Apartheid erased Sophiatown and renamed its rubble Triomf as racialized housing

Evidence

So, starting in 1955, destroyed Sophiatown was. With little forewarning, the bulldozers arrived under army and police protection. Houses were flattened with much of their possessions still in them. Furniture and photographs, dolls and pet dogs, clothing and cooking utensils, cups and crockery were crushed into the soil, to be excavated years later by treasure hunters, as Maureen van Niekerk’s claustrophobic saga recounts for us in the guttural vernacular of Sophiatown’s Afrikaner replacement residents. … Rebuilt by the apartheid government as a housing tract of lifeless cement block, red tin-roofed houses cut through by wide empty streets, the remodeled township was intended to house poor whites, civil service workers, and policemen’s families whose collective vote brought the apartheid government to power in 1948. In a melancholically Riefenstahlian twist, the nominal softness of Sophiatown was replaced by the trumpeted terrorizing of Triomf (“triumph”). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1549

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the apartheid literature and urban planning; echoes ideas of place-erasure in settler colonial contexts and the renaming of conquered spaces that connects to broader readings on racial spatiality. — 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
• SEED: Potential essay angle: toponymic erasure — how regimes literally rename conquered places (Sophiatown to Triomf) as victory inscriptions, and what survives in the soil/excavations.