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Mammon, Magic, Mimicry, and Meaning in Public Postapartheid Johannesburg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Claudia B. Braude
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Extract

Twenty-five kilometers west of my Suburban Johannesburg apartment lies maropeng, the cradle of humankind World Heritage Site. Recently, twelve years since South Africa's first nonracial democratic elections, Mrs. Ples and the Taung Child, two of the paleoanthropological world's oldest skulls, were jointly exhibited. Considered to be the originators of all humanity, they are the global signifier of humanity shared. They are also foundational in forging a postapartheid united South African nationhood and in underpinning President Thabo Mbeki's continent-wide African Renaissance movement. Maropeng's proximity to Johannesburg, in its day “the model apartheid city” (Czeglédy 23), renders additionally acute past policies of racial segregation that shaped the city and, until the demise of apartheid, robbed me and my fellow citizens of the capacity to shape or interpret a shared experience of the city.

Type
Correspondents at large JOHANNESBURG
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 1: Special Topics Cities , January 2007 , pp. 289 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2007

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