Sophiatown
The legend lives on
The folks are gone, the streets look sad and dry, old Sophia is gone. So sang Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks in the 1960s, the decade after the demolition and forced removals that ended the dreams, hopes and possibilities of the fabled cultural life that characterised Sophiatown.
In the almost 65 years since apartheid’s bulldozers arrived in the freehold township in the west of Johannesburg, and residents were forcibly removed to Meadowlands and the other suburbs of what later became Soweto, the mythology of Sophiatown has been kept alive in the public imagination through song, theatre, photography and film, helping the country to see beyond the concrete façades of the working-class suburb of Triomf that replaced it.
They’ve kept the spotlight firmly focused on a brief but glorious past — a time that allowed for the talent of writers such as Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Nat Nakasa and Lewis Nkosi to flourish in a place that was recorded by those same writers and other Drum magazine colleagues such as Jürgen Schadeberg, Henry Nxumalo and Todd Matshikiza.
The legend of Sophiatown inspired the musical King Kong, the 1959 film Come
Back Africa directed by Lionel Rogosin, the music of Makeba and Hugh Masekela and the play Sophiatown, which was produced in the 1980s by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company.
Now a new film, Back of the Moon, directed by Angus Gibson, is here to continue in the footsteps of those who have striven so long to ensure that Sophiatown remains front and centre in the public imagination as a place where, for a fleeting moment, it seemed everything was possible for South Africans both black and white.
A neo-noir tale of gangsters, violence and love in the dying days of the township, Gibson’s film recently won the award for Best South African Feature Film at the Durban International Film Festival.
Gibson first became fascinated with the history of Sof’town, or Kofifi as it was popularly known, when his friend, artist William Kentridge, invited him to be part of the workshopping process for the Junction Avenue Theatre’s play.
As someone who grew up in Durban but “kind of embraced life properly in Johannesburg”, Gibson undertook significant research on the subject, spending his days at the Johannesburg City Library poring over old copies of Drum, reading the stories and studying the advertising and photos.
Soon after the play debuted, Gibson and Kentridge were approached by Channel 4 in
the UK to make a documentary about the history of Sophiatown. Called Freedom Square and Back of the Moon, the film combined interviews with surviving characters from the township’s history, a filmed performance of sections of the play and archive footage, much of it taken from Rogosin’s Come Back Africa, which had been filmed in the dying days of Sophiatown shortly before the removals.
“In the ’60s and ’70s there was a kind of bleakness to the world — the uniformity of the townships for example — that was absolutely opposite to the kind of chaos and the mix of what Sophiatown was,” Gibson says.
“I suppose that Sophiatown represented a challenge — it was a place in which politicians hung out, it was a place in which these journalists who had become legends hung out, it was a place in which the musicians who have become legends hung out, so I have no doubt that a lot of it was mythology. Nevertheless it represented something that was lost and I think that people imagined that in South Africa in the future it would be recreated, but I’m not sure that it ever has been.”
Gibson’s feature film with its sharply dressed gangsters and darkly lit alleyways pays homage not only to the tense nightlife of the era but also to actors like Humphrey Bogart and Richard Widmark and their films The Maltese Falcon and The Street with No Name, which were shown in Sophiatown and had a major influence on the way that many in the township constructed their looks and identities.
The legendary Odin cinema, where many of the township’s residents were captivated and influenced by those films, is long gone, but there is an attempt to recreate it in one of only three original 1950s-era Sophiatown houses that still stand in the suburb today.
That’s the house of former ANC president AB Xuma, which stands on the corner of Toby and Edward streets, next door to the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, and has been preserved pretty much as it was when Xuma lived in it. Built in 1934 and given museum status in 2006, when the name of the suburb was officially changed back from its apartheid era name of Triomf, the Xuma house has outlived forced removals and the vicissitudes that have wrought so much change on the suburb.
While the names of the streets in the writings of Themba, Modisane, Nakasa, Nkosi, Dugmore Boetie and others are still the same, there are very few signs left of the history and heritage of this undeniably special and important place. You can visit Edith Street, where Themba liked to drink, or Victoria Road, which housed the fabled Back of the Moon shebeen, but there is no evidence of their existence beyond their mention in books and recollections.
A few blocks down the road on Ray Street stands the Christ the King Church, built in 1933, where Huddleston, an Anglican bishop, preached his humanist philosophy.
Next door are the playing fields of the Christiaan de Wet Primary School, built after the removals and previously the site of Freedom Square, where political demonstrations led by ANC stalwarts such as Nelson Mandela were held. Now quietly bathed in sunlight, it echoes only to the occasional shrieks of late lingering school children.
You might feel that the taking back of the title of the suburb is a significant recognition of its history and influence, yet visiting its streets today reveals a depressing reality — the triumph that the apartheid government sought to impose through the removal of its residents and the destruction of their houses and shacks.
The Sophiatown of the imagination as expressed in books, songs and films such as Back of the Moon is all we are really left with. The reality is that, to come back to Makeba and the Skylarks song, physically, Sweet Sophia is gone forever.
It’s still only through cultural productions that whatever we know of Kofifi remains. But as gangster-turned-poet Don Mattera, who once lived in Sophiatown, reminds us in his memoir about the suburb, memory is the weapon.
It was a place where legends hung out … I have no doubt that a lot of it [the nostalgic image] was mythology. Nevertheless it represented something that was lost and I think that people imagined that in SA in the future it would be recreated, but I’m not sure that it ever has been Angus Gibson, below Director of the film Back of the Moon