1. Reform and Ruin

The central city of Johannesburg is replete with images of violence, anarchy and decay. Nothing is what is appears to be. In an urban culture where everyone was assigned a particular place and time, and where places embodied narrowly circumscribed connotations, it is only reasonable to expect that in the post-apartheid era a massive and concrete "respatialization" of the central city would take place. It is clear that a contest has ensued in Johannesburg over who has the right to use the city in what kind of way. The rights of some are often seen as fundamentally illegitimate and, therefore, give others the right to do anything with those rights that they want. The order of some becomes the disorder for others, and vice-versa. It is an essential contest over who will ensure the stability of urban life.

A prolific micro-politics of contestation is seemingly normalized as the language through which one's "right" to the city is expressed. It is as if people are saying, "we are in the city now; we must do whatever it takes to make the city work for us, even if it means by doing so, the city is less capable of working for others." It is a "language" increasingly full of violent and brutal grammars tending to crowd out the new forms of civility ushered into South African cities during the times of the struggle for democracy. Images of young men running down streets afraid to walk and not knowing what lies around the next bend have become a dominant representation of the central city image. There is also an impressive, albeit distorted intelligence at work. For example, there are "citizens" who look down Jeppe Street and can tell you exactly how many staff are out sick at a particular business. They can tell you what time salespeople on a particular floor take their tea break, the varying temporal rhythms used by certain shopkeepers to lock and unlock their stores, the varying patterns used by banks to transfer cash. In other word, they can convey the most minute information and details that connote some sense of vulnerability, and thus opportunity for incursions of all kinds. Foreign Africans are known to complain about the way people are scrutinized in public space - how one looks, how one is walking, what one is wearing. Such scrutiny is not done to assess conformity to some urban norm, but to assess weakness.

 

But it would also be a mistake to see the "excessive" only as an instance of violence. For, the municipal is woven out a sense of the extravagance of individuals and communities extending themselves to each other, providing support beyond the call of duty. No matter how violent, for example, the Johannesburg inner city may be, it continues to function largely through such an extravagance of sharing space, resources and opportunities in hundreds of small stories of accommodation and non-threatening opportunism played day in and day out.

As prevailing paradigms of governance emphasize bringing management of public affairs and goods down to the most immediate and practical levels of where they actually take effect, what social units will actually practice this management? Who are the relevant social actors in highly fluid urban spaces? What kinds of effective institutional forms and identities of citizenship are possible? As the central city is a locus for diffuse and highly contested authority on a day-to-day basis, how do residents assess what it is possible to do? What kinds of assumptions about visibility, collaboration, affiliation, and mobility are operative in environments where it is not clear just who has the capacity to do what to whom? As a larger proportion of the population is made up of youth living on their own, as well as those who are HIV-positive¹², how do more provisional forms of social life, affiliation and residence impact upon the mores and practices of all residents?

While these questions may have special resonance to the central city of Johannesburg, they are being increasingly asked in terms of a wide range of urban environments. As such, these considerations are a part of a recent history of important investigations on urban informal economies and social formations.¹³

The central city is a place of great ethnic and national diversity. Perhaps some ninety percent of the area's present residents were not living in the central city ten years ago.¹⁴ Foreign African and Asian immigrants and black South Africans coming from across the country are all vying to establish some foothold.¹⁵ All attempt to do so without substantive institutional support and with an urban infrastructure in severe decline.¹⁶ It also appears that most residents are also living in ways highly dissimilar to those to which they have been accustomed in the past.¹⁷

Elaborate relationships are configured among hawkers, those with some form of formal employment, social networks organized around their patronage of specific bars and hotels, taxi drivers and passengers, railway workers, and the clients of the large number of hotels in the area.¹⁸ There are also large numbers of people operating in the central city, both residents and non-residents, who simply wait for something to happen, or aggressively pursue an opportunity to steal, work in somebody's else scheme or live off of someone else's income.

Thus, survivalist activities undertaken in highly provisional ways and with limited scope seem to be appropriated by "entrepreneurial" networks operating at larger scales. These scales would include in ascending order: the level of the specific quarter, e.g. Hillbrow, Berea, Yeoville; the translocal scale, e.g. flows between Hillbrow and Soweto; Yeoville and Alexandra; Berea and the central business district; and transurban scales, e.g., flows between Johannesburg and Durban; Johannesburg and Maputo.

A great difficulty in assessing the character, composition and scale of such activities is the high degree to which these activities are illegal and are protected by various affiliations with legal institutions and transactions.¹⁹ Within the density of activities and population numbers, information itself becomes an important resource - who is going where, who comes and goes at what time, who guards what, who knows whom - for all of this can be converted into a potential "income-generating" activity. Concomitantly, there is an intricate economy of managing impressions and the visibility of actions that accompany these broadly informal economic activities.

Take for example the following: A warehouse in Dar es Salaam and a shipment whose waybill indicates origin from the World Muslim League - a shipment of thousands of sealed Qurans and between pages counterfeit dollar bills - religious texts to guide the Ummah throughout Southern Africa. And take Taha Jabbir, who comes to Fordsburg, Johannesburg in 1995 to take over the African Muslim Association after spending years in Malawi, where he built a series of fortfications all along the border with Mozambique that, on the surface, provided a bulwark of protection against the insurgency, but were also facades for the coordination of substantial illicit transborder exchanges. Jabbir, citizen of Kuwait, was the son of an enormously wealthy Iraqi family, who also owned sixteen major office buildings is Saô  Paulo.

And take the 789 conversions to Islam officially recorded at masajids in Fordsburg by Angolan immigrants during that same year - some eventually housed informally on large tracts of land outside of Neilspruit in Mapumalanga owned by the historic Hoggs Farm Deobandi family, one of whose branches controlled the labor provided to reconstruct the docks in Dubai. Others ended up in Winterveld, a large peri-urban area north of Winterveld, which until today, has large sections of land owned and settled by successive generations of former Mozambican mineworkers. Indeed, many of these former mineworkers who settled in Winterveld, having heavily invested in mini-bus taxis, channel goods provided them "under the table" by today's mineworkers to a wide range of buyers. These goods come either from their countries of origin or from the networks of other mineworkers with whom they once worked. On the other hand, goods acquired from compatriots and other various networks are sold to mineworkers throughout the country. Individual entrepreneurs are thus plying large territories. The trade continuously changes - from the smuggling of diamonds and precious metals, rhino horns, and guns to more conventional consumer goods such as electronics and packaged foodstuffs. Some of this illegal activity is elaborately syndicated.

Winterveld entrepreneurs constitute a nodal point in links between mineworkers, buyers, and workers at the Maputo port in Mozambique. Most of these activities seem to be loosely organized. Cooperation does exist, but on a deal-by-deal basis. In part, these arrangements act as a mechanism of protection, since threats from more "endowed" syndicates and other competitors can be quite intense. Perhaps more to the point, loose cooperation provides a mechanism for the individual entrepreneur to access a more diverse and wider range of opportunities. For the most part, specific deals or activities are rarely repeated in the exact form in which they have already taken place. They rarely take place in the same location or with the same composition of "collaborators" more than a few times.

At the same time, some consistency must be brought to the playing field. If the structures of deals and the composition of deal-makers are too fluid, things could get out of hand. Competition may be debilitating, even violent. While traders don't want to be locked into overly fixed structures, there also must be mechanisms to socialize trading practices and behaviors. There must be means of ensuring some consistency and predictability. The local churches that have sprung up in Winterveld during the last several years play an important role in these socializing tasks. Some churches play a major role as points of reference for temporary "business coalitions" or syndicates that are formed among members of different congregations. There are scores of small independent churches scattered within the predominantly Mozambican and/or Shangaan speaking wards. The individual memberships are quite close given the quantity of time individuals spend together fulfilling religious obligations and attending prayer meetings.

Information that participants in these loose-knit syndicates generate and exchange among themselves is important. But, this exchange is not the most important means through which deals are put together. Collaborations tend to take place on a deal-by-deal basis. Participants for a "team" are recruited from various churches. Information about the trustworthiness and capacity of potential participants and about the possible roles they might play in the deal is largely based largely on the roles participants in these deals play in their respective churches. Churches provide a context that implicitly "vouches" for the behavior and reliability of particular individuals. At the same time, those putting together deals don't want to recruit others from their own churches in the event that things go wrong. The church may implicitly recognize the existence of such unconventional activities. By leaving it to other more "invisible" or provisional networks to "carry out" deals, the congregations, however, don't risk being identified with them. They are not committed or dependent on their success or failure. In other words, whatever happens does not "bounce" back as a piece of information or feedback relevant to the maintenance of social ties within any individual church.

And take the story of one man from Douala who walked much of the way to South Africa to find himself, finally, on the outskirts of Cape Town, in a refugee camp doubling as an insane asylum (getting in and out, he notes, was complicated: security could not distinguish between the displaced and the deranged); of life in a squat called l'ambassade, overseen by a another Doualais known for claiming rights to residents' girlfriends; of masks and mangoes, raybans and cellphones from Malaysia on their way to Malawi (some counterfeit, others not) sold and re-sold in an ongoing flux of coming and going, and of visits by strange long-bearded Arabs in jellabiya bearing airline tickets to French Guiana via Saõ Paulo and Caracas.

And take the Winterveld owned long distance taxis, one a day, that ply the route from Johannesburg to Dar es Salaam, filled with Angolans. And take these Angolan at Dar airport with Kenyan passports and freshly minted dollar bills on their way to Dubai for one of the well-known shopping fairs. And imagine my surprise to this past summer in Tamatave, Madagascar when ten Angolan converts with whom I attended a hulqa - a study group in Fordsburg with - walk in after having just returned "home" from "working" a ship just landed from Dubai.

This entire circuitry of exchange both finds anchorage in the central city and is also displaced from it; it has simultaneously everything and nothing to do with it. What does this double position mean? If these stories are indeed a small sampling of what is undoubtedly a much larger domain of translocal shadow economy, it would seem that a larger proportion of the overall economy seem to disperse urban resourcefulness across wider territory with unclear consequences.

2. Post-apartheid city

On the surface such dispersal would appear to be a problem for a city that lacks strong histories of social cohabitation. The lack of social cohesion is often cited as the primary characteristic of Johannesburg. Khetso Gordan, the city's top urban manager in the late 1990's, often said that no sector, community or group has any sense of belonging to the city as a whole, or anything good to say about the city. There is a fundamental absence of public life and of concrete opportunities for diverse populations to acknowledge that they share the same universe of operations. Daily life can be increasingly parochial for both rich and poor, although the rich retain enormous capacities to preserve a way of life that barely differs from a typically Northern urban existence.

In this situation where vastly different modalities of existence largely operate in parallel to each other, the overall global space of the city is increasingly privatized. In other words, the space of the city beyond work and housing-related enclaves is increasingly beyond the apprehension, use and affiliation of all but those whose capacities enable them to manipulate a "bird's-eye" view of the city. Such manipulation entails intervening at the level of the city's position within the larger abstract space of inter-urban flows and transactions. The city at large, then, becomes an increasingly dangerous unknown universe, full of threats and unseen circumstances, to the majority of inhabitants.

Urban residents become more defensive and particularized in their social and public relations. In Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's densest black "townships," there exist some 170 different community organizations.²⁰ The multiplicity of these organizations represents different modalities of inhabitation - from homeowners, shack-dwellers, backyard tenants, renters, and squatters. They also represent different territories within the district and other divisions of interests. Cooperation and collaboration is rare; as the motivation for organization is largely the perception of threat and using associations as a means for engaging in a more intense competition for scarcer resources and opportunities.

Municipal authorities are faced with a situation where maintaining the ability to run the city requires keeping many of the trappings which excluded people from the city in the past. At the same time, they must allow the city to be radically re-arranged by very diverse populations and interests no longer forced to "stay in place." Attempts then to make the city more livable for those who have been historically excluded often become perceived as yet another instrument to control those who have been excessively controlled in the past.

While households and communities may adamantly defend their "hold" on specific residential territories that have been informally settled, this "holding" is often mistaken as an expression of an intent to remain within that settlement over a long period of time. Such patterns are usually not the case. While rural to urban migration may have slowed, the South African labor force is increasingly mobile within and among cities, and such a defense of territory is more about defending the "right" to be in the city, to have a place in it - but without commitment to a specific place. Thus the subsidization of rudimentary housing structures, which has been the cornerstone of South Africa's response to the country's housing needs, largely misunderstands the bulk of the population's approach to settlement. For example, housing sub-markets have become increasingly murky and complex as former shack-dwellers sell off their new homes for income and return to living in shacks.²¹

Intensifying mobility is also reinforced by the diversity of strategies employed to secure basic needs, e.g., simultaneous participation in formal and informal economies, dispersion of dependents across different localities, and diversifying sources of borrowing and evasion. Such mobility, in turn, cultivates particular economic and social practices that can weaken customary modalities of social affiliation and social capital. Policy efforts to constrain the mobility of domestic private capital and to attract and maintain mobile external capital have had the effect of intensifying the mobility of the poor. This, of course, is not an upward but rather a lateral mobility - within and between townships and informal settlements, cities and regions, in an incessant hunt for livelihood.

In some areas, such as the inner city of Johannesburg, the extent of demographic shifts is certainly unprecedented in contemporary urban history. Also unprecedented is the degree to which social boundaries are marked by spatial arrangements in high density quarters and the ways in which the physical trappings of wealth and security can be penetrated by "roving bands" of "opportunists" taking whatever they can. The apparent wastage of large parts of the Johannesburg CBD actually house an increasingly vibrant sector of informal businesses engaged in a wide range of artisan production. Nothing is what is appears to be. In an urban culture where everyone was assigned a particular place and time, and where places embodied narrowly circumscribed connotations, it is only reasonable to expect that a massive and concrete "deconstruction" would take place. South African cities are certainly being remade, but by whom or how remains largely undecided.

The intense levels of contestation over who has the "right" to do what in South African cities produces a situation where things can happen very quickly. Urban dwellers don't, as a result, feel constrained by the sense that specific places and resources belong to only certain kinds of uses or identities. There are constant and often violent arguments in apartment blocks, on streets, in taxis, in schools, and in stores about who can do what where. Such argumentation can open up places to greater flexibility as to their use, but it also can break down the integrity of places and a sense of propriety, which in turn, makes them vulnerable to incursions and distortions of all kinds.

Drawing on urban survival strategies used during apartheid to avoid pass laws and other forms of state surveillance, populations proficient in sending the "wrong" signals can continue to do so in order to "win" spaces of autonomous action. Who is a "real" police-person, security guard, domestic, gardener, deliverer, and who isn't is not only increasingly hard to discern, but in many cases doesn't matter, as levels of complicity between the real and the "pretender" intensify. At other times, things move slowly, since urban residents know that many people are paying attention to what they do, and they then try to conform to some sense of what can pass as conventional in order not to stand out. So in South African cities, spaces can change very quickly and also not at all.

Whereas this situation may be the case for all cities, there is a fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge these parameters of urban change or stasis within the collective South African imagination. Yet for the most part, the Johannesburg metropolitan government can do little to satisfy the interests and needs of one group without estranging those of another, who are more willing than ever to assume violent means of expressing their vulnerability. Efficacy in urban governance and planning now increasingly means that no single institutional or sectoral actor is likely to exert much control over how the urban is to be remade.²²

Municipal authorities have attempted to engineer opportunities for different actors to work together while maintaining their identities, their interests, and sense of local "authority." These efforts include a centralized ranking and passenger distribution system, specialized markets for street traders, and attempts to manage, clean and service buildings where owners have long disappeared. An overarching development framework does not drive these efforts - although such frameworks do exist for the Johannesburg inner city. Rather, they have been affected by a proficient set of tactics. They are the result of municipal managers facilitating ongoing negotiations among diverse interests and groupings.

Each public municipal initiative has been informed by a concerted effort to determine what really is going on, who the actors really are, what resources they have, and how are they manage to put together livelihood. This has meant that what was formerly a largely invisible world of economic and social activities was made public. In other words, these activities emerged into some kind of view and, therefore, opportunity to be engaged and transacted with. For example, what appeared to be the largely abandoned sites of medium scale manufacturing in the eastern part of the central business district were often being used to house relatively clandestine small enterprises. Under-utilized office buildings were being converted into makeshift residential units. Instead of a few associations of street traders there were scores of various "organizations." In other words, there exists a complex patchwork of uses, appropriations, modalities of association and economic activities that are highly fluid, often unconventional, and often illegal.

Municipal administrations are charged with ensuring equity and order, some sense of coherence over who does what where. Conventional wisdom has usually indicated that cities have their regulatory frameworks and they must be enforced. Indeed, in a rough and tumble world like Johannesburg, a municipal administration must be seen as tough. For such toughness is the only way most citizens will be convinced that there is any kind of municipal leadership. What Johannesburg has attempted to do in the inner city is not apply some set of conventional rules or bend the rules, but to derive new regulatory frameworks from what actually is taking place. While enforcing codes and orders to ensure that buildings are inhabitable, that labor is not exploited, and that streets remain navigable and clean, it has done these things in such a way not to change the fundamentals of what people are doing or necessarily where they are doing it.

Rather, the municipality has attempted to facilitate a process where different "constituencies" figure out ways of adapting themselves to each other without necessarily feeling that they have to give something up; or that if they do give something up it is in order to gain new capacities or opportunities. In other words, a regulatory system is configured on the basis of what it might take to circumvent unhealthy, illegal or debilitating practices but maintain their basic shape and dynamism.

The departments responsible for the inner city have largely been able to do this through:

a) decentralizing responsibility and authority for the management of specific domains, precincts and activities to coalitions of sectoral actors most affected by and involved in them;

b) establishing project planning and implementation forums that bring different sectoral actors together to evolve the nuts and bolts of specific interventions; and perhaps most significantly;

c) making competing interests and groups co-responsible for the management of particular services and spaces; and

d) putting together a broad range of informal channels through which different sectoral actors can communicate and consult with each other in a more open-ended manner outside the obligations to represent particular points of view or interest or administrative responsibilities. In this way, different actors can more easily explore with each other various scenarios and ways of collaborating without being forced to produce specific outcomes.

This latter point is particularly important in terms of trying to manage the highly contentious politics that usually surround urban development activities. To cultivate new levels of cooperation on the part of various actors requires thinking about ways of facilitating connections among local resources, skills, and institutions. These connections act as both a means of assessing what kind of supply-side upgrading (e.g., skills development, external resource inputs, technical services) are appropriate and building the foundations for building external relationships with larger markets, political and regional contexts.

3. Re-assembling the Central City

Despite the efforts of the municipality, economic and social logics are at work in the inner city that prove not only difficult for the municipality to grasp, but without really a platform to engage them. The sheer rapidity of demographic and economic changes in the central city has created uncertainty as to what is possible to plan for and do.²³ The uncertainty has caused sudden and substantial divestitures of all types. These divestitures further impede adequate monitoring by adding a large volume of transactions to the quick pace of change. Insecurity is intensified and, with it, the practice of getting rid of property and position at a cheap price.

In response to these changes, a large measure of xenophobia prevails, where foreign Africans are blamed for an overcrowded informal trading sector, the growth of the narcotics trade and general deterioration of the inner city.²⁴ Many South African residents believe that it is because of such a foreign presence that government authorities and the private sector are unwilling to make investments in upgrading and service provision.²⁵

In an urban area with such comprehensive demographic change, there are few grounds for anyone to cite and enforce a superseding claim to belonging. But this relative vacuum of belonging, i.e., a situation where almost no one presently living in the inner city can claim an overarching sense of origin, of a protracted history of settlement, points out how, in the absence of effective governance, the "feeling" of belonging holds sway.

The narcotics enterprises that constitute an important component of the inner city economy are commonly seen as the purview of Igbo-dominated Nigerian networks. While such composition may be generally true, such enterprises are by no means ethnically homogenous or formed exclusively on the basis of national identity. Rather, in a business that has little recourse to appealing to law or official commercial standards, the appearance of ethnic or national homogeneity conveys a certain impenetrability. It detracts from both external scrutiny, infiltration, and competition, which allows the enterprise to incorporate the diversity of actors it often requires in order to constantly change supply routes, markets, and so forth.

Such enterprises act as a parody of belonging. In the commercial culture of the inner city narcotics economy, the discrete tasks of importation, circumvention of customs regulations, repackaging, local distribution, money laundering, relations with legal authorities, territorial control, market expansion, and plotting traffic routes all are complementary yet highly territorialized domains. Usually, discrete "units" administer each domain so that disruptions in one domain do not jeopardize the entirety of trade. Nigerian syndicates, which use the hotels in Hillbrow to accommodate a large transient population that in turn serves as a mask behind which to consolidate a steady clientele of drug users including sex workers, have instituted an interesting governance structure.²⁶

The hotels, now largely managed by Nigerian syndicates, become discrete "localities", housing not only workers in the drug trade, but also Nigerians working in a wide range of activities. The syndicates dominate the governing committees that are established for each hotel, with their concomitant sets of rules - for example, no-go areas are often established for Nigerians and fines for various infractions that are then used for legal fees. But, Nigerians who are not involved in the drug economy are also counted upon to provide a semblance of internal diversity, even if they are often used and manipulated.²⁷

Yet, the domains must be well integrated - in such a way that complicity and cooperation become the prevailing practices. But within each domain, each operator has a specific place and is expected to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty. This is the case even if the illicit nature and the practical realities of the trade create an incessantly open space for participants to "take their chances" and seek greater profits and authority outside the hierarchies that each syndicate must attempt to rigidly enforce.

Thus, it is apparent to most inner city residents what hotels, residential buildings, and commercial enterprises belong to which syndicates and to which nationalities these syndicates in turn belong.²⁸ Yet, since any particular narcotics enterprise handles only certain facets of the overall trade, and leaves itself increasingly vulnerable if it expands its efforts to dominate more functions and more territory, spaces also must be maintained that clearly belong to "no one." It is precisely within these spaces, however, that anything might happen, that are contested and unpredictable and that are often subject to the most vociferous claims of belonging. This is often a "contest" over women. For as the vast majority of foreign immigrants are male, the impression is instituted that these immigrants, better off economically than most black South African male residents, are "stealing" local women.

Thus, the inner city is a complex geography, where residents must navigate according to constantly finely-tuned series of movements and assumptions.²⁹ There are places where they know they must not go, be seen - but in an often convoluted economy of safety. A South African municipal worker living in the Heidelberg in Berea is unlikely to sit and read the paper in the lobby of the Mark or Sands Hotel - the domains of so-called Nigerian drug dealers. But, he or she may in actuality be safer in this activity then making a telephone call from the public stand at the nearby petrol station.

The drug economy, with its "hyperactive" sensibilities and codes of belonging, could largely entrench itself in Hillbrow and Berea, because a highly dense, highly urbanized area with massive infrastructure was being vacated - both in terms of its former population and in terms of financial and governmental resources. The modalities of operation of the drug business tend to "provincialize" certain parts of the inner city - i.e., localize it in terms of clearly marked territories and "fiefdoms." But the definitiveness of organizations and territories is more a necessary "performance" than descriptive of actual operational practices. The more entrenched and expansive the drug economy becomes, the more it must generate ambiguous interfaces. For example, these interfaces are those between supposedly discrete groupings, between illicit activity and legitimate investment, between declines and consumption patterns and increased availability, and between inner city Johannesburg as an increasingly well known site of the drug economy and other more invisible and thus often advantageous sites of operation.

Here, the salience of belonging specifies the need for its own demise. While a frequently heard rallying cry in the inner city is for blocks and neighborhoods to be restored to those to whom they really belong, who are these citizens and what would they do with these neighborhoods? To what extent is the inner drug economy the most visible component of an otherwise invisible unfolding of the inner city onto the uncertainties of the metropolitan region. In a city preoccupied with questions about who belongs where, and where within a city where movement and operations is incessantly precarious and insecure, there is a heightened need to identify plausible spaces of safe residence. Yet, the drug operations don't need the inner city - either as market or center of operation. Already, there is some indication that several syndicates are "moving on", seeking other locales. Thus, the heightened sense in the past decade that specific territories within the inner city have exclusively belonged to specific agents is revealed as something arbitrary. One can even hear local sentiment that claims that at least the drug dealers stalled the demise of certain blocks, now vulnerable to an influx of petty criminals.

Within an inner city, where jobs are scarce, everyday life precarious, and the need to mobilize available social capital acute, the very act of counting upon those close to one becomes a practice which leaves individual vulnerable to further difficulties. As has been repeatedly pointed out by Graeme Reid, director of the Johannesburg Development Agency, a critical problem for local governance has been the instability of household composition within the inner city. Families who reside in an apartment unit for several months frequently disperse, with new household arrangements being established in other parts of the inner city or elsewhere.

In part, this instability is directly related to the intensifying uncertainty permeating everyday kinship relations. It becomes dangerous for a person to interweave the details of their daily life too closely to those of family members. If something goes wrong, if one member finds out that they are HIV positive, or if a growing divide in economic capacity becomes apparent, one then leaves themselves vulnerable to witchcraft accusations and thus vulnerable to being ostracized or even killed. As a result, the very process of mobilizing social capital that is needed in order to elaborate a viable sense of belonging is precisely that process which becomes the most difficult to perform. In this absence, the apparent capacity of foreign Africans to elaborate supportive social connections becomes particularly threatening, as it is perceived to provide immigrants with an undo advantage to thrive in this urban environment.

While immigrant networks do depend on always activating a sense of mutual cooperation and interdependency, such ties are also often more apparent then real - especially as a complex mixture of dependence and autonomy is a work in relations among fellow compatriots. For many foreign Africans in the inner city, Johannesburg is neither the preferred or final destination, especially at present.³⁰ Its continental location and the degree to which the South African economy is increasingly intertwined with other African national and regional economies makes the city more accessible, despite the entry and stay regulations proffered by the government, than other European or North American destinations. The city's geographic location facilitates the petty to medium-scale conventional and unconventional trade activities that characterize a significant percentage of immigrant economies. From official commercial markets to informal ones in both Congos, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, to name a few of the predominant national settings, a substantial amount of their inputs either originate or pass through South Africa in a trade frequently controlled or at least mediated by South African-based immigrants.³¹

Although most immigrants dream of a quick score that would enable them to return home with significantly enhanced prestige and purchasing power, such rarely happens. Instead, many years of toil in a series of low paid jobs is the norm, with the bulk of the limited earnings saved remitted back home to support an array of family members. Additionally, bribes to police often must be paid, as well as unofficial surcharges to certain landlords. For traders at any scale, goods are often seized, lost or stolen. The obstacles immigrants persist in dealing with, especially in South Africa, amplify the enormity of the difficulties of home. While fellow nationals or even immigrants of various nationalities may band together to share living expenses, information and risk, the possibilities for corporate action are limited. Each is trying their best to make ends meet and deal with specific family, community, or political situations back home. Each is in some way a competitor, and cooperation is based on self-interest, self-protection and camaraderie, and not on solidifying a long-term investment in the cultivation of a place of operation in Johannesburg.³²

The inner city largely represents a process of "running away", where the inside and the outside make ambiguous any definitive sense of where residents are located, and what their identities and interests "really" are. Black South Africans are running away from the implosive sociality of township life - of a life for too long situated in a "nowhere", i.e. places arbitrarily configured to be apart and to embody the essence of a culture long uprooted from the chance to continually remake itself. Foreign Africans are running away from the impossibility of being at home, i.e. to do whatever is possible to maintain the sense (and often, the illusion) that they can have maintain a home.

This all takes place is an urban area which, however fleetingly, once hinted at the possibility of a more cosmopolitan urban South Africa. But the country has long repressed what that cosmopolitanism might look like. Instead, it is re-imagined primarily in politically vacuous, "rainbow nation" terms. The inner city existed for too many years - and in this case, the seven years between 1988 and 1995 when the rapid demographic shift took place proved to be a "lifetime" - without any significant elaboration of urban policy or programming. Inner city life became increasingly informalized, and in this informalization increasingly illicit. In this interregnum, the caution exhibited by incoming residents, not quite knowing what to make of their new surroundings gave way to the brashness of various "investors." These investors knew how to "recuperate" the trappings of city blocks of hotels with huge discos, rooftop pools, basement wineries, underground car parks into a distorted Miami to be run to the ground by a flourishing drug economy whose proceeds would largely be diverted elsewhere. Ironically, what remains is an inner city ready for nearly anything.