South Africa remains a country of the disenfranchised: a national space from which many are denied the right to fully participate in society’s political debates. This paper explores Johannesburg’s changing artistic colour-scape to document how graffiti and street art provide a means to fight against this marginalisation. I show how graffiti writers co-opt public space to make their own views heard. Considering the practice of graffiti ‘writing’ as an affective act, I underline how the city’s walls provide a space for young people of all races to physically invest in and attempt to transform dominant socio-political trends. Within neglected areas of the city, graffiti artists are successfully wrestling against the authorities to achieve a public identity and confidently explore their own views on wider social phenomena.
In the second part of the paper, I diverge from common perceptions around graffiti and turn towards the landscape of Johannesburg’s affluent northern suburbs. I trace the work of white postgraduate students who write on walls because of their increased sensitivity to the long-term economic and political marginalisation that has been experienced by demographics less fortunate than themselves. Through the juxtaposition of these stories, street art is thus revealed as a complex, multi-layered coping mechanism and narrative of challenge. Johannesburg’s walls act at one and the same time as a literary, historical and physical space from which we can attempt to understand a fuller picture of contemporary South Africa.