Sophiatown returns
2006-02-11 10:53
Johannesburg - Sophiatown - the legendary black cultural hub wiped off the map under apartheid - officially returns to its original name on Saturday.
Its scattered residents have been invited back to attend a celebration marking the occasion featuring jazz legends from the neighbourhood's heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.
The destruction of Sophiatown, one of the oldest black settlements in Johannesburg, more than 50 years ago came to represent some of the worst excesses of the brutal apartheid regime.
Hundreds of thousands lost their homes under the hated Group Areas Act, which confined the races to separate residential areas, reserving the best for whites.
Despite its poverty and violence, the close-knit community on Johannesburg's western edge produced some of the country's most famous writers, musicians, politicians and gangsters.
International jazz stars like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba cut their teeth in its illegal taverns. Drum magazine was a vehicle for emerging black writers like Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi and Es'kia Mphahlele.
The ANC lead a determined campaign to fight the removals. But on a rainy morning in 1955, 2 000 police armed with guns and clubs, moved into its crowded streets.
Residents were forced to load their possessions onto trucks and dumped in the new township of Meadowlands, later incorporated into Soweto, where bleak rows of roughly constructed two-room houses awaited them.
Over the next eight years, the bustling neighborhood that was home to more than 50 000 people was flattened. A new white suburb emerged from the rubble called Triomf.
More than a decade after apartheid's end, Sophiatown continues to occupy a cherished place in South African memory. It has been the subject of books, films and an acclaimed musical.
The City of Johannesburg decided to return the suburb to its original name in 1997, but local authorities were unable to meet the costs at the time and it took another six years to complete the process.
- AP