One of the things that strikes us on reading Michael Watts's comments on the special issue "Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis" (Public Culture 16 [fall 2003]) is not only the degree to which it is a view from the outside but also the extent to which his response displays a certain failure of the imagination.

This is not because "insiders" have a special purchase on what is going on here or on how this city—and the continent of which it is a part—should be read. Views from the outside may indeed illuminate what locals fail to see.

At the same time, outsiders speak from places and within paradigms that carry their own baggage. One result may be a failure to see when one's own rules might not apply or when political, ideological, and hermeneutic certainty is not guaranteed. This may be in part why, despite the immediate "shock of recognition" Watts experiences, he fails to imagine what it might actually be like to live here in Johannesburg, in the midst of, and as full participants in, metropolitan modernity tout court. But these are the terms on which we interact with one another and with the world at large, whether we live in the townships, the squatter camps, or the suburbs.¹

That we should assert this and employ a notion of sameness-as-worldliness to emphasize what we mean is seen by Watts as a failure to bear testimony to Africa's difference constituted, in his view, by its slum life and chronic poverty.

The initial "shock," for Watts, is "the extent to which Johannesburg has always aspired to, and now embodies, a distinctively modern aura." Yet by the end of his piece, he is keen to reinsert the city into a more recognizable frame: "it is the slum that constitutes the defining feature of contemporary African metropolises," he decides. Why should this be the case? Because, he tells us, "in some countries [in Africa] over 90 percent of urban residents live in slums."² But doesn't this serve to confirm a dominant North American research mode for carving up the globe?

If indeed the slum is the master trope of African metropolitanism, how then can we account for the rich suburbs of Lagos, Nigeria, and Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the property boom in the rich neighborhoods of Douala, Cameroon, or the rate at which the old is making way for the new in Maputo, Mozambique, with architectural styles ranging from medieval Portuguese (heavily beamed ceilings, archways, tiles) to nouveau colonial? How can we account for the lavish beachfront houses, security fences, electric gates, closed-circuit television cameras, and the ubiquitous satellite dishes in Les Almadies in Dakar, Senegal; in Nairobi, Kenya; in Luanda, Angola; and in so many other African cities?

Watts appears to underestimate the extent to which cities such as Lagos, Abidjan, Kinshasa, Luanda, or Nairobi have been able to attract and seduce, in their own ways, certain forms of global capital. That such forms of capital are, for the most part, predatory is without doubt. But isn't this at least partly what the process of globalization is about, a set of processes that are refracted, splintered, and cracked? These cities are not simply made up of social black holes. They are also cities of cash—if not quartz. The analysis Arjun Appadurai develops about Mumbai could clearly be extended to encompass Lagos, Nairobi, or Abidjan, where pockets of privilege coexist with misery. These are "cities where the circulation of wealth in the form of cash is ostentatious and immense, but the sources of cash are always restricted, mysterious, or unpredictable…and the search for cash in order to make ends meet is endless."³ Indeed, such fractured, colliding, and splintered orders of urban life can be seen to characterize, increasingly, many cities around the world today, including in Europe and the United States.⁴