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Visiting the Local in South African Urban History

By Vivian Bickford-Smith, Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR and Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town.

Planning what to say at this international symposium has helped me appreciate how central considerations of the local are to my current major research project. This project is a comparative history of the perceptions of three South African cities – Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban – and smaller parts of these cities, and the consequences of these perceptions. Thinking about how the local has been approached historiographically in South Africa has forced me into somewhat refining a previously held idea that there was more or less a simple dichotomy in writing about the local before and after the Soweto Uprising of 1976.

In this oversimplified bifurcation, my view was that before 1976 local urban history in South Africa was dominated by non-academic writers motivated largely either by official boosterist designs or private entrepreneurial ambition, or a combination of the two. After the Soweto uprising, forays into the local came to be dominated by academic research. Prompted by the context of urban revolt, up until the coming of democracy in 1994, these were mainly concerned with discovering and exploring the urban origins of segregation, acts of resistance against segregation and – their authors initially hoped – evidence of emergent African working-class consciousness and vibrant African urban culture. This academic work in the process somewhat overwhelmed, if it did not entirely remove, pre-existing myths of the local.

In other words local urban history post-Soweto was interested almost exclusively in what one might describe as ‘locations’: a synonym for townships or black residential areas in the South African context. Whereas pre-Soweto history was mostly focused on discovering and describing senses of place and urban achievement in what were perceived to be, and represented as, white localities: the city centres and predominantly white suburban areas, albeit it was (albeit often only briefly) acknowledged that these had exotic, picturesque and occasionally problematic black appendages. Only since 1994 have 100 flowers bloomed in writing about the South African local, albeit that the new varieties of flower – studies that have looked at the creation of myth and memory in urban communities destroyed by apartheid; or at gay spaces or locales in the city; or at matro-focal communities; or at respectable, chiefly Christian local communities – have often resembled randomly arranged and thinly planted blooms.[1]

There is considerable truth in this simple summary of amateur and professional historical explorations into South African localities. But a fuller, more complex and more nuanced chronology of how the urban local has been thought about and experienced in South Africa can be achieved by a survey that does not stop short at examining only overt works of history, or that only examines local history in written form. Instead, such a survey could include the likes of city novels, autobiographies, fiction and non-fiction city films, state of the nation accounts and beyond that also describe and sometimes analyze local senses of place. These ‘non-histories’ collectively contribute evidence towards a better understanding of how urban localities have been thought about through time and with what consequences: perhaps in terms of policy making or particular ethno-nationalist urban identities -- and the latter may have their own historical consequences -- being described and often celebrated by all these various imaginings of locality.

So this paper will investigate a variety of major forms in which local history or ideas about the local in South Africa have been transmitted. These are: Official local histories; City novels and films; Unofficial or popular local histories; and the post-1976 academic urban history that indirectly contains a great deal of local history. In the process it will attempt to suggest a slightly more complicated chronology of how the urban local has been thought about in South Africa, and suggest at least some of the consequences.

Official local histories

The hundreds of official or semi-official town and city histories written from 1899 onwards, and in escalating numbers up to the 1970s, were either commissioned, sanctioned or subsidized by local urban authorities or businessmen and written in English. My analysis of these city histories has been greatly aided by the insights of Rosemary Sweet’s work on English eighteenth century urban histories.[2] As with their earlier English counterparts, these South African official histories were aimed at a relatively limited, elite market, and expensively priced; though seriousness or comparative levity of style might range according to level of subsidy and the matter of intended readership.

Predictably, these official histories were tales of the positive contributions to the building of the modern city or town made by merchants, mining magnates, captains of industry more generally, municipal councillors, leading municipal officials and politicians. The histories provided highly detailed chronicles of progress and improvement – of laying out of streets, construction of buildings, and provision of services and amenities – and named (sometimes simply listed the names) of those who were responsible. In many such histories, and as with their eighteenth century (and later) English counterparts, attempts were made to link the city or town with what might be described as South African antiquity.[3]

This was relatively easy for those who wrote about South Africa’s mother city, Cape Town, that had been founded by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century and had from the late fifteenth century been a place of barter and communication between ships from Europe and Khoisan inhabitants. It was rather harder for authors of books about Durban (an early nineteenth century British settlement) or Johannesburg (established due to the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886). So at times all three cities were somewhat ludicrously linked to Mediterranean antiquity: the Phoenicians were alleged to have visited the future sites of Durban and Cape Town; or the fact that Johannesburg was founded on gold linked it with the history of the search for this metal reaching back into antiquity. And particular weight was given to the early history of settlement. For example in the roughly 400 page historical section of John Shorten’s massive history of Johannesburg (1970), 337 pages dealt with the period up to 1922, and only 32 pages with the period 1945 to 1966.[4] Naturally such history highlighted the achievements of city pioneers in enabling progress from ‘Sandbank to Superport’, as one author wrote of Durban, or from rude tents on open veldt to the Johannesburg that many authors likened to an African New York in histories written in the 1930s and beyond.[5]

All the histories gave prominent place to the contributions made specifically by Anglophone white South Africans, whose place in Afrikaner nationalist historical discourse was downplayed or often portrayed in negative ways. In other words prominence was given to makers of history with whom most of the sponsors and readers of these urban chronicles could identify in social and perhaps familial terms, thereby promoting and buttressing their self-identity as white English-speaking, in mnay cases more actively anglophile, South Africans. And this identity was given a physical dimension by residence in predominantly English-speaking, relatively expensive and expansive suburbs

The corollary was that particular groups were specifically categorized as distinct from a white ‘us’ by being racialized as African, Indian or Coloured ‘thems’, even if the descriptions attached to these labels were not necessarily overtly negative. Thus Shorten describes such residents of Johannesburg collectively (if highly patronizingly) as a ‘great mass of useful people’. But their appearance in the book is fleeting, largely confined to thirteen pages of the 1, 159. Indeed Coloured and Asian residents are dealt with in only four paragraphs on page 765. All of ‘them’ are depicted as recipients of the civilization and progress -- in terms of receipt of housing, services and amenities -- brought by ‘us’, white wealth generators, employers and ratepayers.

A better idea of the content of many of these histories might be conveyed by a slightly more detailed examination of Port Natal, a history of Durban written by Janie Malherbe in 1965. The opening chapter of Malherbe’s book describes the legends and documented accounts of Port Natal’s ‘First Civilized Visitors’, beginning with the supposed arrival of Pheonicians in 700BC, before moving on to the Portuguese and, in the second chapter, discussing the first Dutch settlement that lasted from 1685-87. The first ‘permanent’ white settlement is then dated to the formal claim made by a tiny group of British ivory traders and adventurers in 1824. Yet, as Malherbe’s own account reveals, the settlement was temporarily abandoned to a Zulu force in 1838. And settlement remained tiny and insecure for the next five years. After some of those who had run away returned, they were subsequently besieged, and almost over-run, by the Voortrekkers in 1842, before decisive imperial British intervention created the colony of Natal the following year.

So part of Malherbe’s effort at building pride in Durban was to exaggerate its antiquity. And part of giving its white citizens a sense of heritage, belonging and achievement was to combine antiquarianism with a story of progress. This involved separate, reasonably short chapters, chronicling a seemingly endless number of ‘firsts’ and when they happened, then tracing the history of these events, forms of transport, particular inhabitants or structures to the present: Durban’s first own military regiment; the first Durban July race meeting; the first Grand Balls; the first agricultural show; the first steamships; the first railway; the first Indian immigrant; the first hospital; the first bridge over the Umgeni; the first theatre; or the first air flights, which includes a photograph of Mrs Lily Martin, the first woman in the world to fly a plane, who was born in Durban.[6]

‘They’, in the form of people described as Indians and Zulus, are predictably almost as marginal to this story as ‘Non-Europeans’ were in Shorten’s account. Four of the three hundred or so pages are spent describing the coming of Indian immigrants to the city, albeit that some of this is in the form of how such immigration was intended to alleviate local labour shortages (especially in sugar plantations); and two pages relate ‘African Endeavour and Enterprise’. Yet, unlike in Shorten’s Johannesburg saga, at least in these pages some of ‘them’ are given names, and shown as being not dissimilar to ‘us’: Miss Naidoo, who we are told is studying to become a doctor at Dublin University, but who will bring her skills back to help her local community; or Mr Mathis Mathemba and family, examples of the emergence of a successful black business sector consisting largely of building contractors and bottle store owners in the townships, shown in their bright new motor car.[7]

But more prominent, both in size and frequency of illustration, are Indians in Saris (including Miss Naidoo) and half-naked Zulus, particularly in the form of Zulu dancers or Ricksha boys. Images of exotic difference, as well as detailed narration of a pioneer history replete with military conflict between settlers and Zulus, help preserve the imaginative boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Clearly ‘our’ local history, culture and achievements are constantly given greater prominence and validation. And residence in separate places – whether in white suburbs such as Berea whose history is related; or in modern township housing provided by ‘us’ that has rescued ‘them’ from shanties – only serves to give salience to the imagination of separate collective self-identities.

Novels, films and autobiographies

Collectively these forms of representing the city provided a history of at least change and continuity in anglophone imaginings about the local that could challenge or reinforce work overtly intended as urban history.[8] The argument one would make here is that city histories as well as the likes of travelogues and guides to tourists or immigrants offered Utopian visions of the urban local that predominated in public debate about South African towns and cities until the 1940s. But during this decade, and particularly with the publication of Alan Paton’s novel Cry the Beloved Country (1948), one begins to get some decidedly dystopian visual and literary visions.

Paton’s novel presented a dystopian image of Johannesburg as a whole, focusing on particular black residential areas such as Claremont, Alexandra or Shanty Town that the protagonist of the novel, the Rev Kumalo, and thereby the reader, was guided through. Paton’s view appears to be that Johannesburg is a frightening consumer of ‘lost’ (because they are detribalized) black Africans who are forced into cities and thence into immorality and crime. This threatens white urbanites who consequently live in fear behind their burglar bars. Full-on racial conflict was likely to happen unless white South Africans discarded racism, adopted Christian values, recognized the common humanity, rights and equal citizenship of their black compatriots, and helped uplift them. In other words, conflict would happen unless a Utopian urban moral economy was achieved.

Paton’s novel was enormously popular – it sold 15 million copies – so that over the next ten years or so hardly any literary or visual engagement (by anglophone whites or blacks) with urban South Africa failed to refer directly or indirectly to Paton. But there were some generally unintended consequences. For example, by drawing attention to the existence of slums and shanties and condemning that existence in prose or celluloid, novels, autobiographies and films helped politicians in central and local governments justify policies that led to actual condemnation and destruction. This has often been the intended or unintended consequence of dramatic slumland depictions by members of the middle-class as Alan Mayne argued for Sydney, Birmingham and San Francisco in his book The Imagined Slum.[9]