Township Histories, Insurrection and Liberation in Late Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on resistance in South Africa's African townships that emerged in response to the township insurgencies of the 1980s and early 1990s. It focuses on two bodies of writing: the literature that chronicled the revolt as it unfolded on the one hand, and the historical literature that explored township politics and culture during the first half of the twentieth century on the other. It evaluates these writings’ strengths and points to the inevitable gaps and blind spots. It also highlights the disjunctures that existed between the two. The current wave of historical writing on South Africa's liberation struggle as well as the reassertion of township-based resistance and of township history gives this survey a particular salience. This article argues for the need for both a ‘joined-up’ liberation history that gives due place to the township-based rebellions (as opposed to one that is subordinated to that of the exiled ANC in contemporary public history) and one that recognises the deeper roots of, and continuities with, earlier phases of township resistance and rebellion. It also considers this body of writing in the light of subsequent critiques of the resistance paradigm and the social history approach that dominated the study of townships in the 1980s.

Keywords:

• townships
• resistance
• South Africa
• liberation
• historiography

Notes

²J. Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2009), 160–161.

¹I gratefully acknowledge the close reading given this paper by Albert Grundlingh and the anonymous readers. Jeremy Krikler's extensive comments and suggestions have been invaluable in redrafting and I wish to extend my particular thanks to him.

³N. Etherington, ‘Explaining the Death Throes of Apartheid’, in N. Etherington, ed., Peace, Politics and Violence in the New South Africa (London: Hans Zell, 1992), 102–120.

⁴D. Posel, ‘Symbolizing Violence: State and Media Discourse in TV Coverage of Township Protest 1985–7’, in N.C. Manganyi and A. Du Toit, eds, Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1990), 154–171.

⁵I do not consider historical writings after the mid-1990s because especially within the History Workshop (HW) tradition, there was something of a hiatus due to the profoundly changed political context combined with mounting critiques of social history.

⁶For the most recent appraisal of urban historiography since the end of apartheid, see V. Bickford-Smith, ‘Urban History in the New South Africa: Continuity and Innovation since the End of Apartheid’, Urban History, 35, 2 (2008), 288–315, and on the historiography of liberation struggles see J. Seekings, ‘Whose Voices? A Study of Political Organisation and Protest in the Final Phase of the “Struggle for South Africa”’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 1 (2010), 17–28.

⁷N. Nieftagodien, ‘Workers and Youth in the Struggle for Democracy in Kathorus 1984–1994’, in C. Saunders, ed., From Apartheid to Democracy. Localities and Liberation (Cape Town: Department of Historical Studies, 2007), 195.

⁸SADET, The Road to Democracy in South Africa Volume 4 [1980–1990] (Johannesburg: Unisa Press, 2010).

⁹Recent research has revealed the influence of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operatives in some township resistance of the mid-1980s and the resultant blurring of MK and township activist identity: J. Cherry, ‘The Intersection of Violent and Non-Violent Strategies in the South African Liberation Struggle’, in H. Sapire and C. Saunders, eds, The Struggle for Southern Africa: New Local and Global Perspectives (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2012), 142–162; T. Simpson,‘“Umkhonto we Sizwe, We are Waiting for You”: The ANC and the Township Uprising, September 1984–September 1985’, in South African Historical Journal, 61, 1 (2009), 158–177; R. Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa. A Social and Historical Study (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008).

¹⁰B. Bozzoli, ‘The Taming of the Illicit: Bounded Rebellion in South Africa, 1986’, Comparative Studies of Society and History, 46, 2 (2004), 326–354.

¹¹Many post-apartheid township studies have deepened our understandings of the township revolts, the wider cultures out of which they grew and the historical continuities between different periods, but they have mostly addressed the major metropolitan areas, too. See B. Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); P. Bonner and L. Segal, Soweto. A History (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1998); P. Bonner and N. Nieftagodien, Kathorus. A History (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 2001); P. Bonner and N. Nieftagodien, Alexandra. A History (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008); A. Harber, Diepsloot (Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2011).

¹²C. Charney, ‘A World of Networks: Power Political Culture and Collective Action in Black South African Communities 1945–1965’, paper presented to the History Workshop Conference on ‘Democracy: Popular Precedents, Practice, Culture’, University of the Witwatersrand, 13–15 July, 1994.

¹³A. Mbembe, N. Dlamini, and G. Khunou, ‘Soweto Now’, in S. Nuttall and A. Mbembe, eds, Johannesburg. The Elusive Metropolis (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 239–246.

¹⁴Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010), 158-159.

¹⁵There is a considerable body of writing on resistance politics and township insurgency: T. Lodge and B. Nasson, All Here and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1992); M.J. Murray, The Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-Apartheid South Africa (London: Verso, 1994); S. Mufson, Fifty Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990); J. Seekings, ‘Quiescence and the Transition to Confrontation: South African Townships, 1978–1984’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1990); J. Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa 1983–1991 (Cape Town: Ohio University Press, 2000); M. Swilling, ‘Urban Control and Changing Forms of Political Conflict in Uitenhage 1977–86’ (PhD thesis, Warwick University, 1994); P Frankel, N. Pines, and M. Swilling, eds, State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (Pretoria: Southern Book, 1988); W. Cobbett and R. Cohen, eds, Popular Struggles in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1988); M. Swilling, R. Humphries, and K. Shubane, eds, Apartheid City in Transition (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991); I. van Kessell, ‘“Beyond Their Wildest Dreams”: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa’ (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1995); F. Meer, ed., Resistance in the Townships (Durban: Institute for Black Research/Madiba, 1989); C. M.Reintges, ‘Urban Movements in South African Black Townships’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14, 1 (1990), 109–134.

¹⁶ Crossroads. A Report on Human Rights (New York: Lawyers for Human Rights, 1988); J. Cole, Crossroads. The Politics of Reform and Repression 1976–86 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987).

¹⁷Lodge ‘Resistance and Reform’, 447; G. Adler and J. Steinberg, ‘Introduction: From Comrades to Citizens’, in G. Adler and J. Steinberg, From Comrades to Citizens. The South African Civics Movement and the Transition to Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2000), 6–7.

¹⁸Lodge and Nasson, All Here, and Now, 44.

¹⁹C. Saunders, ‘Liberal Democratic Anti-Apartheid Activity Within South Africa’, in South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET), The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Vol. 4 (Pretoria: Unisa Press), 1611–1613.

²⁰M. Kentridge, An Unofficial War. Inside the Conflict in Pietermaritzburg (Cape Town: David Phillip, 1990), 131.

²¹M. Mayekiso, ‘The Legacy of Ungovernability’, Southern African Review of Books, 5, 6 (1993), http://www.uni-ulm.de/~rturrell/antho4html/Mayekiso.html, accessed 12 October 2012.

²²Amongst these were Jeremy Seekings, Colin Bundy, Charles Carter, John Hyslop, Karen Jochelson, Matthew Chaskalson and Ineke van Kessell.

²³This was the early agenda of the University of the Witwatersrand's History Workshop Movement: B. Bozzoli, ‘Popular History and the Witwatersrand’, in B. Bozzoli, ed., Labour, Townships and Protest (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979), 5.

²⁴On the development of the radical historiography, see B. Bozzoli and P. Delius, ‘Radical History and South African Society’, Radical History Review, 46, 7 (1990), 13–45.

²⁶‘Location life in South Africa’, Umsebenzi, 23 May 1936. The evolution of urban ‘native administration’ and the location was a focus of research by historians and geographers. Analyses shifted from an initial functionalism and structuralism to more nuanced characterisations over the period that took into account African agency in contesting location regimes and that of paternalist superintendents and ‘native affairs managers’. For the former, see J. Rex, ‘The Compound, the Reserve and the Urban Location: The Essential Institutions of Labour Repression’, South African Labour Bulletin, 1, 4 (1974), 4–17. For later analyses of ‘the location strategy’, see J. Robinson, The Power of Apartheid: State Power and the Space in South African Cities (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996) and B. Bozzoli, ‘From Governability to Ungovernability: Race, Class and Authority in South Africa's Black Cities’, paper presented to the Institute for Advanced Social Research, UW, 18 March 1996.

²⁵Other residential settings included racially-mixed freehold townships such as Sophiatown and Lady Selbourne in Johannesburg and Pretoria respectively, ‘shanty towns’ and slums, the presence of which reflected the inability of the segregationist governments to fully effect urban segregation in the face of African evasion and resistance and the contradictions within the structures of urban ‘native administration’ and influx controls.

²⁷C. Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance: Township Organizations and Non-Violent Direct Action in Twentieth Century South Africa’, in G. Adler and J. Steinberg, eds, From Comrades to Citizens: The South African Civics Movement and the Transition to Democracy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 32.

²⁸Books were published immediately after these events, though these drew on press sources and researchers did not have access to key official sources: A. Reeves, Shooting at Sharpeville (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960); B. Hirson, Year of Fire Year of Ash. The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution? (London: Zed Press, 1979); J. Kane-Berman, Soweto: Black Revolt White Reaction (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978); A. Brooks and J. Brickhill, Whirlwind Before the Storm: The Origins and Development of the Uprising in Soweto and the Rest of South Africa from June to December 1976 (London: International Defence and Aid Fund, 1980). Studies on educational policy and the student movement from the late 1980s shed light on the context of the student's revolt of 1976: J. Hyslop, ‘State Education Policy and the Social Reproduction of the Urban African Working Class: The Case of the Southern Transvaal, 1955–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14, 3 (1988), 446–476; N. Diseko, ‘The Origins and Development of the South African Student Movement (SASM) 1968–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Special Issue on the Social History of Resistance in South Africa, 1, 18 (1992), 40–62.

²⁹T. Lodge, Black Politics since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), ix.

³⁰T. Lodge ‘Reflections on Black Politics in South Africa since 1945’, paper for the Colloquium on ‘The Burden of the Present: Aspects of South African Historiography of the 1980s’, History Department, University of Stellenbosch, 6 October 2011.

³¹Lodge, ‘Reflections on Black Politics’.

³²Seekings, The UDF.

³³P. Bonner, ‘The 1920 Black Mineworkers’ Strike: A Preliminary Account’, in Bozzoli, Labour, Townships and Protest, 273–298; P. Bonner, ‘The Transvaal National Congress 1917–1920: The Radicalisation of the Black Petty Bourgeoisie on the Rand’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone, eds, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa. African Class Formation Culture and Consciousness (London: Longman, 1982), 270–313; D. Hemson, ‘Class Consciousness and Migrant Workers: Dockworkers of Durban’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1979).

³⁴C. van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886–1914. Vol 1 New Babylon; Vol ll New Nineveh (Harlow: Longman, 1981). Papers and publications in similar vein by students and academics at the University of London complemented this work.

³⁵W. Beinart, ‘Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa, 1970–2008’ in W. Beinart and M.C. Dawson, eds., Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010), 4.

³⁶P. la Hausse, ‘Oral History and South African Historians’, Radical History Review, 46–47, (1990), 346–356.

³⁷Amongst the dissertations in the 1980s and early 1990s were G.F. Baines, ‘New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, c. 1903–1953: A History of An African Community’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994); H. Sapire, ‘African Urbanisation and Struggles Against Municipal Controls in Brakpan 1920–1957’ (PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1989); G. Minkley, ‘Border Dialogues: Race, Class and Space in the Industrialisation of East London, 1902–1963’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994); A.K. Mager, ‘Gender and the Making of the Ciskei 1945–1959’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995); L. Torr, ‘The Social History of an Urban African Community: Lamont, c.1930–60’ (MA diss., University of Natal, Durban, 1985); D. Atkinson, ‘Cities and Citizenship. Towards a Normative Analysis of the Urban Order in South Africa with Special Reference to East London 1950–1986’ (PhD thesis, University of Natal, Durban, 1991); I. Edwards, ‘Mkhumbane: Our Home’ (PhD thesis, University of Natal, Durban, 1989); B. Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Africans in Cape Town: State Policy and Popular Resistance 1936–73’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1992); H.F. Fast, ‘Pondoks, Houses and Hostels’: A History of Nyanga 1946–70 With a Special Focus on Housing’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995); P. la Hausse, ‘The Struggle for the City: Alcohol, the Ematsheni and Popular Culture in Durban, 1903–1’ (MA diss., University of Cape Town, 1984); C. Glaser ‘Anti-Social Bandits: Juvenile Delinquency and the Tsotsi Youth Gang Subculture on the Witwatersrand 1935–1960’ (MA diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1990). See PhD theses written at universities in the UK and North America: J. Wells ‘The History of Black Women's Struggle Against Pass Laws in South Africa’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1982); A.G. Cobley, ‘“On the Shoulders of Giants”: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in Politics and Society in South Africa, 1924–1950’ (PhD thesis, SOAS, 1987); J.V. Bickford-Smith, ‘Commerce Class and Ethnicity in Cape Town 1875–1902’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1989); J. Naughright, ‘“Black Island in a White Sea”: Black and White in the Making of Alexandra Township’ (PhD thesis, Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), 1992); T. Nuttall, ‘Class, Race and Nation: African Politics in Durban, 1929–1949’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1991); Y. Muthien, ‘Pass Controls and Resistance, Cape Town, 1939–1965’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1989).

³⁸W.D. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists 1920–1990 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), Ch. 7.

³⁹E. Roux, Time Longer than Rope (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948); J. Simons and R. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

⁴⁰La Hausse, ‘Oral History and South African Historians’.

⁴¹P. Bonner and T. Lodge, ‘Introduction’, in Holding their Ground. Class, Locality and Culture in Twentieth Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989), 4.

⁴²R. Ross, A. Kelk Mager, and B. Nasson, ‘Introduction’, in Cambridge History of South Africa Vol 2 1885–1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8. Township history was one facet of the social history research of this period.

⁴³A. Cobley, Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).

⁴⁴Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance’.

⁴⁵Charney, ‘A World of Networks’.

⁴⁶J. Seekings, ‘Political Mobilisation in the Black Townships’, in P. Frankel, N. Pines and M. Swilling, eds, State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1988), 207. However, as Seekings and most recently Moloi have shown there were ‘dissident’ and opposition councillors who enjoyed support in some townships for their roles as arbitrators and in opposing the structures from within during the early 1980s: see T. Moloi ‘Black Politics in Kroonstad: Political Mobilisation Protests Local Government and Generational Struggles 1976–1955’ (PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2012); Seekings, ‘Quiescence and the Transition to Confrontation’, Ch. 3.

⁴⁷W. Beinart and C. Bundy, ‘The Union the Nation and the Talking Crow: The Ideology and Tactics of the Independent ICU in East London’, in W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (London: James Currey, 1987) 270–320; E. Koch, ‘Doornfontein and its African Working Class 1914–1935: A Study of Popular Culture in Johannesburg’ (MA diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1983); P. Bonner, ‘Division and Unity in the Struggle: African Politics on the Witwatersrand in the 1920s’, paper presented to the African Studies Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand, March 1992; P. Bonner, ‘South African Society and Culture 1910–1948’, in Ross, Mager, and Nasson, Cambridge History, vol. 2, 294–295

⁴⁸P. Bonner, ‘African Urbanisation on the Rand between the 1930s and 1960s’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1 (1995), 115–130.

⁴⁹J. Wells, ‘The Day the Town Stood Still: Women's Resistance in Potchefstroom 1912–1930’, in B. Bozzoli, ed., Town and Countryside in the Transvaal. Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983); K. Eales, ‘Patriarchs Passes and Privilege. Johannesburg's African Middle Classes and the Question of Night Passes for African Women’, in Bonner and Lodge, Holding their Ground, 105–140; I. Edwards, ‘Cato Manor, June 1959. Men, Women, Crowds, Violence, Politics and History’, in P. Maylam and I. Edwards, eds, The People's City. African Life in Twentieth Century Durban (Pietermaritzburg and Portsmouth, NH: University of Natal Press and Heineman, 1996), 102–144; H. Bradford ‘“We are Now the Men”: Women's Beer Protests in the Natal Countryside 1929’, in B. Bozzoli, ed., Class, Community and Conflict. South African Perspectives (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 292–323; P. Bonner, ‘“Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women”: Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920–1945’, in C. Walker, ed., Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town: David Phillip, 1990), 221–251; B. Bozzoli with Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng. Consciousness, Life Strategy and Migrancy in South Africa 1900–1983 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1991).

⁵⁰A. Mager and G. Minkley, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind. The East London Riots of 1952’, in P. Bonner, P. Delius, and D. Posel, eds, Apartheid's Genesis: 1935–1962 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press and Wits University Press, 1993), 246; Mager, Gender and the Making of the Transkei, Ch. 6.

⁵¹Lodge, Black Politics, Ch. 4; C. Glaser ‘When are They Going to Fight? Tsotsis Youth Politics and the PAC’, in Bonner et al., Apartheid's Genesis, 296–315; P. Bonner, ‘Family Crime and Political Consciousness’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14, 3 (1988), 393–420; ‘The Russians on the Reef, 1947–1957: Urbanisation, Gang Warfare and Ethnic Mobilisation’, in Bonner et al., Apartheid's Genesis, 160–194.

⁵²On the civics and youth congress non-collaborationism, see Swilling, ‘The United Democratic Front and the Township Revolt’, in Cobbet and Cohen, Popular Struggles, 90–91. While most writers did shy away from explicit comparison and theorising, notable exceptions include Colin Bundy who used Mexican student politics of the 1960s and Spanish youth of the 1970s as points of comparison in his study of township youth politics in the 1980s and traced Mannheim's characterization of a ‘sociological generation’ in studies of youth politics in different national contexts. Comparisons were also invoked by Robert M. Price in a chapter on the insurrectionary moment in the townships; he discerned similar processes of ‘chaos’ and ‘transformations’ in the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1905 and in Hungary in 1956. See C. Bundy, ‘Street Sociology and Pavement Politics’ and R.M. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis. Political Transformation in South Africa, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapter 6.

⁵³The phrase is John Wright's, as cited in H. Adam and K. Moodley, The Opening of the Apartheid Mind (Berkeley and London: UCLA Press, 1993), http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft958009mm&chunk.id=ch6&toc.id=ch6&brand=ucpress, accessed on 11 March 2013 (fn 2, chapt 6); A. Grudlingh, ‘The Burden of the Present: Aspects of South African Historiography of the 1980s’ (Department of History, University of Stellenbosch, 6 October, 2011).

⁵⁴J. Seekings, ‘The Black Townships of the Transvaal’, in P. Frankel, N. Pines, and M. Swilling, eds, State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (Pretoria: Sigma Press, 1988), 174–196.

⁵⁵Seekings, ‘Whose Voices?’.

⁵⁶Cole, Crossroads, and J. Cole, ‘Crossroads – The Destruction of a Symbol’, Work in Progress (WIP), 43 (1985) 3–9, for an activist perspective. For the other see M. Chaskalson, K. Jochelson and J. Seekings, ‘Rent Boycotts, the State and the Transformation of the Urban Political Economy in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 40 (1987), 47–64; M. Swilling, ‘Urban Social Movements Under Apartheid’, Cahiers d'etudes Africaines, 25, 95 (1985), 363–379.

⁵⁷J. Seekings, ‘Township Resistance in the 1980s’, in M. Swilling, R. Humphries, and K. Shubane, eds, Apartheid City in Transition (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991), 295.

⁵⁸J. Seekings, ‘Origins of Political Mobilisation’, in Cobbet and Cohen, Popular Struggles, 59–76.

⁵⁹G. Mbeki, Sunset at Midday (Braamfontein: Nolwazi Educational, 1996); J. Cherry, ‘Hegemony, Democracy and Civil Society: Political Participation in Kwazakele Township, 1980–93’, in Adler and Steinberg, From Comrades to Citizen, 87–113.

⁶⁰M. Murray, Time of Agony Time of Destiny: The Upsurge of Popular Protest (London: Verso, 1987), 248. This point made is made in Lodge, ‘Resistance and Reform’, fn. 22, 440.

⁶¹T.C. Moloi, ‘Black Politics in Kroonstad’. Seekings' had drawn attention to factors which some townships on the West Rand and Mamelodi ‘quiescent’ until later in the decade. Seekings, ‘Quiescence and the Transition to Confrontation’.

⁶²Much of the following draws upon Seekings, ‘Whose Voices?’.

⁶³See Ineke van Kessel's reflections upon oral history research in I. van Kessel, ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 312.

⁶⁴S. Burman and W. Scharf, ‘Creating People's Justice: Street Committees and People's Courts in a South African City’, Law and Society Review, 24, 3 (1990), 705.

⁶⁵Seekings,‘Whose Voices?’.

⁶⁶Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle, 17–18. For a critique of scholars' use of trial evidence, see Mayekiso, ‘The Legacy of Ungovernability’.

⁶⁷Seekings, ‘Whose Voices?’, 13.

⁶⁸Cole, Crossroads; N Haysom, Mabangalala: The Rise of Right Wing Violence in South Africa (Johannesburg: Centre for Applied Legal Studies, 1986).

⁶⁹Studies on youth as ‘shock troops’ of the revolt were undertaken initially to explain their centrality: C. Bundy, ‘Street Sociology and Pavement Politics: Aspects of Youth and Student Resistance in Cape Town, 1985’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13, 3 (1985), 303–330; S. Johnson ‘“The Soldiers of Luthuli”: Youth in the Politics of Resistance in South Africa’, in S. Johnson, ed., South Africa: No Turning Back (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 94–152; Carter ‘Comrades and Community: Politics and the Construction of Hegemony in Alexandra Township, 1984–1987’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1991; C. Carter, “We Are the Progressives”: Alexandra Youth Congress Activists and the Freedom Charter, 1983–5’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 17, 2 (1991), 197–220; J. Hyslop, ‘Schools, Unemployment and Youth. The Origins and Significance of Student and Youth Movements, 1976 – 1987’, in B. Nasson and J. Samuel, eds, Education: From Poverty to Liberty (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 79–87. Unease about the ‘lost generation’ was addressed subsequently with insights drawn from social psychology and psychology. See J. Seekings, ‘The “Lost Generation”: South Africa's “Youth Problem” in the Early 1990s’, Transformation, 29 (1996), 103–125; C. Campbell, ‘Learning to Kill? Masculinity, the Family and Violence’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 1 (1992), 614–628; A. Sitas, ‘The Making of the Comrades Movement in Natal, 1985–1991’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 3 (1992), 629–641; M. Marks, ‘Organisation, Identity and Violence Amongst Activist Diepkloof Youth, 1984–93’ (MA diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1993); D. Hemson, ‘“For Sure You are Going to Die!”: Political Participation and the Comrades Movement in Inanda Kwa-Zulu-Natal’, Social Dynamics, 22 (1996), 74–104.

⁷⁰R. Morrell, ‘Masculinity in South African History: Towards a Gendered Approach to the Past’, South African Historical Journal, 37, 1 (1997), 167–177.

⁷¹Josette Cole's Crossroads study revealed women's central role in the later 1970s, a centrality that was eclipsed subsequently by a male elite. See also J. Beall, M. Friedman, S. Hassim, R. Posel, L. Stiebel, and A. Todes, ‘African Women in the Durban Struggle 1985–1986: Towards a Transformation of Roles?, in G. Moss and I. Obery, eds, South African Review 4 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press 1987), 93–103; C. Campbell, ‘The Township Family and Women's Struggles’, Agenda, 6 (1990), 1–22; J. Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980s’, Agenda, 10 (1991), 77–87.

⁷²J. Cherry, ‘“We Were Not Afraid”: The Role of Women in the 1980s Township Uprising in the Eastern Cape’, in N. Gasa, ed., Women in South African History Basus'iimbokodo, Bawel'imilambo/They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 281–313.

⁷³Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology’, 77–78.

⁷⁴Privately commissioned research into informal settlement was concurrently taking place by organisations such as the Urban Foundation but their findings were not yet in the public domain. On early research into the social contexts for the emergence of the violence between squatters and hostel dwellers see L. Segal, ‘The Human Face of Violence: Hostel Dwellers Speak’, Journal of Southern African Studies. Special Issue on the Social History of Resistance in South Africa, 18, 1 (1992), 190–231; H. Sapire, ‘Politics and Protest in the Shack Settlements of the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging Region, South Africa 1980–1990’, in Journal of Southern African Studies. Special Issue: Political Violence in Southern Africa, 18, 3 (1992), 670–697.

⁷⁵P. Bonner and N. Nieftagodien, ‘The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Pursuit of “Social Truth”: The Case of Kathorus’, in D. Posel and G. Simpson, eds, Commissioning the Past. Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002), 173–203.

⁷⁶Seekings, ‘Whose Voices?’, 16.

⁷⁷D. Posel, ‘Social History and the Wits History Workshop’, African Studies, 69, 1 (2010), 29–40.

⁷⁸D. Goodhew, Respectability and Resistance. A History of Sophiatown (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), xxi.

⁷⁹Goodhew, Respectability.

⁸⁰P. Maylam, ‘Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban Historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1 (1995), 19–38; C. Saunders, Writing History. South Africa's Urban Past and Other Essays (Pretoria: HSRC, 1992); S. Parnell and A. Mabin, ‘Rethinking Urban South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies. Special Issue: Urban Studies and Urban Change in Southern Africa, 21, 1 (1995), 39–62; J. Robinson, ‘Spatiality and the Beginnings of Apartheid’, South African Historical Journal, 30 (1994), 144–157.

⁸¹Bhatttacharya, ‘Some Reflections’.

⁸²G. Minkley and C. Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee, eds, Negotiating the Past. The Making of Memory in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89–99. See Moloi's introduction on some of the pitfalls of oral history research in contemporary townships: Moloi, ‘Black Politics’, 27–45.

⁸³A. Cobley, ‘Does Social History Have Future? The Ending of Apartheid and Recent Trends in South African Historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 27, 3 (2001), 613–625.

⁸⁴H. Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘In Good Hands: Researching the 1976 Soweto Uprising the State Archives of South Africa’, in A. Burton, ed., Archive Stories. Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC and London: Durham University Press, 2005), 302.

⁸⁵Van Kessell, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams, 312.

⁸⁶R. Lee, African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa (New York: IB Taurus, 2009), 5.

⁸⁷Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance’, 29.

⁸⁸Burman and Scharf, ‘Creating People's Justice’.

⁸⁹Seekings, ‘The Black Townships’, 206.

⁹⁰Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance’; Sapire, ‘African Urbanisation’; Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Africans in Cape Town’.

⁹¹K. French, ‘James Mpanza and the Sofasonke Party’ (MA diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1984).

⁹²M. Tetelman, ‘The Burial of Canon J.A. Calata and the Revival of Mass-Based Opposition in Cradock South Africa 1983’, African Studies, 38, 1 (1999), 5–32.

⁹³T. Lodge, Sharpeville. An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 284.

⁹⁴T. Lodge, Sharpeville. An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 290–336.

⁹⁵Bickford Smith, ‘Urban History’, 303.

⁹⁶At the University of the Witwatersrand, the NRF Chair Programme, ‘Local Histories and Present Realities’ under Philip Bonner has sought to redress the metropolitan-centric focus of previous research and to tackle a wider palette of issues.

⁹⁷N. Nieftagodien, ‘The Place of “The Local” in History Workshop's Local History’, African Studies, 6, 1 (2000), 41–61.

⁹⁸G. Baines, ‘Narratives of New Brighton: Representations of the Port Elizabeth Township in Official Discourse Cultural Memory and Public History’, African Studies, 64, 2 (2005), 257.

⁹⁹Dlamini, Native Nostalgia.

¹⁰⁰L. Thomas, ‘The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa’, Journal of African History, 47, 3 (2006), 461–490; R.E. Johnson, ‘“The Girl About Town”: Discussions of Modernity and Female Youth in Drum Magazine 1951–1970’, Social Dynamics, 35, 1 (2009), 36–50.