The urban palimpsest: Re‐presenting Sophiatown

Abstract

Evoking the notion of urban topography as palimpsest, this article treats urban space as the parchment on which constructions of urban modernity – always already gendered – are inscribed and reinscribed. Focusing on Sophiatown, one of the most symbolically charged and contested urban spaces, and certainly the most iconic urban fiction, it engages with historical processes of erasure in order to explore representations of Sophiatown as an overwritten document whose past topographies linger as traces resistant to effacement, and which, instead, underpin or haunt the imprint of superimposing layers. Taking as my starting point Dorothy Driver’s exploration of the operations of “woman as ‘sign’” in Drum magazine, I extend her reading across various layers of the urban palimpsest as I trace the sedimentation of gender performances in the production of urban modernity, from Alan Paton and the “fabulous fifties” to post‐apartheid returns to and of Sophiatown in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1994) and the films Drum (2004) and Sophiatown: Surviving Apartheid (2003).

Keywords:

• Alan Paton
• Can Themba
• Drum
• Dolly Rathebe
• Dorothy Masuka
• Marlene van Niekerk
• Sophiatown

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa, and the Research Division of Stellenbosch University (SU) for financial support.

Notes

1. Gesturing towards continuities between the Drum ethos and that of the “New Africans” (epitomized by H.I.E. Dhlomo), Tim Couzens reminds us that this self‐representation was partially fictional (354).

2. That Drum’s circulation figures skyrocketed following Henry Nxumalo’s exposés of black suffering and exploitation in rural South Africa (Sampson, Drum 36) suggests that a critical rearticulation of the rural was as instrumental in crafting new urban subjectivities as was the magazine’s celebration of the city.

3. According to Nxumalo, Themba professed: “I walk up and down the streets of Sophiatown for hours, forming stories in the back of my mind. Then when I come to plan them – to write them down – they are in one piece ready to be written” (qtd in Nicol 160).

4. I depart here from Driver’s reading, which claims that Themba associates women’s “uncontrolled passion [ … ] with tribalism” (236).

5. The metaphorical substitution of cigarette for pen is revealed in Tambudzai’s unconscious in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (90), a novel which also grapples with modernity and femininity in Southern Africa. Driver also sees Drum as being in a state of “nervous condition”: “Femininity was being made to fit a certain space, but it was always also threatening to exceed that space” (232).

6. “Mother of the (Afrikaner) nation”; see Brink on the volksmoeder as ideological sign, and working‐class women’s negotiations around it, during this era.

7. That Masuka is also a cross‐border subject is pertinent; South African urban imaginaries are constructed from precisely such cross‐border movements – both imaginative and actual – which offer potential counterpoints to the searing xenophobia displayed to African immigrants in post‐apartheid South African cities (see Samuelson).