ABSTRACT
When Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall call on scholars working in the tradition
of urban studies in South Africa to consider the ‘underneath world’ of the city as
a route to fresh insights and a means of evading the limited purview of the tradi-
tion, they have in mind the city of Johannesburg and the underneath world of
the mines. The shafts and tunnels, the army of labour that disappears into the
earth and is disgorged at shift’s end, constitute a world within a world, a world
beneath, but also a foundational world, a reminder of the reality of sweat and
toil. If capital achieves its surface apotheosis in the airy fantasy of skyscrapers and
shopping malls, then its grounding reality (its deeper reality) remains the sweated
labour of the workers on the darkened stopes. It is in this context that they
propose the migrant worker as the exemplary figure of African urbanism and
modernity. The vortex of the mines draws in workers from across the subconti-
nent, and returns them – if it returns them – broken in body and spirit or newly
powerful, freighted with new goods and ideas; at any rate transformed, and in
turn transforming. The pulse of the mines becomes the pulse of history itself.
