Building a New South Africa is the US version of a book published in South Africa under the title Experiencing Sophiatown: Conversations among Residents about the Past, Present and Future of a Community. The title of the South African edition was modified in order to place the emphasis on post-apartheid social transformations in general. Nonetheless, it is Sophiatown that is at the heart of the book: a working class, racially mixed district in central Johannesburg, which underwent a forced relocation under apartheid. This traumatic history was documented (Lodge Reference Lodge1981) and the Sophiatown of the 1940–50s (home to eminent jazzmen and political figures) was kept alive in collective memory. As a result, the name Sophiatown has remained associated with images of racial mixing, cultural vitality and political resistance. However, this book is less interested in recapturing a lost Sophiatown than in the emergence of a multicultural experience in a still sharply divided city. Indeed a new, historically unprecedented racial mix is emerging in this neighbourhood. This makes Sophiatown a laboratory for the analysis of racial desegregation and a terrain of social experiment and political hope.
The question of change is ‘attacked’ through an experiment in collaborative research: between 2009 and 2013, researchers from the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Johannesburg facilitated discussion groups between the residents of Sophiatown. The objective was to facilitate the co-production of knowledge by researchers and inhabitants, but also through discussion between the inhabitants, and to focus on a vision from below and from within, by contrast with the ‘look from afar’ that dominates work on Sophiatown (Hannerz Reference Hannerz1994). It is stated on the University website that this project is ‘aimed at fostering reconciliation between residents of different races in Sophiatown’. This standpoint is defined in the book, by reference to the field of ‘conversation studies’, which ‘explore how conversation could transform individuals … who could, by engaging others in conversation, recreate social structures and reshape communities’ (p. xix). This type of ‘community-based research’ is rare in South Africa: the University of Johannesburg made this programme one of its two ‘flagship projects’ of ‘Community Engagement’. The resulting volume consists of a word for word transcription of these intercultural conversations, only made possible by the creation of this exceptional ‘public space’.
Although this research falls within the field of memory studies, although it deals with issues of nostalgia (Gervais-Lambony Reference Gervais-Lambony2012) and with the notion of a ‘place of memory’ (Nora Reference Nora1984–1992), it does so without singing an ode to the loss and recovery of racial mix, instead focusing directly on present-day life. The inhabitants mainly speak of their day-to-day preoccupations: cooking, children, cars, noise, leisure areas, neighbourhood shops, a rude neighbour, the ways they greet each other in the street, sports clubs, etc. As the conversations develop around collective responsibility, mutual help, reciprocal recognition, each person becomes aware that they are agents of the transformation of Sophiatown. It is very lively, profoundly human, non-judgemental, unsensational, centred on the words of the protagonists, while the researchers remain invisible in the background. The book therefore addresses all South African city-dwellers confronting the fear of difference and seeking a ‘comfort zone’ (Ballard Reference Ballard, Distiller and Steyn2004) in a context of accelerated social change.
The conversations are structured around five chapters, which can be read in or out of order and are provided in a semi-raw state, without commentary. This patchwork of exchanges, fragments of portraits, makes global sense without ever closing down the conversation. It accepts discordant views, as well as a certain logical ‘incoherence’, which rings very true, whether in the words of a single individual, or from one discussion group to another. It presents a variety of viewpoints, individuals, genders, races, social classes, and generations. For those who want to read in order, the book proceeds from the moment of meeting (Chapter 1: ‘getting acquainted with neighbours …’), to the quest for collective solutions (Chapters 4 and 5: ‘becoming neighbours …’), via discussions based on photographs taken by the inhabitants (Chapter 2) and around meetings of the neighbourhood cooking club (Chapter 3). Readers wishing to go further can refer to a special issue of African Studies in 2015 (Erlank, Knevel, Naidoo; Fink Reference Fink2014). However, the book can stand alone.
The vision of the neighbourhood that comes out of this is neither mawkish nor glossed. It does not hide the reality of social tensions. Yet never are the conversations structured around stereotypes. The book provides a subtle picture of the difficulties, uncertainties and doubts, but also the aspirations, desires and efforts of this society in the process of imagining its future. Here, we come to one of the main ambitions of the project which, in my view, reflects one of the major challenges of contemporary South African social science: by claiming that these dialogues can speak to anyone (p. xiv), the authors initiate a debate on the possibility and the need to bring South African research out of its post-apartheid theoretical ‘ghetto’, by managing the tension between affirming the traumas of that society, and working to go beyond apartheid by emphasising its banality. The price of this normalisation is to reject classification based around preconceived identity. The inhabitants are presented indirectly, through their names, their residential or migratory histories, through photographs … This delicacy sometimes makes it difficult to ‘situate’ their words, an exercise that all manuals in qualitative methodology tell us is indispensable. From this tightrope position, the book leans towards the side of universal humanity, which links all of us readers to these men and women, caught up in the trivial concerns of day-to-day life in a suburb. This book therefore opens up wonderful prospects for research. For example, it raises the question of the benchmark social category through which one might wish to consider this ‘normalisation’ and the possibility to unpack it in ‘informal settlements’, gentrified inner cities, posh neighbourhoods or mixed suburbs more anonymous and therefore less well studied than Sophiatown.
