The Sophiatown writers of the fifties: the unreal reality of their World

Abstract

Attempts to capture the zest for life and what Geertz called 'a thick description'l of Sophiatown's gargantuan reality have eluded even its most faithful disciples. Mattera has claimed that 'nobody can write the real story of Sophiatown'.2 Sophiatown was a juvenile delinquent in a city also of tender years. The mineral explosion on the Witwatersrand from 1886 hurled it into an era of industrial capitalism, and the world economy. From nothing Johannesburg sprang from the near desert, 6,000 feet above sea level, with gold as its sole rationale, and a texture of life like that of an overgrown mining camp. In this context Sophiatown in the Fifties offered unprecedented possibilities for blacks to choose and invent their society from the novel distractions of urban life, and was what Raban calls 'soft' and open to a variety of interpretations, dreams, commitments, and methods of survival.3 The Sophiatown of this era was a pressure cooker of societal potential and contradictions, and provided a 'moment' in which a collective dream emerged of a black urban culture that might have been. However, the essence of Sophiatown as place and community was a solid element in an otherwise 'soft' city, and lives on as a symbol in South African history. The co-existence of an emergent black urban culture and the National Party's intent to destroy such a phenomenon, moulded both the significance and tragedy of Sophiatown. The literature that surrounds it is less a series of individual works than a composite picture of a world, in which both Sophiatown and the writers symbolised the vitality, novelty, and precariousness of the new black urban generation. Johannesburg is an example of what Berman, in the context of St Petersburg's role in nineteenth-century Russia, describes as 'the modernism of underdevelopment'.4 The modernism of St Petersburg and Johannesburg was twisted, gnarled,

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