“There’s a drumbeat in Africa”: Embodying imaginary geographies of transnational whiteness in contemporary South Africa

Geoforum 49 (2013) 1–9

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‘‘There’s a drumbeat in Africa’’: Embodying imaginary geographies of transnational whiteness in contemporary South Africa Max J. Andrucki ⇑ Department of Geography and Urban Studies, 308 Gladfelter Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122, USA

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Article history: Received 24 October 2012 Received in revised form 1 May 2013 Available online 7 June 2013 Keywords: South Africa Whiteness Transnationalism Imaginative geographies Emotion Bodies Phenomenology

a b s t r a c t Emerging out of a study conducted in Durban of white, English-speaking South Africans (WESSAs) who had previously lived in the UK and elsewhere, this article argues that, because of South Africa’s past and current liminal position within a global meta-geography of whiteness, ‘‘imaginative geographies’’ are centrally important to the construction of transnational WESSA identities. This article uses an expanded concept of imaginative geographies that encompasses not only discursive modes of representation but also the direct, embodied experiences of differential spaces on the part of transmigrants, as informants emphasised their understandings of the spaces in which white bodies were in and out of place. The most frequently deployed imaginative geographies were meta-geographies of ‘‘first world’’ and ‘‘third world,’’ whilst South Africa was discussed as an African space of emotion, authenticity, and freedom and the UK a drab space of conformity, indignity, and discomfort. The data demonstrates that, for WESSA transnationals, South Africa and the UK emerge as geographies in relation to each other. Additionally, I argue that these unstable imaginative geographies offer potential routes to progressive means by which WESSAs can occupy the space of a democratic South Africa. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Noted South African economist and liberal M.C. O’Dowd argued almost four decades ago that South Africa, because it was essentially a colony exploited for its mineral resources, should have ‘remained in a state of overall backwardness’ (O’Dowd, 1976: p. 141), but for the presence of a small class of skilled, English-speaking entrepreneurs and owners of capital, who enabled the country to attain a ‘relatively high degree of economic independence’ (O’Dowd, 1976: p. 149). For O’Dowd, the country thus remained only very precariously outside the category of impoverished former African colonies, due exclusively to the presence of skilled English speakers. Revealingly, however, he disputes the notion that South Africa is actually a ‘developed country’. As he writes: English-speaking South Africans [have] a tendency constantly to measure South Africa by the pre-conceived model of a much wealthier and more highly developed country. This fact of virtually living in two worlds, a world of ideas imported from one kind of country and a world of reality of quite another kind, is perhaps the essential peculiar predicament of English-speaking South Africa. [. . .] It was the English and not the Afrikaner in South Africa who first invented the fallacy of South Africa as a

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White nation of three million people [. . .] to be fairly compared with Canada or Australia. (O’Dowd, 1976: p. 150) O’Dowd here argues that the instability of South Africa’s economic position as a ‘middle income country’ fosters a disconnect between the fantasy, on the one hand, that South Africa is part of the rich world, a ‘white man’s country’ (see Huxley, 1953; Miles and Phizacklea, 1984) and the equally extraordinary notion that simply because of its location on the African continent it could never aspire to be more than a post-colonial basket case. This perceptual disassociation is attributed primarily to the English-speaking population and, he argues, is central to the white, Englishspeaking South African (WESSA) ‘predicament’ of living in two worlds. O’Dowd also highlights the extent to which understandings of other places—in this case, Australia and Canada—inform WESSA perceptions of South Africa. Since the 1970s the position of South Africa within the global-scale geography—the meta-geography—of nations has continued to shift even more dramatically. WESSAs do have a long history of international mobility, and throughout the 20th century were often derogatorily ridiculed by Afrikaners, having few ties to other countries and thus traditionally more likely to stay put, as PFPs (‘Packing For Perth’) or soutpiels (Afrikaans for salt-cocks, insinuating that they stood with one foot in South Africa and one in England, with the penis dipping into the ocean) (Thompson, 2001. See also Foster, 2008). However, scholars tracing shifts in contemporary WESSA identities (e.g. Ballard, 2004a,b, South African Institute of Race Relations, 2005; Bloom,

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2009; Andrucki, 2010a,b) have argued that for many more WESSAs the response to the psychic dislocations of the post-apartheid moment has involved a spatial relocation: temporary or permanent migration, or, increasingly, various practices of ‘semigration’ (withdrawal into all-white gated communities or migration to the supposedly ‘whiter’ Western Cape). In short, O’Dowd was only halfright: WESSAs do not only live virtually in two worlds. In this article I argue that historical and contemporary circuits of migration between South Africa, the UK, and other former ‘white dominions’ inform the propensity of WESSAs to construct imaginative geographies through a meld of both fantasy and embodied practice, as places one has experienced come to be understood in relation, and often opposition, to each other. Thus this article addresses the multiple ways that South Africans imagine, code, and perform the transnational spaces through which they move. Focusing in particular on how these are understood and come to matter through the power of geographic imaginations, it examines the ways in which South Africa, as an indeterminate node within a global space economy of whiteness, is constructed and performed, coconstitutively with the UK, through racialized discourse of desire and abjection, as well as the everyday embodied practices of whiteness. I argue further that geographic imaginaries of where the Anglophone white body is in and out of place play a central role in the construction of WESSA transnational subjectivity, but that the concept of imaginative geographies can be usefully extended to encompass formations rooted not just in fantasies about places but also to those based on embodied experiences of places relationally constructed and experienced as different. I draw on phenomenology in order to highlight this essential connection between the spaces that bodies inhabit and the embodied modes of subjectivity that arise out of and project onto these same spaces. I suggest that attending to embodied life histories of transmigrants moving through and making sense of divergent spaces, and the disparities between them, allows for a more nuanced reading of the nature and role of imaginative geographies in shaping the ongoing phenomenon of white South African mobility circuits. Although much of the experience of migration and return, and the geographic imaginaries engendered by these mobilities, are doubtless shared by many South Africans of other backgrounds, the specificity of WESSA expectations and experiences of home and away in the UK and South Africa is central to the argument of this article. I highlight three main themes through which specifically WESSA imaginative geographies constitute not only sites of representation but also modes of experiencing space: the distinction between ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds; the deployment of the South Africa’s ‘Africanness’; and the identification of London as an unsuitable place to live. Through an historically-situated exploration of post-apartheid WESSA discourses on the UK and South Africa as very much contested spaces this article also argues that a closer reading of narratives of imaginative geographies reveals the potential for more cosmopolitan ways through which whites in South Africa can engage with the spaces and subjects of post-apartheid South Africa.

2. Methods and context This article draws primarily on interview material with 42 white, English-speaking South Africans (WESSAs) living in Durban, South Africa but who had spent between 3 months and 8 years living overseas. EThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, which encompasses Durban, is an industrial metropolis of approximately 3.5 million. Although its population is roughly equivalent to that of Cape Town, it is usually considered South Africa’s third city, without the ‘world city’ aspirations of Johannesburg and Cape Town (McDonald, 2008). Though its mild weather makes KwaZulu-Natal, and Durban’s ‘Golden Mile’ of beaches in particular, the

top domestic holiday destination, the city is home to heavy industry, including oil refining and automotive manufacturing. It is Africa’s busiest port, connected by road and rail to the Johannesburg region some 500 km to the north. The city region is demographically unique in South Africa, with its large Indian population (80% of the country’s total) and largely homogeneous Zulu-speaking black African population, and it is the only region of South Africa where the white and Coloured (mixed-race) populations are majority-English-speaking. The former province of Natal (since 1994 merged with the former homeland into the province of KwaZulu-Natal), founded separately from the Cape or the Boer Republics,1 and its primarily British-descended white population, is renowned for its staunch history of loyalism, royalism, and even separatism before and during the apartheid period. Even after South Africa became a republic in 1961, Natal was often dubbed ‘The Last Outpost of the British Empire’ (Thompson, 1990). Respondents’ ages ranged between 21 and 57; 27 interviewees were female and 15 male. This article is part of a broader research project on circular migration practices between South Africa and other Anglosphere countries; all but one interviewee had experience of living in the UK (the other had lived in Ireland), though some had also lived in Canada, Ireland, Taiwan, Zimbabwe, Dubai, Gabon, the Netherlands, Australia, and Germany. Most had in fact made multiple long-term sojourns to the UK, returning to South Africa each time. At the time of interviews some were in the process of re-emigrating to the UK and Australia, ostensibly for good, though this was of course unpredictable. All research subjects’ overseas experience had taken place during the post-apartheid period, defined most liberally as the time since 1990. This is the period during which South Africa re-entered the Commonwealth and began its uneasy reinsertion back into the global economy and world stage. 3. Imaginative geographies Drawing on the late cultural critic Edward Said, geographers have contributed to a growing body of work on ‘imaginative geographies,’ or what Derek Gregory (2004) calls ‘constructions that fold distance into difference’ (17). Imaginative geographies are popular understandings of faraway places and are usually understood as discursive productions that cement identities through the creation and continuous deployment of a spatially distant constitutive exterior in which otherness is embedded. Said, quoted in Holloway and Valentine (2000: p. 337), writes that ‘there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the difference and distance between what is close to it and what is far away’ (Said, 1985: p. 55). This phenomenon is of course most notoriously associated with ‘orientalism’—a discursive mode through which Europeans, by ostensibly coding ‘the Orient’ as primitive, exotic, and unchanging, were in fact attempting to shore up their own distinctiveness and its supposed relation to white racial superiority. Derek Gregory, also citing Said, (2004) writes that European and American imaginative geographies of ‘the Orient’ combine over time to produce an archive in which things come to be seen as neither completely novel nor thoroughly familiar. Instead, a median category emerges that ‘allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing’ (p. 58). This [. . .] is immensely important because the citationary structure that is authorized by these accretions is also in some substantial sense performative: it produces the effects that it names. [. . .] [I]maginative geographies are not 1 It was the site of the short-lived Natalia Republic, which was founded in 1839 and annexed by Britain in 1843 (Thompson, 2001).

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only accumulations of time, sedimentations of successive histories; they are also performances of space [. . .] (Gregory, 2004: pp. 18–19) Orientalization succeeds in ‘rendering its spaces inchoate, outside the space of Reason’ (Gregory, 2003: p. 313), creating what Gregory calls ‘‘‘wild zones’’ of the colonial imagination’ (Gregory, 2003: p. 321). Emphasising the power of discourse to construct reality, and writing against the fetishisation of abstract space, elsewhere he notes that ‘distance—like difference—is not an absolute, fixed and given, but is set in motion and made meaningful through cultural practices’ (Gregory, 2004: p. 18). South Africa itself is of course no stranger to fantastic discursive projections of both difference and sameness. Morag Bell (1993) notes that, in late Victorian Britain, South Africa was understood as a temperate part of Africa that was uniquely habitable for whites, and particularly for English women and their civilising influence. This is closely related to what Merrington (2001: p. 326) calls ‘staggered orientalism,’ an imaginative geography that took hold around the time of Union in 1910, ‘whereby the Cape and southern Africa [were] made out to be the naturalized allies of Mediterranean Africa’ (Merrington, 2001: p. 326) and Mediterranean themes in architecture prevailed. For Jeremy Foster (2008) WESSA imaginative geographies of South Africa in the inter-war period, and their expression through art, centred on the twin constructions of ‘sunshine’ and ‘distance.’ And as O’Dowd makes clear, apartheid-era WESSA imaginaries discursively erased the presence of the black majority and positioned the country as ‘white man’s country’ on par with Empire’s other former dominions. Work on imaginative geographies, both in the South African context and generally, is dominated by the centrality of texts to their production. Schwartz (1996), for instance, focuses on the part played by new technology of photography in the production of British imaginative geographies of Egypt and North America. Holloway and Valentine (2000) note the central role played by television and professional sports in the emergence of British and New Zealand children’s imaginative geographies of each other. These writers argue that geographic imaginaries are modes through which subjectivities and spaces come into co-constitutive being, but I want to argue that they can emerge not just through the circulation of text, wherein exotic places are viewed and fantasized about at a distance, but that they are produced out of embodied knowledges of dwelling in space. Geographers have begun to incorporate the embodied and material elements of the human relationship to place, including the ways in which perception of and engagement with landscapes operates through so much more than any simple formulation of the visual (Tolia-Kelly, 2004), for instance via mobile bodies that transact with their environments (Merriman et al., 2008). At the same time there has been increasing interest in the centrality of everyday, embodied and sensory interactions to the social construction of place (Dyck, 2005; McKay, 2005; Strüver, 2005; Haldrup et al., 2006; Dickinson et al., 2008; Ballard, 2010). Imaginative geographies are often constructed about distant places, and much of their ‘source material’ is fictional in origin; as Said (2000) notes, ‘the invention and construction of a geographical space called the Orient, for instance, paid scant attention to the actuality of the geography and its inhabitants’ (p. 181). Daniels (2011: p. 185), however, has recently issued a call for work on ‘the material world of the geographical imagination, including sites and spaces for the production of images’. In this article I want to explore the modes through which imaginative geographies can be informed by actual sensory, visceral, embodied experience, as situated and partial as this can be (see Scott, 1991), of life in that place. And I want to ask how subjects might use imaginative geographies to make sense of their bodies in the spaces they currently inhabit.

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4. White bodies, white spaces To answer this question requires attention to how bodies experienced as racialized are imagined to inhabit particular spaces and how the way in which one imagines space is dependent on who one imagines one is. I turn here to a discussion of recent work that takes seriously the materiality of whiteness and its co-constitution with place. Within geography whiteness has most often been portrayed as primarily a socially-constructed, discursively-mediated identity—not an ontology, but rather an epistemology and best conceptualised as a way of knowing and interacting with the world (see e.g. Dwyer and Jones, 2000). It is not understood as a material property of bodies but rather a means by which bodies are represented, understood, and variously valued and devalued. Thus, though whiteness is seen as thoroughly ‘constructed,’ the notion of a mobile body, transacting with the environment, is downplayed (see Saldanha, 2006, 2007). In short, if the body is the subject of whiteness studies at all, it is as a body racially inscribed by the functioning of power. Scholars of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa (Ballard, 2004a,b; Steyn, 2005; Steyn and Foster, 2007; Griffiths and Prozesky, 2010) have focused on discursive techniques such as ‘white talk’ to argue that ‘the dominant white representations of contemporary South Africa attempt to ‘fix’ groups relative to each other, reproducing and extending the power structures of whiteness into post-apartheid South African society’ (Steyn and Foster, 2007: p. 27). By contrast, phenomenological perspectives on race start from the lived experience of the body and understand identity and perception as arising first and foremost from bodies that are situated in space; as Crossley (1996) writes, ‘meaning is not produced by a transcendental or constituting consciousness but by an engaged body-subject’ (101; see also Seamon, 1979). In a seminal piece, Linda Martín Alcoff (1999) explains how phenomenology is indispensable to the project of understanding the mechanisms of race. Alcoff writes that an approach that privileges the lived experience of race ‘can reveal how race is constitutive of bodily experience, subjectivity, judgement and epistemic relationships’ (p. 17). She is thus interested in what she calls a ‘subjectivist’ account of race, one which is focused on ‘how race operates preconsciously on spoken and unspoken interaction, gesture, affect and stance’ (p. 17). A subjectivist approach also attends to how ‘racialization structures [. . .] the imaginary self’ (p. 18) and thus how the body’s ‘tacit knowledge about racial embodiment’ (p. 19) can be made explicit. Sara Ahmed (2007) extends this approach, with a specific emphasis on white bodies’ orientations to space, and spaces’ to bodies, and how these are inherited historical conditions. Whiteness is material for Ahmed in that it ‘orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘‘take up’’ space’. Though whiteness in itself may not have any ontological force, it is a function that ‘allow[s] bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape’ (p. 158). Thus space is crucial to her argument: spaces, she writes, ‘acquire the ‘‘skin’’ of the bodies that inhabit them’ (p. 157). They ‘take shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others’ and ‘by the repetition of the passing by of some bodies and not others’ (p. 159). White bodies, she writes, are bodies that are ‘comfortable as they inhabit spaces that extend their shape. The bodies and spaces ‘‘point’’ towards each other’ (158). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed argues that ‘white bodies are habitual insofar as they ‘‘trail behind’’ actions: they do not get ‘‘stressed’’ in their encounters with objects or others, as their whiteness ‘‘goes unnoticed’’’ (156). Because the white body has the privilege of being able to ‘lag behind,’ it has the privilege of not being noticed, and whiteness coheres and extends its reach around this bodily ‘behindness.’ This privilege has a distinct historical cause:

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Colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface. (Ahmed, 2007: pp. 153–154) Ahmed (2007: p. 156) thus argues that ‘spaces can take on the very ‘‘qualities’’ that are given to bodies.’ If whiteness is a quality of the historically privileged body, a body which is co-emergent with the production of white spaces, then it makes sense to ask how body-subjects, alive in and transacting with the world, perceive the spaces they inhabit. The whiteness of white South Africans is rooted not only in a historically-determined bodily orientation to the things that have been made reachable to them—the relative intransigence of roads, suburbs, and leisure spaces—but also by the relative ease of temporary or permanent migration to the metropole (Andrucki, 2010b). Given the centrality of both movement and imagination as a ‘spatial fix’ for WESSAs it makes sense to ask how these imaginative geographies are informed in particular by the embodied experience of being white in more than one place. 5. Different worlds As Alberto Vanolo (2010: p. 27) writes in his recent analysis of imaginative meta-geographies of core and periphery, ‘every geographical discourse [. . .] reveals a metaphorical nature’. For WESSAs with a relational understanding of South Africa’s location in space, imaginative geographies of South Africa often reflect on the country’s position within metaphorical imaginaries of global meta-geographies. The most commonly cited meta-geography is a breakdown of the world’s nation-states into those of the ‘first world’ and those of the ‘third world’ (Vanolo, 2010: p. 29), terminology that dates from the Cold War and has been superseded by the terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ in many arenas, but remains a powerful and frequently deployed framework through which transnational white South Africans understand the world. Discourses of first and third worlds, alternately pathologising and lionising large swathes of the earth’s surface, can have a very clearly racist dimension, in which ‘third world’ means ‘black,’ ‘out of control,’ ‘disorderly,’ ‘criminal,’ and ‘poor’ and ‘first world’ the opposite. However, as Stuart demonstrates, sometimes these imaginaries are more mundane. Relational depictions of the UK versus South Africa repeatedly focus on matters of efficiency and consumption: Stuart: [The UK’s] definitely far more first-world, so any government services that you require, it’s very accessible. It’s not time-consuming to, you know, apply for something [. . .]. As Gary in this quotation makes clear, the terms ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds are continuously used as shorthand for the efficiency as well as the availability of public services. Gary: I enjoyed I suppose living in a first world country as opposed to having lived here, which has a kind of a first world and third world aspect to it. [. . .] There’s certain aspects about South Africa which are still very much sort of third world. [. . .] For instance, there’s just no sort of transport system, public transport or—there is a public transport system but it’s not like the UK’s transport system, which is very much first world. Stuart and Gary’s concerns with public transport provision, especially, indicate the extent to which the provision of public goods (however privatised they may be in the UK and elsewhere) is a major contributor to imaginative geographies of what constitutes being ‘first’ and ‘third’ world—terms whose ready availability illustrates a citationary structure that performs transnational

space. It is clear that, for Gary, however, assigning South Africa as either the ‘first’ or ‘third’ world is not entirely clear-cut. His translocal subjectivity (Conradson and McKay, 2007) has given his everyday life a relational cast—the business of going about life in South Africa is constantly compared to how it would be in the UK, especially in terms of engagements with the state. Sarah indicates a second major means by which ‘first world’ is understood: as occupying a privileged location within the global division of consumption: Sarah: I like the fact that [the UK’s] so first world. Got access to, just, unlimited choice. You go into Tesco, there’s 20 different types of cheese. So from that point of view you’re just spoiled for choice. Donald discusses how his initial motivation to move to London after graduating from university was motivated by an imaginary of ‘first world’ life as providing access to cultural capital inaccessible in South Africa: Donald: I am much more interested in the trappings of the first world. Media, books, films, DVDs, music, everything that I’m interested in, video and creative stuff, art, food, you name it, we just grew up completely devoid of real exposure to, in a Christian Nationalist prison. And by the time I got to the end of [university], I had had enough, you know? So, it was very much a kind of idealised version of the first world, in a very, probably a shallow material sense, really [. . .] For me it was all about being young and enjoying the things that I enjoyed, all of which were very Eurocentric. Donald’s desire to consume culture and media in the ‘first world’ space of the UK is contrasted not with the post-apartheid order but with the authoritarian nature of the South African state when he was growing up—where television, for example, was only allowed into the country in 1976 and censorship was rife. This disrupts assumptions easily made about the racialised way in which WESSAs apply the term ‘third world’ to South Africa. In tandem with invocations of ‘third world’ as a byword for dysfunctional public services and the inability to consume, everyday emotional experiences of space in the UK and South Africa also play a role in constructing imaginative meta-geographies of difference. Jasper contrasts the supposed lack of social problems in the UK to the sense of the heaviness of life in South Africa: Jasper: I think I just enjoyed being in a first world society where there weren’t these pressing social issues. Or things didn’t feel as heavy. You know, it felt like things were, in other countries being relatively well-run, and I think I realised what a hectic society South Africa really is in a lot of ways. Fascinatingly, older now and having returned to live in South Africa, Donald likes the way in which the peculiarly South African combination of poverty and income inequality makes the country a good place to raise children who are conscious of difference and the ‘real’ state of the world: Donald: This is more real here, this is closer to what life is actually like in the world than, than living in a first world bubble. And in a strange way that’s why I want my children to grow up here, because they see both sides of it. You can see [the] capitalist first world at work, you can see third world abject poverty at work, you can see the schism between the rich and the poor. And when you look at the stats of the world, South Africa’s a pretty good microcosm of the way the world is laid out demographically, statistically, economically—you’ve got a fair indication of what things are like, you know?

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Donald is correct that South Africa’s Gini coefficient is only slightly higher than the world’s as a whole. As Vanolo notes, in meta-geographical discourse, though, all too often ‘world regions, instead of being viewed as different societies facing each other at the same time, are [. . .] differentiated and caricaturised [sic] [. . .] promoting also an idea of impossibility with respect to the possibility of modifying this economic and political framework’ (Vanolo, 2010: p. 34). For Donald, South Africa exists as a space caught within the interstices of this framework. As such it is for him an emotionally fulfilling and instructive place not only in which to live, but in which to raise children. The use of ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ thus serves as a discursive, embodied, and altogether overdetermined means of allowing for a problematic categorisation of the respective places of the UK and South Africa within a single global space economy. 6. ‘‘There’s a drumbeat in Africa. . .’’: Geographies of intensity and authenticity Scholars in geography and beyond have begun to theorise emotion as a complexly corporeal, rather than simply cognitive, experience (Lupton, 1998; Davidson et al., 2005). In this section, I turn my attention to another imaginative meta-geography, the way in which the term ‘Africa’ is deployed, in reference to South Africa, as an emotionally-loaded geographical referent. The term ‘Africa’ can also of course function as a stand-in for ‘third world’—as a space layered with a sense of slowness, inefficiency, and distanciation from modernity. As Kirk puts it: Kirk: You know, I guess the unknown is always concerning. I mean, this is Africa, so one can never tell the way things are gonna go. Valerie echoes this in an offhand remark: Valerie: I think our friends here are tired of the crime, of standing in queues, lack of service, incompetence, whereas we’ve come back and said ‘we’re coming home’, it doesn’t matter. You know, we’re in Africa, so we’ll stand in the Post Office queue, doesn’t matter. It’ll take us longer at the bank; that’s OK. Because we want to be home. The point here is not to minimise the inconvenience and inefficiency of particular services—and in fact Valerie and her husband seem quite resigned to them. What is striking is how the specificities of inefficiencies in particular government or consumer services in South Africa are subsumed by the geographic imagination, which explains differences in everyday life through the essentialisation of space rather than through an investigation into the political and economic particulars of certain types of institutional failure. More common, however, are deployments of ‘Africa’ that hinge on positive emotions elicited by thoughts of and presence in South Africa. Experience of embodied presence in the space of South Africa itself takes on special significance as imaginative geographies of Africa paint the continent as a mystical, even enchanted space, a space of the sensual, and also as a place that is imbued with meaning in a way that its geographic counterpoint/s can never be. Crucially, the ‘Africanness’ of South Africa functions synecdochically for the whole varied continent. Thus for respondents like Simon there is a sense in which the country, being in Africa, offers more authentic and real experience of life. Simon draws, in particular, on the natural environment, and sounds in particular, in a sensory and deeply corporeal description of the essence of his feelings for South Africa, positing the irresistible emotional call of natural ‘Africa’ as the antithesis of what is ‘logical’:

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Simon: The pull back, it’s very difficult to explain. It’s very much an emotional response. It’s not one that’s based on logic, it’s not one that’s based on anything else except pure emotion. You’re watching a television nature documentary, and it’s set in South Africa. And you hear a very common bird here, the hadeda; it’s one that wakes you up at the crack of dawn every morning with that loud, raucous cry that just has you reaching for a catapult to shut it up when you live here. But when you’re over there, and you hear that, it just does something really deep inside you, and it’s like someone put a hand on your heart and just squeezed it. And it’s an incredibly emotional pull, and you do wake up one morning and you just think, you know, whatever the problems here are, let’s give it a shot. This sensuous and emotional imaginative geography of course works in both directions—as the moral landscapes of England and South Africa become each others’ constitutive exteriors. In this way, paeans to Africa are clearly not endogenous, but emerge as the result of transnational experience. For instance, Peter’s imaginative emotional geography of the UK is inseparable from his sense of the ‘vibrancy’ that even crime brings to everyday life in South Africa: Peter: There’s a kind of death of politics that’s happened in England, where people have retreated into their rooms with their Gameboys. [. . .] And sort of retreated from life. [. . .] And it’s just so enervating, it’s a kind of depression I think, actually, that isn’t here. I mean, perhaps some people are depressed about the crime situation here. I’m not. I mean it’s rife, it’s rampant, it’s probably the worst in the world. But it’s not something I can get depressed about, because it’s something that’s happening, it’s a kind of vibrancy. For Harriet, while Africa has always been a space of connection, and interaction with others is imbued with a special quality, London is explicitly imagined as an ultimately soulless space. Harriet: It was kind of, more exciting, in a way, to come back here. [. . .] England never gave me that feeling, that feeling that South Africa gave me. I never felt a real fondness for things in England. However long I was there, I enjoyed the people, it was amazing, I enjoyed like the culture and everything, but I never had that really deep feeling that I have always had for South Africa. When you speak to someone, they look at you, and they’re genuine. [In London] I’d walk out my flat and I wouldn’t even want to see the people that I was seeing. It’s kind of, such a horrible, consumerism, and vulgarity that kind of just made me feel sick. Emphasising the co-constitution of imaginaries of spaces and of bodies, Cicely expresses this sentiment through an evaluation of the relative masculinity of British and South African men, as well as through an invocation of South Africa’s more appealing visual landscape: Cicely: I turned around to [a friend in England] one day and I said, you know, I just could never marry an Englishman. You know, they’re little grey men, they come home in the evenings and play with train sets in the attic and I just don’t know what to do with that. I want to sit outside and. . .braai meat. Go do stuff, walk barefoot. They just don’t hear of it. And they’re always grey, and black. Everybody has a black umbrella. You drive along the streets in South Africa, and people are wearing orange and green, and, you know, it’s so much more lively. And you don’t have to be skinny. In South Africa it really doesn’t matter as long as you’re happy. [. . .] You know, there’s a drumbeat in Africa. And it beats inside you, and you can’t ignore it. And this is where I belong. I need my feet on African soil.

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Cicely’s imaginative geographies are very clearly informed by corporeal, sensory experiences, and she narrates her preference for South Africa as emerging out of the romantic potential of the space. Sensorily, she responds to the pleasing nature of colours, particularly in clothing, encountered in everyday life in South Africa. Furthermore, she constructs South Africa as a space of bodily comfort by indicating her sense that her weight, as a woman, is less closely monitored and stigmatised than in the UK. These emotional invocations of ‘Africa’ are the bread and butter of groups like the Homecoming Revolution that attempt to lure back overseas South Africans with tales of South Africa’s beauty and the feelings it stirs (Andrucki, 2010a), and in this sense they can be construed as ‘positive’ images. However they also serve to construct Africa as an irrational, ungovernable space ruled by the irresistible forces of nature, lauding the continent’s and country’s landscapes while very often circumventing the issue of engagement with its people (see Ballard and Jones, 2010). But this is not always the case. According to Sarah, it is the diversity of landscapes and peoples in the country that makes it both particularly ‘African’ and particularly appealing: Sarah: I think it’s very difficult to get Africa out your blood. It’s the Africanness of it, the fact that you’ve got all these different cultures in one country. Different landscapes. You know, you’ve got Cape Town, Durban, they’re all so different. And in all those places the people are different. They speak Afrikaans, or they’re Cape Coloured—all that variety, it’s colourful. There’s a rawness there, in the landscape, and the people, and I think that that’s quite appealing, and I think it’s quite difficult to let go of that. Makes life interesting. Whereas [in the UK] it’s a little bit more predictable, and it can be quite bland after a while. Sarah here not only indicates that it is a combination of environmental and sociocultural conditions that construct South Africa as both a familiar and yet exciting place, but also demonstrate the role that transnational imaginative geography can play in the production of a post-apartheid cosmopolitan whiteness. For though the UK might offer the prospect of predictability, it is in fact Durban’s diverse, heterotopic landscape that both she and Cicely prefer. This thus throws up fundamental questions about the epistemology of whiteness as a ‘non-relational ontology’ (Dwyer and Jones, 2000: 212) defined by its unwillingness to see itself as anything other than a stable referent requiring mastery over space. Though imaginative geographies do ‘enfold difference into distance,’ fetishising and often homogenising images of space, this process can also have productive, emancipatory ends through which subjects can choose to comfortably locate themselves as white subjects in spaces in which whiteness itself is no longer hegemonic (see Ballard, 2004a). This sense of ‘cosmopolitan whiteness’ is thus potentially enabled through imaginaries of (South) Africa as a comfortably diverse space in which the white body-subject feels at home, but only if that projection of an organic relationship between subject and world operates through symmetrical power relations. 7. The indignities of London and the nanny state: Imagining the white body out of place If South Africa is constructed as a space of authenticity and intensity of experience, a colourful, diverse, exciting, and wild peripheral space, the ‘first world’ destinations of migration, London in particular, are imagined in relational and often opposing ways by transnationals making sense of their experiences in the metropolis. Although many informants discussed the cultural and career opportunities available in London, repeatedly in interviews was imparted a discrete sense of the indignities imposed on the white

body in these spaces, which include both the lack of luxury for the middling classes as well as annoyance at the heavy presence of the everyday state—in other words, the sense that the ‘nanny state’ is out of control. These perhaps unexpected geographic imaginaries, in which the WESSA body is imagined as out of place in the UK, with its markedly different political and racial economy, are subtended by an appeal to a whiteness constituted materially through class, a whiteness marking potential belonging in any Englishspeaking country, but yet as a middle class experience which demands creature comforts and the physical distance that only Africa can provide for from, in particular, those uncanny poor white bodies. Echoes of this clearly live on in the discourse of white South Africans who are not only routinely shocked to see white people performing manual labour in Britain but whose whiteness is in some sense threatened by the imagined loss of prestige that proximity to these other white bodies might occasion (see Kennedy, 1987). These views emphasise continuities with earlier histories of circuits of white migration. David Kynaston’s (2007) work on postwar Britain indicates the extent to which, during the 1940s and 50s, the English middle class felt itself squeezed by the austerity measures and welfare state expansion of the Attlee government and how South Africa was seen by many, in the words of one would-be emigrant, as ‘[a] country [. . .] which has many attractions as against Britain, where we are hedged around with so many restrictions and frustrations and where the retired rentier has to pay penal taxation, and, in the Socialist mentality, is looked upon as a cross between a drone and a criminal’ (261). Similarly, many post-war British settlers in Kenya explicitly identified themselves as ‘refugees from the welfare state’ (Lipscomb, 1955). Donald, speaking of why he’d never move overseas again, articulates the sense of frustration at the restrictions—perhaps exaggerated—imposed on him when he lived overseas in Canada: Donald: Everyone drives at 60, you can’t trim a tree in your own garden without like getting the neighbours to sign various forms and applying to the local municipality to get a permission slip. [. . .] It’s overregulated to the point of insanity, and that would just drive me nuts because I like the relatively lawless feel of living in Africa, you know. I’d like it less if I were living in Zimbabwe, say, [laughs]? But the middle ground, where there’s a like first/third world crossover nation. Many WESSAs reported being disturbed by the highly regulated nature of life in ‘first world’ countries, even if at best they are simply circulating urban legends: Rae: It’s a bizarre sense of. . .order, that I find slightly disturbing. I felt like I needed to misbehave more in the UK because it was just so much more ordered and structured, in terms of the most, like mundane things, the way that streets work, the way that people walk. It was a very ordered kind of society, which I found a little bit unnerving. Elizabeth: They want to be super-regulated, I mean, people don’t even drive with their arms out the window. I don’t know if that’s illegal or whatever, but they’re like, ‘ooh, no, you don’t do that.’ [. . .] They’re so anal, I couldn’t take it. Someone even told me that they won’t let you take a doggy bag from a restaurant in case it’s since gone off and then you poison yourself. There is a clear connection to the privilege whites have had in South Africa to more or less do as they please without the intrusion of the state. I interpret this not only as the flip side of the UK’s social wage provision, but, like the material trappings of everyday life, as closely bound up with South African expectations for the privileges associated with whiteness—to be able to do whatever one wants without interference from the state. This set of discourses is complex. On the one hand it invokes image of South

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Africa that is heterogeneous, diverse, and even unpredictable. However, it also draws on orientalising notions of life in Africa as intrinsically more ‘colourful’. Even more problematically, it echoes a nostalgia about the unsettled, frontier-nature of life in Africa, in which white bodies have been uniquely positioned to do as they please. Unsurprisingly, this is closely matched in the economic sphere as well, where white entrepreneurs appreciate the wide open field of possibilities they have to make a buck, paradoxically a particular attribute of contemporary South Africa, now rid of the high level of state intervention in many sectors characteristic of the apartheid era of national capitalism. On the other hand, in the UK the state, through its provision of a safety net, is imagined not only to constrain economic behaviour but to sap the very vitality of the population: Kirk: I think there was always this feeling [in the UK] that the state’s gonna look after them and that, and I think nothing was challenging for them. Because, having come from South Africa where everything’s been a challenge, life’s a challenge, I think, and there’s no free handouts. There, nothing seemed to challenge them. For Kirk, a beneficiary of apartheid, to describe himself as having had ‘no free handouts’ itself reveals a particular geographic imaginary of 20th-century South Africa as a ‘level playing field’ populated by hardy, self-reliant whites. Thus through this fantasy of self-reliance, Kirk also invokes the transnational emotional imaginary in which South Africa is imbued with feelings of pride and satisfaction and Britain a space devoid of it. The sense of a general lack of freedom was frequently expressed in terms of a profound dislike for the routines of urban life in London, in particular riding the Underground, and the associated proximity to unknown others that is largely alien to South African whites who, unlike the country’s poor majority, rely for transportation almost entirely on private cars: Daniel: [I disliked] the lack of space when you’re on the Tubes. [. . .] Not having that breathing space, not having the space we have in South Africa. That got to me for a while. Peg, like Daniel, directly contrasts her experience of the affective experience of everyday urban life in London with that in South Africa: Peg: British people are very unfriendly, but I became unfriendly too. Because you’re sitting in the Tube with like 15 million people stuffed in the Tube, the last thing you want to do is have a little chit chat, you know? The environment doesn’t create a nice happy feeling. If you’re here in Durban, the sun is shining, the beautiful weather, of course I’m gonna be smiling all the time and greeting you. For Peg, not only were the material encounters undergone in the London transport system unsuitable for white bodies, bodies used to the privilege afforded them by the racialized structure of South Africa’s political economy, but, again, even the environmental and infrastructural preconditions for good feelings in the UK are inadequate. This was not, of course, restricted to the sensory experiences of transport and weather, but also to a general sense that, as Greg notes, the privileges of whiteness are not protected in London as they are in South Africa: Greg: I found it very difficult getting around, I found the Tube travelling incredibly tiring. And I think London’s a very hard place to not be making money. [. . .] Being back was amazing. It just felt really comfortable and so much easier than England [. . .] in terms of getting around, travelling, in terms of getting work, in terms of everything being familiar. It just felt life, certainly compared to London, was a little slower and a little more forgiving.

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Greg disliked what he perceived as the disjuncture between the class privileges associated with whiteness in London the World City versus peripheral South Africa, where life, even without a top-flight job, is ‘comfortable’ and ‘easy.’ This perception of whiteness in Britain as devoid of privilege and marked by indignity extended into perceptions of the country as full of masses of undistinguishable people living in mass-produced houses: Arlene: I couldn’t individualise between British people, they all seemed the same to me. And they all seemed like they lived in those, those houses that all the houses look the same. [. . .] And there were just so many of them. I couldn’t figure them out. In this way Britain functions as a constitutive outside for the imaginative geography of South Africa as a post-colony still identified as a frontier space, in which whiteness in particular is characterised by the freedom to do what one pleases, and away from the indignities of the ‘nanny state’ and the lack of similar levels of relative white privilege in Britain. Whiteness in South Africa is imagined as specific, individual, and special; in the UK it’s anonymous, undistinguished, and not at all special. Thus this set of imaginative geographies very clearly locates white bodies as ‘in place’ in postapartheid South Africa—on their own terms. 8. Conclusion This article has focused on the way in which geographies—in particular, South Africa and the UK—are imagined and performed by WESSA transnationals, as co-constitutive spaces that are made meaningful through the way in which white bodies are understood as alternately in and out of place. I began this article with a discussion of how, before and during apartheid, South Africa was imagined by WESSAs as a ‘white country,’ a ‘first-world country,’ and thus, though increasingly marginalised by sanctions, as part of the club of English-speaking countries that perceived themselves as central to global economy and culture. While in many ways the sense of displacement, in-betweenness, and longing are characteristic of many transnational and diasporic populations (see e.g. Glick Schiller et al., 1995; Ley and Kobayashi, 2005), as I have demonstrated, the case of WESSAs is distinct in terms of the history of privilege and mobility that subtend their subjectivities and how this informs both discourses around and lived experiences of transnational body-spaces. In addition, South Africa is in many ways distinct by virtue of its rapid discursive makeover from ‘first world’ to ‘third world’ and much longer path from Dominion to BRICS member. As M.C. O’Dowd noted, WESSAs in particular have a long history of investing the space of South Africa with particular geographic attributions, attributions that have long served political and personal projects of settlement and domination. I have argued that in the post-apartheid period, South Africa, occupying a particularly liminal space in the imaginative meta-geography of its white English-speakers, has been a template into which productions of self, of difference, and of space have been poured, through discursive constructions as well as the manifold material practices of colonialism and apartheid. Throughout the 20th century, but especially since the democratic transition, WESSAs have depended on the deployment of strategies of the geographic imagination in order to reconcile both their continued presence in the new democratic country, their departure from it, and circuits of movement in and out. As the single most popular country of temporary and permanent destination, but also by virtue of its uncontested core location (the re-insertion of London into the global ‘scene’ in the mid-1990s through discourses of ‘Cool Britannia’ surely helped) and a long history of its construction as ‘home’ and ‘mother country’, the UK has emerged as the site through which South Africa was relationally imagined, but also, through

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direct experience, understood. The relationality of geographic imaginations is rendered salient through the exploration of the ways in which South Africa as colourful, ungoverned, emotional, and authentic—as African—is opposed to imaginings of UK as the drab home of an overbearing nanny state and a drab, undistinguishable populace. Thus here I argue that the embodied experience of lives lived in more than one country has also allowed the expansion of the term ‘imaginative geography’ to encompass the way spaces are inhabited and practiced, not only represented. This does not, however, mean that embodied subjectivity and geographical imaginaries are locked in a closed feedback loop. As Gregory (2003) writes, geographic imaginaries also produce ruptures in which new performances and thus spatial productions become possible: Performance creates a space in which it is possible for ‘newness’ to enter the world. This space of potential is always conditional, always precarious, but every performance of the colonial present carries within it the possibilities of reaffirming and even radicalizing the hold of the past on the present or of undoing its enclosures and approaching closer to the horizon of the postcolonial [. . .] (Gregory, 2003: p. 308) For instance, invocations of South Africa as Africa, problematic though they can be, are also a means of acknowledging and participating in the re-scripting national space in light of the democratic transition, as South Africa has become understood as an African country, culturally and demographically as well as geopolitically through its leadership in the Southern African Development Community and the African Union. South Africa is performed as peripheral within the global division of labour and consumption, as a space that is abject, dysfunctional, and incomprehensible, but also as a space of colour, emotion, and comfort, while the UK and other parts of the Anglosphere are simultaneously positioned as the constitutive opposite—efficient and orderly, sometimes too orderly. Imaginative geographies of South Africa that can be interpreted as complaints for many, and which at times subtend South Africa’s supposed post-apartheid ‘white flight,’ can be interpreted both as a means of exercising white privilege as well as an attempt to imagine a utopian space where less problematic relations to South Africa’s others can be constructed. In short, the instability of South Africa as a geographical referent and its role in a global context, and the ways it is imagined by transnational whites in relation to the UK, also reveals the unstable positionality of the WESSA subject itself, and that identities and imaginaries need to be understood as co-constituted in as well as between places. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Johan Andersson, Jen Dickinson, Héctor Agredano Rivera, Joanna Sadgrove, Charlotte Lemanski, Daniel Conway, Belinda Dodson, Richard Ballard, the Citizenship and Belonging Research Cluster at the School of Geography, University of Leeds, and three anonymous reviewers for their assistance and many helpful comments. References Ahmed, S., 2007. The phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory 8 (2), 149–168. Alcoff, L.M., 1999. Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment. Radical Philosophy 95, 15–26. Andrucki, M., 2010a. Circuits of Whiteness: Transnational Practices in PostApartheid South Africa. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. School of Geography, University of Leeds. Andrucki, M., 2010b. The visa whiteness machine: transnational motility in postapartheid South Africa. Ethnicities 10 (3), 358–370. Ballard, R., 2004a. Assimilation, emigration, semigration, and integration: ‘‘white’’ peoples strategies for finding a comfort zone in post-apartheid South Africa. In:

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