The term “Afropolitanism” was first coined by Taiye Selasi in 2005. It was used to describe those ‘African young people working and living in cities around the globe’ who ‘belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.’ Selasi’s focus on the African diaspora, particularly that of the US and UK — ‘the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon, or collected already, at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you’ — has come under scrutiny for echoing a lifestyle of excess and consumption (Dabiri 2013) whilst projecting a privileged purview of mobility that is inaccessible to most who live on the continent (Ogbechie 2008).

In 2006, when Achille Mbembe popularised the term, he attempted to bring it closer to home, labelling Johannesburg as the penultimate Afropolitan city. His use of the term extended its reach to highlight the movements of peoples and cultures across pre-colonial Africa. Drawn to Afropolitanism for its ability to interweave ‘the here and there, the presence of elsewhere in the here and vice versa,’ Mbembe sought to articulate a way of ‘being in the world’ that embraces ‘strangeness, foreignness, and remoteness,’ at a time in South Africa’s history that was marked by an increase in deadly xenophobic attacks (2017, 105). He sought sanctuary in the lives of artists, musicians, composers, writers, and poets, who, through ‘the course of movement,’ had experienced worlds outside of their own, suggesting that such a worldly view might lead to greater tolerance.

For Emma Dabiri, however, the promise that the term may once have held has since been commodified; infused with a hype that is too ‘polite,’ too ‘corporate,’ too ‘glossy’ to bring about any real sense of change (2017, 205). ‘The problem is not that Afropolitans are privileged per se,’ she explains, ‘rather it is that at a time when poverty remains endemic for millions, the narratives of a privileged few telling us how great everything is, how much opportunity and potential is available, may drown out the voices of a majority who continue to be denied basic life chances’ (2017, 207).

Penny Siopis’s film Welcome Visitors! (2017) could be said to occupy a central position in these debates. It revolves around the migration of a piece of music, Skokiaan (1947); the meeting between Zimbabwean musician August Musarurwa — the composer of the song — and Louis Armstrong in Bulawayo in 1960; and Armstrong’s 1954 adaptation of Musarurwa’s composition, which included exoticising lyrics about ‘Happy, happy Africa.’ In this way, Siopis’s film brings both the transnational and regional to the fore, first through the figure of Armstrong (as at home in Bulawayo as he is in the US), and second, through Musarurwa’s Skokiaan and its afterlives.

Tasked with exploring the links between Southern Africa and the American South for a group exhibition in New Orleans in 2017, Siopis visited the city, where she stumbled across a coconut in a charity shop with the word ‘ZULU’ inscribed on the side in gold; an acronym for the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club to which Armstrong belonged, and for the krewe who participate in the Mardi Gras Carnival, who are famous for their hand-decorated coconuts — highly sought after souvenirs that are thrown from floats to the crowd during the parade.

The connection led Siopis to Armstrong’s rendition of Musarurwa’s Skokiaan, and their meeting in Bulawayo in 1960. ‘I had always imagined [the song] to be South African,’ she explains. ‘On learning of the music’s Zimbabwean origins, and finding out more about composer August Musarurwa, a world opened up to me, including that of Yvonne Vera’s writing which later came to dwell in my paintings’ (one of Vera’s novels references Armstrong’s visit to Bulawayo).

For this exhibition, Welcome Visitors! is played in the Screening Room alongside various remnants of Siopis’s installation at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo in 2019. The installation includes cuttings from local newspapers that have been shaped into Vera’s words. These words emanate from Siopis’s large visceral drawing, entangled with souvenirs that the artist gathered from the thrift stores and souvenir shops of Bulawayo. Many of these objects are made of copper. They evoke mining in that region, and by association, connect to the travels and travails of local migrant workers to Johannesburg to labour on the gold mines. The film includes three different versions of Skokiaan by Musarurwa, Armstrong, and Kevin Davidson, as well as footage from Armstrong’s visit in 1960, juxtaposed with 8mm home-movies of travel, including scenes from Zimbabwe, that the artist found in charity shops and flea markets in other parts of the world. ‘I don’t know who shot the films or who is pictured,’ she explains. ‘These sequences bear no direct relationship to the empirical facts of the story, which is written in the first person. While suggesting an imagined narrator, the story is full of holes, the sprocket marks and uneven quality of the footage resonating with the fragmentary nature of memory.’

The lyricists romanticised view of a ‘Happy, happy Africa’ is also mirrored, in part, by the early writing that surrounded artists like Jackson Hlungwani. As pointed out by David Koloane, the ‘magic realm of mythology’ woven around the artist’s practice and the continued reference to him as a ‘rural’ artist tends to cast his work as ‘the missing link between civilisation and primivity,’ with his life in Limpopo used as a claim to something ‘authentically’ African, and therefore distinct from the world at large (cited in Mdluli 2015).

The artist’s reference to soccer in Champion Man and other works challenges this view. Similarly, when one takes into account the forced removal of his family, his time in the asbestos mines of Polokwane, or the injuries that he later sustained while living in Johannesburg in the early 1940s, the unbounded sense of optimism bodied forth in Champion Man becomes all the more poignant; a reminder of the artist’s strength and resolve to overcome the odds stacked against him in his everyday life.

In the pages that follow, Tumelo Thuthuka also references the place of mining in the everyday (pp. 28–9). He draws attention to the buckets used in both Egoli I and II (2009), and how these objects found their way back into everyday life in Botswana, following the return of one’s parents or grandparents from working in Johannesburg’s mines: ‘Our forefathers would come back with them,’ he explains. ‘Whenever you see them, you know that they were brought here by someone who used to work in the mines. So I found that interesting. It places more emphasis on Egoli as “the place of gold,” the place of opportunity.’

Thuthuka’s experience of South Africa’s largest metropole – a halfway point in his travels from Botswana to Cape Town, where he matriculated and studied – is marked, on the one hand, by an abiding curiosity, underpinned by the idea of the city as a ‘place of opportunity’ but also danger. Central to these works is his engagement with the built environment: how it informs, and is informed by, the construction of individual and collective identities.

They bring to mind Mbembe’s description of Afropolitanism as a ‘slow and sometimes incoherent dance with forms and signs which we have not been able to choose freely, but which we have succeeded as best we can in domesticating at our disposal.’ Here a series of crudely-carved skyscrapers are brought back down to earth, juxtaposed with an upturned bucket – a nod toward the uncontainable nature of the city, described by Thuthuka as ‘a giant living organism that not only mutates or re-invents itself, but is capable of shaping our identities and our perceptions’ (p. 21). Similarly, in Power Play (2017), Thuthuka juxtaposes a series of larger-than-life clothespegs, broken and whole. As residue, these works speak not only to the aspirational nature of trying to to domesticate or tame the world around us, but the impossiblity thereof. Spillage, it seems, is inevitable, no matter how constructed, contained, or policed.

Although they employ a completely different vocabulary, Collen Maswanganyi’s neatly-cropped, low-relief sculptures seem to suggest something similar. His are a more direct link to the Afropolitanism of Selasi’s world, yet here the world of privilege is also shadowed by its attendant paranoia. Despite the neatly-tucked shirts and buttoned-cuffs, the implication is always of a world ‘out there’, beyond the spotlight. In this, Maswanganyi’s ‘reliefs’ are anything but. ‘People say it’s a dog-eat-dog world,’ he explains, ‘Locking things up is a way of life in the city. Even coming to NIROX, you don’t just get there. You need to ask for permission to get in. They open for you, they know who you are. Things are like that.’ A little later on, he describes his own experience of moving to Johannesburg from Limpopo, the harrassment he experienced at the hands of the police, and how he has been able to adapt and assert himself with time.

The conversation with Maswanganyi foregrounds a particular way of inhabiting the city, from the way we act and speak to our choice of dress: ‘Certain clothes will distinguish you from the crowd,’ he explains. ‘Most Nigerian people have a way of dressing; the Shangaan people have a way of dressing; the Zulus have got their way of dressing — you can be easily distinguished from the crowd, because city people wear things that are acceptable according to city norms, you see?’ In times of xenophobia, such clothes can put a target on your back, so that where some might feel comfortable enough to wear their culture with pride, others choose to sink back into the fabric of the city as a means of self-preservation.

Here the suit and tie, or the various patterns in his work begin to read a bit like camouflage. His description of life in Johannesburg for those deemed ‘outsiders’ brings to mind a passage from Raqs Media Collective’s “Dreams and Disguises, As Usual”, in which the authors relay the story of Fantômas, for whom ‘the disguise of the man in the hat and the overcoat’ becomes ‘the only effective passport... into the world enclosed by the modern citadel... a means to travel from a world apparently in shadow, to a world where the sharp glare that brings visibility in its iridescent wake is not without the threat of capture and confinement’ (2017, 2).

Such uncertainty also shadows the work of Shepherd Ndudzo, whose ironwood sculptures Immigrant and Heavy Winds (2020) were inspired by the physical and psychological ramifications of migration. ‘There’s a degree of uncertainty that is quite important: the uncertainty of the place that you are going to; the uncertainty of your surroundings; the uncertainty of the people around you…’, yet for Ndudzo, what matters most is how we embrace change, noting that not all change is bad. ‘[Change] can show you things that you tend to overlook, or introduce you to things that you haven’t been exposed to, which may make you a better person.’

In contrast to the rapid pace of city life, Ndudzo advocates that we do away with shortcuts and quick fixes, opting for a more measured tempo: ‘We’ve got all this potential to make great things, but at this moment everybody wants to be rich without taking the baby steps. Nobody wants to go through the process, you understand?’ Here the investment is quite different. His is not a pursuit to step into the arc lights, but out of them, reflecting the desire for a world beyond the smoke and mirrors of big city life; a space in which to step back, take heed, and gather one’s thoughts.