The Soweto uprising of 1976 confirmed to most observers that the anti-apartheid struggle (in contrast to anti-colonial struggles in many other parts of Africa) would be largely urban in character. This realization gave impetus to a rapid growth in the hitherto small field of South African urban history. Much new work predictably sought to understand the nature of conflict and inequality in South African cities and its possible resolution.
The growth of South African urban history was sufficient to merit an exploration in an earlier incarnation of this journal by Gordon Pirie in 1985.Footnote 1 Updated surveys were provided by Christopher Saunders in 1992 and a special edition of the Journal of Southern African Studies in 1995.Footnote 2 Together, these overview articles provide extensive bibliographical information on South African urban historiography up to this last date that does not need to be repeated here in great detail. But revisiting and reflecting on these essays will hopefully give non-South African specialists some sense of the pre-1995 literature. It should also facilitate a grasp of continuity and innovation in the field in the post-apartheid era.
South African urban history up to apartheid's demise
The essays by Pirie and Saunders provide enduringly useful accounts of the origins, initial slow development (but significant pre-1976 moments) and eventual post-Soweto burgeoning of South African urban historiography.Footnote 3 They point to ways in which the latter was influenced by developments in American and British urban history, and the rise of the ‘new social history’. An urgent desire to explain problems of the present undoubtedly leant energy, imagination and cohesion to much South African urban historiography of the apartheid period. Notably, history workshops with an urban focus were established by scholars at Witwatersrand and Cape Town Universities. These were institutions situated in the two urban areas most affected by protests and state repression. The first in a series of publications from both workshops appeared in 1979.Footnote 4 A further significant collection of essays emanated from workshops in Britain, similarly inspired by events of 1976, instigated by Shula Marks at the University of London.Footnote 5 Pirie judged the two-volume social history of the Witwatersrand by Charles Van Onselen to be the ‘brightest jewels to crown’ the new work.Footnote 6 Subsequently two impressive studies were also forthcoming on early Kimberley.Footnote 7
Yet, this was the sum of monograph-length single authored studies within the new social history by 1992. Saunders dwelt on what he saw as other substantial shortcomings in the overall urban history literature. He pointed out that most work had looked at only one section of a city's population or failed to present a city ‘as an integrated whole’. It followed that there was a need for syntheses that could enable (still largely absent) comparative urban history. The history of small towns had been all but neglected, as had the nature and agency of the local state. Urban history needed to be placed within regional, national and international contexts, and pre-colonial settlements integrated within histories of urbanization. Overall, Saunders concluded that South African urban history was much less sophisticated than its counterparts in north America and Europe, with insufficient work on such key areas as (public and private) finance and spatial growth, transport, urban–rural links and leisure.Footnote 8
Contributors to the Journal of Southern African Studies in 1995 echoed some of these criticisms.Footnote 9 Paul Maylam added that much historiography was ‘afrocentric’, focusing on ‘black’ experience. He regretted that too many studies were ‘history-in-the-city’ rather than ‘of-the-city’. Maylam distinguished a two-way split in the historiography between work on urban policy and social history, arguing that the former predominated. His essay then provided a skilful synthesis of the dominant theme in urban policy historiography: attempts to explain the origins of the apartheid city. These attempts had involved numerous investigations of the development of urban racial segregation from the nineteenth century onwards. Much had thereby been revealed about the history of elements of urban regulation and control: the migrant labour and pass system, mine compounds, the establishment of locations,Footnote 10 location administration, location finance (particularly revenue gathered from a monopoly on beer brewing) and housing. While welcoming the abandonment of simple economic reductionism, Maylam emphasized the need to understand the role that material forces had played in the evolution of urban segregation.Footnote 11
In contrast, historical geographers Susan Parnell and Alan Mabin were highly critical of what they saw as an obsession with race in existing historiography.Footnote 12 Too little attention had been given to the constructed nature of racial categories; too many case studies took race for granted and were racially compartmentalized. Parnell and Mabin believed that ‘racial fetishism’ had led to an emphasis on South African uniqueness that concealed global commonalities in urban evolution and reduced the possibility for comparative research. In their view, studying ‘urban society does not begin with race – rather it reflects the creation of race as part of the intricate development of modern society’.Footnote 13 There was too much social history that obscured the ‘larger picture’ of the way in which modernist planning, that included a concern for ‘improvement’ as well as power, had shaped South African cities. What was needed was more history from ‘above’, from the perspective of local or central state politicians or bureaucrats.
Parnell and Mabin certainly made a persuasive case for urban history that paid greater attention to the role of the (central or local) state, and were consistently more alert to international theorizing on cities. But they perhaps unfairly over-generalized about the limitations of social history. As Peter Alexander has pointed out, there is a difference between history ‘from below’ and ‘of below’: between social history that helps to demonstrate how ‘ordinary’ people shaped history (including urban spaces) and that which merely describes how they lived their lives.Footnote 14 Influenced by cultural materialists such as Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, Gareth Stedman Jones and Edward Thompson, at least some social historians self-consciously used neo-Marxist theory to make connections between varieties of production, social relationships, consciousness, culture and action. In this paradigm, the formation of space and senses of place was contested, and inextricably connected to the nature of a city's productive base: the world commerce made (Cape Town), say, compared to that of mining (Johannesburg or Kimberley).Footnote 15
Yet much social history was indeed racially compartmentalized. Work on Cape Town was something of an exception here, and had included attempts to highlight the socially constructed nature of urban ethnic and racial identities.Footnote 16 This may in part have been because Cape Town's longer, pre-industrial, history made it harder to take race for granted. For Cape Town, it was argued, free or slave status, then class, had been more salient in terms of social structure than race before the late nineteenth century.Footnote 17 And at the advent of the ‘mineral revolution’, the discovery of diamonds and gold that produced Kimberley and Johannesburg and accelerated South African industrialization, a substantial ‘mixed race’ population existed in Cape Town according to census enumerators. A more enduring categorization and self-identity as ‘whites’, ‘coloureds’, ‘natives’ (‘Africans’ or ‘blacks’) and ‘Indians’ (or ‘Asians’) only emerged over the next three decades. It was argued that crucial to understanding this development was the growth of new divisions of labour in Cape Town that interacted and eventually all but correlated with racial or ethnic categorization and self-identity. This stemmed from particular and changing demands for labour, how these were met from within and beyond Cape society and the result of social struggle.Footnote 18 Racial and ethnic ideologies were available to a variety of ‘protagonists in those struggles’, ideologies that drew from both rural and urban experience.Footnote 19 Paraphrasing the oft-quoted phrase of Karl Marx, social historians realized that ordinary people do not make cities in circumstances of their own choosing, but help make them they did.
One might conclude this section by suggesting that urban racial and ethnic identities were not simply created ‘from above’ or by entirely impersonal economic forces devoid of human agency. But experts in the central and local state did increasingly suggest racial segregation (including, but beyond, various forms of residential segregation) as a response to modern urban problems. And spatial separation certainly helped to maintain, and make ‘normal’, senses of racial and ethnic distinction.Footnote 20
Urban history in the new South Africa
The demise of apartheid did not mark a sharp break with previous work. This is partly because much historiography has consisted of research commenced before the formal transition from white minority rule to democracy (in 1994; apartheid legislation was repealed in 1991). Despite the intervention of Parnell and Mabin, there has continued to be a fascination with the origins and implementation of racial segregation. Recent work has suggested its origins in metropolitan British notions of self-control or reaffirmed links between segregation in town and countryside.Footnote 21 Paul Maylam has produced a monograph in this latter respect that takes the reader adroitly through issues of periodization, differing theories and historiographical debates up to 2001.Footnote 22 There is also, as we shall see, predictable engagement with the still very recent and ongoing history of racial de-segregation, and the nature and potential future of the ‘apartheid city in transition’. Yet the Parnell and Mabin essay has been influential in the growth of work, particularly by historical geographers, that has not made race the prime category of study. In addition, much urban history has implicitly or explicitly reflected the influence of newly perceived problems (such as continued inequality and violent crime) or possibilities (tourism and heritage reconstruction) of the urban present. Consequently, much has been focused on the (late) twentieth century, and South African urban history's previous strength in earlier periods (particularly the mineral revolution era) has been considerably reduced.Footnote 23 The influence of changing international conceptions of the urban, and postmodern intellectual insights more generally, have also been discernable.
Historical geography has been a significant force in studies of spatial structuring (including racial segregation) since Parnell and Mabin's essay of 1995, albeit these have not always been written with much reference to an international context. One early exception was the work of Jennifer Robinson. Drawing on Foucault and Michael Mann, she argued (with detailed reference to Port Elizabeth) that the South African state, like all modern states, was an ‘autonomous institution’ that exercised its power through the spatial organization and ordering (‘biopower over’ citizens) of society.Footnote 24 Using the 1936 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, Robinson has expanded her ideas on modernity and segregation.Footnote 25 Mabin himself has written about urban planning in South Africa through the twentieth century, and there have been several studies of early twentieth-century town planning in Natal alert to the influences of British ideas.Footnote 26 There has also been more contemporary studies, but with historical perspectives, of planning in the Cape Town and Pretoria regions.Footnote 27
Parnell and Mabin have been much involved in researching and writing about the contemporary South African city, with policy formation in mind. But on occasion they have elaborated and expanded on their earlier thinking about urban South Africa in ways that could usefully inform future work by historians. Parnell, for instance, argued for the deployment (and unification) in South African urban studies of theories about both ‘first’ and ‘third world’ cities. She wants the inclusion of postmodern urban theory as well as an understanding of the dynamics of ‘typical’ African cities.Footnote 28 This argument was expanded by Robinson in a thoughtful essay on the question of categorizing modern Johannesburg: existing labels such as global city, world city, mega-city or third world city seemed inappropriate. All cities should be seen as both ‘ordinary’ but ‘complex, diverse, and contested environments for living’.Footnote 29 And there have been other postmodern meditations with historical dimensions on the nature of (postmodern) South African urbanity.Footnote 30
The majority of other studies by historical geographers has been less theoretically concerned histories ‘from above’. Two still-rare studies of planned segregation in small towns have been Heyman Zituta on King William's Town and Alison Todes on Newcastle, Natal.Footnote 31 Brij Maharaj has opened up new territory by exploring the sensitive topic of attempts by members of the Durban Indian elite to negotiate ‘voluntary segregation’ with the municipality and the South African government. This was in the two decades immediately preceding apartheid, and (unsuccessfully) aimed at protecting material interests and avoiding the humiliation of statutory segregation.Footnote 32 And he has explored the role of Durban municipality during apartheid, particularly in relation to the Group Areas Act.Footnote 33
Maharaj has also been one of many geographers (in particular) who have looked at the extent and limitations of segregation in South African cities (for some, their re-segregation) since the end of apartheid. Many of these studies have not confined themselves to segregation and have investigated a range of spatial, social and governance issues including inner city decay, decentralization, poverty, local government restructuring and service delivery. Most have been concerned with South Africa's major cities, especially Johannesburg.Footnote 34 Durban has also received considerable attention. In a notable contribution to a collection of essays on this apartheid city in transition, and building on work by Maharaj, economic historian Bill Freund emphasized historical connections between municipal government financing and spatial planning.Footnote 35 There has also been some work on Pretoria and Cape Town,Footnote 36 and there are a couple of examples of studies that examine the extent of desegregation in smaller, less written about places.Footnote 37
There continues to be work on housing, especially the housing of black South Africans closely connected to the implementation of segregation.Footnote 38 Parnell has published articles (drawn from her pre-1995 Ph.D. thesis) on Johannesburg's inner city slumyards and urban segregation from 1910 through to the 1930s.Footnote 39 Together with Deborah Hart, she has also written about the state's role in accepting or rejecting self-help housing initiatives in the twentieth century.Footnote 40 This and other work may mark a greater stress, as Parnell and Mabin had hoped, on motivations of ‘improvement’ and poverty alleviation (rather than mere social control) in state dealings with lower-class South Africans, whether in terms of housing, welfare or health provision.Footnote 41 And there was a considerable historical dimension to Parnell's important co-authored work aimed at addressing the question of inequality in contemporary Johannesburg, a question specifically addressed for the second half of the twentieth century in a paper co-written with Owen Crankshaw.Footnote 42 Crankshaw in turn has written about social differentiation within Johannesburg townships, and drawn attention to the practice by occupiers of formal housing of renting ‘backyard’ space for shacks.Footnote 43
Together, all this work provides a mass of empirical material invaluable to any attempted history of South African cities that wishes to take its chronological time-span up to the near present. Economic historian Bill Freund has incorporated many of its insights into his recently published The African City.Footnote 44 This is a path-breaking, skilful work of synthesis and comparative history that brings together work on cities throughout the continent. But Freund's book is particularly strong on South African urban history. Following Parnell and Mabin, he demonstrates that South African cities have experienced similar evolutionary stages (such as modernist, post-Fordist and postmodernist), with consequent implications for land use and spatial ordering, as many others in Africa and around the world. Race, according to Freund, has not necessarily been the sole, or even the most important, factor explaining spatial ordering. The effects of globalization and international urban evolutionary trends are clearly discernable, including the emergence of north American style edge cities like La Lucia-Umhlanga Ridge (Durban).Footnote 45
Much work on change and continuity in spatial ordering since apartheid's legislated end mentioned thus far is, of course, implicitly or explicitly concerned with why that end came about. The answers given thus far have emphasized structural change and decisions made from above: the changing nature of international capital, or economic structural forces, and decisions made by the state, financial and business elites and planners. Adding to our elucidation in terms of structural factors, Owen Crankshaw has demonstrated how changing economic production, particularly de-industrialization and the growth of (most obviously service industry) occupations that required greater entry level skills, played a key role in eroding correlation between race and occupation. And importantly, they did so by increasing intra-racial inequality.Footnote 46
Again there is the question of the agency of ordinary people, including the workers themselves. Most studies of workers since 1994 for the pre-apartheid era remain more histories in, rather than of, the city.Footnote 47 The same may be said of the huge literature that has explored the anti-apartheid struggle in urban contexts, whether trade union organization or broader popular protest and resistance.Footnote 48 Yet a major thrust of the urban struggle was, by the mid-1980s, self-consciously to make townships ‘ungovernable’, or only governed by ‘the people’ through street committees and ‘civics’ organizations, with implications for wider urban governance (then and now). Belinda Bozzoli has used an innovatively structured narrative to explore the revolt in Alexandra township, Johannesburg.Footnote 49 There is one rare history that examines questions of control and conflict in a smaller town, Uitenhage (Eastern Cape), from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s.Footnote 50 And there have been a number of studies tracing the history and (often declining) fate of civics through the period of transition.Footnote 51
Keith Beavon's Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of a City (2004) has been a rare ‘whole’ history of a city (from its origins to the near present) and one that is relatively alert to both structure and agency. Beavon demonstrates connections between physical geography, economic forces, demographic and technological change, and a variety of political interventions. Although largely a history from above, Beavon also shows how the actions of ordinary people helped shape Johannesburg. Squatter movements, crowds protesting in city centres or widespread gangsterism affected the precise timing of ‘international’ elements of urban evolution. These included housing provision, the decentralization of businesses, relocation of retail outlets to suburbs and the emergence of gated communities.Footnote 52 Suburban fortifications in many South African cities are now reminiscent of a South American ‘city of walls’.Footnote 53 Beavon's history demonstrates relationships between space, race, the built environment and class in South Africa's largest city from its origins to the near present, invaluable for national and international comparative purposes.
Beavon's overt intention was to give readers a ‘sense of place’. If part of doing so is explaining, following Henri Lefebvre, the links between economic production and elements of social reproduction (such as housing and the ordering of public space), Beavon has certainly made a key contribution to this end.Footnote 54 But, despite stated intentions, he has perhaps said more about Johannesburg as constructed space and built environment than Johannesburg as place, in the sense of how people experienced the city through time. Understanding senses of place requires an understanding of both structure and experience, history from above and below. How places, in Dolores Hayden's phrase, have been ‘planned, designed, built, inhabited, appropriated, celebrated, despoiled and discarded’.Footnote 55 Human experience of Johannesburg, though by no means entirely neglected in Beavon's history, receives less attention than economic geography.
The problem for most South African urban historians has been difficulty in weaving historical geography, economic history and social history together. Beavon has come closer than most. The problem of attempting ‘whole’ city history was somewhat bypassed in a substantial ‘historical dictionary’ of the broader Witwatersrand area. This combined a chronological guide to the city's development with essays on individuals, institutions, organizations and a variety of other themes and processes that offers immensely useful bibliographical detail.Footnote 56 Gary Baines situated his important study of New Brighton township within an understanding of the political economy of Port Elizabeth. His approach was to use separate sections to offer rich accounts of how this township was created from above and below.Footnote 57
For Durban, Freund and Maylam have both produced overview essays that, combined, give a good sense of Durban's evolution from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Freund focused on the economic forces and the role of the local state in shaping the city and its spaces. In contrast, Maylam's essay focused more obviously on how the city's spaces were shaped and experienced ‘from below’. In an introduction to a collection of essays on African life in the city in the twentieth century, he demonstrated how all the contributions were connected by their consideration of the occupation, contestation and uses of urban space.Footnote 58 Gary Minkley and Anne Mager have each examined aspects of the creation of space in East London, sensitive to how gender operated in this respect.Footnote 59
Writing a ‘whole history’ of how Cape Town was ‘planned, designed, built, inhabited, appropriated, celebrated, despoiled and discarded’ over 350 years was a motivation for a two-volume history of Cape Town, initially conceived as a single book, completed by 1999: Cape Town: The Making of a City and Cape Town in the Twentieth Century. This project obviously drew on existing material, not least the Cape Town history workshop publications. A substantial research grant enabled the commissioning of research assistants to fill in at least some of the gaps. Considerable new archival work was also undertaken by the authors themselves. Dealing with the history of South Africa's oldest city through more than three centuries virtually ensured that they had to be sensitive to the complex relationship between space and a wide variety of group identities, created in a dialectical relationship from above and below. Visual sources were incorporated not merely to illustrate how the city may have appeared at various stages of its evolution, but as ‘representations’, and thus sources revealing contemporary ideas about the city.Footnote 60
There are also now some overview histories of small towns. They include work on ‘company towns’: Pilgrim's Rest (Mpumulanga), Velddrift and Kleinsee (both in the Cape).Footnote 61 There are also accounts of the creation of the extraordinary capital of the Bophutatswanan homeland, Mmabatho, and the struggle between Pietermaritzburg and Ulundi over which would become the capital of KwazuluNatal.Footnote 62 And Nico Kotze has outlined the emergence of Orania, the only ‘whites-only’ town in the New South Africa.Footnote 63
Additional studies by Kevin Greenbank and Bickford-Smith have focused on Cape Town for a relatively short period of its existence, in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 64 Andrew Bank and Gary Minkley have written an imaginative overview essay for a substantial ‘pre-millenium’ edition of Kronos: Journal of Cape History on the spatial shaping of Cape Town from its origins to the near present. They used the theoretical insights of Lefebvre to outline a history of perceived, conceived and lived space.Footnote 65 And there are some studies that compare Cape Town with other, themselves widely differing, urban places: New Orleans, the Zambian Copperbelt and Lagos.Footnote 66
Important contributory essays in the Kronos collection included articles by Nigel Worden on space and identity in the Dutch East India Company (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) period and Kirsten McKenzie on the creation of public and private spheres in the first half of the nineteenth century (after British occupation of the Cape).Footnote 67 Worden argued that there was a predominant three-way spatial division of Cape Town between company, burgher and ‘liminal’ space that lay between (or on the outer margins) of the first two kinds. McKenzie used insights that stemmed from her innovative masters' thesis to explain the creation of a public sphere in Cape Town, a gendered middle-class identity and gendered divisions of space.Footnote 68 Unfortunately there has been little recent academic work on the role of settler elites in shaping other nineteenth-century British South African towns, with the exception of an unpublished doctoral thesis on Durban.Footnote 69
Producing ‘whole’ and comparative urban histories clearly requires the building blocks provided by case studies of parts of cities, particular citizens or periods. Such case studies predictably still dominate South African urban history. What might seem less predictable is that so many remain explicitly or implicitly ethnically and racially compartmentalized. Given the demise of apartheid and the criticism of obsession with race in the mid-1990s essays noted above, this is perhaps surprising. But the close correlation over time between (historically created) space and ethnicity or race in South African cities makes this at least understandable as a research topic strategy. It is also how many scholars (and citizens) would continue to perceive the social ‘reality’ of the South African urban past and present: senses of place, ethnicity and race remain intimately intertwined.
Thus a range of urban South African ethnic and racial groups, and the spaces they inhabited (and that inhabited them), have continued to be the focus of urban histories since 1995. Albeit with varying degrees of attention to the socially constructed nature of race, many have been excellent. They have included work on ‘black Americans’,Footnote 70 coloureds,Footnote 71 Indians,Footnote 72 Chinese,Footnote 73 Jews,Footnote 74 ‘poor whites’Footnote 75 and Afrikaners.Footnote 76
But urban histories of South Africans defined as African continue to dominate. African life in Durban was the subject of a particularly impressive collection of essays in 1996.Footnote 77 Three major studies now exist for the segregation, administration and resistance of Africans in Port Elizabeth.Footnote 78 There have also been a number of studies of informal settlements and townships in the greater Cape Town area.Footnote 79 Rebekah Lee's work on African women and the construction (or reconstruction) of ‘home’ in Cape Town has been innovative here.Footnote 80
For the greater Johannesburg area, there have been two ‘popular’ township histories, both co-written by a leading social historian of African experience on the Rand. The first, a history of Soweto, stemmed from the making of a four-part television documentary and involved skilful synthesis of a large amount of existing academic scholarship. The second, on Kathorus, relied more directly on extensive oral histories conducted by a number of researchers between 1985 and 1999.Footnote 81 Nauright has written on the early administration of Alexandra.Footnote 82 Noor Nieftagodien's masters and doctoral theses examined the implementation of apartheid in Springs and Benoni (Witwatersrand), and the consequent creation in the latter case of the township of Daveyton.Footnote 83 Simangaliso Malinga has also written about Daveyton and the informal settlements that emerged in this vicinity.Footnote 84 And Philip Frankel, in revisiting the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, has done so within an understanding of the township context.Footnote 85
Bonner had argued, in his contribution to the Journal of Southern African Studies special edition, that more attention needed to be given to the process of first-generation urbanization. Much work before 1995 had focused either on migrancy or second generation urbanites, and particularly neglected women's motivations and experience of urbanization.Footnote 86 Hilary Sapire helped address this lacuna with an innovative comparison between women's experiences in South Africa and the American South.Footnote 87
In the process Sapire added to the previously masculine-dominated literature on the creation of gender-segregated urban space such as mine compounds and migrant labourers' barracks. Although research for them had begun in the 1980s, a series of major monograph-length studies of male migrant labour were only published in the early 1990s, three in 1994 alone, and did not receive great recognition in the 1995 essays. Yet this work was among the most innovative of social history contributions.Footnote 88 Much was revealed about motivation for migrancy, not least an enduring male desire to travel to the city in order to preserve the rural household and male patriarchy. Displaying sensitivity to complex constructions of gendered and age-related urban identities, attention was drawn by Dunbar Moodie and Patrick Harries to the extensive existence of same-sex ‘mine marriages’. Together with a monograph on female migrancy by Belinda Bozzoli, this work on migrancy demonstrated intricate urban–rural links (helping fill a gap indicated by Saunders) and showed the syncretic (creolized or hybrid) nature of urban (and rural) African popular culture and consciousness. And Belinda Bozzoli showed how urbanization on the Rand was a phase in the lives of women from Phokeng (north-west of Johannesburg).Footnote 89
These monographs pointed the way forward to work by anthropologist Lesley Bank that argued that rural linkages (both real and in terms of ideological constructions) endured in many townships much longer than studies published in the 1960s had estimated, and that a one-directional (second generational) rural to urban model of urbanization might suggest.Footnote 90 This and other work suggests that categories such as township dweller or migrant were less discrete than apartheid-era scholarship (perhaps overemphasizing town dwellers' dislocation with the countryside so as to oppose ‘influx control’ legislation) may have implied. In addition, John Sharp has demonstrated that relative affluence might (for Cape Town at least) be more significant to maintenance of rural links than more recent arrival in the city.Footnote 91 And in a still-rare small town study, Sean Jones has explored the existence and implications of ‘matrifilial’ families, a product of extensive male migrancy, in Bathurst (Eastern Cape).Footnote 92
Interest in migrancy and urbanization underpinned the emergence of work on the history of gangs, apartheid-era social history that all too accurately guessed at enduring urban realities. The path-breaking work of van Onselen on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gangs on the Rand was built on by Bonner for the mid-twentieth century, and by Paul La Hausse for early twentieth-century Durban.Footnote 93 This was social history that ‘guessed at and very nearly grasped’ more than an occasional ‘thin wisp’ of a post-apartheid ‘tomorrow’.Footnote 94
By the early 1990s, and in the context of dreadful acts of urban ‘political’ violence, La Hausse and Clive Glaser drew attention to the relationships between gangsterism, masculinity and youth (as a stage of life).Footnote 95 Glaser's work continued through the 1990s, culminating in a monograph. He explored connections between political organization and tsotsis, and suggested that the distinction between ‘school’ and ‘non-school’ culture, and political and criminal activity, became blurred in the 1980s with the appearance of the ‘com-tsotsis’. Glaser explained the attractions, hybrid style and value systems of gangsterism within an understanding of urban family structure, gender socialization and generational tensions.Footnote 96 But if there may have been a tendency to enlist gangsterism as a form of resistance (to bourgeois society or the state) in 1980s literature, Glaser portrays this phenomenon as profoundly anti-social banditry and a deepening problem in South African cities, not least in terms of violence against women.Footnote 97 So does Gary Kynoch, who built on Bonner's pioneering work on the Marashea or Russians gang, and who addresses many of the same themes as Glaser. Both suggest that any attempts to deal with gangsterism should take its particular South African history into consideration.Footnote 98
Exploring that history has already included examining relationships between same-sex hostels, masculinity, ethnicity and mine-work.Footnote 99 A future focus will surely be on re-examining state ability to control cities in the apartheid era. Kynoch stressed the apartheid state's limited power, its peculiar inability (and possible lack of desire when dealing with townships) to control the growth of ordinary criminality. Bonner has also recently written of ways in which members of the African working class were able to avoid state control in under-policed Benoni in the 1940s.Footnote 100 Work on such themes is likely to increase, perhaps particularly histories of policing.Footnote 101 One might also expect a growth in explorations of urban crime networks that explore both social pathology, economic implications and international dimensions. Van Onselen's recent splendid work for late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be pointing the way forward here.Footnote 102
Such insight, and perhaps greater awareness that under policed disreputable elements might constitute enduring danger to people other than members of the white bourgeoisie, arguably underpin post-apartheid investigations of respectability and honour. This development may have been furthered by the postmodern turn, and desire to move beyond old dualities such as oppressor and oppressed, bad (anything that appeared to uphold ‘the system’, such as petit-bourgeois respectability) and good (anything that could be characterized as ‘resistance’). David Goodhew has recently produced an absorbing monograph that emphasizes respectability as a component of resistance within a history of Sophiatown.Footnote 103 In path-breaking work, Kirsten McKenzie has explored gendered notions of honour in nineteenth-century Cape Town identities, and strengthened her argument with (sometimes wry) comparisons with Sydney: cosmopolitan colonial port cities leant themselves to misrepresentation and trickery, with consequent additional concern for reputation. In addition, Robert Ross drew early attention for South Africa to notions of respectability and material culture.Footnote 104 Perhaps only John Iliffe could detect honour amongst thieves as well. In a magisterial work he has teased out (again gendered) variations of honour notions among many different groups of urban South Africans – including gangsters, slaves, Christian converts, members of temperance organizations and people living with HIV/AIDS.Footnote 105 There has also been a growth of work on religion and sacred space in the city.Footnote 106 And Robert Garner, in neo-Weberian vein, has explored connections between varieties of Christian denominations and economic change in Edenvale township (Pietermaritzburg).Footnote 107 The small amount of work on urban Muslims, and largely ineffective attempts to convert them, is likely to expand.Footnote 108
A plethora of research on communities destroyed by apartheid legislation has revealed a yearning among ex-inhabitants for respectable worlds they have lost, nostalgia for less violent, more neighbourly and (ironically) less racially divisive times.Footnote 109 This yearning is apparent both in academic studies based on oral testimonies,Footnote 110 as well as in autobiographical histories, particularly about District Six (Cape Town).Footnote 111 There is a developing body of work on both the process and narratives behind claims for restitution by ex-inhabitants, and one study that has traced land ownership since the removals.Footnote 112 In the case of District Six, there have also been a number of studies that have explored the creation of myth and memory,Footnote 113 and these can be compared with the much grimmer place contained in the pre-removal writings of ex-resident Alex La Guma.Footnote 114 A recent edited collection has given welcome attention to literary representations of towns such as these, alongside perceptions of the countryside.Footnote 115
Clearly connected with questions of collective memory and myth, there has also been burgeoning work on the creation and negation of heritage in urban South Africa: whether in the likes of waterfront developments, visual culture, museums or monuments.Footnote 116 This interest and scholarship in turn is closely connected with investigations into the rise (boosted by the end of apartheid) and nature of urban tourism, including the marketing of Cape Town as the gay capital of South Africa.Footnote 117 The end of apartheid has also facilitated recent research by Andrew Tucker into the creation of overt ‘gay spaces’ influenced by north American example, but one that also analyses varieties of less public displays of ‘male homosexual’ identities among ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ Capetonians.Footnote 118
Tucker's findings remind us, as does research on gangster style and work on (predominantly white) youth ‘ducktail’ subculture, to be sensitive not only to the creation of ‘difference’ in the city, but also to the culturally hybrid nature of urban identities more generally.Footnote 119 This was an urban reality that apartheid dogma (like nationalisms in other places and periods) denied. There is already interesting and suggestive research on the social history of urban languages.Footnote 120 Urban culture is increasingly globalized, and urban identities in South Africa include the transnational. Beginning in the apartheid era, there has been a particularly rich literature that reveals the creolized and globalized nature of popular music and musical performance.Footnote 121 One expects an increase in urban history that explores such hybridity within and across urban spaces, as well as the mixed (in a racial, ethnic, class or gendered sense) use of urban space.
Such explorations already characterize much work on pre-twentieth-century Cape Town that has not taken ‘race’ as a prime category of study. Historical archaeologist Antonia Malan's research on households and material culture in Cape Town may promote similar explorations in other places and periods.Footnote 122 A substantial research project on the ‘VOC World’ has resulted in comparative perspectives on material culture and social identity in the urban Cape and other Dutch East Indian Company possessions.Footnote 123 Robert Shell's work has revealed much about creolized culture, consciousness and spatial arrangements among urban slaves at the Cape.Footnote 124
Several articles in the Kronos pre-millennium special edition explored a range of hybrid leisure activities, festivals and their relationship to space and identity that are contributions towards a still-small literature in this respect for South African cities.Footnote 125 Much pre-1994 work, though pioneering,Footnote 126 often explored leisure in terms of social control, and in a more racially compartmentalized fashion. Some still does, though not without innovative insights. One recent study has examined ‘tribal’ recreation in gold mine compounds.Footnote 127 Shirley Brooks has demonstrated that the establishment of game parks in Natal was intended as a form of leisure provision for the white urban poor.Footnote 128 Albert Grundlingh has offered a study of gambling and dog racing on the Rand.Footnote 129 John Nauright has explored masculinity and coloured rugby.Footnote 130 And there has been a continued fascination with what is still called, disturbingly to outsiders, the ‘Coon Carnival’, New Year parading by working-class (predominantly coloured) Capetonians.Footnote 131
The growing study of urban texts, and these might of course include heritage sites or carnival performances, has undoubtedly been informed by the postmodern turn. This development was perhaps also a reaction to the dominance of materialist history in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 132 It is now belatedly respectable to write about intellectual circles and societies in the city.Footnote 133 There has also been a steadily expanding interest in urban texture, architecture and landscape. Jennifer Beningfield has examined a rich array of visual, written and cartographical archival records to explore the historical perception of urban (and rural) landscapes that include the liminal, disused mining company land in Johannesburg. She inevitably also discusses District Six, both in terms of landscapes of erasure and of the imagination.Footnote 134 How the urban has been represented in cinema has attracted attention, whether as ‘edgy’ Johannesburg or ‘fairest’ Cape Town.Footnote 135 So has the matter of how cinema has been consumed in the city, how it has influenced consciousness and culture and been used as a form of (state or elite) education or propaganda.Footnote 136
There have been surprisingly few attempts at providing an overview of South African urban history since the mid-1990s.Footnote 137 Many criticisms of that period unfortunately remain pertinent today, not least that there is still little (compared to many other national academies) of a self-conscious practice of this discipline.Footnote 138 Yet it is possible to detect particular strengths in recent cross-disciplinary studies, and hopefully insights that might inform and enrich practice elsewhere. It is likely that manifestations here will still be shaped in large part by absorption with problems and possibilities of the present, like violence or hybridity, and that there will be more studies in time of the histories of poverty and disease. One might hope that the coming of the soccer world cup to South Africa in 2010, and an accompanying rush of visitors to our cities, might also kick start a greater interest in the history (and adequacy) of urban transport; and thence in urban infrastructure in general. This may encourage work on the history of suburbs.Footnote 139 More certainly it will generate a few more histories of football.Footnote 140
This article has attempted to give a reasonable sense of strengths and weaknesses in urban historiography since apartheid's demise. An additional purpose has been to argue the case for social history, and that it should be included alongside other varieties in the historiography. Turning our back on history ‘from below’ must inevitably impoverish our understanding of how South African cities have been shaped and experienced. Understanding both is necessary to explain how South African ‘senses of place’ have been created.
