The Destruction of Sophiatown:
Rare Color Photos, 1959
"My mind recoiled with anger and a little with fear, I had not realised the scope of the destruction; it was a wasteland, like a canvas by Salvador Dali...." --Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History
This isn't a war zone, at least not in the conventional sense. As much as these photos might remind us of Bosnia, in the 1990s, or Afghanistan, today, the damage here was done by bulldozers, not by bombs, by bureaucrats, not by generals. The place is Sophiatown, a mostly African but racially mixed suburb of Johannesburg that was once home to some 70,000 souls. During the mid-twentieth century, it was one of the few places in urban South Africa in which Africans could own real estate. Not coincidentally, it was also the epicenter of the most important cultural and intellectual renaissance in South Africa history.
Eliot Elisofon: Sophiatown as it was left after removal of the population under the Western Areas Removal Scheme, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1959. (From the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC. Click directly on any of these images to see larger versions.)
"Whatever else Sophiatown was, it was home.... We took the ugliness of life in a slum and wove a kind of beauty...." --Modisane
Sophiatown was an anomaly within a nation shaped by white supremacy. It was a living contradiction of everything that the government of the day held most dear, especially the separation of the races and a strictly enforced hierarchy of color, freedom, expression, and hope. And so the government destroyed it.
Sophiatown's death agony lasted from 1955 until 1959. Eliot Elisofon, an American photographer who was in South Africa on an assignment from Life magazine, captured Sophiatown's last breaths. As far as I've been able to determine, these photos were never published and have never been seen, outside of the archives of Life magazine, his employer, and the National Museum of African Art, which now holds them. Elisofon's photos are remarkable for at least a couple of reasons -- they're all in color and many were made in the air. Neither of these points is trivial. I've seen many dozens of photos of Sophiatown, over the years. Many are powerful, but all have been in black and white, and none were made in the air.
Eliot Elisofon: Areial view of Anglican Church of Christ the King, Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1959.
"Sometimes, looking up at Sophiatown... I have felt I was looking at an Italian village somewhere in Umbria. For you do ‘look up’ at Sophiatown, and in the evening light, across the blue-grey haze of smoke from braziers and chimneys, against a saffron sky, you see close-packed, red-roofed little houses. ...And above it all you see the Church of Christ the King, its tower visible north, south, east, and west...." --Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort
It's easy to think of the past as having been lived in black and white. The quote above from Father Trevor Huddleston, who from 1943 until 1955 was the priest-in-charge of Sophiatown's Anglican church of Christ the King, reminds us that color matters. Even though Elisofon's photos are of a prostrate Sophiatown, they help us imagine our way into the neighborhood that the writer Can Themba knew so well: "...the swarming, cacophonous, strutting, brawling, vibrating... Sophiatown that was."
Eliot Elisofon: Aerial view of Sophiatown as it was left after removal of the population under the Western Areas Removal Scheme, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1959.
"In the name of slum clearance they had brought the bulldozers and gored into her body, and, for a brief moment, looking down Good Street, Sophiatown was like one of its own many victims; a man gored by the knives of Sophiatown, lying in the open gutters... dying of multiple stab wounds... the look of shock and bewilderment, of horror and incredulity, on the face of the dying man." --Modisane
Nobody argued that Sophiatown wasn't a slum, at least in part. The journalist Anthony Sampson, who knew both the neighborhood and its people quite well, once wrote that it "was filthy, overcrowded and it stank...." It was also, he quickly added, "the heartland of developing urban black culture -- it vibrated with activity, talk and excitement." And, so, everybody -- everybody, that is, who was black or politically progressive -- would have agreed with Father Huddleston that "...the Government’s scheme was not slum-clearance but robbery: robbery carried out in the interests of and under pressure from the neighboring white suburbs: a political manoeuvre."
Eliot Elisofon: Areial view of Anglican Church of Christ the King, Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1959.
"Freehold rights and permanence, the building up of a living community -- these things are contrary to the whole doctrine of apartheid." --Huddleston
What sort of place was this community? Bloke Modisane, a journalist, actor and writer of plays and fiction who was born and raised in Sophiatown, called it "the most cosmopolitan of South Africa’s racial igloos and perhaps the most perfect experiment in non-racial community living...." He acknowledged that "there were, of course, the inevitable racial tensions...." On the whole, however, "[a]fricans, Coloureds... Indians and Chinese, lived a raceless existence."
Eliot Elisofon: Sophiatown as it was left after removal of the population under the Western Areas Removal Scheme, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1959.
Sophiatown's multi-racial character, in and of itself, was enough to make it, in the words of Father Huddleston "the very antithesis of a sound ‘native policy’." But Sophiatown had done much more than this to earn the government's wrath. It was a center of political resistance to apartheid and overwhelmingly the home of a new, cosmopolitan African urban culture that emerged in defiance of and in opposition to the culture of white supremacy.
On this last point, it's worth quoting David Coplan at length. He's an American musicologist who, for the last several decades, has written from a position deeply embedded in black South African performance culture. These passages are from In Township Tonight!:
"A new synthesis of urban African culture sprang up here, shouting for recognition. Materially poor but intensely social; crime-ridden and violent but neighborly and self-protective; proud, bursting with music and literature, swaggering with personality, simmering with intellectual and political militance, Sophiatown was a slums of dreams, a battleground of the heart in the war for the city’s and even the country’s suppressed black soul.
"Sophiatown produced leaders in many fields, enough to create a ‘Sophiatown Renaissance’ comparable to New York’s Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Africans in other cities looked to Sophiatown for inspiration, and the location became a symbol as well as a partial realisation of their aspirations.
"Even as government bulldozers were leveling its houses, Sophiatown generated a cultural flowering unequaled in the urban history of South Africa."
Eliot Elisofon: Aerial view of Sophiatown as it was left after removal of the population under the Western Areas Removal Scheme, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1959.
Sophiatown had been in the government's cross-hairs since before World War II. Until the '50s, however, it had been saved by the government's reluctance to build alternative housing for the African workers that South African industries and households so desperately needed. With the coming of apartheid-- the reinforced and reinvigorated form of white supremacy that the Nationalist Party had ushered in after its victory in the 1948 all-white election -- Sophiatown's time was clearly coming to an end. (Other neighborhoods that were racial anomolies, such as Cape Town’s District 6, were also targeted.) By the early '50s, the government was making plans for its destruction and for the removal of its residents to the newly constructed township of Meadowlands, many miles to the southwest of Johannesburg.
Residents and political activists resisted the government's plans. The African National Congress [ANC], for instance, initiated its "anti-removal campaign" in 1953. Throughout that year and 1954 an 1955, as well, it held frequent public rallies, often attracting thousands of participants, and pledged that Sophiatown would be destroyed "Over Our Dead Bodies." It was a promise, however, that the ANC couldn't keep. Nelson Mandela, a leader of the campaign and the man who was to become South Africa's first democratically elected president, in 1994, admitted that the organization's efforts were "too little and too late." Most importantly, it had failed offer Sophiatown's residents a realistic alternative to the government's scheme and few -- very few -- were prepared to risk their lives for a promise that had proven to be empty. "In the end," Mandela wrote in his autobiography, "Sophiatown died not to the sound of gunfire but to the sound of rumbling trucks and sledgehammers."
The government built Triomf [Triumph], a housing development for working-class whites, on the ruins of Sophiatown. In 2006, 12 years after the fall of apartheid, the area was renamed Sophiatown.
* * *
Interestingly. the same archive that holds Elisofon's photos of Sophiatown also contains several that the South African photographer Constance Stuart Larrabeemade in the neighborhood, a decade before it was destroyed. She captured, among other things, Father Huddleston in happier times.
Constance Stuart Larrabee: Father Huddleston with Children, 1948. (From the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC. The bell tower of the church of Christ the King, visible in number of Elisofon's photos, can also be seen here. Click on the image to see a larger version.)
He once described a scene almost exactly like the one above:
"The Sophiatown child is the most friendly creature on earth, and the most trusting. ...You will be walking across the playground and suddenly feel a tug at your sleeve or a pressure on your knee: and then there will be a sticky hand in yours. ...You will come back from Johannesburg, as I have done a thousand times, fed up and sick with weariness from that soul-less city, and immediately you are caught in a rush and scurry of feet: in faces pressed against your car window: in arms stretching up to reach yours whether you like it or not. You are home. Your children are around you -- ten of them, a hundred, a thousand: you belong to them and they will never let you forget it."
* * *
Father Trevor Huddleston left South Africa for his native England, in 1955, shortly after the publication of Naught for Your Comfort, a memoir of his years in Sophiatown and a fierce denunciation of apartheid. (The quotations above are from this book.) The book, which was an international best-seller, angered the South African government and led to his recall by his religious order, the Community of the Resurrection. He went on to serve as a bishop in England and Tanzania and as archbishop of the Anglican Province of the Indian Ocean. Throughout, he remained a foe of apartheid and was for many years the chairman of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, which did much to hasten the coming of democracy in South Africa. He died in 1998.
Frustrated by apartheid's restrictions and doubting the possibility of change, Bloke Modisane went into exile in 1959. In 1963, he published his autobiography, Blame Me on History, the book from which I've taken the quotations above. The South African government banned it in 1966. In exile he worked as a writer and actor. Modisane died in West Germany in 1986, never having returned to his native land.
Update, 21 December 2010: Although Life magazine never published Elisofon's photos of Sophiatown, it did cover the first of the removals, in an article published on 7 March 1955. Under a headline reading "African Resettlement: Enforcing segregation, Johannesburg police move Negroes from homes," the magazine called Sophiatown a slum, but criticized the "police-state tactics" that the government used against the neighborhood's residents. Several black and white photographs by local photographers Jurgen Schadeburg, Terence Spencer, and Alan Peake accompanied the story. You can see the story, here.
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Two things are particularly striking about this astonishing collection of photographs by Elisofon:
1. There's no question in my mind that by choosing to shoot from the air and by presenting a blasted landscape devoid of humans he intended to portray the destruction of Sophiatown as an act of war on par with the destruction of European cities as depicted in war photography from WW2. The orderly grid patterns, the ruined masonry, the church bell tower still intact in the midst of the destruction - it's all there and so familiar to the American/western reader. Seen this way, Sophiatown was not going to be perceived as some distant exotic slum in a little known part of the world, but as recognisable and as immediate as Dresden or Hamburg or Coventry.
2. For so long most of the photography of the destruction of Sophiatown has focussed on the victimization of the inhabitants and in presenting images of their displaced belongings, their defeat, and of the the dismantled and disordely streetscape at close range, these photographs have, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced the impression of Sophiatown as a slum. By stepping back, shooting from a distance, emphasizing the grid pattern of the blocks and streets, and in color, Elisofon gives us the impression of an orderly settlement brutally disembowelled.
Posted by: ekapa | 18 December 2010 at 10:24 PM
As for Larabbee, she has always struck me as an exemplar of the tension between ideology/belief and art, and in her case art invariably wins out. It's as if she can't help being an artist no matter what her ideological intentions are. Hard as she might try to produce "native studies," time and time again she produces some of the most un-condescending and beautiful photographs of black South Africans such as this marvellous shot of Huddleston and the children.
Posted by: ekapa | 18 December 2010 at 10:40 PM
@ekapa
I'm not sure precisely why Elisofon hired a airplane and pilot. I agree, however, that once he was in the air, he saw things that reminded him of the destruction that bombers had visited on Europe and Asia during World War Two. He had seen a considerable amount of action as a war photographer.
I'll also agree that many of Larrabee's "native studies" are, as you say, un-condescending and beautiful. But the studies that she chose to publish and exhibit nevertheless render Africans as rooted in local, rural, tribal identities. Her personal work -- as opposed to paid assignments -- rarely depicted urban Africans. I discuss this here: http://johnedwinmason.typepad.com/john_edwin_mason_photogra/2010/08/constance-stuart-larrabee-ndebele.html
Posted by: John | 19 December 2010 at 12:32 AM
ekapa's interpretation of the photos is very much to the point, and to go further, brings into sharp focus controversial comparisons between German Nazism and white nationalism in South Africa. Tribalistic regimes less sophisticated than the nascent cosmopolitanisms they sought to disperse. It seems extraordinary in retrospect that either regime thought that what was occurring in Weimar Berlin or post-war Johannesburg could be not only erased, but reversed. Viva Sophiatown, viva.
Posted by: David Coplan | 19 December 2010 at 03:44 AM
@JEM:
I just finished reading your excellent(typically so) post on Larrabee and found it quite illuminating. I absolutely agree with you that her intent was to render black Africans in a condescendingly romantic fashion as people who existed in some static pre-modern milieu completely untouched by the march of time and the changing world around them. What I've always found interesting about her work is that despite her intentions, her ideology, and the careful editing and curating intended to eliminate any signs of modernity, the subjects of her photographs seem to always defy and subvert her intention. The gaze, body language, and most importantly, her skill in photographing dark skin correctly, make it such that despite the contrived "authentic" settings, the deliberately pre-modern attire, and the careful elision of western artifacts, the people in the pictures are unquestionably modern, fully engaged in the rapidly changing world that they live in. My point is that, yes, Larrabee set out to produce "native studies", but despite her intentions, the product was something other than what she intended.
@David:
Thank you. Your point about comparisons between Nazism and white nationalism is certainly food for thought.
Posted by: ekapa | 19 December 2010 at 12:35 PM