Approaching thirty years of the post-Apartheid era (2024), the predominantly Coloured community of Westbury continues to wrestle with the identity-formation of “not being Black enough and White enough.”^[1] Geographically, Westbury is a township located within the Johannesburg metropolitan region. Due to the history of slavery, racism, and urban-violence, the mixed-race population remains a marginalized community within the de-facto racially-segregated city of Johannesburg. Then, as the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) questioned in terms of analyzing modern societal problems – Where do we go from here?^[2] Centered on the theoretical concept of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003), this research project will analyze how systemic-racism, poverty, urban violence, and the de-facto racial ghettoization plaguing the Westbury community are indeed environmental justice issues that needs to be eradicated to achieve genuine liberation.

The Westbury Rising project is an extension of my dissertation, Blurred Consciousness: How Blackness and Space Shapes Identity Formation among South African Coloureds and New Orleans Creoles (ProQuest, 2017). Through applying racial formation theory, métissage (miscegenation), and intersectionality theories, I explored how the Creoles of Color of New Orleans and Coloured South Africans in Westbury had similar historiographies concerning their identity formation. I aim to take this research project to dimensions by investigating how necropolitics affects the Westbury residents.

Westbury Rising is a collaborative project providing service to the Westbury Youth Centre (WYC) led by Reginald Botha, Director of Mashup at WYC. This project will deploy these youth to schools and various groups of young people in the community to train and mentor them, form youth clubs, and develop young leaders. More importantly, as an International Representative for the Mashup E-board, I continue to engage in my ten-plus years of community engagement and development at the WYC.

Due to the complexity of centuries-long racial politics and Coloured consciousness in South Africa, there has not been a substantial focus on the mixed-race or “Coloured problem” which requires analysis because of high levels of unemployment and social challenges faced by the youth in Westbury. This has led to increases in gang-related violence, drug abuse, and other forms of criminal activity. Recent murders in Westbury have brought to the fore the need to address the underlying causes of these social problems. The overall purpose of my project is to provide training and skills development to unemployed youth in Westbury, so that they can become leaders, facilitators, and community developers. Through this study, these youth will be trained to develop various skills that will make them employable, while also empowering them to be agents of change in their community.

Westbury is located on the southwest outskirts of the formerly known Western Coloured

Township. This designated area was enforced by the Afrikaner National Party (NP) Group Areas Act of 1950 which established decades of ghettoization. Over the last thirty years, residents in Westbury expressed hope with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC)-led “Rainbow Nation” end of Apartheid. Yet, within the current neocolonialist ANC that continues to ignore ongoing Coloured South African needs, the support for the “Rainbow Nation” has since faded. Mbembe states that “operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field, or biopower as coined by Michel Foucault (1979), in which the phantom-like world of race locates its roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death” (2015). In the Westbury context, residents remain displaced due to perpetual actions of systemic racial-segregation and power dynamics which maintain the Westbury Coloured community within a marginalized state. Through a chronic state of acceptance that necropolitical conditions in South Africa are creating zones in which people are exposed to conditions that are not conducive to living but in actually maintaining a “slow death”.^[3]For instance, zones of death in Westbury involve concentrated- poverty and unemployment festered within the confinement of the township which contributes to breeding crime, drug use, gang activity, and police brutality. Moreover, zones of death also include stress/hypertension/high blood pressure, substandard living conditions/sanitation, poor diet and eating habits, and food deserts that plague de-facto racially segregated neighborhoods in Westbury.

Previous social scientists’ shortcomings in the field have either ignored the Coloured community or tend to view South African racial politics within the United States “White/Black” racial binary framework. Hence, the socialization and spatialization of Colouredness, which is quintessential to otherness at its core, is for the primary purpose of generating a space of controlled decay of the racialized body. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic is an additional layer which furthers the toxicity of an already oppressed group in Westbury.

The research project aims to address the social challenges faced by young people in Westbury, South Africa, particularly the high rate of unemployment and the recent increase in gang-related violence and killings. Through a comprehensive training and development program, the project seeks to equip young people with the skills and resources necessary to secure gainful employment and become leaders promoting a culture of peace and non-violence. The project will also involve working with local schools, community organizations, and government agencies to ensure the sustainability and scalability of the program beyond the grant period. Finally, the project will also aim to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and/or experience between Americans and South Africans. Then, the relationship amongst individuals is not only central to African diasporic culture, but Black Studies as a field and also for me as a former urban planner.

In the long-term, Westbury Rising will adhere to the Fulbright and ACSUS objective of producing international cultural exchange and furthering my scholarly achievement as I advance in my academic career. This research project will also contribute to the rising from the ashes of the zones of death through the agency and actions of environmental justice, community development, sustainability, and engagement with the Westbury community.

By Blair M. Proctor, PhD

^[1] Mohamed Adhikari Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (2015)

^[2] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

^[3] Tony Sandset.Global Public Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice, 2021.