South Africans of all colours this weekend celebrated the return to its original name of Johannesburg’s most famous suburb, once blighted by apartheid bulldozers more than half-a-century ago.
The working-class area in western Johannesburg was renamed Sophiatown on Saturday as it was once known by the 65 000 black residents who lived there before being forcibly removed by the white minority government in 1955.
On February 9 of that year, apartheid police armed with machine guns and truncheons surrounded the vibrant multiracial Sophiatown before homes were bulldozed and people’s possessions were loaded onto open trucks as part of the government’s segregative policies.
Most people were dumped in Soweto township’s Meadowlands, about 10km to the south, effectively wiping the suburb know as Johannesburg’s Harlem off the map.
The white regime renamed it Triomf (triumph) and turned it into an area where whites only were allowed to live.
”We are here today to rename Triomf to Sophiatown,” said city mayor Amos Masondo as he unveiled a signboard bearing the original name in bold black letters.
”There is no need to say how deeply devisive the name Triomf has been to our nation,” Masondo told a crowd of about 500 people including many who had lived in the suburb before 1955.
”I’m feeling ecstatic about it. When we were thrown out we lost hope that we would ever be able to come back,” said jazz diva Abigail Kubeka, who started her singing career in Sophiatown’s beerhalls.
”I am back here to celebrate this wonderful day,” she said.
Often called the Harlem or Greenwich village of South Africa, Sophiatown was a contrasting but vibrant mix of red-roofed brick homes and tin shacks and the birthplace of South African jazz, styled on black American culture of the time.
Artists mixed with tsotsis who belonged to gangs like the Berliners and the Americans, adopting the names of American movie stars like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart.
There were bands like the Boston Stars, the Manhattan Brothers and the Pitch Black Follies and famous shebeens like Aunt Babe’s and The House on Telegraph Hill where these bands used to play.
It was here where South African international music stars like trumpet maestro Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim first made a name for themselves.
Masekela got his first trumpet here, given to him by veteran anti-apartheid cleric and Sophiatown’s Anglican priest, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston.
”Despite the poverty, Sophiatown had a special character; for Africans it was the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, the home of writers, artists, doctors and lawyers. It was both bohemian and conventional, lively and sedate,” former president Nelson Mandela recalled in his autobiography
to Freedom.
It was a hotbed of liberation politics, and here where Mandela first called for the now ruling African National Congress (ANC) to take up armed resistance against racial segregation.
But the day white South Africa’s bulldozers moved in and razed Sophiatown to make place for Triomf, Huddleston said the country ”lost not only a place but an ideal”.
Masekela told Agence France-Presse on Saturday that although he was happy that
Sophiatown had got its name back, he still lamented the demise of what was once Johannesburg’s cultural heart.
”For me it’s sad. It’s almost like the unveiling of a tombstone — you relive the past and you commemorate but can never bring back its glories,” he said in an interview. – AFP
