Hub of black culture back on the map

Published on Sunday 12 February 2006 00:53

SOPHIATOWN, a legendary black cultural hub wiped off the map under apartheid, officially returned to its original name yesterday.

Its scattered residents were 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 one of the worst excesses of the white regime. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes under the Group Areas Act, which confined the races to separate residential areas, reserving the best for whites.

Despite its poverty and violence, the community on Johannesburg's western edge produced some of South Africa's most famous writers, musicians, politicians and gangsters.

International jazz stars such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba cut their teeth in its illegal taverns. A magazine called Drum was a vehicle for emerging black writers such as Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi and Es'kia Mphahlele.

The ANC led 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 on to trucks and dumped in the new township of Meadowlands, later incorporated into Soweto.

The bustling neighbourhood that was home to more than 50,000 people was flattened, and a new white suburb, Triomf, emerged from the rubble.