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Film, TV, Video

Not No Place, Jeppe on a Friday and representing Joburg: Excerpts from a conversation

Shannon Walsh, Arya Lalloo, Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt

Abstracts

Shannon Walsh and Arya Lalloo are co-directors of the documentary feature Jeppe on a Friday, which documents life in the Johannesburg neighbourhood of Jeppestown. Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt are co-authors of a book on Johannesburg entitled Not No Place (Jacana Media, 2013). What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation about the process of making the documentary film and the book, on the occasion of their tenth anniversary, with special focus on the distinct approaches to, and difficulties of, representing the city of Johannesburg.

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1Not No Place is a collage of visual and written fragments on Johannesburg—historical, archival, found and self-generated. The book is the result of documenting and collecting material on the city over the course of five years. It interweaves selected quotations with personal memories and reflective accounts, as well as fiction, in an attempt to explore the city as both lived place and an imagined no-place (the direct translation of Utopia). A montage combining photographs, drawings, archival material and texts, the book alternates between the mode of collector, witness, observer and author, taking into account the numerous representations of the city in historical writing, urban theory, film, media and fiction. Not No Place presents a collection of moments in the city’s complex history, its contemporary spatial realities as well as its future projections. Thematic sections vary from the poetic to the concrete: water, passages, mining, animal, green, speculation, etc.

2Jeppe on a Friday is a feature-length documentary that traces the ups and downs of a day in the lives of five people in the neighbourhood of Jeppestown. The film follows Arouna, a restaurant owner from Benin, Robert, the leader of a Zulu Men’s choir based in the Miner’s Hostels, J.J., a young urban developer with big plans for the neighbourhood, Vusi, who collects and sorts out trash, and Ravi, an Indian shopkeeper who has lived in the neighbourhood his whole life. More than just an ethnographic exercise, Jeppe on a Friday provides an insightful and cross-cultural appreciation of the idea of neighborhood and community in contemporary South Africa.

3Bettina Malcomess (BM): The book started with us both working in the city of Jo’burg. Dorothee had been running (part of) the Joubert Park Project, based at Drill Hall. I had come in on a residency, and we’d thrown around the idea of making a collaborative book together about Johannesburg. I’d grown up in Jo’burg but had been living in Cape Town for ten years or so at that point.

4Dorothee Kreutzfeltd (DK): I had come to Johannesburg in 2000.What I brought [to the book project] was having worked in the city for more than nine years or so, in one part of the inner city not too far from the area that you focused on in the film, Jeppestown. At the Drill Hall, we were running a kind of a multiuse heritage site. We were based there, had a gallery and ran a residency project, alongside a couple of social organizations who worked with street kids and ex-sex workers and so on. I would not have considered doing a book or writing at that time, so making the transition was a challenge, even though the book ended up not really being a traditional text.

5BM: Yes, we approached the book like a collage, instead of writing about the city from one point of view. It consists of fragments of our writing, which is quite personal usually, but also sometimes fictional, mixed with fragments taken from a wide variety of sources. There is material such as weird government-commissioned studies on highways, material we found in archives and secondhand scrap yards, like invitations to the opening of the great Carlton Hotel at the beginning of the city’s founding. I think the interesting thing about Jo’burg is that it is such a young city, so you have about a hundred and thirty years in which the city has come from literally nothing to what it is today. It’s a gold mining city. It has this interesting dynamism about it, and the speed with which it has grown. In a way it’s never stopped to account for its history or its past. This is why the fragmentary method of working fit. It started to feel like it was the only way to write the book.

6Shannon Walsh (SW): I think there’s a lot of crossover between the way you worked on the book, and the way Arya and I approached making the documentary Jeppe on a Friday. Arya, it reminds me of the ways you were seeing the city when I met you. It actually resonates a lot with what Dorothee and Bettina are saying.

7Arya Lalloo (AL): I think the city is in a constant process of change; the way that the organic history is very much alive in the space—the mix of people, the kind of communities that are already old and established up against new communities. There is inherently a set of tensions, because these kinds of things are not easily set up against each other. I suppose for me, personally, coming to Jo’burg was tied to 1994 because that was the moment we came here from Pietermaritzburg. For me, Jo’burg is this city of dreams in that kind of way. And I think that a lot of people were arriving at that time, not just from South African rural areas but from across the continent. You know the early nineties were this incredible moment and tied to my coming of age. So to me, the city, the urban, to bring all the dreams you had—if you were a small town girl that kind of space at that moment in time was really incredible.

8DK: It’s funny, when I arrived here there was this sort of big exodus from the city. I moved up from Cape Town and everybody was leaving Johannesburg. It was really going through a bad patch, officially.

9SW: That is the tension, though. Joburg is the city of dreams and also a city of fear and apprehension. The imaginary of Jo’burg contains both promise and this destructive element.

10AL: It’s true. Someone pointed out to me the other day that it was actually pretty depressing, like Detroit. And I was completely offended. [Laughter] But it’s true.

11BM: Parts of the inner city can look really run down. And, you know, it’s always this mix of a kind of aspiration and spectacular wealth, and then this kind of degeneration or decay. That’s where we got the title for the book from. Not No Place comes from the idea that Jo’burg is definitely a place, but the double negative refuses the kind of narratives of dystopia, which often particularly define the inner city, especially with the large wave of immigrants who live in areas like Hillbrow, which are really over populated. And then the no place also contains a reference to utopia. So, it’s also not a utopia, which is the “no place.”

12DK: You could speak to so many different people from Johannesburg, whether they are from Alex, Soweto or the Northern suburbs, and they would speak from the point of view of a place, or neighbourhood, really differently. There would always be multiple imaginaries in one’s head. In your film, you place a particular focus on one neighbourhood, Jeppestown, which is so much part of the original history of Johannesburg, as young as the city is. You must have come across many people who do not necessarily identify with being from that neighbourhood, but they pass through, and this is where they have made it their home. This is the lens from which they enter the broader network of Jo’burg. So Jo’burg is in many ways something that exists in many people’s memories and in their imaginaries as they traverse the city on a daily basis. And it becomes a real place when they enter their own neighbourhood.

  • 1 Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Factory was an interactive exhibition that allowed participants to make (...)

13AL: We had a strange question at one of the recent screenings: “It’s a great film, thanks for presenting it, but, what have you shown that’s new?” There was something funny about that question coming from an upwardly mobile student at the film school next door to where the screening was happening. There seemed to be a desire for a kind of representation beyond the dystopic version of Jo’burg. I also worked on the Johannesburg version of Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Factory,1 and in that project we recreated a film set of Johannesburg that the public could make films in. Some of the notes we got back from our funders was that they wanted to see more of the aspirational Jo’burg, or the Jo’burg of the future, what the world’s premier African city imagines itself to be one day. We were being pressured to represent that imaginary in the space. It was a strange thing because that’s exactly why the movie Jeppe resonates. As a viewer, you have time to unpack and deconstruct really everyday life—the now. Accepting it, embracing it, finding ways to look at it. It’s difficult though because that sort of future-looking is a symptom of a real desire for development. A desire for change.

14AL: I had a great conversation with a young Kenyan, who was at the First Wednesday screening of Jeppe on a Friday. And he was saying that Kenya is also undergoing rapid development. The film really resonated with him because it gave him an opportunity to think about his own community, which is an old neighbourhood, which is deeply depressed, which you just want to escape, to be someplace else. It gave him a way to look at it and a way to think about it that made him feel some kind of pride, actually.

15SW: I think that’s one of the things with the film that felt subversive to us, and it’s hard to know if it always comes across, but it is about bringing the joyfulness of everyday human experience back into the stories that we tell about Johannesburg. The story of Jo’burg as a place dominated by crime, or the idea of the inner city as only a place of tension and frustration and dystopic worlds, is only one narrative. While it is also all of those things, we evicted a lot of the harshest parts of that discussion in the film. It’s not to pretend that they are not there, but it seems like the everyday lives of Africans sit in this uncomfortable position globally, in terms of what cinema representations and narratives of Africans are supposed to be. It’s acceptable if it’s violent or poverty stricken or genocidal. It’s as if there is a certain kind of representation that’s fine, but to look at the everyday idiosyncrasies of daily life provokes a response of questioning why we would do that. Why show Africans’ daily lives? Isn’t there supposed to be more happening? While Europeans’ and North Americans’ everyday lives are very well documented. It is part of how the film acts for us as a political opening. We wanted to make this small incision into the discourse within the sphere of Jo’burg, but also within how we structured the film.

16BM: Yes, it’s about the ordinary. You really get the sense of people’s everydayness. I remember attending the feedback screening for the film. All of us were feeling uncomfortable with the critique that emerged around the developer, J.J., who is the only white character in the film. It seemed really too harsh. In the final edit, you tone him down a lot, and I think that was quite interesting.

17SW: It’s a complicated thing, because I think we were trying to make something open enough through a collection of ideas that the spectator can participate in constructing their own story, and so the viewer has to give themselves to the story a little bit. Who is looking at the film really changes what they are looking at. When we screened Jeppe on a Friday internationally, we had some strong negative reactions to the white character. People felt a lot more discomfort around him than we saw with South African audiences. It depends on who those audiences are, where they’re coming from, and this shapes their perceptions. Someone asked me recently “Was it difficult to make the film as a foreigner?” And it’s funny, I thought in South Africa we’re all foreigners in some ways. You know? For our five characters in the film, no one had been in all of the spaces represented in the one neighbourhood seen in the film. There was a shared sense of space (Jeppestown), but there’s also a distance around who has access to what space. So Arya, you’re from South Africa, but not from Jo’burg. You know? You’ve got your own kind of cultural position, your own race position, your own class, gender position, and yet walking into the Men’s Hostel would have been as foreign to you as it was for me. Those kinds of tensions are part of the craziness of South Africa as well.

18DK: The story and character that I felt was the most interesting in the film was Robert, the leader of the men’s choir who lives among many men in the former miners’ Men’s Hostel. I think it has to do with the fact that as much as we follow him, as much as we enter with him into an area that definitely one doesn’t have access to—and you had to negotiate your place in order to film there—when we follow him in the film and see the interactions and the environment in which he lives, and how he gets deals for the choir, and listening to the choir, seeing the choir perform in the basement and so on . . . As much as it is extraordinary to see it, it also remains absolutely mysterious. It does not explain itself, does not offer us a sense of how this environment can exist, and the fact that they live under these circumstances to this day in that particular neighbourhood is not explained.

19In many ways, this is something that I feel again and again in Johannesburg. Even if you spend time—months—many conversations with a specific group of people that come from a particular place and have been living here for long, still you know you’ll never fully enter their world. So, this idea of the foreigner or the stranger remains. Yes, at the same time, it’s also not only “outsiders” and “strangers.” There needs to be another word for it.

20We are participants and we can have these conversations, and yet it’s more a sentiment of what the city can allow oneself to encounter and what one walks away with, in terms of gathering a sense of belonging . . . That, for me, was one of the most interesting parts in the story of Robert and the choir. It felt visually, and in terms of its presence, one of the most powerful scenes, yet at the same time it left me with a feeling of total sadness because I feel like there’s a point at which this kind of life cannot sustain itself much longer. One feels that it’s at an end point . . . The way it’s being lived now cannot last.

21SW: I wonder if it is. It actually reminds me of something you said, Bettina, not long ago about gender in the city, and talking about the way that you can or you can’t engage as a woman in the city as well, and in the streets it doesn’t allow for a certain kind of walking to experience the space.

22BM: The one thing that I did in the book was to construct a figure, who is an avatar for the kind of spaces I would like to be able to enter. The figure is a time traveller, who is a black man, who is able to traverse the city in ways that I cannot. But, also, it is someone who is a total outsider who can never totally engage. The character has an affliction of vertigo and cannot judge spatial distance, which is a side effect of time travel, so he’s somewhat a limited traveller, but he is a traveller through the city’s different times and is trying to make a coherent report but cannot. It reflects the book’s fragmentary nature and this inability to reconcile these various narratives of the city, and these various voices—the inability to reconcile the voices that speak the city, in various languages and genres...

23AL: I had a really funny moment the other day. It was just the early evening and we were driving home on the east side of the city, and there was a group of guys that were coming towards the car. And I was like, “Oh shit!, we’re going to get mugged” and as that happened I saw another group of guys approaching this first group. So I realized that the reason they were moving into the road towards our car was because they themselves felt completely unsafe. They had reacted to the group of men coming towards them in the same way that I had reacted to them. The thing is, I suppose you always imagine that the way somebody else can move through Johannesburg is going to be easier than how you do, because it cannot be that we all cannot easily navigate it. But I think that might be the case.

24SW: That is a lot of what we were trying to do with the film. To represent that irreconcilable tension in Johannesburg . . . I think it’s uncomfortable sometimes for people to watch for that reason. They are almost frustrated with us for not reconciling all the characters in the film.

25AL: Right.

26SW: People expect that there should be a moment in the film when everyone comes together. After screenings there are often questions around if the people in the film meet. There’s this desire for reconciliation in this irreconcilable division between people, where each world is actually complete and inaccessible. I think that’s the kind of sadness, Dorothee, that you talk about—or there’s some kind of impossibility there. I don’t know if it’s about things coming to an end or just the separation between worlds that feels it doesn’t have a clear way to overcome. We talk about things like transportation and construct glorious narratives of how better bus systems will connect people together and break down the divisions, or how if we can learn each other’s languages that there would be some potential unity, and then it suddenly all feels like it splits apart again and everyone is in their absolutely impenetrable bubbles.

27AL: I think that’s why J.J.’s character is so disquieting. If you imagine the idea that you can navigate the city easily, then that space and the neighbourhood become yours. It’s the place you’re going to. You know the person at the corner shop, you are familiar there. You are not perceived as alien or as someone that is not supposed to be there. Not temporary . . . it’s like a dream . . . it’s a transitory, very temporary familiarity inside of sorts of self-contained micro worlds. It’s those micro worlds that we explore in Jeppe. J.J.’s character is disquieting because of the act of claiming, which is also the act of dominion.

28SW: Hmm . . . There is something suspicious in the attempt to flatten everything into a false unity. There’s something that is about more than just gentrification in that flattening. It’s disquieting in that it’s an erasure as well as it is an act of dominion, even if that’s not his intention or the intention behind urban gentrification. At the same time, is the flip side a desire for a unified Jo’burg?

29BM: I think the flip side is also the spaces like the Arts on Main development (where J.J. lives), which implants a certain subjectivity into the space of what was really a rundown area that edged a former light industrial area, that has its own community and makes its own networks and markets, that has this huge Men’s hostel and was one of the original mining areas . . . and then you suddenly have this weird zone (the Arts on Main development) that isn’t quite a context for the people who have lived there either. It’s like these two sorts of parallel worlds that suddenly collide in the space of Jeppestown.

30AL: I don’t think there are only two. There are multiple worlds.

31BM: Absolutely.

32AL: That’s the thing where we started with the multiple layers of communities, organic layers of history of different degrees of a kind of fixedness, or transition, and I suppose, the question is perhaps whether we want it flattened? I guess it is an organic process, or an organic way that this kind of integration and identity can be formed.

33DK: It goes back to talking about the fact that in the film the characters don’t really meet, you know, that each person seems to kind of pass through the area, or spends time, but they don’t necessarily meet. They don’t make meaningful contact beyond going to the shop and buying something in Ravi’s place. I was thinking that in the film, what comes through is that what binds them together is the street. It’s the street that enables these different arteries to develop, these areas where you claim your place. I think that life on the street will be always something about the city of Johannesburg, particularly the inner city—something that will draw me in. On one hand, it is changing so enormously fast, so it isn’t a surprise that you have this new urban chic development that has such an instant audience and such big support by people who go there on a daily basis. J.J. is part of that environment, and he’s developing it further. He kind of envisions something else to take place there, which seems from an outside point of view to be stagnant.

34In each point in the film, there is a particular part of the city that can be seen as so immobile, so stagnant, so gendered, so resistant, so incredibly inventive. As in the case of the guy from Benin who opens a restaurant which becomes the place where many other African foreigners meet. So contrary to the sense that Johannesburg is a xenophobic city, the film counteracts these super-narratives that the city continually churns out. I think as it begins to make us see and take notice of these points, the streets are always the places that we return to.

35SW: Coming back to territory, coming back to everyday life to actually inform our analysis about what is happening in the world . . . to allow the contradictions to flourish as well. If there’s a knowing to be had, that knowing is within accepting the contradictions. The way it is with a friend or a lover—a calmness about the contradictions—and in the contradictions there is a way of relaxing. In Johannesburg, we’re often not there. The contradictions repel us. We don’t want them. Perhaps embracing them is a way of reconciling our relationships with the city. Maybe it is this otherness, foreignness and contradiction, that is the sense of place.

36BM: Yes, doing the book for five years, and then returning to the city, it sort of helped me to live here. I mean it’s really quite hard for me to return to Jo’burg. I’m not a romantic about the city at all, on the contrary. The book kind of reconciles that for me, it also kind of leaves things really up to the reader to draw judgments and never gives one structure or overarching narrative.

37DK: For me, some of the conversations in the book stand out, for example with the men that were involved in the uMkhonto we Sizwe and the self defense units (in Soweto). They spoke about the early nineties in Johannesburg and what was going on there, it made me so angry in relation to what is happening now and where they are at the moment. So, it’s peculiar because one reads the history . . . maybe even more so than what the contemporary Johannesburg is with all its dysfunctions, things that continue to be uncovered also in the media, as not working—the infrastructure that would have been lost, the acid mine drainage; things that are threatening to really cause havoc with the environment and so forth. It’s the sum of these enormously hard histories that are now more present than they were before. You walk through the city of Johannesburg and they are so absolutely present. It’s not as if one is bound to them; it’s just simply a feeling more than anything else. It is a feeling that you have to manage. I mean you have to consciously, with a certain kind of awareness, negotiate this feeling on a daily basis. It’s not something that you can just take for granted.

38I think that in the film you are pointing at something where so much is made, and enabled, without being romantic, without being sentimental. It’s not a distanced or indifferent look towards the lives of these five people at a particular time in the history of the city. Nor is it saying, “Everything is possible.” In a way, what we are talking about here can be echoed in many different other cities. You know, not just in Africa, in South America, but also in Europe. I think that is special about the film. I mean, you had to search for it, and you found it.

39AL: It occurs to me that the postcolonial is a kind of good friend. I went to a British Council style workshop, and everyone was talking about Afro-futurism as if it was this new concept, which is completely bizarre to me. You know the moment of the “new” again. We imagine forward. Of course, part of that is the dystopian. The way that we imagine this unsustainable world, the way the crises of the South have become cultural currency because they somehow regulate the death drive or the kind of death of dynamism in the North.

40SW: The same way that the young developers are looking at the kind of emptiness of the inner city of Jo’burg to recapitalize it. As the whole city and, of course, also the continent itself being a place of new flows of capital or new possibilities. That is where and when we hear the funders also complain that they want to see the Black Diamonds; they want to see the potentials of the new and the growth, and also the end of those patriarchal, traditional structures, of the Zulu Men’s hostels and whatnot. I mean, I feel like those things aren’t going away at all. I feel like the closer I get to the city, the further I feel like I can’t understand it or enter into some kind of discussion around what the future holds. I don’t know. It’s actually full of so many variables.

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Bibliography

Jeppe on a Friday, dir. Shannon Walsh and Arya Lalloo, Parabola Films and Urucu Media, 2012.

Malcomess, Bettina, and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt. Not No Place: Johannesburg. Fragments of Spaces and Times. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013.

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Notes

1 Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Factory was an interactive exhibition that allowed participants to make films in pre-designed sets. It was mounted in Johannesburg at MOAD in Jeppestown, as part of the French Season in South Africa from September to October 2012.
“L’usine de films amateurs de Michel Gondry”, <http://www.thehomemoviefactory.com/en/hmfs-around-the-world/past-hmf/johannesburg-2012/>. Accessed 30 September 2023.

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References

Electronic reference

Shannon Walsh, Arya Lalloo, Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Not No Place, Jeppe on a Friday and representing Joburg: Excerpts from a conversationMiranda [Online], 28 | 2023, Online since 13 October 2023, connection on 19 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/57005; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.57005

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About the authors

Shannon Walsh

Associate professor / Senior Research Associate
Department of Theatre and Film / Centre for Social Change
University of British Columbia / University of Johannesburg
shannon.walsh@ubc.ca

Arya Lalloo

Writer and filmmaker

Bettina Malcomess

Writer and artist

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt

Writer and artist

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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