Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
69
The Final
Giovanni Spissu
(University of Manchester)
On 28 May 2011, the final of the European Football Champions League was played in London between Manchester
United and Barcelona. The match was broadcast in every corner of the world. On Long Street, one of Cape Town’s
oldest and most popular streets, people of different races, social backgrounds, and from different parts of the city
poured into the street to watch the final on the video screens in the bars. I took inspiration from Mikhail Bakhtin’s
study of poetry and novels (1973), considering Long Street as a chronotopic unit made up of a dual time-space
dimension. I used the final as a pretext for observing Cape Town through the intersection of its inhabitants’ memories
with urban spaces. Choosing my interviewees from those who were on Long Street to watch the match on the evening
of the final, I decided to create urban pathways that start from this street and branch off to the city’s different areas. In
this sense, the final will be taken as a pattern that connects the different life stories that crossed that evening on Long
Street.
Keywords
: Chronotope, Polyphony, South Africa, City, Road.
Introduction
It is rare for a work of literature not to include some variation on the theme of the road. Many
works are built around the concept of the street and the meetings and adventures experienced
‘on the road’. In the folkloristic novel the road is often used as a metaphor for life as a
journey: ‘The choice of a real itinerary equals the choice of “the path of life”’ (Bakhtin 1981:
120).
The space of the road is filled by a meaning, which is vital and real and assumes an
essential relationship with the protagonist’s destiny. On the other hand, the road is also the
place par excellence in which exceptional everyday events occur which are capable of
changing one’s destiny. On the road it is possible to break the tranquil repetitive nature of
everyday life, of relationships organised within a specific structure of stable relations. On the
road unexpected meetings can occur which change one’s life.
Bakhtin saw the road as a literary chronotope, a space-time fusion. The road is, most
importantly, the place where different lives converge with diverse ways of recounting the past
and envisioning the future. I argue that in ethnographic research, we can observe a road (or
any other urban place) and take it as a space-time fusion. Urban spaces take on a meaning
when put into relationship with their inhabitants’ memories. Likewise, memories can be
understood through their projection on the urban spaces in which they take shape and evolve.
In this article I observed Long Street, a central street in Cape Town (South Africa). Taking
inspiration from a sports event (the Champions League final) broadcast on the street’s
television screens and watched by people from the city’s different areas, and considering the
street as an intersection of the experiences and memories of its regulars, I decided to explore
Cape Town by interviewing the people who had decided to watch the event on Long Street.
Taking Long Street as a starting point, I went back over my interviewees’ life paths, trying to
discover the events that led them to that evening, watching the final in this street. Though the
interviews presented in this article are exclusively with people who were on Long Street on
the evening of 28 May, I used the same method to conduct other interviews for my doctorate
research, involving other Long Street regulars who were not watching the final that evening.
