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17 1w฀ ฀ Sophiatown after the Fall The Sixties A small, undistinguished house sits at 111 Ray Street, near Johannesburg. In its ordinariness, it offers mute testimony to failure. This area is the suburb known once again as Sophiatown—“once again” because only recently has this suburb regained its birth name. For generations, the neighborhood was known as Triomf—from the Afrikaans word meaning “triumph”—a name linked to its history. As Sophiatown, the neighborhood was founded in the early twentieth century as a “freehold” township, and it had been one of Johannesburg’s only multiracial and relatively free spaces. The so-called triumph was the apartheid state’s destruction of this space by the end of the 1950s; as apartheid dictated, Sophiatown’s inhabitants were separated according to racial groups, with their neighborhood bulldozed and Triomf erected in its place. Which brings us to the small house with its attached garage and neat fence of black spikes. It hearkens back to a well-remembered part of both Sophiatown’s and South Africa’s history, where Drum writers held forth with Can Themba at his famed House of Truth. In the years since the neighborhood ’s destruction, Themba’s home has figured prominently in the writing of historians, memoirists, writers of fiction, and others who have memorialized and lamented the rise and fall of the “Sophiatown Renaissance” during the 1950s. Themba is a wonderful character, and the renaissance makes for lively stories.1 But the problem of its end looms. The building at 111 Ray is no longer the House of Truth, nor is the rechristened but still predominantly Afrikaans Triomf truly Sophiatown. The black spot’s residents failed to stop the destruction of their homes, just as in Sharpeville’s wake, it was apparent that the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and the African National Congress (ANC) had failed to stop apartheid. 18 w฀ Making Black Consciousness Sophiatown was a rallying point for antiapartheid agitation during the 1950s, but in the end, rallies and protests achieved little—a momentary release, author and Sophiatown resident Bloke Modisane remembered, “that left us exhausted and limp.”2 By 1960, the ANC and PAC were banned; by 1964, their leaders were imprisoned or in exile and the struggle, it seemed, had stilled. The university students of 1968 were teenagers in 1960. Some counted political activists among their family members; others had grown up in Sophiatown and similar places and remembered with anger the removals, police raids, disillusionment, and frustration that marked its final days. Sophiatown after the fall is the critical intellectual context for understanding what the pre-1968 failures meant to those students who sought to begin again in the years that followed. The state’s triumph was black South Africa’s defeat; the failure to save Sophiatown and similar places—and the helplessness that defeat engendered —was the context in which the Black Consciousness generation formed its political and mental consciousness. In this chapter, I first set the political and institutional context in which Black Consciousness developed, and then I consider the less overt but perhaps more resonant memories and experiences that students took with them to the university. liberal politics and gra nd aparthei d In the wake of the 1960 bannings and subsequent imprisonment or exile of African political leaders, black voices more or less ceded the mantle of opposition to self-described liberal political groups that plotted multiracial reform against white exclusiveness. Embodied by Alan Paton’s short-lived Liberal Party and the National Union of South African Students, liberals agitated against the moral bankruptcy of the apartheid regime and called for “nonwhites” to be integrated into the (white-dominated) political and economic system. Liberal politics, however, failed to slow apartheid’s further development during the 1960s. Instead, Sophiatown, Sharpeville, and subsequent defeats cleared the stage for Grand Apartheid—Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s master plan for the final and total separation of the country’s peoples. Sophiatown’s demolition was only one famous example among thousands of similar actions. All told, hundreds of thousands of people fell victim to the Department of Bantu Administration’s planning during the 1960s, and by that decade’s close, the apartheid idea reigned. The government moved ahead with plans for Bantustan independence, after which South Africa was to be not one country but many—one rich, powerful white republic ringed by black, poor, and ostensibly independent nations.3 The government similarly restructured other areas of South African life, especially the education system. In...

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