Routes to Sophiatown

What is Sophiatown? Is it a vibrant black, urbanity, or a more tragic recollection: the suburb that was destroyed by the apartheid state's forced removals of black South Africans from areas proclaimed white from the 1950s onwards. Both of these representations have considerable contemporary traction. The former lends itself to a very nostalgic view of the suburb, the South African rainbow nation transported into a multi-cultural and cooperative past, while anti-apartheid commemorative initiatives highlight the removals beginning in February 1955. Neither of these representations, though, reflects the entirety of Sophiatown's histories, including of when it was called Triomf. This article brings together the different histories and representations of Sophiatown, showing their messy connection with one another, through a consideration of two linked sets of ideas: in the first place, space viewed as socially-produced draws attention to the multiply-constructed nature of the landscape known as Sophiatown. In the second, attention to the quotidian accounts which Sophiatown residents produce about their lives reveals the way in which space and place (house and home, daily travel routes) work to overlap the familiar with the unfamiliar. The first set of ideas looks to ideas of space as politically-contingent, the second to the processual role it plays in how people remember their everyday lives.