Answer

Reading Notes on Elements of Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow
– Anyone with the desire to read more regarding the life of South Africans post-apartheid should in no wise fail to read Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.
– There are several though provoking, interesting, confusing, and compelling issues that capture the mind of a reader of the novel.
A. One thought provoking and confusing elements of the novel is the prejudices and attitudes of Black South Africans against their fellow Black South Africans as well as immigrants from other countries within Africa.
i) When it would be expected that after the abolition of the apartheid rule, Africans would appreciate one another and respect their individual human value, prejudices and negative attitudes emerge among them, causing serious economic, social, and political challenges.
ii) The rural people, interestingly, in cities such as Johannesburg, are with low morals, dirty, and nothing good can originate from connecting with them.
iii) It gets even more confusing when the AIDS pandemic is perceived and understood in the light of these prejudices and attitudes – it is believed that the pandemic was brought by Black African immigrants from African nations, like Nigeria.
B. The novel is disturbing and exhilarating through Hillbrow’s hyper-real and chaotic zone – microcosm of everything that is alluring, painful, and contradictory in the post-apartheid South African spirit.
i) Everything characterizes the post-apartheid lifestyle: youth’s shattered dreams, sexuality along with its unpredictable costs, xenophobia, AIDS, suicide, the ever present violence that usually cuts short young people’s lives, among other issues.
ii) The Mpe, therefore, invites the readers to rethink the national community notion from the viewpoint of the exclusions and limits this formation generates.
iii) The novel looks at a country with an alienated gaze: Through the apposition of scenes of happiness for the soccer victory, the novel does introduce what would later become one of the fundamental themes of the story: nationalism’s sour fruits. Conversely, in the scenes that follow the opening chapter, the “welcome to our Hillbrow” phrase is repeated, welcoming the protagonists and reader to a neighbourhood that signifies the urban degeneration as well as rampaging criminality in Johannesburg, where, interestingly, where people were first labeled as Indians, blacks, and coloured.
C. Something more that is confusing and interesting is the narrative voice of “our”, which progressively expands into “our Hillbrow,” “our England,” “our Oxford,” and “our Heathrow” (100-102).
i) “our Hillbrow,” “our England,” “our Oxford,” and “our Heathrow” are, nonetheless, all places that are regarded as by the global composition of the individuals who pass or inhibit them and by the attitudes and prejudices of the locals towards the immigrants who have arrived to inhabit what they regard as their land.
ii) The use of the possessive pronoun “our”, therefore constantly comes into war with the hurdles that are created by the identitarian explosions that in Heathrow, Hillbrow, Oxford, or England reestablish those classes/sub-divisions. This is the was that generates and is resounded by the performative vagueness in the employment of “our” by Mpe, which encapsulates the stress and tension between the utopian psych in the novel and the defensive identitarian closings of the occupants of the places that embody and symbolize both possibility of negation and inclusive cosmopolitan.
– Mpe’s novel interrogates the concepts of belonging and national identity by revealing the exlusive kinds of collective ways of identification upon which they are founded.
– Two questions arise from a reading of Mpe’s novel:
i. Why would South Africans discriminate their fellow South Africans when it is for discrimination reasons that they fought for independence from the Whites?
ii. Why is it that South Africa’s leafy suburbs post-apartheid were characterized by all manner of evils, like the shattering of dreams, unpredictable costs, AIDS, suicide, and sexuality issues, when the “our Hillbrow” was used to imply a prospective future?