Vivian Bickford-Smith

South African urban history, racial segregation and the unique case of Cape Town?

Cape Town has enjoyed an academic and popular reputation for being the most relaxed of South African cities in terms of ‘race’ relations. Part of this reputation is based on the belief that there was much less segregation in Cape Town than elsewhere in southern Africa before Apartheid. This article reviews this contention. Attention is drawn to the extent of segregation that did exist in the city by the early twentieth century. In particular, an explanation is offered for its non‐residential forms, a hitherto neglected exercise in South African urban historiography. But the limits of segregation in Cape Town, the features that have contributed to its reputation for uniqueness, are also examined and explained. These include the existence of considerable ‘miscegenation’, an enduring non‐racial political tradition and the fact that social segregation was far from comprehensive. The task of explaining these occurrences necessarily involves exploring Cape Town as a place, and thus needs to be a work of urban h...

Revisiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Writing about the British world should do more than merely tell us about events which happened in that world. It should necessarily involve exploring how such a world was constructed and maintained in its various geographical parts through time. To paraphrase comments made about urban historiography: writing about the British world should involve ‘history-of-the-British world’, not just ‘history-in-the-British world’. Studying the ‘history-of-the-British world’ is, then, in part about studying the history of British ‘hegemony’. Hegemony, following Raymond Williams’s definition, refers to: ‘not only the articulate upper level of “ideology” nor ... only those [policies/processes] ordinarily seen as “manipulation” or “indoctrination”. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living ... our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values.’ The establishment of British hegemony was driven by English nationalism; its ideological content, ‘practices and expectations’ derived from English values and customs, from Englishness itself, which was the dominant influence within Britishness. Such values and customs, and resulting practices and expectations, were not of course static; and one task facing historians of the British world is to be sensitive to the chronology of change in this respect. Equally British hegemony, whatever its precise ideological content, was not established over tabula rasa. As Bredekamp and Ross have written while examining the history of Christianity in South Africa, ‘their [i.e. indigenous South Africans] consciousness was not colonized, at least [not] in the same way as their land and their labour was colonized’. Richard Elphick has expanded on this view: ‘two systems of thought do not “collide”; rather, real people negotiate their way through life, grasping, combining, and opposing different elements which the scholar (but not necessarily the actor) assign to different origins’. In this postmodern world it has become easier to accept that there was no simple divide between acceptance and rejection of imperial values: ‘To this process people brought traditions, acquired or inherited social identities, practices and skills, and whatever they could marshal from their native cultures and the colonial

Urban history in the new South Africa: continuity and innovation since the end of apartheid

The Soweto uprising of 1976 confirmed to most observers that the anti-apartheid struggle (in contrast to anti-colonial struggles in many other parts of Africa) would be largely urban in character. This realization gave impetus to a rapid growth in the hitherto small field of South African urban history. Much new work predictably sought to understand the nature of conflict and inequality in South African cities and its possible resolution.

Cinematic cities: a 'film and history' overview for South Africa's major metropolises from the 1890s to the 1950s

This article provides a thematic and chronological overview of ideas about South African cities, parts of cities or urbanity in general contained in films from the 1890s to the 1950s. These ideas – whether in feature films, travelogues, newsreels, documentaries or docudramas – reflected the attitudes not only of the film makers, but often also of many others in the places and periods in which they were made. City films could also transmit ideas, and thereby convey or help maintain attitudes towards the urban. Yet there is still a paucity of studies on cinematic portrayals of African cities. The article is drawn from a larger project that looks at the perceptions and experiences of South African cities from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, and the consequences of those perceptions and experiences. Hence it is an exercise in both film as historical evidence and the role of film in history. The article argues that depictions of South African urbanity on film contained both utopian and dystopian imagery, as was usual with cinematic depictions of cities in many other parts of the world. For South Africa, depictions of cities in film during the 1920s and 1930s were largely utopian, the product in part of the rise of place-selling initiatives. But after the Second World War the likes of Cry, the Beloved Country and Civilization on Trial in South Africa provided decidedly dystopian visions of South African ‘slums’. The article explains how and why this happened, and why such representations were part of more general post-war domestic and international debate on the nature of South African urban problems and possibilities, not least over the conditions and experiences of urban Africans. It also suggests ways in which this debate, and therefore visual and literary depictions of cities, evolved in the course of the 1950s, resulting in more complex cinematic representations that argued that even South African ‘slums’ were places of creativity as well as hardship.

Rosenstone on film, Rosenstone on history: An African perspective

Rosenstones work has been central to the growth of film and history studies in South Africa. It is argued that for some African history films, useful gradations can be made within and between Rosenstones categories of ‘mainstream’ (Hollywood) or ‘innovative’ (self-consciously oppositional to Hollywood) dramas. To this end, films like Lumumba, Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond and Red Dust are explored in terms of differing production values, editing styles, political tone, use of language, casting policies and choice of protagonists. Rosenstones insights into the nature of history on film suggest why such history might sometimes offer more acceptable visions of the past than historiography for students of history in highly divided societies like South Africa.

Reviewing Hollywood's Apartheid: 'Cry Freedom' (1987) and 'Dry White Season' (1989)

This article focuses on two big budget feature films of the late 1980s that aimed at revealing the ‘truth’ about apartheid South Africa primarily to audiences in the United States and Europe namely Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom and Euzhan Palcy’s Dry White Season. As such, it inevitably has to revisit what has become the orthodox analytical line on these films in academic circles: the largely hostile and reinforcing verdicts espoused in the mid 1990s by Peter Davis’s In Darkest Hollywood and Rob Nixon’s Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood.‘ It is my contention that these adverse judgments on Hollywood’s two leading apartheid history films are in need of considerable qualification and revision, that both Cry Freedom and Dry White Season arcfar better attempts at filmic history than Davis or Nixon would have us believe. However it is worth acknowledging at the outset that they were not the only, nor necessarily the best, docudrama portrayals of apartheid South Africa to appear before the latter’s demise in the early 1990s. The 1950s had seen Zoltan Korda’s version of Alan Paton’s renowned novel, Cry The Beloved Country (1952) as well as Lionel Rogosin’s extraordinary Come Back Apica ( 1959), a particularly skilful blending of documentary and feature film genres.’ But both of these films, as well as later efforts such as A World Apart (1 987) and South Africa’s own critically acclaimed Mapantsula (1988), drew a relatively limited number of viewers and were largely confined to ‘art house’ cinema^.^ In between had comean action film, The Wilby Conspiracy (1975), which certainly set out to capture a broader audience. To this end it starred Sidney Poitier (in a role loosely based on Nelson Mandela) and Michael Caine (an increasingly politicised British tourist) as inadvertent partners in the struggle, both on the run from a ruthless security

Film and History Studies in South Africa Revisited: Representing the African Past on Screen

Seven years ago the co-editor of this special issue put the case in the South African Historical Jolouruaal for ‘film and history’ studies in South Africa. Inspired by a lively debate within the American academy about this emerging sub-discipline and a decade of experience of teaching history through film at the University of Cape Town (UCT), he hoped ‘to encourage the study, teaching and discussion of film and history in South African history departments, as well as to promote the involvement of academics and students in attempting filmic history’. One vehicle for doing so, he proposed, might be the South Aj?ican Historical Journal itself which could provide a regular forum for the discussion of visual history and for the reviewing of ‘popular, important or controversial feature films, documentaries and television series (particularly if not exclusively) “about” South African history’.’ What has happened since the original appeal in 1996? At UCT the teaching of ‘film and history’ has broadened substantially. Formerly on the fringes of the more traditional teaching of the history department, it has now moved closer to centre-stage with the establishment of an autonomous semester-length film and history course taught at senior undergraduate level. Despite an overall decline in the numbers of students majoring in history, the number of third-year students electing to study ‘film and history’ has soared due in significant measure to an interdisciplinary partnership with the burgeoning area of film and media studies at UCT. The course engages with the continuing debate around the presentation of the past on film, focusing on case studies including the representation ofthe holocaust and of apartheid on screen and the long history of the war-film genre, from contemporary (mis)representations of the Spanish-American and Anglo-Boer wars to Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.2

Representing Cape Town on the eve of apartheid

This article attempts a detailed social portrait of Cape Town on the eve of apartheid. In the process it provides a rare cross-racial study of a twentieth-century South African city. The first section reveals a complex place already distinguished by considerable segregation and predictable social inequalities, both between and within racial and ethnic categories. Yet such findings are at odds with popular memories of a golden age – marked by tolerance, greater cohesion and security. So the second section explores and explains the differences. It finds that memories cannot simply be dismissed as myths.

Providing local color?: "cape coloreds," "cockneys," and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s.

Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged “individual characteristics” that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city’s distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its “local colour”: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of “others”. In Cape Town, depictions of “Coloured” inhabitants as unique “city types” became part of the city’s “destination branding”. The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s “Cockneys” and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical “place-selling”.

The Use of ‘Local Colour’ and History in Promoting the Identity of Port Cities: The Case of Durban, c.1890s–1950s

Distinct city identities have been promoted in both literary and visual media, normally through a combination of the two. This chapter argues that those who seek to convey a port town’s distinctiveness have done so through describing not only its particular topography, architecture, history, and functions but also by describing its ‘local colour’: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In the case of Durban, doing so partly obscured the place’s functions as major port and industrial centre in favour of promoting the town as a national and international tourist destination. This was accomplished by portraying black working-class inhabitants as nonindustrial and unthreatening, the ‘popular in its place’, notably as cheerful, dramatically adorned rickshaw pullers.