A Reflection On Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity

A recent article titled: Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity penned by Molefi Ndlovu, is yet another astute analysis of a phenomenon which still haunts our precarious lives in the enclaves of social experimentation named townships.

These places still feel like concentration camps where capitalists enterprises could extract cheap labour while securely caging populations through proximity/distance morality.

There was time when I attempted to analyse the “shack” as structural interpretation of what I viewed as “corrugated steel boxes of de-privatised and denuded lives of black folks”.

And as these squatter camps emerged around mining areas in the form of “Baipei” self-locating households, the powers that be figured that creating a coloured region just before the white areas was deterrent to black urban influx.

This obviously created the animosity we still seem between most black people and their “coloured” brothers and sisters.

And through your text I now understand the extent to which social segregation was entrenched through town planning, enhancing visibility of those deemed “nearly white” to become buffer zones that can neutralise black revolt.

Reading your article now resuscitates some of my bitter sentiments about the continued impact of spatial segregation rationalised as cultured settlement of natives for the sole benefit and access of whites.

Molefi expose how architecture can carry the souls of a people - and suffice to say, the spirit of each place (township or location) was inevitably going to break through the normative grids and spill to overwhelm the infrastructure of poverty that kept black communities in enclosed spaces.

And as is the case with many of your literary works that read issues, objects, practices from an internationalist vantage point, I am now forced to re-evaluate my own analysis, or perhaps bolden and broaden their scope through my audio-visual practice.

“Baipei”, as an epitaph and monicker for various squatter camps seems a residual retaliation to the pre-arranged degradation to be encountered in townships. 

Baipei - Those Who Located Themselves have thus become a new incarnation of illegitimate residences, which are in turn heavily policed and criminalised and labelled as illegal.

The country is truly grappling with politicised geographies of land dispossession, and the rampant dislocation from locations have left a truly transitory generation, who seem rootless as they cannot fix roots within any of the reinventions of “locations” around apartheid spatial designs and demarcations.

The contested issue of “origins” still haunt me, because I still cannot understand why so many places along the Witwatersrand and the N12, going as far as Lichtenberg, communities trace their origins in “locations” once called Makweteng”.

Imagine the planned and organised rationale behind the dislocation of communities onto environmental landscapes known for mud and inhospitable soil for any cultivation; places like wetlands that are always cold in winter and soggy in summer.

Peter Sloterdijk’s Critic Of Cynical Reason comes to mind when further delving into Molefi’s analysis of ghettoised existence, providing a sweeping diagnosis of our current social decay muddled by naive ideologies based on “false consciousness” manufactured by mainstream think-tanks.

The now unmasked illusion that the township is our heritage forces us to rethink the simple deceptions that went to our collective fetishisation of squalor.

And this article poses sustained arguments reflecting on how our purported modernity at various stage of human evolution can mirror disillusionment and the political fragility of systems that constructed them.

The colonial powers saw it fit to do all manner of experiments on black communities, possibly to sedate their perceived disregard for western modernity.

Molefi views geography, architecture and spatial displacement not as political aftermaths, but as constructs meant to anchor and root social dynamics “into land” which later form political ideological lineages of the dispossessed versus the possessors.

His investigation is both intuitive and interrogative of the historiography of spatial

design in relation to South African township grids, how they influence psychological

imaginings and constraints; a dialogue with his partially Sowetan heritage, that unveils those hidden codes of domination etched into topographies.

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Molefi speaks of a lifelong desire to discover a language that would insist of recognising Orlando as a microcosm of a vast modernist experiment entered around the mining economy.

This unequivocal claim could also resonate with persons from regions such as present day Merafong, or any township along the stretch of the N12, where mining industry capital invested vast resources to exploit black labour.

It was a design that constantly displaced black communities to suit radicalised economic priorities. And living in Khutsong and Kokosi or Wedela, one can observe vividly the similar spatial grid designed to plot the contemporary, yet “contained” Orlando Molefi analyses.

This spatial design applies to many townships clustered around mine-shafts and white affluent towns established for the sole purpose of white monopoly capital. 

 

From the earliest memories told by of elders in Kokosi in a documentary produced some years ago, the present township is testament and a result of forced removals from places once owned by black farming communities endowed with multiracial social layers and economic co-dependence.

Those targeted demolitions are what Molefi calls “designed beginnings” due to ”an absence produced by violence”; municipal violence through demolitions of histories and livelihood, violence of continual relocations to smudgy and often inhabitable landscapes in the periphery of white towns.

This legacy of segregationist spatial planning continues to this day, evident in many new residential developments designed around the same infrastructural seam of surveilled existence; where density is a structural condition blamed on ever growing urban, criminalised populations that require monitoring.

It therefore is commendable that, through an informed observation of past architectural forms from a contemporary vantage point, Molefi could yield such a analytically illuminating portrait of an Orlando East that seems to converge in organised symmetry into an eye slumped unto the earth; a vast township system that regulates and constitutes South African inter-personal interactions.