Tracing the Footprints of Ghosts in Johannesburg’s Sophiatown
by Tal Zalmanovich -- This July, I arrived in Johannesburg for the first time. A historian of Modern Britain, I had recently begun researching British activists who participated in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and their influence on the discourse of race relations in Britain. After several visits to archives in Britain and months poring over documents I had gathered there, I was eager to follow in the footsteps of some of my protagonists. My first stop was the Sophiatown Heritage Centre dedicated to the memory of a ghost neighbourhood. Sophiatown was an abnormality in South African terms – a neighbourhood in which black South Africans could own their houses, where a local culture was forged in jazz clubs, in shebeens, in crowded rooms and dark allies. The cultural production of its inhabitants had a lasting impact on literature, journalism, fashion, music and speech. It was the product of Johannesburg’s rapid urbanisation in all its gore and glory. In 1955, th...