Gordon H. Pirie

The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown

URBAN slums have been studied by social scientists for a long time. The detached, quantitative approaches of these investigators typically depict slums in pathological metaphors with data from censuses, institutional records, interviews, and, occasionally, participant observation.l Experiential approaches tend to portray slums as more enigmatic places than they seem to be in the social science literature. In contrast with the external viewpoint, a slum becomes a place where a number of basic human demands can be fulfilled.2 For Sophiatown, a mixed-race suburb of Johannesburg, which was demolished in the late 1950s, novels, autobiographies, short stories, and essays reveal the human aspects better than any other sort of record. Several prominent South African authors lived in or visited Sophiatown and wrote about the place. This literature allows investigation of the subjective dimensions of a legendary South African slum as well as promotes appreciation of the objective characteristics of Sophiatown. A great deal of this literature is protest writing, fashioned during a period of increased racial repression, which manifested itself, in part, in the destruction of Sophiatown. This genre of literature contained, for the first time on any scale, work about black urbanism by blacks themselves. Relying heavily on the precedent of the Harlem Renaissance school in the United States, the South African authors wrote in a caustic, piquant style about everyday affairs which they interpreted to be preoccupying. Charges of embittered partisanship and willful misrepresentation by the writers are readily wrung from these contextual observations. To rebut this hasty judgment, it may be pointed out that the consistent allusion by several authors to both the good and the bad in Sophiatown indicates that impressions were not entirely idiosyncratic. Critics may retort with accusations of conspiratorial exaggeration or even joint delusion among the nostalgic and, in some cases, exiled literati. One way of deciding the validity of the literature as a statement of objective realities in Sophiatown is to ponder its official reception. The outspoken commentary was not lightly dismissed. Much of the literature cited in this article has been banned by South African censors from local circulation and citation.

Race zoning in South Africa: board, court, parliament, public

Abstract Legalized control over land use and ownership among different race groups, culminating in the Group Areas Act of 1950, is reviewed historically. The Parliamentary passage of the enabling Bill is summarized. Implementation of the racially discriminatory Act over three decades has meant costly financial, social and psychological dislocation of over half a million people, mostly coloureds and Indians. Owing to its sweeping powers buttressed by frequent amendments to the Act, the government department responsible for guarding urban racial segregation has been largely immune to Parliamentary, popular and legal challenges. The state has posed as agent of slum upgrading and moderator of racial conflict, but its actions speak more of disruption and the politicization of law and rights. The courts have played a very restricted role in adjudication of racially discriminatory legislation.

TRANSPORT, FOOD INSECURITY AND FOOD AID IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA.

Abstract The contribution made by transport projects to long-term regional economic change obscures the role of transport in the daily struggle for survival in places afflicted by food insecurity. In sub-Saharan Africa, limited infrastructure and transport service has occasionally disrupted food production and circulation. During the widespread food crises of the past decade, land, sea and air transport have been used more constructively to distribute food aid. An empirical review of the contradictory relations between transport and food insecurity precedes discussion of the logistics and potential impact of emergency food aid transport in north-eastern and southern Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

Southern African Air Transport After Apartheid

Aviation in Southern Africa was subject throughout the 1980s to increasingly intense political pressures. As ever, the cause was protests about apartheid. The severe blow that black African countries dealt to South African Airways (S.A.A.), the Republics state-owned national airline, in the 1960s by withdrawing overflying rights was magnified by similar action from a wider spectrum of non-African governments. In the mid-1980s, Australia and the United States of America, for example, revoked S.A.A.s landing rights, and forbad airlines registered in their countries from flying to South Africa. Other carriers, such as Air Canada, closed their offices and then terminated representation in South Africa.

Letters, Words, Worlds: the Naming of Soweto

This chapter deals with the naming of South Africas best-known black urban township, Soweto, and its subdivisions. At one level the presentation seeks only to detail the findings of an exercise in local toponymy. First, attention is given to the proposals put forward for labelling the southwestern townships, to the consultations and to the selection procedures followed. In the opening section it is the naming process which is spotlighted. The subsequent section switches the focus to the distinctive meanings and interpretations embedded in certain of the names submitted for consideration. This second section highlights the connotations which the southwestern townships acquired. Throughout the study, information is drawn from official archival records.

Johannesburg transport 1905–1945: African capitulation and resistance

Among Johannesburgs African township residents, hostel dwellers and domestic servants, use of time-consuming, costly, overcrowded and inferior public transport involved sacrifice of free time and curtailed expenditure on household and personal necessities. Complaint about transport services was made by users, African organizations, employers, press and public commissioners. Boycott occurred only in a more impoverished and remote district where there was no transport competition. Even in its rudimentary state, public transport made viable a racially segregated urban mosaic as well as control and reproduction of the African working class. Low wages, residential and work-place immobility and surplus labour closed options for effective resistance and deferred the necessity of urgent transport improvements. Capitulation meant employability, but also the persistence of transport conditions conducive to domination of labour.

African township railways and the South African state, 1902–1963

Since 1902, provision of railway commuter transport to and from African dormitory townships has involved construction of branch lines as well as elaboration of existing trunk services. Operation of short distance services was first funded from fares, but as townships increased in number and became more remote, and as road competition threatened, uneconomic fares had to be charged so as not to throttle the mobility of low wage commuters. Beginning in the 1920s, the state-owned and operated Railways sought traffic privileges and financial guarantees on township services from local urban authorities engaged in township construction. In a confused atmosphere, unsynchronized and inadequate train service followed, and relocation of Africans to townships was affected adversely. Unwilling to let the railways upset racial residential segregation, the new apartheid government resolved in the mid-1950s to underwrite operating losses on township railway services. Until the 1960s the installation of African township railways was part of a saga of unaffordable race zoning and uncoordinated state housing and transport provision.

Mostly ‘Jubek’: Urbanism in Some South African English Literature

Black urban townships have been neglected by South African geographers. The novels of Dhlomo, Paton, Dikobe, Huddleston, Mphahlele, Gordimer, Markowitz, Jacobson and Fugard throw light on conditions and activities in Johannesburg’s Black townships, slumyards and mixed-race areas which presently exist and in those which have been demolished. Since insights into these phenomena are difficult to acquire by scientific research, especially in the apartheid city, the experimental literary record is an extremely valuable one.

Railways and labour migration to the rand mines: constraints and significance

From the start of the twentieth century, southern African railways conveyed vast numbers of miners to and from the Rand gold mines in a fluid and contested political and economic setting. The need for a large, continually replenished and low‐cost workforce was met by tapping new and distant labour pools. Railways mobilised miners by offering relatively inexpensive, quick, long‐distance mass transport. They also curtailed desertion and exhaustion associated with walking. Yet the interests of state‐owned railways and mining capital were not completely harmonious. The contribution of trains to migrancy was limited by the geography of a railway network built for other purposes, by geopolitical restrictions on recruiting, by complex and discriminatory tariffs, and by the inefficiency and disunity of railway operations. In the 1930s the reach of railways was enhanced by flexible road transport; thereafter, non‐rail modes of transport operated by and for mine‐labour agencies, conveyed an increasing share of the ...

Tourism and empire

The ‘age of empires’ closely overlaps the dramatic development of tourism from a largely European phenomenon to a global one. This round table discussion draws together six scholars to explore the relationship(s) between empire and tourism across time and place.