Global Urban History

Vivian Bickford-Smith, The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016. 340 pp., $ 99.99 / £ 64.99 / € 94.99. ISBN 978-1-107-00293-7.

Reviewed by Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University and University of Pretoria

Can Themba was one of the great generation of black South African writers grouped around the renowned 1950s Johannesburg magazine Drum. He had his home in the brutally tough but immensely culturally and politically creative slumland of Sophiatown. Themba once commented that: “Sometimes I think … only Charles Dickens – or perhaps Victor Hugo – could have understood Sophiatown.” South Africa’s cities have been much discussed in recent scholarship but, usually, simply as theatres in which racial conflict took place, and in nationally specific terms. This point of departure has led to an attenuation of thought about these cities as cities. Contestations over South African urban spaces were central to the production of social cleavages and identities. While these battles always crucially interacted with the politics of race, they were not reducible to it. And what contemporary scholarship frequently misses is that historical actors often understood the places in which they lived in a transnational framework of discourses about urbanization and urban life. Themba imagined the city in terms that ranged as far as the worlds of Oliver Twist and Les Misérables.

Sophiatown in the 1950s

Continue reading →