The genesis of this book lies in the fact that there is very little writing about anxiety in the global south. While anxiety is frequently expressed about the south (about population growth, or people moving north), the experience of being anxious in global south cities receives much less attention. However, beyond facilitating the expression of this experience, it is also important to show how these two are different but not discrete. Many global south anxieties relate to specific local realities, but others overlap with preoccupations in the north, albeit in unpredictable and oblique ways. In some cases we see transnational concern about the south colliding with, and heightening, the experience of anxiety in the south.

In this chapter I will focus on one such incident: the Global Citizen Festival, a star-studded music and philanthropic event that took place in Johannesburg in December 2018. In some respects the concert was a great success. It secured more than $7 billion in funding pledges for progressive causes and transfixed a stadium of music fans. However, it also caused an eruption of public violence outside the stadium, which significantly complicated its meaning. The subsequent controversy revealed much about Johannesburg's specific anxieties, while raising wider questions about how the changing role of the state is affecting life in cities like Johannesburg. As I will argue, the Global Citizen incident was the site of a collision between the local and the global. Specifically, it reveals much about how the functionality of the state is being affected at the local and global levels simultaneously. Johannesburg becomes a useful example informing the experience of anxiety around systemic collapse and the infiltration of state structures by outside interests in cities around the world.

GLOBAL CITIZEN: WHAT WENT DOWN

On 2 December 2018, Johannesburg hosted the Global Citizen music festival. Global Citizen has become famous as an enterprise focused on galvanising volunteerism (mostly) in the global north, in order to facilitate social change (mostly) in the global south. The organisation partners with development agencies and NGOs, but its particular strength lies in instrumentalising celebrity and fandom in order to elicit funding pledges from governments and corporations. One of its key activities is arranging music festivals around the world, which become the occasion for high-profile funding announcements.

The 2018 show was the first Global Citizen event held in Africa.