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The Social History of Cape Town
Cape Town: The Making of a City: An Illustrated Social History by Nigel Worden, Elizabeth Van
Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith
Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History by Nigel Worden, Elizabeth
Van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith
Review by: Wayne Dooling
Source: The Journal of African History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2004), pp. 139-140
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4100344
Accessed: 09-08-2014 07:33 UTC
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REVIEWS
139
South Africanists interested in
Natal,
but to
anyone
interested in a meticulous and
compelling
work of
history.
University of Maryland
PAUL S. LANDAU
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF CAPE TOWN
DOI:
Io.
ioi7/Soo2185370330o9144
Cape
Town: The
Making of
a
City
: An Illustrated Social
History.
Edited
by
NIGEL
WORDEN,
ELIZABETH VAN HEYNINGEN and
VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH.
Cape
Town: David
Philip, 1998. Pp. 283.
Rand
250 (ISBN 0-86486-435-3).
Cape
Town in the Twentieth
Century:
An Illustrated Social
History.
Edited
by
NIGEL
WORDEN,
ELIZABETH VAN HEYNINGEN and VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH.
Cape
Town: David
Philip, 1999. Pp. 255.
Rand
225 (ISBN 0-86486-384-5).
KEY WORDS: South
Africa, urban, social, colonial, apartheid.
These volumes tell a
sweeping story.
Founded in the mid-seventeenth
century
as a Dutch East India
Company
refreshment
station, Cape
Town became a
port
city
like so
many
others borne out of
European
overseas
expansion.
It drew
northern
Europeans
of all
classes,
as well as
Africans,
Asians and
indigenous
Khoisans.
Slaves,
sailors and soldiers lived
side-by-side,
at once divided
by
race
and
status, yet
united
by
the common line that
separated
them from the
dining
tables of the
Company's
merchant elite.
The
incorporation
of the
Cape
into the British
Empire
after I8o6 transformed
the
colony. By
the
I
86os
Cape
Town had
developed
into a 'colonial'
city,
driven
by
commerce and remade in the
image
of a Victorian
English
merchant class who
looked to London for cultural
guidance.
At the same time
Cape
Town had become
home to a
large
African
population.
The interwar
years
were the
city's 'golden
age', despite
massive
poverty
and
deepening
social division.
The second half of the twentieth
century
was marked
by
forced
removals,
as the
Nationalist
government relentlessly
saw
through
the
process
of residential
segre-
gation
started
by
the
English
merchant elite. As a
consequence Cape
Town became
starkly polarized along
racial lines. Whites continue to live in the
leafy
suburbs
close to the
city
centre and blacks in the
bleak,
soulless
ghettoes
of the
Cape
Flats.
The residents of
Cape
Town
played
their
part
in
seeing
off
apartheid.
In the
198os
civic associations
proliferated
and the
secondary
schools of the
Cape
Flats bred a
'culture
of revolution'.
By
the end of the twentieth
century Cape
Town had be-
come a multi-cultural tourist
Mecca,
where the likes of British celebrities Kate
Moss and Richard Branson could
jive
to Peter Gabriel's
song
'Biko'.
With their beautiful
photographs
and
illustrations,
it would be
easy
to mistake
these volumes for 'coffee table' books.
Undoubtedly they
have been aimed at a
relatively wide, popular
market. But these volumes
bring together,
in an
appealing
new
way,
most of the research carried out on
Cape
Town over the
past
two dec-
ades. The authors conducted and steered much of this research themselves.
Thus,
although specialist
readers will be familiar with much of the
content,
there is also a
great
deal that is new.
The
early history
is told in novel and
captivating terms, stressing
its
fragility
and
weakness. The
development
of a
thriving
settler
colony
was
by
no means inevitable.
Cape Town,
we are
told,
was founded almost
accidentally.
The Dutch had no
intention of
creating
a
permanent European
settlement. For a while it
appeared
that the settlement would not
survive;
in
1654
it
nearly
starved to death. The
granting
of
freeburgher
status to
Company
servants was a
response
to
crisis,
not
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
140 JOURNAL
OF AFRICAN HISTORY
the
consequence
of a decision to found a settler
colony. Many
of these free-
burghers,
for their
part,
were
happy
to turn their backs on settler status and either
returned to
Company
service or fled the
colony altogether
and
attempted
to return
to
Europe.
A number of issues are addressed here for the first time. These include the
spatial
and
gendered
dimensions of colonial
settlement,
the extent to which
Cape
Town was from the start
dependent
on the labour of
imported
slaves
and, perhaps
most
importantly,
its
development
as a
specifically
urban environment and its
relationship
with the rural hinterland. One of the
big strengths
of this
history
is the
way
these themes are all interwoven. The
fragility
of the settlement was
sym-
bolized
by
the
inability
of the
Company radically
to order and transform the
physical
landscape:
in
1663
the earthen fort it built
collapsed.
The
permanent
castle was
completed only
in
1674,
and
beyond
its walls the
Company
had even less control.
This was a settlement of the unfree.
Slaves,
soldiers and sailors
conspired (some-
times in
unison)
to
challenge Company
control. And it was the men and women of
the
settlement,
who from the
eighteenth century
saw themselves as distinct from
the
surrounding countryside,
who defined
Cape
Town as an urban centre.
In this
history,
the thread of
'respectability'
serves to link nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Cape
Town.
'Respectability'
was central to late nineteenth-
century
Victorian
bourgeois identity.
For
whites, including
those of Dutch
origin,
'respectability'
meant the
sanctity
of the
(nuclear) family
and a
leisurely
life that
came with the
employment
of
(black)
servants in the suburban household. For the
'coloured'
petite bourgeoisie
it meant distance from the slave
past,
education and
temperance.
To
all, respectability
was
inseparable
from
competence
in
English.
Thus, 'respectability'
was both class-based and
highly gendered.
But there is a
danger
here that
'respectability' explains
all. The contested nature of its definition
and content is hinted at but never
explored.
It remains the
prerogative
of white and
black middle
classes,
and the
quest
for
respectability
on the
part
of the 'coloured'
petite bourgeoisie
is seen far too much as a reaction to the
hegemony
of Victorian
ideals and the
'internalisation
of white middle-class values'
(Cape
Town in the
Twentieth
Century, p. 43).
There is little
recognition,
for
example,
of how
'respectability' might
have
pervaded
the identities of
prostitutes,
domestic ser-
vants and
organized youth gangs.
Nor is there much sense of its
changing
content.
The
'respectability'
of the African Political
Organization
in the
early years
of the
twentieth
century
was
presumably
not the same as that of the civic associations
which in the
i98os
so
vigorously sought
to
promote
a vision of non-racialism.
Cape
Town was transformed
during
and after the Second World
War,
and this
history, drawing
on the vast collection of oral testimonies collected
by
the Uni-
versity
of
Cape Town,
tells the
story
well. For most
Cape
Town residents the
twentieth
century
is to be divided into the era before and after forced removals.
The
Group
Areas Act of
1950
stands out in a vast
battery
of
apartheid-era legis-
lation. Reaction to
apartheid spawned
a host of
political parties, although
the
Sharpeville-to-Soweto paradigm
does not
quite
do them
justice.
The final
chapter
is a
breathtaking
account of the rebellion of the
i98os
and the end of the
apartheid
state in the western
Cape.
These volumes
testify
to the
strengths
of South African social
history.
But
they
also remind us how much needs to be done. There are no
full-length
histories
of, for
example, eighteenth-century
urban
slavery,
of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century
domestic
servants, of
any
number of
townships and, perhaps
most starkly,
of the social
history
of
apartheid.
School
of
Oriental and
African Studies,
University of London WAYNE DOOLING
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