Sophiatown remembered
2005-02-09 15:14
Johannesburg - South Africans of all races on Wednesday gathered on a sunny hill in western Johannesburg to commemorate one of apartheid's cruellest forced removals 50 years ago, when Sophiatown was wiped off the map.
As actors staged a mock "forced removal", elderly former residents recalled 9 February 1955 when the white minority government started the eviction of some 65 000 black South Africans.
On that day, apartheid police armed with machine guns and truncheons surrounded the vibrant multi-racial township before homes were bulldozed and people's possessions were loaded onto open trucks as part of the government's policy of racial segregation.
Most people were dumped in Soweto township's Meadowlands, some 10km to the south.
"We woke up that day to hundreds of policemen, with their trucks and Sten guns," remembered Simon Ramela, who lived here as a teenager.
A total surprise
"They took us by complete surprise," he said.
"Sophiatown was also against all the ideals of the Nationalist government," added Victor Mokhine, another former resident.
Often called the "Harlem" or "Chicago" of South Africa, it was a contrasting but vibrant mix of red-roofed brick homes and tin shacks and the birthplace of South African jazz, styled on black American culture of the time.
Artists mixed with township "tsotsis" (gangsters) who belonged to gangs like the "Berliners" and the "Americans", adopting the names of American movie stars like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart.
There were bands like the "Boston Stars", the "Manhattan Brothers" and the "Pitch Black Follies" and famous shebeens (illegal beer houses) like "Aunt Babe's" and "The House on Telegraph Hill" where these bands used to play.
Where stars were born
It was here where South African international music stars like Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim first made a name for themselves.
Veteran anti-apartheid cleric and Sophiatown's Anglican priest, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston once compared the old township to an Italian village, said former president Nelson Mandela in his autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom.
"Despite the poverty, Sophiatown had a special character; for Africans it was the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, the home of writers, artists, doctors and lawyers. It was both bohemian and conventional, lively and sedate," Mandela recalled.
It was a hotbed of liberation politics, and here where Mandela first called for the now ruling ANC to take up armed resistance against racial segregation.
Bulldozed
But the day white South Africa's bulldozers moved in and razed Sophiatown to make place for the whites-only suburb called "Triomf" (Afrikaans for "triumph") Huddleston said the country "lost not only a place but an ideal".
Until South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, the area remained overwhelmingly a white working-class suburb, but dominated by one of the few structures to survive the eviction - the brickface and red-roofed Christ the King Church, from where Huddleston delivered his sermons.
Now the neighbourhood is slowly claiming back its identity, having been renamed Sophiatown in 1995.
This month will see a series of commemorations including church services, Wednesday's procession, and a gala dinner next week, to be attended by former president Nelson Mandela and retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Last week, the documentary film Sophiatown, a bittersweet trip down memory lane featuring interviews with Mandela, Masekela and singer Dolly Rathebe was released in theatres countrywide.
"We feel happy that there are these commemorations to celebrate Sophiatown," former resident Ramela said.
"We hope one day the spirit that we feel here today, the spirit of our ancestors can return to this place," he said.
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