Reef of Time: On the Heterochronicity of Johannesburg

It directs us to consider the "reef of time" that poet William Plomer once invoked in a poem titled "Conquistadors" (1924) which describes the origins of Johannesburg—"that plundering city," as he terms it. In a recent seminar at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, I explored how Johannesburg can be understood through its "heterochronicity" or the coexistence of radically different temporalities that continue to shape the city’s landscapes, infrastructures, and cultural life. Rather than approaching Johannesburg only through political economy or urban history, I joined an ongoing scholarly conversation regarding the cultural and material afterlives of the mines that brought it into being—through exploring motifs of rock, water, and dust. 

This line of argument links the city of my birth to questions concerning the long histories of race and extraction that arc between colonial pasts and Anthropocene futures. My discussion sought to provide a perspective from which to understand the phrase "climate apartheid" that stands at the core of our project "Confronting Climate Apartheid: law, economy, culture" at the IAS, and to do so not merely by way of analogy but with particular relation to the foundational place of Johannesburg in the history of what has become known as "racial capitalism" in South Africa.

Race and Waste

Indeed, as Kentridge suggests, the political economy of Johannesburg owes much to the geology of the Witwatersrand gold reef. Two billion years ago, a colossal meteor strike impacted the area now known as the Vredefort Dome. Layers of gold and uranium deposits that had been sedimented beneath an ancient inland sea were forced closer to the surface. Mining the resultant deep and sloping reef required immense capital investment and a highly controlled labor force. South African scholars of the 1970s have shown how mining imperatives were central to apartheid, including the need to secure cheap Black labor through migration, spatial segregation, and political repression.

More recent work on the part of scholars like Achille Mbembe and Rosalind C. Morris has demonstrated how thoroughly the value of Black life was debased on the mines of the Witwatersrand—how Black life was squandered with abandon; made waste. Waste is a key concept for understanding Johannesburg as the site of past, present and future environmental devastation, as Gabrielle Hecht reminds us. From mine tailings and toxic dumps to acid mine drainage, extraction generated residues that continue to circulate long after production ceased on the mines. These forms of waste are not easily contained. They seep into groundwater, drift through air, and reshape entire ecosystems. 

Elemental Time

To close the seminar, I turned to literature and visual culture as ways of reading the various temporalities of harm attached to the Witwatersrand gold reef. In William Kentridge’s animated film Mine (1991) a visual plunge through the rock-face draws motifs of slavery, colonial violence, and apartheid into a single vertical descent. In the work of Mark Lewis and Jason Larkin, photographs of acid mine drainage create landscapes that are deceptively beautiful until the eye registers their toxicity.  Contemporary poet Uhuru Portia Phalafala memorializes her dead grandfather, a migrant worker on the mines, his "lungs contaminated by history / brimming full with mine dust." Rock, water, and dust carry memory. They refuse closure. Attending to their agency in the racially stratified landscapes of Johannesburg, past and present, may offer new ways of thinking about the salience of race in theoretical framings of climate emergency.

Louise Bethlehem
English and Cultural Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Institute of Advanced Study Fellow, Durham