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  • Respectability and Resistance: A History of Sophiatown
  • Mvuselelo Ngcoya
David Goodhew . Respectability and Resistance: A History of Sophiatown. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. xxvi + 190 pp. Maps. Photographs. References. Index. $84.95. Cloth.

When the apartheid state machinery forcibly removed residents and demolished the South African township of Sophiatown half a century ago, it demonstrated the worst of the engulfing brutality of apartheid. However, the valiant struggles of the township's residents have been tattooed on the country's history. Although the writer Don Mattera, a former resident, has warned that nobody can write the real story of Sophiatown, the cultural and social mosaic of life in apartheid's delinquent township has been resurrected in many forms. Now David Goodhew has written what he calls "the first full-blown history" of Sophiatown (xvii).

Earlier scholars such as Bernard Magubane have argued that the various struggles of the 1950s convinced the people that they had a common class interest (The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa, 1979). In sharp contrast, Goodhew jettisons as unwanted cargo the overarching concept of class, and replaces it with what he calls "working-class respectability"—an expectation that if one sought to be respectable in the way one lived, sought education and principles by which to live, respect from the authorities was forthcoming (xix). In chapters 1 and 4, he maintains that the residents of Sophiatown were so situated in the economy of Johannesburg that they experienced severe poverty alongside powerful pressures militating against a unified political consciousness. Workers were divided by generation, ethnicity, occupation, and gender, and were hedged round by a highly coercive system so that blanket poverty did not lead to blanket class consciousness. Instead, it was respectability that welded the community together.

While some historians assume that respectability is always ripe for state co-option, Goodhew insists that the campaigns against removal and Bantu Education were not only the most successful acts of political mobilization in the district, they were also rooted in the impeccably respectable notions of the right to own land and the right to a decent education. However, respectability was not static. For example, there was a pronounced overlap between devout church members and illegal beer brewers. At the same [End Page 144] time, since education's main attraction lay in the hope that it might lead to greater opportunities to acquire wealth and status, many African women engaged in the less respectable pursuit of liquor production to raise funds to educate their children.

In this meticulously researched study, Goodhew demonstrates a keen appetite for a variety of primary and secondary sources, and for methodological versatility. The book is larded with useful anecdotes and gives a good account of the role of individuals such as, inter alia, J. B. Marks, Robert Resha, Josie Mpama, P. Q. Vundla, and Alfred Xuma in shaping and supporting the culture of respectability. But while the author's main thesis is a provocative one, in his attempt to avoid class and its attendant ghosts, he turns to a rather wooly concept. Since respectability provides the guiding thread in this book, it is surprising that he offers no crisp definition; it is more of a catch-all concept. Related to this, Goodhew would have done well to engage feminist critiques of the oppressive underside of respectability—as used here, the notion is virtually unimpeachable. Moreover, one is left wondering if respectability may in fact be a framework that the author has imposed on his subjects.

These cavils apart, this book will be valuable to those who are searching for alternative accounts of the diverse forms of resistance to apartheid in South Africa. Unlike many recent re-creations of the township, Goodhew's book is no hagiography of Sophiatown; it is an absorbing critical study of the penurious conditions of daily life. Even scholars familiar with postapartheid township life will find Goodhew's provocative thesis and rigorous research methods extremely useful.

Mvuselelo Ngcoya
American University
Washington, D.C.
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