Jonathan Cane

"Events in themselves are not so much interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events," David Goldblatt says to interviewer Jonathan Cane. While other photographers have focused on the turmoil of South Africa's colonial and apartheid years, Goldblatt, who is now eighty-four, tends to train his lens on quieter subjects emblematic of the prevailing social order. He will soon be republishing his series In Boksburg (1979-80), in which he looked at daily life in a white middle-class community in the years of apartheid. Among his many series are Some Afrikaners Photographed (1961-68); On the Mines (1973), documenting South Africa's mining industry; and The Transported of KwaNdebele (1989), addressing the plight of black workers forced to travel great distances for employment. More recently, for Ex-Offenders (2010-present), he photographs individuals on parole at the scene of their crimes. The conversation that follows took place last May at Goldblatt's home in an old Johannesburg suburb; like much of Goldblatt's work, it was framed by events in the news-the controversy over a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate and imperialist symbol, at the University of Cape Town, for instance. In protest of the university's faculty, overwhelmingly dominated by white men, an activist threw human feces on the Rhodes statue in March 2015; the statue was subsequently removed, and has since become a symbol for "decolonizing" the university. This concern with monuments has been central to Goldblatt's work for many years. Also happening around the time of Goldblatt and Cane's talks were xenophobic conflagrations across South Africa-deeply unsettling violence involving exiles and refugees from other African countries. The photojournalism documenting these recent conflicts throws into relief the incisive work Goldblatt made during the most violent times in South Africa, and which he continues to make still.

This article is an attempt to foreground considerations in African cities of three-dimensional urbanism, or what Eyal Weizman has called the 'politics of verticality'. Through analysis of the work of three builder/artists the article resists a strain of persistent horizontality in African urban studies. The focus of this article is on three specific urban forms which are contested in interesting and provocative ways. The first, the Tower, in Limete Kinshasa is simultaneously a built form, an imagined space, a set of processes, a film and a theoretical proposition for Filip de Boeck and Sammy Baloji. The second structure is a radical reimagining of Bodys Isek Kingelez's childhood agricultural village as a megacity of cardboard skyscrapers, paper parks and polystyrene promenades. Kimbembele Ihunga (1994) is a three-by-two-meter 'extreme maquette' in which Kingelez presents an unbuildable city which is nevertheless intended in all seriousness as a visionary proposal for post-independence African urbanism. The third structure is a literary residential high-rise, the Maianga Building in Luanda. Ondjaki's novel, Transparent City (2018) presents the biography of a building in a general state of decay but which is, counterintuitively, not a burden to its residents; in fact, its idiosyncratic dysfunction offers some promising, pleasant and useful affordances.

Speaking from his studio in Johannesburg last summer, Kentridge tells the writer and fellow South African Jonathan Cane, in response to those same questions, that he had been in his studio collaborating with editors and artists; working on a large ink drawing for his career-spanning solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; preparing for a major presentation at the Broad, in Los Angeles; and revitalizing a nineteenth-century theatrical technique called Pepper’s Ghost. Internationally recognized for his drawings, animated films, theater and opera sets, sculptures, tapestries, and performance pieces, Kentridge is not, in fact, a photographer. Yet, as he describes, his childhood discovery of forensic photographs recording a terrible massacre, his boxes of reference pictures, and the images Instagram’s algorithm filters into his feed have all informed a photographic approach when Kentridge puts charcoal to paper.

Berthold Lubetkin's 1934 Penguin Pool at the London Zoo is empty. No water, no penguins. A chip packet flutters around the dry floor and the leafless Ailanthus altissima tree casts dramatic shadows on the white concrete. The singularity of the architectural proposition is striking, and it is still strikingly modern today, especially in contrast with the faux naturalist designs which surround it: vultures on dead branches wrapped in AstroTurf seem to jealously eye the abandoned Pool. 'So where are the penguins today?' reads the "March of the Penguins" educational display on the eastern wall of the empty Pool. 'Don't worry! They're still in the zoo … but not here.' They are on the 'stunning Penguin Beach … England's biggest penguin pool!', reads the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) website. Since 2004, the ZSL has taken the position that although Lubetkin and his firm Tecton 'researched penguin behaviour, we know a lot more about them today. The truth is: the Penguin Pool is not suitable for penguins. Why is this? Hard concrete surfaces can give the penguins arthritis and bumblefoot'. During the eighty years in which the Pool was in use, the ZSL "Death Books" record that approximately 176

The article presents a queer reflection on the method of Walter Benjamin in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using a critical method of ephemera collection and collage, it offers a layered and provocative map of the city before the end of apartheid and at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The notion of "cruising," an anachronistic theoretical mode, is applied to one iconic club, the Dungeon. Through archival research, oral histories with elder gay and lesbian Johannesburg residents, and personal reflection and cruising anecdotes, the article reflects on the process of queer archival work. O artigo apresenta uma reflexão queer sobre o método de Walter Benjamin, em Johanesburgo, África do Sul. Usando um método crítico de coleta e colagem de coisas efêmeras, mostra um mapa da cidade provocativo, com várias camadas, antes do fim do apartheid e no início da epidemia de AIDS. A noção de cruising, um modo teórico anacrônico, é aplicada a uma boate icônica, o Dungeon. Por meio de pesquisa em arquivos, histórias orais com gays e lésbicas mais velhos residentes em Johanesburgo, reflexões pessoais e anedotas sobre cruising, o artigo reflete sobre o processo de trabalho queer em arquivos.

When Mobutu Sese Seko summoned renowned South African landscaper Patrick Watson to his ostentatious rooms in the Republic of Bophuthatswana's luxury resort, the Palace of the Lost City, he was, it turns out, being far too optimistic about how much time he had left to build more of his obscene tropical gardens. When Watson arrived at the Lost City (all of which he had landscaped, including the rest of the Sun City resort) he was dressed, as usual, unassumingly in scruffy chinos and a dusty white shirt. Mobutu's protocol officers insisted he was in no state to meet the Zairean dictator but was eventually, after the customary period of being kept waiting, ushered in. There, he was asked via a translator for two things: gardens even larger and more dramatic than the jungles he gestured to from the palace windows, and roses. The first, Watson explained, was possible but the second was not. Money and political power could buy one a tropical jungle of about any size but it could not make roses grow on the equator. The roses that Mobutu obstinately planted were dead soon after that meeting, as was Mobutu in 1997, deposed and exiled in Morocco. In 2015, Watson would be flown to the neighbouring Republic of Congo to receive a similar commission from president Denis Sassou Nguesso for a landscape garden deep in the rainforest, bigger and better than the jungles of the Lost City.

This article is concerned with an object called the "dolos," a concrete coastal structure developed by the South African state at the height of apartheid, in 1963. A twisted H-shape with attenuating limbs, it is formally rather beautiful, exhibiting a kind of brutal elegance, and it has been successfully used in hydraulic engineering projects around the globe. It is, nevertheless, a relatively unremarkable invention. Even in its category of "coastal armor," it was invented 14 years after the first, French-patented Tetrapod. And yet, during apartheid and after, it captured the popular imagination of many white citizens who proudly connected with the narrative of innovation, self-sufficiency and apartheid modernity. The history of the dolos reveals a modernizing state that worked vigorously through its parastatals and research institutions to explore the material, structural and esthetic possibilities of concrete to articulate a convincing and legitimate national identity. This article joins with scholars in the critical oceanic humanities who are arguing for more-than-human, Anthropocene-directed research in the Global South, framed by Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg's call to adopt a more-than-wet ontology addressing the (i) materiality, (ii) motion, and (iii) temporality of the ocean and, indeed, of ocean infrastructure.