Anthony Egan
CAPE TOWN IN THE 20th CENTURY by Vivian Bickford Smith, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Nigel Worden (David Philip)
Serious history meets the coffee-table format in this second of two volumes on the history of Cape Town. The authors, historians at the University of Cape Town, draw heavily on unpublished as well as published sources, in a work that is both informative and visually attractive.
As the title suggests, the book begins with the Anglo-Boer War and ends midway through the Mandela era, combining the conventional political history with social and economic studies of the growth of the Mother City. The authors rightly see that these three areas of history are closely interlinked and cannot be divorced from each other. Complex socio-political relations may also account for the city’s ambivalent nature – simultaneously more liberal and more conservative than most parts of South Africa.
It is the story of the growth and transformation of a city, from a very colonial town to a modern African city, a city that has seen waves of immigration from overseas as well as from within South Africa. Immigrant communities from Europe – including Italians, Greeks and Portuguese – put their mark on the city and contributed to its cosmopolitan feel. African migrants from the Eastern Cape moved in ever greater numbers to the city as industrialisation took off, leading to inevitable economic competition for jobs with local coloured workers.
Until 1948, Cape Town was probably one of the least racially segregated societies in South Africa. This is not to say that racism or segregation did not exist: it existed, but was never as rigidly enforced as elsewhere in South Africa. Coloured voters shared a common voters’ roll with whites. Abdurahman, leader of the African People’s Organisation (in practical fact, a coloured political party) was a municipal councillor until his death in 1940. Though by no means a radical, his was an independent and critical voice, advocating broader representation for all South Africans.
After 1948, work colour bars and the Group Areas Act deepened existing social, political and economic divisions. Coloureds were taken off the common voters’ roll and their community was increasingly split between those who supported participation in apartheid-introduced structures and those who identified with broader liberation movements.
Apartheid social engineering made its mark, destroying “grey” areas like District Six and creating segregated areas for whites, coloureds, “Asians”, “Malays” and Africans. In 1960 Pan Africanist Congress supporters – led by a young activist, Philip Kgosana – marched on Parliament to protest the shootings at Sharpeville and demand for a universal franchise. Sixteen years later, African and coloured schoolchildren joined the nationwide protests in the wake of the Soweto uprising.
During the 1980s many (of all races) took part in the resistance that contributed to a political stalemate which forced the Government to unban the African National Congress and other organisations on February 2 1990 and commence the process that led to the 1994 democratic elections.
Radicalism and conservatism have both played a role in the history of Cape Town. The South African Communist Party was founded there in 1921. Throughout the century it has been the home of numerous Trotskyist groups. The first significant women’s movement – as well as the first suffragette activities – were initiated in the city. Yet, in 1994 the Western Cape returned a National Party provincial government and in the 1996 municipal elections all six metropolitan areas returned Nat majorities.
Economically and demographically the city has expanded dramatically – from a port to a major industrial centre. Since 1994 it has also become one of the great tourist spots of the world, despite a relatively high crime rate. Interestingly, on the latter point, the authors include a cartoon mocking the incompetence of the police in “this city of Sin, Sand and Sedition”. The date: August 15 1902!
Social conditions and socio-cultural life is also covered by the authors. In the face of waves of grinding poverty, Cape Town has seen the growth since early in this century of welfare and charitable organisations, many of them the offshoot of late Victorian philanthropic ideals but increasingly in recent years community self-help schemes.
The authors have put together a masterly synthesis without trivialising the serious academic material they have used. Writing a popular book requires one set of skills; writing an academic monograph another. What one sees here is academic work written with a lighter touch: respectable scholarship made accessible to the average reader. The main text is admirably supplemented with short “information windows” dealing with individual biographies, events, and exposition of subthemes.
Splendid illustrations make for an added delight, as do the excellent production values. Cape Town in the 20th Century is a book to be read, displayed on one’s coffee table, and re-read.