John Western

WHAT'S IN A NAME? LINGUISTICS, GEOGRAPHY, AND TOPONYMS*

In differing ways, linguistics and geography each observes that a names significance is connected to a society. According to lexical theory, a word is arbitrary: Its sound and meaning have no intrinsic link; its function is grammatical. Names are, however, special words. We bestow names based on how they sound or on what they may already have come to represent; names are not arbitrary. In turn, toponyms are special names, and as example we discuss a specific one, “New Orleans.” Far from an arbitrary pairing of form and meaning, this toponym reveals that names reflect the experience of the people who use them.

AFRICA IS COMING TO THE CAPE

At the southern tip of Africa, culmination of one of the worldsgreat population shifts is there for the witnessing: a southward movement of Bantu‐speaking Black Africans, previously stalled in South AfricasEastern Cape first by climatic factors and later by European‐imposed racial segregation. Cape Town, throughout its demographic history a “Coloured” and “White” city, is now Africanizing. Liberation from apartheid has brought rapid African influx, and the metropolitan population has more than doubled in less than twenty years. Sociocultural tensions and sociocultural possibilities ensue.

A divided city: Cape Town

Abstract A sketch of Cape Town’s history since its 1652 foundation is offered. A mixed Afro–euro–asian people, the Coloureds, evolved during the era of Dutch and then British colonialism. By the time of apartheid’s imposition from 1948 onwards they had become Cape Town’s majority population group. Now, half a century later, the defeat of apartheid has brought a great influx of Black African poor from distant parts of South Africa, persons whom White rule’s infamous Pass Laws had formerly prohibited from Cape Town. The results: the metropolis has in the last twenty years doubled in population and has not only seen an immense growth in self-built shantytowns and in basic low-income housing, but also a change in complexion. An African majority is now in view, with attendant social tensions and social possibilities.

Just How Different? Loïc Wacquant's Chicago-Paris Comparisons

Addressing Wacquant in the symposium on the book Urban Outcasts, the commentator (Western) notes in introduction certain parallels in both their academic approach and their international experience, and expresses admiration for Wacquants work. Then, a summary is provided of Wacquants comparison of the U.S. inner city with the French banlieue (suburban zones of public housing), in particular of two neighborhoods in Chicago and Paris. Strong contrasts emerge along five dimensions: scale/location, race, relative deprivation, criminal violence, and state intervention/inaction. In conclusion, Wacquants call for engagement, his insistence on agency, and his refusal to submit to seemingly determinant structural-historical factors is appreciatively noted.

Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait. John Western.

John Western’s opus weaves together a rich trove of 160 in-depth interviews, conducted over seven years, of Strasburgers of all ages, origins, and classes, to offer a view of what has happened in Europe over the last, troubled century, through the lens of the emblematic city that is Strasbourg and through the lens of its people’s words. Western has gathered many stories, from the earliest memories of a German-born Alsatian of Strasbourg under Wilhelmine rule in 1909, to the most recent conversation, in 2011, with a local couple, respectively of Turkish and Moroccan origins. This ample time span, combined with a place-centered approach, allows Western to take us along on many personal wandering paths through social change and economic opportunities or difficulties, and chiefly through the vagaries of nationalism, binationalism, supranationalism, and transnationalism. Colorful, almost epic tales of Alsatian warriors (from opposing sides on European or colonial battlefields); silences; simple although often poignant stories of daily toil and social progress; joyful recollections of childhoods, travels, and homecomings, all weave together everyday life and paroxysmal events. The book is ethnographic in method and profoundly empathetic by choice. Its tone is marked by a deep honesty, and sometimes more than a hint of mischievousness—on both interviewer and interviewees’ sides. Through Western’s use of open-ended questions, Strasburgers speak of what they deem important about their city and living in it, and of what they care about. The author rigorously and seamlessly structures the variegated stories, partly chronologically, partly by focusing on specific groups of individuals (e.g., ERASMUS students, Eurocrats, “invisible” or postcolonial migrants). We learn how these individuals relate to Strasbourg, and how other Strasburgers see them.

The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. Elijah Anderson. New York, NY: Norton, 2011. xvii and 318 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, index.

Elijah Anderson is an urban ethnographer. His is hands-on, first-person research. I first met his work a good twenty years ago in Streetwise (Anderson 1990), in which he depicted the largely unlovable North Philadelphia, where I had recently been working for six years at Temple University. In measured prose, he told us with neither romanticism nor sensationalism about grim ghetto lives, and the approach of middle-class gentrifiers. How did those of such two contrasting if not adversarial worlds manage their encounters in juxtaposed-becoming-interpenetrating inner-city neighborhoods? The word I took away from that book was comity: a kind of careful, wary, sort of tolerance. Hardly cause for moral celebration, but still, a semblance of an answer to Rodney King’s plea in the Los Angeles riots: “Can’t we all get along?”

17.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-393-34051-8).

Question: for what was the struggle? Answer: social and racial justice. To be achieved, one presumed, by the abolition of apartheid. The great debate among the University of Cape Town social scientists in my time there (1974–80) was between the Liberal versus the Marxist critiques of apartheid. In the Actually Existing world, Marxism came a cropper. Did therefore the Liberal critique win out? Was not democracy brought in and – the focus of this book – has not the Cape Town metropolis been remodeled to render it secure for all, via both ‘social development’ and via the templates of ‘social crime prevention’ plus ‘best practice policing’ taken from the UK and particularly the USA? Yet what does Tony Samara find here, after 18 years of liberation? In ‘what may be the world’s most segregated city’ (p. 189) the quality of life hardly seems to be better for most, and the book’s last sentence concludes of the new spatial politics and political spaces of the Cape Flats that ‘...it is only a matter of time before they render the neoliberal city ungovernable’ (p. 195). Samara’s portrayal of contemporary Cape Town is profoundly depressing. He thinks the oppressions of global neoliberalism are being visited upon the more vulnerable and poorer and darker citizens of this place. Is Samara insisting that the glass is half empty, whereas, could it just possibly be half full? On this issue my Capetonian friends, be they in the favored city or on the Cape Flats, differ greatly among themselves. If this one insists I must understand what a positive boost to the spirit of the entire country the 2010 World Cup proved, then this other one by contrast is bitter over the relative disinvestment in Coloured schooling, and takes the African National Congress government to be heedless of brown people’s best interests. Apartheid’s legacy to me personally imparts a lack of acquaintances in the Black African townships. For such persons, once the most oppressed citizens of all, is it not all so much better now – do they not have electricity and water and telephones and no Pass raids? Yet when asked in 2002 about the job situation since liberation in 1994, 77% of them said it had got worse. Ten years later, is it still as dire? Approaching 50% of the population of the metropolis must have been born subsequent to that day of relief and of hope, Nelson Mandela’s release in February 1990. The young cannot know that ‘liberation’ is no misnomer, that those were indeed the Bad Old Days from which the beloved country escaped. What they do know, alas, is that for too many of them, jobs, respect, and personal safety are in short supply right now: these are the Bad Present-Days. The current leaders of Cape Town have world-city aspirations for their city, and wish to develop the touristic potential of the topographically magnificent metropolis. Plus, the current leaders of South Africa have as aim first to achieve macroeconomic order, to establish the nation’s position in the BRICS world club (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Social development is perforce on the backburner (though one can hardly announce that). Thus the poor – certainly half of Cape Town’s metropolitan population in 2007 – are now seen almost African Geographical Review Vol. 31, No. 2, December 2012, 200–203

Cape Town after apartheid: crime and governance in the divided city

diversity of topics and command of detail; some subjects will be very familiar, others more foreign, but it will reward with fresh insights and provoke newmental links between topics that are often treated as unrelated. The book is extensively illustrated with attractively designed diagrams, drawings, photographs, and maps and contains a useful list of relevant Websites. Nearly half of its 1,1001 references date from 1997 or later, particularly from sources such as Nature and Science. It is a worthwhile companion and update to classics like Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas 1956) and The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (Turner et al. 1990).