The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown

URBAN slums have been studied by social scientists for a long time. The detached, quantitative approaches of these investigators typically depict slums in pathological metaphors with data from censuses, institutional records, interviews, and, occasionally, participant observation.l Experiential approaches tend to portray slums as more enigmatic places than they seem to be in the social science literature. In contrast with the external viewpoint, a slum becomes a place where a number of basic human demands can be fulfilled.2 For Sophiatown, a mixed-race suburb of Johannesburg, which was demolished in the late 1950s, novels, autobiographies, short stories, and essays reveal the human aspects better than any other sort of record. Several prominent South African authors lived in or visited Sophiatown and wrote about the place. This literature allows investigation of the subjective dimensions of a legendary South African slum as well as promotes appreciation of the objective characteristics of Sophiatown. A great deal of this literature is protest writing, fashioned during a period of increased racial repression, which manifested itself, in part, in the destruction of Sophiatown. This genre of literature contained, for the first time on any scale, work about black urbanism by blacks themselves. Relying heavily on the precedent of the Harlem Renaissance school in the United States, the South African authors wrote in a caustic, piquant style about everyday affairs which they interpreted to be preoccupying. Charges of embittered partisanship and willful misrepresentation by the writers are readily wrung from these contextual observations. To rebut this hasty judgment, it may be pointed out that the consistent allusion by several authors to both the good and the bad in Sophiatown indicates that impressions were not entirely idiosyncratic. Critics may retort with accusations of conspiratorial exaggeration or even joint delusion among the nostalgic and, in some cases, exiled literati. One way of deciding the validity of the literature as a statement of objective realities in Sophiatown is to ponder its official reception. The outspoken commentary was not lightly dismissed. Much of the literature cited in this article has been banned by South African censors from local circulation and citation.