Seeing Johannesburg Anew: Conviviality and Opacity in Khalo Matabane’s Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon

Abstract

Anxieties about the perceived failure of democracy since the end of apartheid in South Africa have been displaced onto migrant communities, resulting in xenophobic violence against black African immigrants. To envision alternatives to this violence, this chapter revisits Khalo Matabane’s Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (Matabane Filmworks, South Africa, 2005), a hybrid fiction-documentary film that traces a South African poet’s chance meeting with a Somali refugee in Johannesburg and the encounters with other immigrants it enables. The film’s basic strategy is to track ‘convivial’ urban encounters, yet it also raises questions about the dynamics of such encounters and underscores the need to respect migrant ‘opacity’. Matabane shows how both conviviality and opacity are necessary to seeing Johannesburg anew and making it a truly hospitable environment.