I am wrapping up an extended research and study visit in East and Southeast Asia. Reflecting on the interactions of the past few weeks, I recall the ways that I have prepared faces to meet the faces that I met in places far and wide — from political, economic and financial capitals and military strategic centres around the South China Sea and elsewhere, I have answered questions about South Africa by foregrounding different aspects of the country.
This changing of messages goes back to that communications theory about knowing your target (audience) and preparing an appropriate message. It is also about avoiding slagging off the country abroad just because I have personal grievances, or because I cannot think beyond a single-story narrative that rests on a belief that there is only a single cause of the country’s problems, and contiguously, a singular explanation.
The biggest change in emphasis is reflected in the difference between, say, a meeting with public policy-makers in Singapore, Jakarta, or Kuala Lumpur, with Karen refugees fleeing Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, with islanders off the West Coast of Sumatra, with military people from the littoral states of the South China Seas, or with friends down at the pub where a good banter is always, well, good.
You go through iterations of stories about hope, fear, anger and rage, and of idealism and prospects for prosperity, peace and trust among the citizenry. Along the way, you realise at once the complexity of a society as fractured as we are, and what dreams may come.
When asked about South Africa, you can either say we have electricity blackouts, collapsing infrastructure, prebendalism, retribalisation of politics, rising populism, crime, violence… and assume the moral high ground.
Or you could say there needs to be investment in infrastructure to improve energy supply, public transport, a greater focus on investigations, prosecutions, and addressing the culture of bribery in the police force.
All of this may be true at the same time, but a child in a refugee camp, or a migrant worker, or an undocumented worker may want to hear about diversity and inclusion, a Constitution that protects the rights of all, and the foundational idea that the country belongs to everyone who lives in it. You may have to answer questions about the Springbok rugby team, or Table Mountain or Nelson Mandela.
As for why things have gone wrong or what caused all the problems, there is actually a greater appreciation of the difficulties that the state faces, and of the historical problems that have bled into the present.
My view is that each crisis is the child of an earlier crisis, and that there is a lot more beyond what we see, here, now, and the self-satisfaction of accepting the world as it is, tout court.
Causation is always elusive
I turn, often, to Richard Feynman’s explanation of causation; his response to the “why” question which, I agree, helps provide a much more interesting understanding of the social world and all its complications. You could, for instance, say that everything that has gone wrong in South Africa is because of the ANC’s policies and practices (a valid explanation, necessary but insufficient).
Feynman has explained his approach in this way: “If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example, if you go, ‘Why did she slip on the ice?’ Well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that, no problem. But you ask why is ice slippery? That’s kinda curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It’s very interesting. You say, how does it work? You could either say, ‘I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me. Ice is slippery; that explains it,’ or you could go on and say, ‘Why is ice slippery?’ and then you’re involved with something, because there aren’t many things as slippery as ice. It’s not very hard to get greasy stuff, but that’s sort of wet and slimy. But a solid that’s so slippery? Because it is, in the case of ice, when you stand on it (they say) momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit so you get a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you’re slipping.”
This probably does not satisfy anyone who would insist on the single-story narrative or parsimonious explanations. Such explanations are valid, and necessary, but insufficient.
Let’s take the virtual collapse of Johannesburg. You can rest your case on the ANC’s maladministration and corruption (all valid), but there are deeper explanations that are equally valid, and provide a much more interesting understanding of Johannesburg’s decline.
Drawing on research that was completed a couple of decades ago, and which I don’t have at hand, Johannesburg was designed to accommodate no more than 200,000 people in the city centre during the day, and most of these people, office and service workers, would return to outlying areas, suburbs and townships.
This was kept in place, in part, by the Group Areas Act, influx control and the pass laws. In other words, white people could come and go into the city, to theatres like the old Colosseum Theatre or the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and back to the suburbs, at will. Black people were “allowed” to commute into the city, to their jobs, and leave at the end of the day.
Other than cinemas in Fordsburg, there were very few, if any, places where black people could go after dark. And anyway, the “homelands” were created, which relocated millions of people to distant locales, away from white South Africa.
Massive increases in urbanisation
By the mid-1980s, shortly before the Group Areas Act slipped into disuse, and “grey areas” emerged, the population of Johannesburg was about 1.6 million. The mid-1980s also saw massive increases in urbanisation. Areas like Hillbrow, Berea or Joubert Park became available for settlement.
An important caveat is necessary here. Almost all the homes (flats and freestanding family homes) were owned by white people who either left the country for various reasons, fled to the suburbs or to Cape Town or simply cut their losses. The buildings lacked servicing, and maintenance was non-existent.
With rapid urbanisation came overcrowding. It became difficult and almost impossible to count the number of residents of the city, but one account had Johannesburg’s population at 1.9 million people by 1990.
By the time the Group Areas Act and influx control were completely abolished, and the homelands were revealed for what they were — dumping grounds in the grand apartheid scheme — hundreds of thousands of people travelled to the cities.
New abodes — shacks, “spare rooms” on top of buildings, backrooms, boarded-up garages — were created. Extended families in search of a better life filled small spaces in flats and informal settlements that had been mushrooming.
We now had a situation where a city that in 1950 had no more than about 950,000 people, swelled to more than two million people, a size of influx that caused the city to gradually come apart.
By the time the ANC came along, promises were made (about free electricity and other utilities) that were not kept. The situation became untenable. In 2024, Johannesburg’s population was about 6.3 million.
Let’s return to the founding of the city. It was built as a mining town, which promised get-rich opportunities for colonists and settlers in the late 1800s. The city grew as mining and business grew. Its population was controlled, as it were, by keeping black people on the periphery through a system that successive governments imagined would remain in place forever. That was a serious lapse in vision and foresight.
By the time most of the apartheid laws that controlled the movement of black people were abolished, the new leaders (the ANC) also lacked foresight and vision; they simply could not manage the combination of urban decay (because of overcrowding), urbanisation, and lack of maintenance and oversight of buildings that were (and probably remain) owned by white people who no longer live in the country.
Entering the democracy era, more immigrants, documented and undocumented, arrived in South Africa, and gravitated to cities like Johannesburg. It all became unmanageable, and eventually a runaway problem.
We have gone within a century from Johannesburg as a mining town to the city attracting the glitz and glamour of nightlife and residences reminiscent of the colonial era — all kept in place by various means of coercion (forced removals) and consent (attracted by the seduction of a “homeland”) — to a city that simply cannot hold together its people and the built environment.
Along the way, there was a lack of vision and foresight; little or no planning for a future; rapid urbanisation; property owners who failed to maintain the homes they let out to black people; and the ANC who simply could not cope with the enormity of the problems and turned to patronage, nepotism, cronyism…
The problem has become intractable. Forcefully moving from one city block to the next, cleaning up, renovating and renting out or providing homes and places of business to people sounds good, but it may cause more problems than it can solve.
Johannesburg is a runaway city, a reflection of South Africa at large, and sometimes explaining that to people in various parts of the world is necessary. But sometimes it’s best to simply say: “We’re going through difficult times, and we have to build a society that is stable, peaceful, prosperous and with high levels of trust among the population.”
The single-story narrative is a conversation stopper. It’s not just corruption. The crisis is a child of earlier crises in planning and delusion; the earliest founders simply failed to anticipate a future in which people were free to move around at will, and the post-democracy order was simply lacking in management and governance skills — also with a lack of vision and foresight. DM