Mobility, Migration and ‘Migritude’ in Afrocartography: Traces of Places and all points in between

Abstract

According to Tim Cr es swell, ‘mobility exists in the same relation to movement as place does to location, and [...] involves a fragile entangle- ment of physical movement, representations and practices (Cresswell, 2011, p. 160). Considering Cresswell’s three aspects of mobility - movement, representations and practices — this chapter will reflect on a self-written, unpublished, autobiographical choreopoem titled Afrocartography: Traces of Places and all points in between. It was written in Cape Town in 2007 in response to the complexities of living and working in the city as a non-South African migrant of Zambian and Zimbabwean extraction. It will consider how the city of Cape Town, as the incubator of the work, can be a place that both attracts and rejects African immigrants, and how this contradictory interplay may have shaped the kind of work that Afrocartography has become. The produc- tion itself, as itinerant as its title suggests, has had showings at the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town¹ in 2007; the UNESCO World Festival of Theatre Schools in Barcelona in 2008; at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)² symposium on Knowledge and Transformation in Stellenbosch in 2008; at the opening of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) in Cape Town, 2009; and as part of the live performance programme of GIPCA’s Exuberance Project³ in Cape Town in 2012. It has also been performed at the Wits Theatre in Johannesburg and at the Afrovibes Festival in the Netherlands in 2013.