustrating the Boland, and photographs (of local contexts and

Commission hearings) would have assisted the unfamiliar reader, particularly in Chapter 4 where the

case of Zwelethemba is introduced.

The first chapter critically addresses the making of the subject ‘women’ and ‘victim’ by the

Commission with thought-provoking analyses of the historical production of the Commission.

The chapter engages with fellow academics’ calls to view the subject as an ‘open question’ (p. 26), but

does not satisfactorily address the sticky question of the limitations of ever knowing a subject ‘fully’.

Chapter 2 critically explores testimonial practices, using five women’s stories to draw out a number of

generic themes. Nyameka and Elizabeth’s stories contrast the subjectivities of the widow versus the

expert, and Nonceba, Eunice and Sylvia’s stories illustrate the significance of time and domestic space.

The chapter concludes by exploring listening’s counterfactual – silence. The celebration of the power

180 Journal of Southern African Studies

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of silence somewhat undermines the import of the five verbal stories and the focus on stories of death

(rather than on other forms of violence) raises questions about how the analytical themes would adapt to

less final memories. Dreams and fears are two obvious arenas for difference here. Chapter 3 is pivotal to

the argument of the book. It carefully illustrates the meaning of the term ‘activist’ and challenges the

Commission’s categorisation of women as victims. Ross reveals the diverse experiences of self using

spaces of detention as a backdrop. She explores gender specific violence, the fracturing (and solidifying)

of social relationships and the activist sense of self. The chapter reveals widespread harm, poorly

understood in the conclusions drawn by the Commission. Ross implores that we understand the ‘effort and

costs’ of trying to ‘create a coherent sense of self . . . in the face of the state’s raw power, brutally wielded’

(p. 73). The sections on womanhood (p. 65) and the disorientation experienced by some activists with the

transition to democracy (p. 75) are gripping, and I would have enjoyed a fuller account.

Chapter 4 leads the reader to the case of Zwelethemba, a township in the Boland, and develops two

strong points. First, it challenges the assumption that providing testimony is necessarily a healing

experience and, second, it uses multiple methodologies to prove the Commission and the media’s

obsession with conflating stories of harm with those of sexual violence. Ross vividly illustrates both points

using the experiences of Yvonne Khutwane, an ANC activist who suffered political, social and personal

harm at the hands of the police and also her community. Yvonne’s request is for the Commission to aid her

own understanding of her mistreatment within her community (her home was burned and she was labelled

an informant). This plea is overlooked as Yvonne takes on the constructed label of ‘sexual victim’.

Ross’s argument that testimonies must be understood in terms of their production, their content and

the contexts ‘within which’ they are ‘shaped and received’ (p. 79), is most apt. Chapter 5 places at centre

stage young women of Zwelethemba and explores ten women’s histories of political activism and the

reasons for their partial absence from the Commission’s reports. Ross cites the Commission’s

methodologies, its time constraints and its (narrow) definitions of gross violations of human rights as

determinants. She also cites the personal decisions of some women to not report their experiences. Ross’s

own research contrasts with the procedures adopted by the Commission, and in doing so she offers an

impressive account of political activity and political harm in the Zwelethemba area, particularly during

the mid-1980s. An understanding of the socially networked nature of harm perpetuated by the apartheid

state is one important contribution of her work, and Ross points to the failure of the Commission to draw

adequate conclusions about the consequences of this for female youth in particular (p. 128). Employing

five markers of social success in these ten women’s current lives, Ross concludes that there has been a

‘distancing of the horizons of success for young women’ which they themselves link to a world which

‘does not recognise skills learned in conditions of protest’ (pp. 130–1). Here, Ross’s ability to link harm

caused during apartheid and women’s resistance to this harm with socio-economic reality transforms this

book from a singular historical account of violence to one that contextualises violence and draws violent

histories into the ambit of everyday and future life.

Chapter 6 opens with an extensive account of the political activities of Mirriam Moleleki, currently head

of Masikhule Rural Development Centre, and draws attention to Mirriam’s decision to not make a statement

to the Commission regarding the harm she experienced because she felt she had ‘no need of reparation’ and

had suffered less than others (p. 139). Ross uses Mirriam’s choice to illustrate activities by women which

remake the everyday and pursue the ‘ordinary’. Mirriam achieves this by constantly aiming to secure social

recuperation (p. 139) for others (not always interpreted positively by fellow women). The chapter then

reconsiders various historical accounts of activism as attempts to pursue the ordinary rather than the

‘spectacular’. Here Ross moves beyond the activism against apartheid brutality to document broader social

and economic activism, which represented the realities of people’s everyday lives. She concludes by

redrawing attention to the narratives used by the activist women she interviewed, arguing that their

expression of activism ‘is lively and confrontational’ and they seldom describe themselves as heroes,

victims or martyrs as does the Commission (p. 154). She critically illustrates the use of trickster narratives by

activist women (offering several endearing accounts of trickery) and contrasts this with the ‘grammar of

pain’ employed by the Commission (p. 157). Ross ends her journey by reminding us of the continuity of

women’s activity and the ways in which imagining everyday life is ‘future-oriented’ (p. 161).

Despite ‘the making of the subject’ enjoying a key intellectual position in the text, Ross largely avoids

her own subjectivities. The reader would benefit from learning about Ross’s own troubled reflection on

questions of feedback to interviewees, and antagonisms and expectations produced as a result of this

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publication. Ethnographic methodologies are exalted here, however, although I largely agree, are other

approaches always homogenising? Further consideration (or at least clarification) of the intended

audience of the text would have been helpful. Finally, it is worth reminding publishers that notes at the end

of texts are frustrating and often lose value as a result.

This is a passionate, well-researched and profoundly analytical text – it makes for a gripping read,

offers the reader substantial material regarding South Africa’s past and present, and provides feminists

with another feather in their hat.

Paula Meth

Department of Town and Regional Planning

University of Sheffield

Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa

Garth Andrew Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa(Syracuse, New York, Syracuse University Press, 2003), 224 pp., $39.95 hardback, ISBN0-8156-2872-9; $19.95 paperback, ISBN 0-8156-2997-4

The ‘verandahs of power’ in the title of this book come from a comment by Elspeth Huxley about one of

the key figures in the book, Eric Dutton. She suggested that he had never been ‘far from the verandahs of

power’ (p. 2). Dutton was an English colonial officer who never reached senior rank in the colonial civil

service, and yet who played an important role in shaping the urban landscape of some of East Africa’s

more prominent cities – Nairobi, Zanzibar and Lusaka especially. Myers also weaves his narrative

around the architect Ajit Singh, who was similarly present on the verandahs of power – although a tier

lower in the colonial hierarchy. While Dutton inhabited a position within the colonial elite, his relatively

marginal position and crippling disabilities mean that, in Myer’s account, he exposes some of the

ambivalences and complexities of colonial rule. Ajit Singh also lacked substantial authority, but this was

by virtue of his position as part of the ‘colonised middle’ – an Asian in Africa working for the colonial

and later postcolonial governments of Zanzibar and Malawi who had a strong interest in local African

cultures and lived in the mostly African area of Ng’ambo in Zanzibar.

Garth Myers weaves an exceptionally readable and interesting tale about East African cities and the

people who make them through the lives of these two individuals, as they become caught up in the wider

politics and cultural dynamics of Zanzibar, Nairobi, Lusaka and Lilongwe. Alongside these two

‘verandahs’ of colonial power, he places strong and vibrant narratives about the making of the ‘other

side’ of each of these cities, the third verandah, the areas of the city shaped by the majority African

residents, evading and often undermining the enframing colonial projects which sought to generate

orderly and controlled urban spaces. In the opening chapter, he layers in a personal narrative about Juma

Maalim Kombo, a seaman in Zanzibar, to match the other two personalities, but whereas Dutton and

Singh move between cities to anchor the storyline of the book, Bwana Juma’s mobility is tied to his

work on the docks and ships. But his mobility within Zanzibari society – his links stretch to friendship

with Abeid Amani Karume, leader of revolutionary Zanzibar – brings out a core theme of the book: the

entwined nature of colonial rule and African society in these cities.

The verandahs metaphor also hails from a building in Zanzibar, originally constructed by the Omani

Sultan, Barghash bin Said in the 1880s. Taken over by the British in 1896, this ‘House of Wonders’, with

its three wrap-around verandahs became the administrative headquarters of the British Protectorate

government. Many of the other suggestive metaphors Myers draws on to frame the narrative also

emanate from the Zanzibari context – the ‘other side’ of the city being the literal translation of the

Ng’ambo area of Zanzibar, whose spatial form and social life he captures through the three Swahili

terms, uwezo (power), desturi (custom) and imani (faith), concepts which he then uses to analyse

African urban life in all four cities. Although he also makes use of Timothy Mitchell’s account

of colonial enframing combined with a very subtle analysis of the colonial state to explore the strategies

of planning and order in these cities, it is the lively, embedded analytic which Myers draws from the

Zanzibari context which illuminates this book.

182 Journal of Southern African Studies

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The analysis of the politics and development of these cities roughly coincides with the working

lifetimes of Dutton and Singh, from around 1918, when Dutton arrived in Nairobi, through to 1979,

when Singh left his work in Malawi to return to his family in Zanzibar. In tracing their movements,

Garth Myers brings out an important theme in the history of cities in Africa, namely the ways in which

ideas and practices circulated between different cities, through the various networks of colonial rule and

professional practice. The career of Ajit Singh layers in a sense of connections to the Indian

subcontinent, evidenced in some of his building designs. As colonial officers and bureaucrats moved

from one context to another, their practices and ideas moved with them. Singh’s designs in Malawi drew

on his earlier work in Zanzibar to shape the look of new developments in Lilongwe and across the

country, as much as the South African architects and project managers who led the construction of the

new Malawian capital city. And in revolutionary Zanzibar, attempts to impose order on the ‘other side’

of the city also drew on the planning practices of the German Democratic Republic to build socialist-

style high-rise public housing. Dutton’s interest in architecture and urban design saw him play a central

role in the design of Lusaka, the new capital city of Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia). He was strongly

influenced by ‘garden city’ ideas, but also drew on local African forms and customs in the design of

public buildings and houses in African areas, albeit within a European idiom of the nuclear family.

The narrative strategy this book adopts opens up the ways in which the prosaic activities of colonial

officials, their individual trajectories and enthusiasms, as much as the wider political context, have given

shape to life in these cities. The colonial state, while implicated in various practices of ordering and

enframing, is shown to be a product of mundane and sometimes fragile decisions, actions and personal

relationships – relationships that often cut across the very racial segregations the colonial state was

formalising in cities during this period.

The book also details how many of the ordering strategies that led to the construction of these

colonial and postcolonial cities were profoundly remade through the initiatives of African residents of

the cities. Myers doesn’t see this as a necessary victory:

the urban majority often remain marginalized and must struggle with conditions of over-crowding,poverty, unemployment, hunger and endemic disease. Nevertheless, cities in Africa, as livedenvironments and social systems, often display an order much more akin to the lifeworld of themajority than to the enframing order of the upper verandahs in those ‘Houses of Wonder’ (p. 16).

Verandahs of Power is a significant achievement, bringing together in a detailed and nuanced way

the histories of four different African cities. It places what are often seen as the singular trajectories of

individual cities within a wider analytical and historical frame. And it offers much food for thought for

urban historians, curious about the ways in which similar events and processes seem to be replicated

across the continent. In excavating the power relations of urban planning, the dynamism of African

urban life, and the circulation of urban practices across these four cities, Garth Myers has made an

original and much overdue contribution to African urban history.

Jennifer Robinson

Geography Department

The Open University

Postcolonial Lusophone Africa

Patrick Chabal (with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibertand Elisa Silva Andrade), A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (London, Hurst &Company, 2002), xxþ339 pp., £40.00 hardback, ISBN 1-85065-594-4; £14.95 paperback,ISBN 1-85065-589-8

A long-time scholar of contemporary Africa, Patrick Chabal has brought together in this volume five

experts (two of whom, the historians David Birmingham and Malyn Newitt, will be well known

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to readers of this Journal) to examine the postcolonial development of the African ‘Lusophone’

countries of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Sao Tome e Prıncipe, a generation

after they gained political independence from Portuguese colonial rule. Although ostensibly a ‘co-

authored’ work, this ambitious volume has a unique structure that may prove an annoyance for a number

of readers: a lengthy set of ‘introductory’ interpretive essays by the compiler Chabal, which offer a

historical and comparative analysis of all of these African countries; and five historical ‘country study’

essays: Birmingham on Angola, Newitt on Mozambique, Joshua Forrest on Guinea-Bissau, Elisa Silva

Andrade on Cape Verde and Gerhard Seibert on Sao Tome e Prıncipe. These are commendable for

presenting detailed accounts of, in the main, the major political and economic developments within

these countries from 1975 to 2000.

Part I of the book, sub-divided into three complementary chapters, opens with a long historical and

comparative analysis of the five ‘Lusophone’ African countries by Chabal. It is organised both

thematically and chronologically, as it considers the topics of the end of empire, the establishment of the

nation-state and the limits of nationhood. Chabal is at pains to point out the importance of studying the

‘evolution of the postcolonial state from an “African” rather than from a strictly Lusophone perspective’

(p. 34), as a way of understanding a process he calls political Africanisation: ‘the all important processes

whereby the political legacy – the ideas, practices and institutions – of colonial rule and colonisation

was assimilated, transformed and re-appropriated by Africa’ (p. 34). This interest in broader

comparative politics is laudable. The attempt to move beyond ‘the narrow Lusophone focus which

afflicts most accounts of Portuguese-speaking Africa’ (p. xviii) is, however, somewhat undermined

precisely by the analytical focus of the project on ‘Lusophone’ countries. Chabal admits that there is

little that connects these disparate countries, other than a shared legacy of colonial rule by Portugal, and

it remains unclear why they should be necessarily grouped together and studied comparatively as a

single unit. Indeed, the very terminology used to refer to these countries as ‘Lusophone’ (much like the

term ‘Francophone’ is used for former French possessions in West Africa) is in need of revision, more

careful problematisation or it should, perhaps, be jettisoned altogether.

Turning to the country studies in Part II of the volume, these can – and probably should – be read

independently of one another (as indeed is suggested by Chabal in the Preface). They open with

Birmingham’s highly engaging interpretation of Angola’s post-independence political history.

Reflecting the expertise of one who has devoted many years to thinking and writing about various

aspects of the country’s past, Birmingham has crafted an essay that takes the reader rapidly through the

most important political developments of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the emergence of the alliance

between Savimbi and the United States. He is unsparing in his criticism of the Angolan political

leadership. Birmingham is particularly good at drawing out the role of oil and the confluence of

international factors that had an impact on the country’s politics and economy. Newitt’s essay on

Mozambique also bears impressive scholarly authority. Crisply written and meticulously referenced, the

essay offers a well-balanced account of the political life of Frelimo and of the economic transitions that

marked the post-independence period. Newitt also manages successfully to show how regional and

international factors influenced internal developments, like the country’s devastating ‘civil’ war of the

1980s and early 1990s. In his chapter on Guinea-Bissau, Forrest discusses the emergence of localised

power in rural areas in the face of neglect from the national ruling party, the PAIGC. The author

presents an incisive account of the ‘breakdown of political unity at the level of the national leadership’

(p. 250), contrasting it with popular, community-level political mobilisation, and charts the emergence

of the ill-formed multipartyism that was overseen by President Nino Vieira. The essay on Cape Verde,

by Silva Andrade, focuses on economic, political and social developments, and shows that – in contrast

to some of its neighbours – the country was fairly successful in its development programmes. Seibert’s

essay on the small island-state of Sao Tome e Prıncipe draws attention to the particularities of the

development of political culture in this Creole society. It demonstrates effectively the persistence of

patronage politics and clientalism, notably in public administration.

Given that individual authors appear to have been given carte blanche, the essays vary considerably

in terms of style and approach. As such, the volume suffers from an unevenness that a more stringent

editorial direction may perhaps have helped correct. For example, whereas the contribution by

Birmingham carries no footnotes, that by Forrest has close to 100 references. There are other annoyances:

while the volume has a very good bibliography of works published in English, Portuguese, French,

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German, Spanish and Italian complied by Caroline Shaw, it is not entirely clear how these relate to

the individual essays. Nor are all of the references mentioned in the essays reproduced in the

bibliography. Also, except for a single, wholly inadequate map on p. xx, no maps have been

included in any of the individual chapters. Inclusion of detailed maps would certainly have

complemented the texts well.

Nonetheless, Chabal is to be congratulated for bringing together in a single volume essays that

present insightful and accessible introductions to the contemporary histories of these African countries.

Pedro Machado

New York University

Johannesburg I: Emerging Metropolis

Richard Tomlinson, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner and Xolela Mangcu, (eds),Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City (London, Routledge,2003), xv þ305 pp., £65.00 hardback, ISBN 0-41593-558-X

Cities worldwide are struggling to balance and connect the goals of economic competitiveness,

social cohesion and responsive governance. Intensified international competition forces governments to

take business demands for lower taxes, flexible labour markets and exclusive locations more seriously.

Meanwhile, rising unemployment and poverty demand higher public spending on welfare

services, housing and basic infrastructure in the poorest places. City-level governance is widely seen

as the way to reconcile such tensions because of its presumed capacity to lure private investment,

mobilise social capital through community action, and negotiate new ways of linking economic

opportunities and social needs.

These challenges are particularly acute in post-apartheid South Africa, following its re-entry into

the global economy and pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies that have damaged jobs and incomes.

Apartheid left a seriously dysfunctional legacy of segregated cities with extreme social inequalities,

collapsed services and enfeebled public institutions in the poorest areas. Meanwhile, the extension of

civil, political and social rights to the disenfranchised majority has raised popular expectations of

progress towards prosperity, but also revealed extensive cultural, religious, class and other social

divisions. Recognition of its limitations as an agent of delivery and development has prompted the

government to shift more responsibility for social reconstruction on to local and regional authorities.

This book is a valiant attempt to make sense of the intricate, unfolding socio-economic and

institutional transformation of South Africa’s foremost city. A decade ago there were high hopes that

Johannesburg would pioneer an all-round renaissance as southern Africa’s gateway to the world. It

seemed to be the sub-continent’s best prospect of becoming a significant player on the world economic

stage, with major spin-offs expected in business and financial services, tourism and resource processing.

In practice, this vision was unrealistic and ill-conceived, and instead the city remains plagued by high

unemployment, concentrated poverty, violent crime, AIDS and wide-ranging social and political

tensions that civic institutions are unable to manage.

The book seeks to locate the complex dynamics of social and political change in Johannesburg

within a wider national and international context. Its scope is extensive and covers the changing physical

and social structure of the city, the everyday experiences of different groups and communities, and

various aspects of governance and institution building. The collection stems from an ambitious

multidisciplinary international conference in Johannesburg organised by an innovative partnership

between the University of Witwatersrand and the Johannesburg City Council. There are fifteen chapters

altogether, involving no less than 24 contributors from an impressive range of backgrounds. They vary

in emphasis from the broad-brush and conceptual to the detailed and empirical, often with some

combination of theory and description. They showcase the growing strength and diversity of urban

research in and on South Africa.

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One of the clearest themes to emerge is the widening social and spatial segmentation of the city, in

stark contrast to the goal of urban integration. The northwards drift of the formal economy continues

unabated, including office, retail and industrial development. Local and regional public strategies seem

to endorse this pattern in the interests of attracting foreign investment and raising the economic growth

rate. There is little apparent concern for the growing geographical separation of jobs from where the

majority of the population live, to the south. More and more gated communities are also appearing in the

northern suburbs, with income replacing race as the basis of residential segregation, although without

major changes to the social composition of these areas. Overall, it appears that promoting social

inclusion and redistribution is extremely difficult for local authorities because of the mobility of private

capital and wealthy people.

Crime is another recurring theme of the collection, reflecting hardship, family breakdown and

dislocated communities caused by apartheid and sustained by the weak social fabric of this highly

unequal and divided city. Contrary to the impression conveyed by the media, the burden of violent crime

is suffered by black people living in the townships. Increasing immigration from other parts of southern

Africa has added to the competition for scarce resources and exacerbated social tensions, although

immigrants are disproportionate victims rather than perpetrators of crime. Government responses tend

to emphasize more policing and seem to be doing very little to address the root causes of crime.

The book is also useful in exploring the different perspectives people have of Johannesburg. Issues

of citizenship, identity and representation are central to many of the conflicts in the city. They also need

to be far better understood by the organisations responsible for formulating strategies to resolve them.

Public bodies somehow need to rise above sectional interests and short-term responses to entrenched

problems in order to find common cause and develop a more imaginative narrative that can be shared by

different groups and communities, based on a long-term vision of a more productive and inclusive city.

Narrow conceptions of the city’s future have so far merely served to alienate the majority and generate

further disorder and uncertainty.

The collection is well structured and includes many authoritative, original and well-written

contributions. Of course, there are some inevitable limitations of coherence and repetition associated

with an edited volume of this kind. Given the speed and complexity of Johannesburg’s transformation it

is also unsurprising that efforts to conceptualise the process remain partial and uneven. Reliable

statistical evidence of trends and patterns would help, but it is patently incomplete. And although this

would undoubtedly have been difficult, the book would certainly have benefited from a concluding

chapter that drew together some of the key insights of different authors and offered constructive

suggestions both for future research priorities and for improved policies for the city. Given the immense

challenges faced, researchers cannot afford to sit on the fence.

Ivan Turok

Department of Urban Studies

University of Glasgow

Johannesburg II: Elusive Metropolis

Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis,Special Issue of Public Culture, 16, 3 (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004),pp. ix–x þ 347–547, paperback, ISBN 0-8223-6610-X, ISSN 0899-2363

The special edition of Public Culture on ‘Johannesburg – the Elusive Metropolis’ promises a great deal.

It is clear that the editors see it as part of a project to alter radically the perspectives of South African

scholarship on Johannesburg and, by inference, on other urban and metropolitan studies. Drawing on

‘new critical pedagogies’, the volume seeks, according to its editors, to ‘shift, if partially, the centre of

gravity of traditional forms of analysis and interpretations of Africa in global scholarship’ (p. 352). In

this enterprise, they draw attention to a number of deficiencies they perceive in prior scholarship on

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Africa: the tendency to perceive Africa as caught within an inflexible web of alterity and difference; the

refusal of adequate theoretical frameworks whereby local and/or empirical studies could be made more

meaningful; the attenuated nature of the archive available to scholars; and the particularly attenuated

nature of the postmodern and postcolonial challenge in African studies to more traditional and

‘functionalist’ narrations and analyses of political economy such as Marxism and (neo)liberalism.

This has left contemporary analysis, they believe, in an ‘epistemological abyss’, especially in dealing

with the topographies through which the quotidian is experienced and negotiated, and with those social,

cultural and material forms that have ‘not yet become or will never be definite – an encounter with

indeterminacy, provisionality and the contingent’ (p. 349). As a result, the continent has thus been left

‘at the mercy of stolid analyses on the one hand and rapid surveys, off-the-cuff remarks, and anecdotes

with sensational value on the other’ (p. 351).

These are far-reaching claims, and any perception of their accuracy will no doubt vary. At best, the

contents do seem to initiate fresh areas of enquiry, as well as an extension of South African historical

and cultural studies into unfamiliar spatial modes. There is no doubt that academic knowledge of

African forms of experience and civil society is underdeveloped: and the interweaving of the insights of

European theorists of the ‘everyday’ with contemporary African experience is at times powerful.

However, in light of the editors’ ambitious goals, it is somewhat curious that it is the two more

descriptive, less ambitious essays that are most persuasive. AbdouMaliq Simone’s ‘People as

Infrastructure’ examines the inner-city enclave of Hillbrow as a means of describing the flexible and

provisional interdependencies and collaborations of some of the city’s poorer, more marginalised

inhabitants: discussing, amongst others, issues of migrancy and crime networks. Adopting a wider,

people-centred (and certainly more useful) definition of urban ‘infrastructure’ than is usual, this detailed

ethnography shows the ‘decaying’ inner city as an area of social agency, experience and operation.

Simone maps out the multiple provisional, open-ended activities and interactions taking place in

Hillbrow, and the manner in which notions of self-identity are demarcated, overlap, are formed or

broken in the search for advantage. Especially interesting is the tension he demonstrates emerging

between urban development and upgrading schemes, and the provisional but crucial forms of social

order that residents eke out for themselves. ‘The Suffering Body of the City’ by Frederic Le Marcis

deals with the trajectories, choices and networks of dependency traced out by AIDS sufferers seeking

treatment and support in the Johannesburg area. Le Marcis paints a bleak, compelling picture of the

networks of exploitation and corruption that have flourished to feed off of AIDS sufferers, and maps the

ever-widening ‘circles of exploration’ (p. 460) they are forced to undertake in search of adequate

treatment; suggesting that this urge has prompted them to become part of the emergence of a new civil

society – one which, it is implied, tends to be misrecognised by scholars.

Sarah Nuttall’s ‘Stylizing the Self’, depicts efforts by a section of the youth to forge new modes of

cultural identification and fashion, and uses as its epicentre of scrutiny the mall suburb of Rosebank and

the hybrid culture (‘Loxion Culcha’) in part styled and responded to by Y magazine. Her essay starts

promisingly, as it seeks to delineate neglected sensory modes of cultural expression as well as the

stylisation of self and remodelling of, and pastiches of, the past in existence among principally black

youth. However, such stylisation and self-fashioning ‘from below’ are nothing new; and Nuttall’s essay

would perhaps have gained in historical and comparative perspective if it had discussed earlier forms of

borrowing and remodelling, such as (to pick one example at random) the amatimiti adopted by black

miners a century ago. The essay further disappoints in the degree to which it remains preoccupied with

textual evidence, mainly from Y and SLmagazines, when much wider scrutiny is clearly needed (there are

scant interviews, and these come from postgraduate papers and theses). In the absence of this, she can do

little more than gesture towards an area that needs to be fleshed out much more fully. Achille Mbembe’s

‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’ uses the notion of ‘superfluity’ (adopted primarily from Simmel) to examine

issues of race, delirium, sex, affluence and consumption in Johannesburg’s social and built environment,

in an attempt to sketch out an impression of the city’s ‘unconscious’; concluding with an examination of

two recently constructed social spaces, Montecasino and Melrose Arch. It is peppered with Mbembe’s

characteristic suggestive insights and connections. His reading of the new pseudo-Tuscan (among other

fabrications of architectural style) middle-class enclosures proliferating at present in the suburbs as an

‘architecture of hysteria . . . a form of regressive forgetting . . . an attempt to ward off the movement of

time’ (p. 402) is especially fascinating, and one of the places (certainly not the only one) where he is at his

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best. What is of concern, though, is not so much the speculative nature of the piece, but the reductive

manner whereby it makes use of previous scholarship to provide its own historic overview. Paradoxically,

his desire to extend the range and scope of scholarly perspectives, and his determination to show the

epistemological break that his own work constitutes from prior functionalist modes of exploration, ends

up too often in functionalist and reductive explanation itself. It is certainly correct to state that the city

developed along utilitarian lines, with clear zones of spatial demarcation revolving (most obviously)

around race. Yet there is no sense that legislation around labour, and the axes of social demarcation, were

themselves a site of political struggle and disagreement, even among legislators. There is no room for

bungling or untidy accretions in Mbembe’s overview. Historical events that do not fit comfortably into his

version of the making of the ‘dual city’, such as Chinese indentured labour and the ‘poor white’ question,

are given scant attention. Furthermore, the hypotheses of prior scholars and commentators cited in support

of his overview are occasionally elided into each other. For example, the footnoting of Giliomee, Horrell

and Legassick in close proximity as proof of apartheid’s ‘deterritoralizing machine’ (p. 389) pays scant

regard to the differences of ideology and perspective between these sources; while the usage of

Hannah Arendt and Sarah Gertrude Millin as sufficiently authoritative sources, in the twenty-first

century, for a discussion of Boer exploitation of labour and black mining labour respectively, must be

described as bizarre. Such problems as these are a pity, because Mbembe’s critiques of prior

historiography and contemporary academic practices are sometimes germane, and would be less easy to

dismiss if they were nuanced.

The shorter ‘Voice-lines’ in the volume deal with a number of concerns: the impressions of

returning exile John Matshikiza; an interview with architect and conceptual artist Rodney Place; an

interview conducted by Mbembe with two young black South Africans, relating to their sense of

being in the post-apartheid city; and descriptions of projects connected with the development of new

social and architectural spaces in the area of Constitution Hill, as well as the Kliptown Project at the

site of Freedom Square, site of the Congress of the People five decades ago. These are at times

interesting, but add little to the collection’s major thrust (except, perhaps, for the invigorating ideas

of Place).

Johannesburg – the Elusive Metropolis is both stimulating and exasperating. At best, the essays

contain rich conceptualisations and suggestions for scholars working in many fields, and this short

review cannot do these justice. On the other hand, there are flaws. It is a pity that the search for new

or neglected forms of social cleavage and identity undertaken in some essays do not always pay

sufficient attention to established forms other than race: for instance, both Nuttall’s essay and

Mbembe’s interview cry out for a discussion of the delimiting effects of class on the perceptions laid

out to view. Because of the constant stress on the uniqueness of the Africanicity of Johannesburg,

few of the essays pay sufficient attention to global currents that wash through the city and

intermingle with the local. Mbembe and Nuttall are correct to be suspicious of viewing Africa

through the prism of overweening, and often dated, narratives of modernity and modernisation.

Indeed, in most contributions ‘modernity’ is invoked with a slightly disapproving tone, as evincing

too Western an influence. This, however, downplays the degree to which Africans have adapted and

forged shards of modernity to their own uses – there remains a need, noted by James Ferguson, to

register the degree to which the ‘decomposing’ dream of modernity still forms part of the evaluative

perspectives of many Africans.1 Moreover, less adroit scholars may be tempted merely to collapse

the collection’s emphasis on the turbulent, unstable, uncertain nature of contemporary African

livelihood into the terms of those postmodern theories that focus on issues of contingency, flexibility

and unpredictability. While such theories are at times undoubtedly useful, their applicability to

African particulars needs to be forged through the tests of both practical and theoretical scrutiny and

scholarship, rather than simply assumed.

Kelwyn Sole

Department of English

University of Cape Town

1 J. Ferguson, ‘Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development’, in A. Loomba et al. (eds),Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press, 2005).

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African Film I: Africa

Joseph Gugler, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent (Oxford, James Currey, 2003),xiii þ202 pp., £14.95 paperback, ISBN 0-85255-561-X

Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-SaharanFrancophone African Film (Oxford, James Currey, 2003), x þ 23 pp., £16.95 paperback,ISBN 0-85255-576-8

The project of ‘re-imagining a continent’ is an impossibly ambitious one and Gugler’s work is a

laudable attempt to match the sweep of his title. In effect, his focus is on ‘Africa South of the Sahara’, a

phrase that he proposes is less Eurocentric than ‘sub-Saharan’ Africa. Thackway, on the other hand,

adopts the more commonly-used phrase in her title and perhaps more usefully delineates the book’s

narrower focus at first sight. Nevertheless, both writers inevitably cannot avoid slipping between ‘sub-

Saharan African Film’ and the broader continental magnitude of ‘African Film’.

Both Gugler and Thackway take care to establish their own positioning in a Western frame, which

usefully permits a discussion of that very frame and its limits. In Gugler’s case, this relates specifically

to his title and the objective it proposes – ‘re-imagining’. For Gugler, Western knowledge of Africa is

shaped by television news, documentaries and feature films made in the West. News is, in the main,

relatively limited. Documentaries often match the disaster-focus of news programmes or provide a

‘picture-book’ perspective on Africa. Feature films made in the West, such as the Tarzan films, reinforce

negative stereotypes of black Africans while applauding white superheroes. He examines seventeen

‘African’ films as a test of their ability to engender the re-imaging and re-imagining that he seeks. Not

that he proposes this type of ‘test’ himself. But, for the reader, emerging from the other side of these

films, the question one cannot help posing is whether, and how, these films, in quantity, quality and type,

can represent the kind of turnaround that Gugler desires to achieve.

On balance, Gugler’s analysis is a helpful contribution to critiques of African film and its potential

to invert the supremacy of Western epistemology, although he is less directly concerned with the West’s

epistemological critical foundations than Thackway. He achieves this through broader contextual

discussions at the beginning of each section. These provide a valuable and necessary framing for

sustaining the engagement between the sometimes minute detail of a specific film and the re-figuring it

makes/might make possible. This is especially important since the book is not wholly focused on films

made by black Africans. Indeed, Gugler takes the rather bold step of including The Gods Must Be Crazy

(1980), a controversial South African film with enormous international box-office takings, made by a

white film-maker Jamie Uys, who benefited from state subsidies for white film-makers under apartheid.

He also examines A Dry White Season (1989), made by an African-American, Euzhan Palcy, based on a

novel by Andre Brink, and Out of Africa (1985), made by Sydney Pollack and representing for Gugler

the ‘most successful film ever to be set in Africa’ (p. 23), a ‘success’ he measures primarily in economic

terms. These films, for different reasons and to different extents, push the edges of what might be

defined as an African film but they provide useful comparative material for the films that are made

within Africa by African film-makers with a conscious vision for re-presenting Africa. These film-

makers have to contend with levels of economic, production and distribution struggles that make some

of Gugler’s choices rather awkward.

The book’s ‘middle’ is devoted to two sections: ‘The Struggle for Majority Rule in South Africa’

and ‘Betrayals of Independence’ and these two sections together comprise half the book. Whilst the

section on South African film is the only one to represent a specific country, it is in many ways justified

by the interface between South Africa’s liberation struggle and the fact that of all African countries it

has the most developed film production infrastructures. Here, Gugler draws together a wealth of

information with references to significant historical developments as well as background

commentary on two seminal films representing black perspectives. These are Cry, The Beloved

Country (1951) and Come Back, Africa (1959), both made in the 1950s by non-South African film-

makers, Korda and Rogosin. They invest their films with a social realism that was hardly visible on the

screen at the time. This key feature places them in a historical category of films that at least one critic has

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proposed represents the beginnings of a ‘black cinema’ in South Africa, which apartheid did so

much to stifle.

In all, Gugler discusses four major films in the section on South Africa. Alongside The Gods Must

Be Crazy and A Dry White Season the other two major films are Mapantsula (1988) and Fools (1997).

Mapantsula tells the story of a one-time township gangster who refuses to collude with apartheid police.

Set in the late 1980s, its geography of Johannesburg’s urban space, split between white affluence and

power and black impoverishment and resistance, played out through the chief characters, has made a

lasting impression on South African audiences (at the time, most watched the film on pirated video

copies after it was banned for public distribution) and on the country’s cinema history. Fools is based on

a short story by the South African author Njabulo Ndebele. Directed by Ramadan Suleman, who co-

wrote the script with Bhekizizwe Peterson, Fools weaves a narrative located almost entirely within the

town of Charterston where the teacher, Zamani, is confronted with his guilt and shame for having raped

a young scholar, Mimi. The film exemplifies how the effects of apartheid are played out intimately and

implosively within the confines of a black township neighbourhood.

The value of the broader concerns raised by Gugler is that they allow for comparison across a

sometimes vastly divergent range of material. The final chapter takes this on board through an aptly

located discussion entitled ‘Between the African Mass Market and International Recognition’. It is the

‘between’ that is important here. Should African cinema maintain its ‘“African” specificity’ (p. 179) in

order to sustain a Western audience, however small? How will access to new video technologies in

countries like Nigeria and Ghana, affect local distribution of African cinema? How can film-makers

escape the ‘confines of producing films that present “African stories” in an “African mode”’ (p. 179)?

Is the only alternative to ‘join the mainstream’ (p. 188)? Perhaps the sweep is too broad to adequately

answer these questions, pointing towards the need for critics and theorists to disaggregate the notion of

an all-encompassing ‘African cinema’ and to examine specific countries or regions in more detail.

Indeed Thackway’s discussion of the Western frame makes some headway in supporting this view.

She quotes from an interview with Idrissa Ouedraogo, a film-maker in Burkina Faso: ‘We don’t all share

the same vision of the world just because we’re all African film-makers . . . It’s the diversity of ideas, of

opinions that will lead to the creation . . . of thriving African cinemas’ (p. 28). Thackway matches this

view with her carefully constructed argument for a diversity of critical paradigms to facilitate a dis-

engagement from Eurocentric perspectives, particularly the modernist/postmodernist ‘debate’ (p. 21),

without necessarily ‘belittling’ (p. 28) Western perspectives. One proposal is for Western critics to

engage with the work of local critics in the spirit of ‘an on-going critical dialogue’ (p. 28) rather than

making closed, definitive statements. She makes a plea for an open-ended critical framework that might

permit something of a marriage between Western and African critique, a kind of theoretical and critical

‘hybrid’. She herself calls it ‘a more flexible critical approach capable of encompassing divergent

cultural references’ (p. 181). Although the dominance of Western epistemology makes this an extremely

challenging task, Thackway’s book is in many senses an attempt to realise this project. She incorporates

references from a wide range of critical material, including interviews with many African film-makers,

some of which are usefully produced in both French and English at the back of the book. Gugler, too,

incorporates references to interviews with film-makers.

Both Gugler and Thackway provide extremely valuable adjunctive information. Gugler includes

maps and statistics that help contextualise the main text (the specifics can be misleading, however, as in

the case of South Africa’s independence being dated to 1910). He also includes useful discussion of film

posters and marketing. Each of his chapters is enriched with a wide range of references and detail in

footnotes alongside the main text, as well as a section on ‘References and Further Reading’. Thackway’s

book similarly fleshes out the primary narrative, adding an extensive Bibliography and Filmography at

the back. Both books are passionate accounts of their subjects. For scholars of film, and specifically film

in Africa, notwithstanding their ambitious reach, they are worthwhile additions to the small library on

African cinema that has been slow to develop.

Jacqueline Maingard

Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television

University of Bristol

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African Film II: South Africa

Isabel Balseiro and Ntongela Masilela (eds), To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture inSouth Africa (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2003), xii þ272 pp., £22.95hardback, ISBN 0-8143-3991-9

This collection of essays makes an important and much-needed intervention in the undeveloped and

generally parochial field of South African film studies. As editors Balseiro and Masilela themselves point

out in their introduction, only a ‘handful of book-length studies on South African filmmaking’ exist,2 and

they criticise these works, first and foremost, for not offering a ‘systematic approach to film history that

problematises the absence of black voices in South African cinematography’ (p. 1). There are

fundamental historical reasons why there has been a dearth of theoretical and critical interest in, and

writing on, South African film, and these are to be found implicitly in the essays of the book, which are

divided into four parts. These parts, arranged according to a rough chronology of experiences of cinema in

South Africa, from the early twentieth century to the present day, are entitled: ‘Historical Perspectives’;

‘Cinema before and under Apartheid’; ‘Contemporary Debates’; and ‘Into the New South Africa’.

The editors foreground their historical as well as historicised approach – they even anticipate

criticism of this methodology, noting that ‘One could argue that [the] book is mostly about the prehistory

of South African cinema, about the “cinema of occupation” . . . ’ (p. 6). Through the essays the reader

develops a strong, if not coherent, sense of the chief obstacles to the emergence of a flourishing film

culture in South Africa: that is, the fact that South Africa was largely colonised by Britain, a nation that

showed little interest in inculcating colonial policy specifically through culture; the co-option of South

Africa’s fledging film industry by Hollywood; and the Afrikaner Nationalist government’s subsidising of

Afrikaans (at the expense of other) films during apartheid. The editors thus wisely recognise the need for

the collection to address not merely ‘film production’ in South Africa, but to approach cinema as ‘a

manifestation of South African cultural history’ (p. 1). Embedded in each of the essays is an anxiety

around the question of what constitutes a ‘South African’ film and a ‘national’ film culture. The collective

achievement of the essays is to be found in their profound enquiry into the rhetoric that has dominated

post-1994 South African cultural discourse: the loose use of terminology such as ‘post-apartheid’,

‘transitional culture’, ‘national identity’, ‘diversity’, and ‘African Renaissance’.

The book boldly undertakes both to ‘set film in a social context’ and to offer ‘an examination of

particular films as aesthetic objects’ (p. 3). It would certainly have been dangerous for the contributors to

have approached individual films from an aesthetic perspective without taking into account the context

of production and, particularly, reception in South Africa, and they do not disappoint on this account.

During apartheid, black people could not attend white cinemas and there were very few cinemas in areas

designated for black people. Even today there are only two cinemas in Soweto, which has a population

of two million. Although most cinemas were non-racial by 1986, many black people still do not have the

economic means to travel long distances by taxi to reach the cinemas, or to pay to attend the screenings.

Balseiro and Masilela, in their introduction, thus raise the important question of what the point is ‘of

promoting cinema when people lack adequate housing, health care, and nutrition’ (p. 7). In this regard,

Maingard’s essay is particularly prescient: by providing analysis of television as well as film, she

acknowledges that, since television is much more accessible than cinema to the majority of South

Africans, South African film critics cannot limit their analysis solely to films on celluloid formats.

Each contributor adopts a thoroughly historicised approach, ranging from the recounting of

conditions of film viewing for black South Africans in the early 1900s (Masilela and Peterson), through

to analysis of the context of production of feature films, documentaries, and television series during

apartheid (Hees and Maingard), to a focus on the role of the state and the market in the current attempt to

create a national film culture (Saks). The reader thus comes away with a sound knowledge of different

aspects of South African culture of the past and present (including marabi culture, the Marxist/Liberal

2 Of these, I would argue that the most intellectually rigorous are Thelma Gutsche’s The History and SocialSignificance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895–1940 (Cape Town, H. Timmins, 1972) and KeyanTomaselli’s The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film (Sandton, Radix, 1989). JacquelineMaingard’s book South African National Cinema, is due to be published in the ‘Routledge National CinemasSeries’ in 2006.

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political and literary debate, and Trade Union politics), and with a sense of how these traditions and

conditions have informed – and have been informed by – film culture.

While Balseiro and Masilela’s collection does fulfil their second claim – to provide close

analysis of particular films (six of the ten essays provide in-depth cinematic analysis, grounded in a

thorough knowledge of film theory and criticism) – it ultimately falls short of achieving what they

accuse earlier books on South African cinema of lacking: that is, the problematising of the ‘absence

of black voices in South African cinematography’ (p. 1). For a book that claims through the

metaphor of its title – to change reels – to be addressing contemporary film culture in South Africa,

and particularly the role of blacks in this culture, the lack of attention to the large body of films

recently made by black South Africans is astounding. The only film by a black South African

screenwriter and director that is discussed in depth is Fools (1997), by Bhekizizwe Peterson and

Ramadan Suleman. Should they have wished to provide a more accurate and interesting picture of

the state of South African cinema today, the editors might have included analysis of the

documentary and fiction films of Dumisani Phakhati, Sechaba Morojele, Palesa Letlaka-Nkosi, and

Norman Maake, to name but a few.

As it stands, the most ‘revolutionary’ contribution made by the collection is to be found in the

recuperatory essays by Masilela and Peterson, who bring to our attention a history of black film

viewing experience that previously has been hidden or unacknowledged. It is perhaps also to be

found, however, in the editors’ inclusive approach – their insistence on the need to present the work

of a range of film critics, black and white. Following the discourse of restorative justice made popular

by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the editors voice wariness of contributing to

the creation of a national culture built on an exclusive nationalism. It is thus surprising that they

choose to close their collection with an Afterword by the Ethiopian director and critic Haile Gerima, a

proponent of a Negritude-inspired, race-based nationalism. Gerima’s suggestion that ‘white

filmmakers’ should ‘refrain from future film projects and take responsibility for producing and

financing the filmmaking of Africans [read: black Africans]’ (p. 204) seems to undermine the editors’

interest in the post-1994 ‘shift from an emphasis on racial politics’ (p. 8) and their postmodernist

stance that filmmakers must now address issues of gender in order to be ‘radical’ (p. 8). The

disappointment of this finale to an otherwise highly informative and well-researched collection is,

furthermore, that it seems to compromise the potential for South African film discourses not only to

be inserted into African film criticism more generally, but also to lead African film theory towards

new insights.

Lindiwe Dovey

Trinity College, University of Cambridge

NGOs in Zimbabwe in the 1990s

E. Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality and Economics inZimbabwe, (New York and London, Routledge, 2003), xiv þ213 pp., £50 hardback,ISBN: 0-415-94383-3; (Stanford and London, Stanford University Press, 2005), 228 pp.,$21.95 paperback, ISBN: 0-804-75336-9

In recent years, a growing number of anthropologists have turned their attention to the study of

non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in their efforts to understand the processes of globalisation,

the dynamics of civil society, and the practices of development. There is, as yet, only a small

body of high-quality anthropological works on these increasingly important organisations;

Erica Bornstein’s ethnography is one of the finest, and is likely to find a place as a foundational

study in this emerging field.

192 Journal of Southern African Studies

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The Spirit of Development focuses on two Protestant NGOs in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s:

World Vision and Christian Care. World Vision, founded in the United States, grew out of the new

evangelical movement of the 1940s. It is today a multi-million-dollar NGO that operates in

over 90 countries in an effort to provide, as described in its annual reports, ‘emergency relief,

economic development, and evangelistic activities’ (p. 22). Christian Care grew out of the

ecumenicist movement of the World Council of Churches in the first decades of the twentieth

century. It is the development wing of the Zimbabwe Council of Churches and, like World Vision,

defines its mission as development-based with an emphasis (in more recent years) on ‘the self-

supporting capacities of disadvantaged people in Zimbabwe’ (p. 24). A key strength of Bornstein’s

research on these organisations is the range of people with whom she was able to interact. Bornstein

worked with the groups on a day-to-day basis, and spoke to everyone from top-level bureaucrats in

World Vision’s world headquarters in California to the ‘beneficiaries’ – and non-beneficiaries – of

projects through Zimbabwe’s towns and rural areas.

Bornstein’s writing is structured to ‘zoom in’ on the objects of study. Chapter 1 provides an

analysis of mission work in Zimbabwe, suggesting the historical links between Christianity and the

discourses and practices of development. Chapter 2 contains an insightful discussion of the theology

behind evangelical NGOs. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the connections between the theological

motivations and socio-economic agendas of the NGOs at the international and national level,

respectively. While Chapters 5 and 6, finally, bring us from the institutional frameworks to the ways

in which specific projects shape, and are shaped by, the communities in which they take place.

Throughout each chapter, Bornstein develops an important critique of neo-liberal models of

modernisation that define religion and ‘development’ as antithetical. This is, in fact, one of the major

arguments in the book; by the end, Bornstein has mounted a convincing case that the

developmentalist logic of neo-liberalism fails to account for the situation in Zimbabwe. One cannot

understand discourses of development, much less the unfolding of those discourses on the ground,

without serious attention to the role of Christianity at the global and local levels.

Bornstein writes with a good deal of sophistication on the question of development. She is, at once,

both critical of and respectful towards the goals of the NGOs. Throughout The Spirit of Development she

highlights the paradoxes and tensions of development discourse that emerge in the academic literature

as well as in practice. She is well versed in the academic debates but never presents these gratuitously.

Indeed, one of the major strengths in Bornstein’s style is her ability to animate the main theoretical

discussions – which cover development, religion, power, and governance – through exceedingly rich

ethnography. In Chapter 3, for example, Bornstein analyses World Vision’s child sponsorship

programme in Zimbabwe by presenting us with portraits of two individuals: a Canadian university

student called Peter who came to Zimbabwe to meet ‘his child’; and a young Zimbabwean man called

Albert who was himself sponsored. Peter’s story brings out a number of interesting issues about the

structural inequality between sponsor and child, as mediated by World Vision as an institution. It also

addresses the dynamics of place-making and identity formation through a compelling account of Peter’s

meeting with the girl he sponsored. Albert’s story raises important questions about kinship, witchcraft,

and individualism. Being sponsored as a child gave Albert certain advantages and tied him into a global

‘Christian family’; at the same time, this ‘privilege’ affected relations with his Zimbabwean family by

sparking jealousies. Out of Albert’s story, then, we get a picture not only of a transnational NGO’s work

on the ground, but also a detailed picture of how the discourses of jealousy and witchcraft can be part

and parcel of such work.

The prose in this book is crystal clear, making it an excellent text for undergraduate-level courses on

development, civil society, and religion in Africa. (Routledge originally issued the book in 2003 in

hardback, but a paperback edition is now available from Stanford University Press.) More advanced

students and professionals (in both academia and NGOs) will also be rewarded, whether they are

interested in the contemporaneous importance of the material or, more generally, classic debates in the

literature on the relations between economy and religion.

Matthew Engelke

London School of Economics

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Land, State and Nation in Contemporary Zimbabwe

Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos and Stig Jensen (eds), Zimbabwe’s UnfinishedBusiness: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Harare, WeaverPress, 2003), 328 pp., £25.95 /$38.95 paperback, ISBN 1-77922-011-1

The broad themes of this book are, first, to examine the crisis in Zimbabwe, giving a voice to those that

have been silenced by the dominant national narrative propagated by the ruling party, Zanu(PF), and,

secondly, to open more productive pathways for dialogue and understanding by working through the

complexities and contradictions of the crisis.

The editors and contributors have undoubtedly succeeded in their first objective, to give voice to a

variety of positions on land, state and nation within Zimbabwe. The best parts of the book chronicle the

evolution and major consequences of the current crisis. Their descriptions of events in different national

arenas provide clear alternative narratives of the nation since independence. The reader is reminded of

the tragedy of the Matabeleland massacres in the mid-1980s, the land grabbing and Willowgate

scandals, the alienation of white farmers and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of farm workers

and their families after 2000, the meltdown of the economy and the violent crushing of many

expressions of political dissent.

The book sets out to open pathways to greater understanding between adversaries by presupposing a

mutual respect for other’s ideas and the democratic right to express them. However, this hope is shown

to be an illusion. President Robert Mugabe has closed off democratic debate and the right of expression.

Indeed, one is immediately struck by the contrasting tones in this dialogue of the deaf. On the one hand,

the book reveals the silencing of dissenting voices by the state; on the other, the contributors’ own

voices of reason seek to engage, discuss and understand.

This willingness to contextualise and understand the various voices within contemporary Zimbabwe

means that an empathy with the ruling party’s nationalist narrative occasionally also seeps through the

anthology. Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopoulos’ insistence on ‘radical’ land redistribution, for

example, appears to exonerate Mugabe’s land grab. They claim that ‘the persistence of racialised

patterns of inequitable land distribution in Zimbabwe prior to 2000, made the ruling party’s assertions of

a radical land reform difficult to dispute’ (p. 8). This perspective perhaps occludes the point that Mugabe

failed in his state-driven land reform programmes in the 1980s, and that he accorded land redistribution

such low priority in the early 1990s that it virtually fizzled out. As Jocelyn Alexander rightly argues,

Zanu(PF)’s liberation philosophy of ‘land to the people’ was replaced after independence by

resettlement aimed at increased production and land use planning not far removed from Southern

Rhodesia’s 1951 Land Husbandry Act. She concludes that the government’s resettlement programmes

during the 1980s failed to address grievances over land: a failure that Mugabe conveniently exploited

after 2000 to serve his own political ends.

Alexander notes that these shifts in discourses over land have followed the re-definition of

nationalism since its heyday in the 1970s when it stood for: ‘Freedom, democracy, equality and an

accountable state alongside a restoration of land to the people’ (p. 114). In the 1980s, nationalism was

redefined as a top-down modernising force. Colonial ideas and institutions continued to guide policy,

controlled by a highly centralised state apparatus. After losing the constitutional referendum in 2000,

nationalism was again redefined, this time in revolutionary terms to justify Zanu(PF)’s right to rule.

Squatting, illegal in the 1980s, was led by war veterans and legitimised by the state as ‘occupations’.

Restitution, after 2000, had become a bottom-up process.

Nelson Marongwe takes us on to the occupied farms themselves, so that the problems isolated by

Alexander reverberate at grassroots level. Whereas Alexander examined the role of the state in the new

bottom-up movements, Marongwe questions whether land occupations by peasants were the result of

independent class action, or whether they were politically guided. He also considers the communities’

justifications for occupying farms, such as government delays in resettling people, proximity of

commercial farms, poor relationships with commercial farmers, and historical land claims. Like

Alexander, he concludes that the 2000 occupations differed from earlier ones. However, Marongwe’s

work does not give the ordinary man or woman a voice, and thereby fails to provide a counterbalance to

the official government interpretation of events. Nevertheless, he has documented fascinating data

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on coercion to ‘recruit’ invaders and enforce involuntary detentions. Most youths, he tells us,

immediately fled the occupied farms. Eventually, without food and social services, many occupiers

simply lost patience and stole away.

Brian Rutherford probes deeper into the land occupations at grassroots level. He takes us on to the

farms and into the lives of those who bore the brunt of the invasions: the farm workers. He speaks of

farm workers as the group forgotten by both of the dominant discourses on land in the country, and how

‘the management of life’ has affected this recipient group. Eric Worby, quoting Foucault, talks of ‘bare

life’ (p. 58). Rutherford reveals bare life at first-hand.

It is left to Worby to expose – through the lens of power and national sovereignty – what lies at the

heart of the Zimbabwe experience. Whereas Western states aspired to pluralist national sovereignty,

post-colonial Zimbabwe adopted a different process of building a modern nation state, especially after

2000, to include systemic violence and banning and, ultimately, the power over life and death. For

Worby, development symbolises the state’s ‘coming of age’, which he calls political modernity. This

has not happened in Zimbabwe. Instead, the exercise of power has replaced development in an

endeavour to achieve modernity. The notion of sovereignty as the vehicle for the attainment of

development has likewise been corrupted, so that perfect sovereignty ultimately displaced development,

as Worby suggests through the cannibalistic image of a body devouring itself.

The second aspect of Unfinished Business is its attempt to examine and analyse the complexities and

contradictions of the crisis. This involves ‘rethinking the state and redefining the contours of the nation’,

without reproducing the narrowly nationalist rhetoric of Zanu(PF), nor adopting the liberalist ‘counter-

position’ that blames the crisis solely on misrule (p. 2). Here, again, the attempt at achieving balance,

while intellectually sound, can sometimes look like prevarication in the face of an unrelenting

dictatorship.

Amanda Hammar provides an excellent synopsis of ‘normal’ government within a liberal

framework. Yet, in the face of tyranny, liberalism is continually undermined. The authors themselves

‘essentialise’ liberalism and neo-liberalism by amplifying differences between them, stripping these

concepts of their complexity and variability, and representing them as static and simple extremes.

Hammar, for example, labels private property rights as the ‘sacred cow of liberalism’, which has been

‘responsible for decades if not centuries of dispossession’ (p. 266). Ben Cousins rejects neo-liberal

development prescriptions, believing that the state should play a central role in both acquiring land and

planning for its productive use – with the proviso that it should be ‘a strong and capable central state’.

He invites us, in other words, to both trust the state and entrust it with national development. Yet, most

postcolonial southern African states remain weak and inept: part of the problem rather than the solution.

Their tendency to fuse and monopolise power undermines legislative and judicial institutions that act as

counter-weights to executive power, allowing clientelism, corruption and impunity to flourish.

Zimbabwe’s recent history is a timely reminder that the roots of liberalism are firmly anchored in the

eternal fear that those who control the levers of state power can, and do, turn against their own people.

Worby’s outrage speaks directly to this fear: ‘How can the exclusion and killing of citizens by their own

government be defended as a modern act – an act of progress, the consummation of national

development – in short, as an act of reason?’ (p. 53).

Cousins goes on to recall the core–periphery theorists of the 1970s, and castigates the persistence of

a highly dualistic agrarian sector. But rather than proposing structural and institutional changes to bring

marginalised areas into the mainstream of political and economic life, he calls for the maintenance of

the state’s nominal ownership over communal land and for legal recognition of customary rights. Such

prescriptions, while rooted in a concern to preserve the rights of marginalised groups (notably women

and the elderly) to have access to land, may in the broader context serve only to entrench the dualism

and structural inequalities of the economy that Cousins berates. They risk preserving the communal

areas as pools of poverty under the autocratic powers of traditional leaders.

Nonetheless, the differences between those who propose a more social democratic post-Mugabe

society and those who seek a more liberal democratic agenda are not wide. While Cousins is willing to

see a pro-active state make use of market mechanisms, those of a more liberal economic disposition

recognise the need for some measure of state intervention. Ultimately, it is the democratic ideal that is

the unifying theme of this book. For Cousins, this is a journey in the deepening of democracy: from the

inception of liberal democracy, to the consolidation of interlocking democratic institutions, and finally

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to the ‘deep politics’ of participatory democracy. The necessity for a constitutional democracy,

underpinned by functioning democratic institutions, was never so keenly felt as by their absence.

The book’s sense of purpose – to contest Mugabe’s reinvented and expedient nationalist narrative

by providing space for alternative voices – is never in doubt. Unfinished Business not only represents

the integrity of Zimbabwe’s strong intellectual tradition, but is also the brave voice of resistance. As

Hammar points out, organisations and people that have been manipulated and abused by Zanu(PF) are

not simply ‘empty vessels’ devoid of their own agency. Rather, they ‘are engaged in constant processes

of contestation and renegotiation over the terms of rule and practice of government’ (p. 147). This book

is a testament to that belief.

Dale Dore

Shanduko Centre for Agrarian and Environmental Research, Harare

Eira Kramer

Department of Economic History

University of Zimbabwe

Bringing the Body Home: The Story of El Negro

Caitlin Davies, The Return of El Negro: The Compelling Story of Africa’s UnknownSoldier (London, Penguin, Viking, 2003), 260 pp., R140 paperback, ISBN 0-670-04793-7

As we are increasingly learning, individuals from Africa and the Americas and their often-dismembered

body parts formed a central pillar of nineteenth-century European science. Contemporary writers now

collect and write the histories of the people whose lives and deaths were poached by Europe. The

twenty-first century has also witnessed the final return of the remains of individuals such as Sara

Baartman and El Negro to the continent of their birth.

Caitlin Davies documents the history of one man from southern Africa and the ways in which his

life and death became imbricated in the European fascination with things African. Davies writes for the

general reader and her style is both accessible and journalistic. While the book does not have a contents

page, a strange omission – it does have a good bibliography including both books and websites. The first

chapter details a conference on El Negro held in Gaberone in 2001. Subsequent chapters examine the

possible natal origins of the man, the stealing of his body from his original gravesite, his long journeys

through French and, later, Spanish museums and scientific cultures, the wider western fascination with

the bodies of indigenous peoples, and his final return to Gaberone, Botswana for reburial in 2000.

The activities of two French entrepreneurs and taxidermists, Jules and Edouard Verreaux, are

central to the story. Jules Verreaux was, for a while, the taxidermist in the South African Museum in

Cape Town. As a boy he helped his uncle, the naturalist Delalande, return hundreds of ‘specimens’ to

France, including the skulls as well as the skeletons of Africans. (p. 20). As an adult, Jules

communicated with Georges Cuvier, a leading naturalist of his day, and the man who examined Sara

Baartman in life and death and who, through his scientific writings, inscribed the centrality of her body

to evolving European theories of race.

The Verreaux brothers appear to have stolen the body of ‘El Negro’ from a grave near the Orange

River in 1830. They took the body to their taxidermy shop, Maison Verreaux in the heart of Paris, then

stuffed the body and put it on display. The twenty-first century reader can hardly fathom such a practice.

Davies demonstrates that stuffing was common both to Maison Verreaux and to western cultures more

broadly. The shop displayed the man as ‘El Betjouana’ – a nod to the territory from whence he was

stolen. However, following Neil Parsons, Davies suggests that claims to knowledge about the man’s

natal society are very hard to resolve. Like Sara Baartman, El Negro’s identity changed through time,

with him being re-identified according to shifting European preoccupations with particular African

societies. In 1880, Francesc Darder, a naturalist from Spain, bought the body. Now known as ‘El Negro’

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the body was displayed at the small Darder Museum in Banyoles, Spain until the 1990s. A Dr Arcelin

became aware of the display and campaigned to end it, suffering social exile as a result. The last part of

the book chronicles his efforts, as well as those of Davies, tracing the history of El Negro through visits

to the museum and conversations with Dr Arcelin and others.

This book is a good general read. Davies links the story of El Negro to wider issues relating to

museum curation in post-settler societies such as South Africa and Australia. The Return of El Negro

demonstrates that far from being aberrations in European zoology and natural history, the fate of

individuals such as El Negro helped constitute the very foundations of science in the nineteenth century

and possibly of a European self-image into the twentieth century.

Pamela Scully

Department of Women’s Studies,

Emory University

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