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‘Africa Thina’? Xenophobic and Cosmopolitan Agency in Johannesburg's Film and Television Drama*

The characterisation of Johannesburg as a city of crime perpetrated by foreigners and other outsiders is as old as the city itself. What is new in the post-apartheid period is the tension between the fear of foreigners as shadowy figures who allegedly spirit away the livelihoods of locals, and the attempt, in planning as well as imaginative initiatives, to reconceive of strangers as cosmopolitan agents of new modes of ‘belonging and becoming’. The cosmopolitan invoked here is less the Enlightenment concept of the knowing and usually wealthy citizen of the world who might transcend difference and conflict, than the informal cosmopolitan, the transnational migrant engaged in improvised economic, social and cultural exchange. Set in Johannesburg, films such as The Foreigner (1997), and television serials from The Line (1994) to Yizo Yizo (2000–2002), Gaz'lam (2002–2006) and A Place Called Home (2006), suggest, in their portrayals of encounters between locals and strangers, the effects of built environments on character and action, and posit the roles of ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ as alternatives to violent nativist attempts to expel strangers even if those ‘strangers’ turn out to be citizens. While South African official discourse has only recently addressed migrants, cinematic fictions have for at least a decade offered narratives of city life that look hopefully, but also plausibly, to a more cosmopolitan future.