Apartheid destroyed Sophiatown precisely because it embodied vibrant racial mixing

Evidence

Perhaps nothing more symbolizes the crusading spirit, subjugating domination, and repressive suffering which apartheid sought to impose than the legacy of Sophiatown. Founded at the edge of spreading Johannesburg as the twentieth century opened up, it became a site of freehold property first by whites and then increasingly by blacks and mixed race people as the Johannesburg city council established a sewage plant in the area and upwardly mobile whites sought better living conditions in less polluted environments of the city. By the 1940s Sophiatown had become Harlemlike in hosting a vibrant avant-garde culture of writing, music, art and poetry, the font of a vernacular cultural expressiveness unmatched elsewhere in South Africa. Home to kwela and penny whistle street corner jive, to the dramatic photography and writing of Drum Magazine and convivial dance halls, to the great saxophonist Kiepie Moketsi and the street sense of writer Bloke Modisane, to Jewish watchmakers and The Jazz Epistles, to the grittiness of smoky shebeen life and the unstinting humanizing commitments of Anglican archbishop and apartheid arch-critic Terry Huddleston. The site and standard-bearer of intense, vibrant, lived South African mestizaje, Sophiatown stood for everything apartheid found repulsive and sought to deny. The living spirit and symbol of another way of being, for the protectors of apartheid Sophiatown was the site of sin, the Earthly City. It had to be destroyed. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1547

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘Sacrifice’ essays’ themes: a vibrant mixed community destroyed as a ritual purification of the racial body politic — parallels the sacrificial logic of removing what threatens a stratified order.
• SEED: Angle: how the racial state reads vibrant mixed neighborhoods as ‘the site of sin’ — a comparative piece on Sophiatown, Tulsa’s Greenwood, and other destroyed mixed-culture districts as acts of sacrificial cleansing.
• XREF: Connects to Jane Eyre’s themes of a built place carrying moral impurity that must be destroyed, and to the parable structure of A Very Minor Prophet. — connects to: Apartheid demolished a thriving mixed-race neighborhood precisely because it embodied racial mixing — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1547