July 15, 2002
By Bongani Majola
"SOMETHING in me died when Sophiatown died ..." wrote prolific Bloke Modisane, one of the many perceptive writers who lived and told the Sophiatown experience. If he still lived, Modisane would be thrilled to learn that the City of Johannesburg will on Friday 19 July celebrate the spirit and vitality of Sophiatown.
By way of an exhibition at MuseuMAfricA, photographs, oral accounts, newspaper reports and literary images will re-live the atmosphere of Sophiatown, one of the country's first truly cosmopolitan and racially harmonious environments.
Bulldozed to the ground by the Nationalist government in 1955, Kofifi, as Sophiatown was affectionately known, was home to some of the best jazz musicians, politicians, lawyers, shebeen queens and gangsters South Africa has ever seen.
In the 1950s, only in Kofifi would you witness a church next to a shebeen, an Indian next door to Jewish trader, a black man next door to a white woman and a politician in the company of gangsters. It was an explosive mixture, culturally and politically. Sophiatown was the "Chicago of South Africa", complete with its own original versions of Al Capone, Back o' the Moon and civil rights politics.
Despite the National Party government's brutal crackdown on political activity, this is where the liberation movements gained momentum. At gatherings, the African National Congress's signature thumbs-up salute became a regular feature. It was in Sophiatown that the 1952 defiance campaign was hatched and executed.
In a wicked feat of irony, Sophiatown was renamed Triomf, Dutch for triumph, after it was bulldozed from 1955 onwards, forcing its black residents into racially designated match-box houses called "townships", leaving "whites only" to live in the suburb close to the city of Johannesburg.
Dubbed "Reawakening The Spirit of Sophiatown: Images of Life, Loss, Laughter and Love", the exhibition will be opened by the executive mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Masondo.
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