EXTRACTS:

1. Townships in South Africa; a brief history

2. Township music

3. Visiting a Township

Townships in South Africa :
a brief history

Ciraj Rassool *

In September 1996, the land claims commissioner, Wallace Mgoqi addressed a packed meeting in Langa of former residents of Ndabeni, who had launched a claim for compensation arising from their removal to Langa almost 70 years ago. Complaining that their houses in Langa were too small as their children and grandchildren were living with them, former Ndabeni residents, now in their 70s and 80s, said that they longed to return to the area, even though this was now not possible because of the subsequent of factories there. In Ndabeni, they said, was a place where people had lived like a family and shared their possessions with each other. They were close to the city and had easier access to transport. «Ndabeni had no lights, but crime was not like it is today», one resident said. To a tumultuous applause, Mgoqi assured the meeting that top priority was given to compensating the former residents of Ndabeni.

Between 1927 and 1935, hundreds of residents of Ndabeni had refused to be moved to Langa which had been launched as a model ‘garden village’ location where Africans could have‘their own houses and gardens’. In contrast to Ndabeni, Langa would be a planned township. The land on which Ndabeni had been built increasingly came to be seen as desirable for industrial development. However, a sense of community and belonging had begun to develop among its residents in spite of its overcrowded and insanitary conditions, and the constant surveillance of the administration. People only moved from Ndabeni to Langa when they were forced.

Ndabeni itself, ironically, had been the location of Cape Town’s first forced removal at the beginning of the twentieth century. African immigrants from the eastern Cape working in the Cape Town docks were removed to Uitvlugt, later to be named Ndabeni. White middle class residents who controlled the city had become concerned about a ‘Kafir invasion’. An outbreak of bubonic plague at Cape Town’s docks in 1901 resulted in the swift removals of African people to Uitvlugt by the authorities acting under powers granted to them by the Public Health Act. The removals took place almost over night so that Africans would not be seen on the streets of Cape Town. Within a month 5000 African people had been herded into the location, with its surrounding fence and street grid with its regular constable patrol.

Ndabeni also bore the stigma of a plague camp. It consisted of five large dormitories, each of which accommodated 500 men. 615 unlined lean-to corrugated iron huts also housed 8 people each. Nobody had privacy, and washing and cooking facilities were inadequate. Huts had no floors and were subject to flooding in winter, and only later were they raised on banks. In a remarkable twist of historical irony, almost 70 years later, the aged former residents of Ndabeni were claiming relief for a subsequent removal to Langa from Ndabeni, itself the very site of the first forced removal.

Since 1901, the story of Ndabeni has been repeated many times in South Africa. Only the names of people and locations have differed. Millions of black South Africans have experienced forced removals from places they called home. The emergence of new townships has followed a pattern of outward movement and ever increasing distance from heart of South African cities, into dormitory locations, the space of urban control and surveillance. These spaces on the periphery of cities were separated from white areas by industrial areas, highways, railway lines, golf courses and buffer areas. They were designed and located so that they could easily be cordoned off and encircled in the event of open rebellion. The black township has been the key institution of segregation and apartheid in the city.

It was the mining compound and the migrant worker hostel which were the initial form of residential segregation in the South African city. Compounds were an instrument of labour control, and their prison-like conditions and quasi-tribal system of discipline and authority involving compound police, indunas and ethnic division served to control desertion and absenteeism, and hamper the development of organisation among workers. Ordered townships were created following on this experience. Black locations were a mechanism of dividing the working class. The single-sex hostel, a variant of the compound served to separate male migrant workers from all other urban residents. The basis of these urban patterns was a contradictory policy objective of attempting to secure labour power while minimising the presence of labourers.

Between the 1920s and 1940s there was a sharp growth in the size of the urban African population resulting in increasing intervention by the state to control and regulate the lives of Africans in the South African city. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 gave municipalities the power to establish segregated locations for Africans, to control the movement of Africans into towns through passes and to police African communities in cities. It allowed for the creation of a self-financing system in which income was collected from the sale of beer, from rents, fines and fees. It also provided for the establishment of advisory boards for the co-option of potential collaborators.

But the implementation of this law was not effective because of the interests of small businessmen and slum landlords. In many cities by the 1930s, Africans lived outside of locations, in mine compounds, in backyard quarters in white suburbs and in slumyards. Slumyards mushroomed because they gave workers residence close to work, and afforded opportunities for economic independence to many women who brewed beer. In addition, older locations closer to the city such as Sophiatown and Alexander were closer to the city and gave opportunities for home ownership. Meanwhile, legislation passed in the 1930s set out to prevent African women from entering cities and provided for the removal of Africans to the rural areas who were deemed to be surplus to labour requirements. So, before the onset of the apartheid period in the late 1940s, a system had already been created to control movement and to regulate the daily lives of Africans. During the apartheid period, these patterns were intensified when the central state acquired more power to control the lives of Africans in the city.

Attempts at slum clearance on the Witwatersrand in the 1940s were geared towards moving people from slumyards to peri-urban locations such as Orlando, which had been established in the South West of Johannesburg and which later became a node around which Soweto developed. At this time as well, efforts by the municipality to control the numbers of houses and sites, as well as the design of dwellings in the locations of East London resulted in the emergence of an underground form of squatting. This took shape as ‘adding-in’ instead of ‘adding-on’, as internal subdivision of houses occurred.

This was part of the emergence of shanty towns or pondokkie settlements in cities throughout South Africa. The 1940s also saw the emergence of squatter movements, particularly on the Witwatersrand. In the eyes of officials, shanty towns represented disorder and dislocation and chaos, and was part of what official discourses regarded as the ‘native problem’ in the city. As a threatening African space, pondokkies were depicted as disease-ridden and filthy, where crime, drinking and promiscuity abounded. The shanty town represented was a symbol of the ‘native’ outside the scope of official control, while the shanty raised the spectre of the permanent, uncontrolled urban‘native’. What was required were new model townships, built at minimal cost, which would incorporate people into official systems, for orderly influx control.

By the 1950s, townships were part of a scheme of labour differentiation which attempted to divide urban‘insiders’ among Africans from rural migrants. In terms of the Urban Areas Act of 1952, Africans could live and work in cities only through birth, long residence, or uninterrupted work for employers. The system endorsed out all others who could not find work after mandatory registration as work seekers. A web of laws controlled the movement of African people, with some having access to housing and employment and others kept as migrants. The construction of townships took place on a large scale in the 1950s when the state adopted a site and service approach. Now, the rhetoric of urban planning and slum clearance were added to the metaphor of disease. The Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of 1951 sped up the institution of racialised spatial zones.

Whereas African urban spaces had constituted an irregular landscape - of slums, shanties and some middle class housing - at the end of the second world war, these haphazard circumstances were brought to a halt by forced removals, demolitions and mass rehousing. Now, low-cost houses and hostel buildings followed a uniform pattern, built from the same range of materials and a standardised set of architectural designs. It is from this period that the relentless image of endless rows of matchbox houses, which symbolised the state’s regimentation of the townships, is derived.

Matchbox houses were either detatched or semi-detatched. Apart from this, they were identical. A front door was flanked by windows on either side, walls were unplastered and roofs made of unpainted asbestos. The front door opened on to a living room, from which doors to two bedrooms and a kitchen led. The kitchen was at the back of the house, while the only source of water was a single tap outside next to the back door. Single-sex hostels on the other hand, housed migrant workers. While they were made by the same materials, their interiors were different. You entered the front door into a central kitchen, from which two doors led off to dormitories, each with eight beds. Separate ablution buildings housed toilets and showers.

But the townships by the 1960s were also homogeneous and monotonous in that all residents were tenants of the state, and regardless of income all Africans were provided with the same level of services. And these did not include access to electricity, phone lines or postal deliveries. Streets tended to be uniformly unpaved, with no drains, or kerbstones, no streetlights, no trees, and usually, no street names. Strict municipal control was exercised over squatting, sub-letting and domestic renovations. A township grid of block, plot and street gave authorities control over access and movement.

The lives of people who lived under conditions of such monotony were also regulated and regimented by pass laws which sought to control urbanisation. African men not born in urban areas were restricted to single-sex hostels as migrant workers. Family housing was restricted to those who had been born in urban areas or who had been employed in cities for long periods of time and thus qualified for residence. Every aspect of the lives of Africans in the city was controlled by the state. Transport between townships and workplaces was controlled by the state, through state owned train and bus services. It was the state which provided limited forms of leisure and recreation facilities were provided by the state. Establishments such as bars, music clubs and restaurants were illegal. Apart from regimented, controlled houses the only other buildings were churches and municipal beer halls.

Whereas the construction of townships took place on a large scale in the 1950s and early 1960s, housing provision slowed down dramatically from the 1960s as the state attempted to prevent urbanisation and to confine Africans to the bantustans. Many townships were administratively relocated to the bantustans, and from this time any official housing development was restricted to the bantustans. Along with this, industries were induced to relocate to areas bordering the bantustans. This gave rise to an acute housing shortage in urban areas by the 1980s, as the African population of cities continued to grow in spite of restrictions.

During the 1970s, townships were administered in a ruthless fashion by Administration Boards. With the emergence of black local authorities in the 1980s, a new township political order based on patron-client relationships emerged. During popular uprisings of the 1980s, squatter camps or ‘informal settlements’ proliferated as community councils lost control of townships. Civic bodies and youth organisations led land invasions in open defiance of the state. The state attempted to win over the win over an emerging black elite with urban policy reforms in the form of 99 year leasehold rights.

By the 1980s, as a result of these new circumstances, the township landscape of the apartheid city began to change. Backyard shacks made of wood, zinc and plastic proliferated as families ‘spilled out’ of overcrowded houses. The variety in design, materials and position of these ‘informal buildings’ served to break the uniformity of the past. Today, townships reflect a heterogeneous landscape. Shacks have also emerged on vacant land in townships as well as the outer fringes of cities. Layer upon layer of shacks have been built outside the law by residents themselves as people have staked their claim on a place in the South African city. These dense and haphazard informal settlements are traversed by winding footpaths which stand in contrast to the streetgrid plan of surveillance. Spaza shops abound and there is ample evidence of an informal trade economy in services such as hair care and shoe repair.

It is under these new circumstances that the workings of memory have turned an old location such as Ndabeni into a space of nostalgia and object of restitution. The reconstitution of community after apartheid has seen the emergence of new housing schemes under state’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, as well as the upgrading of existing buildings. Hostels, built for male migrant workers, are being converted into family-size houses. Heritage projects have begun to get off the ground as funds become available for commemorative sites, building conservation (for example, of old pass offices) and the development of green spaces in townships. Townships have been incorporated into the tourist gaze on South Africa as township tour operators jostle for the attention of tourists in search of ‘the African experience’, and a glimpse at apartheid’s past.

Many of these initiatives draw on forms of cultural expression and social experience which were features of the development of townships. Slumyards might have been overcrowded places of poverty and despair, but they were the setting for the development of a vibrant music and dance culture, particularly around shebeens and dance halls. A specifically urban culture had developed in places like Sophiatown and Marabastad, centred on music, dance and literature. A place like Sophiatown contained a world of shebeens and gangs as much as it was the home of writers and intellectuals. Townships like Langa, Sharpeville and Soweto were the setting for dramatic challenges to the authority of the apartheid order. In the process, townships have also been sites of community formation and identity construction as people fought against the odds for a place called home.

* Ciraj Rassool lectures in History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). He has written widely on South African public history, visual history and resistance historiography. He is a Trustee and serves on the Executive of the District Six Museum in Cape Town. He chairs the Convening Committee of the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies offered by UWC in association with UCT and the Robben Island Museum.

References

1. Vivian Bickford-Smith, Elizabeth van Heyningen et Nigel Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, David Philip, Cape Town, 1999.

2. Paul Maylam, « The rise and fall of urban apartheid in South Africa », African Affairs, 89, 354, 1990.

3. Paul Maylam, « Explaining the apartheid city : 20 years of South African urban historiography », Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1, 1995 (n° spécial : « Urban Studies and Urban Change in Southern Africa »).

4. Owen Crankshaw and Susan Parnell, « Interpreting the 1994 African township landscape », in Hilton Judin et Ivan Vladislavi (éd.), blank : Architecture, apartheid, after, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999.

5. Gary Minkley, «“Corpses Behind Screens” : Native Space in the City », in Hilton Judin et Ivan Vladislavi (éd.), blank : Architecture, apartheid, after, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999.

2. Township music

Valmont Layne *


Township music affirms the aspirations of Blacks in the cities. Yet, townships are also imaginative spaces, motifs for a wealth of urban African culture. The township is a place of homage for all African artists.

In cultural terms, the township evokes a totality of Black urban experience. Yet the term as applied to music, has been in relatively short useage. Before the 1940s, it was not in common use. It gained currency in the 1970s with the advent of Black Consciousness. Artists and intellectuals now used the word township as a motif in literature, art, theatre and music. For example, we speak of the Drum generation of writers of Sophiatown of the 1950s, or the Soweto novelists of the 1970s.

One may trace a contemporary view of “township music” to the years in South Africa’s history following the Second World War. In the 1940s and 1950s, new generations of activists, artists and writers created a climate of experimentation in urban African music. This was esepecially the case with urban intellectuals. Some musicians would later draw on the rich musical traditions of District Six and townships around Cape Town (such as Malay choirs and carnival). They forged new African jazz experiments in nightclubs around the city centre such as the Ambassador. Here a young Dollar Brand and the Jazz Epistles helped fashioned a South African combo jazz idiom.

Manenberg, South Africa’s township jazz anthem sprang from these roots in the early 1970s. Manenberg has been an anthem for political activists throughout the country during the dark years. Musically, the music draws on the rich urban performance traditions that came before it, including the marabi piano traditions in Gauteng, African choral music, the music of carnival and the Cape Malay choirs. Manenberg carried within it in encoded form, the heritage of postwar township music.

Because of this symbolism, it expressed more powerfully than any other tune, the prevailing mood of defiance and resistance that characterised the 1970s and 1980s. It expressed a desire for an alternative culture that affirmed the aspirations of people living in the townships. In this sense, township music is a referent for music that affirms the will of the emergent underclasses.

Prior to this era, Cape Town’s underclasses had developed their own unique regional expressive cultures exemplified in the music represented here: Cape Malay choirs, makwaya and the hugely popular marimba bands.


Cape Malay Choirs

Cape Malay Choirs carry with them the lore of slave emancipation in 1834. It is inscribed in the history of this music. Performers traditionally take to the streets in the run-up to the New Year as, lore would have it, they did at the emancipation. After the celebrations, the performers become part of choral competitions. In the past, Cape Malay choirs also formed part of traditional social events such as “picnics” during this time of year. They occupy the streets as nagtroepe over the New Year. These“nighttroupes” dress informally as they march. However, for the competition, performing teams usually dresses formally. Fezzes are compulsory and they normally wear blazers. The Cape Malay Choir Board has been coordinating the Malay Choir competition annually since the 1930s. One can deduce, from the history of human migration to the Cape, that the music of Cape Malay choirs has numerous historical antecedents. Firstly, its migration is linked to the slave trade from the Indonesian Archipelago, the Malabar Coast of India, and East Africa. Secondly, European settlers would have exercised considerable musical influence here. Thirdly, Black residents at the Cape would have been involved with music-making, particularly through slave performance. These include“free Blacks”, Nguni language speakers from Eastern parts of Southern Africa, and people collectively designated as Bushmen who originally resided at the Cape, in the Karoo, and the Kalahari Desert

It is not strictly correct to use the “Malay” designation. It is incorrect to say that these performing groups are composed of the descendents of Malaysians. While laypersons broadly attribute East Asian influences, there is little intrinsically“Malay” about the music. Also, the performers would subscribe to the Islamic faith as well as the Christian faith. Cape Malay secular music, notably nederlandsliedere, moppies and hommaliedtjies reflects equally significant indebtedness to Western European musical traditions. Four items are normally presented in the competition.

Within the Malay designation, there is also a religious music generally termed Ratiep. This music is performed in the context of religious rituals where believers test their faith against the limitations of the human body. Ratiep music with its strong rhythmical element provided by the dhol and rebanna accompaniment appears to have strong resemblance with African drumming traditions. Similarly, the drumming in Cape Muslim kaseda music and the secular ghommaliedere and moppies show relatedness to African drumming.


Choral music

African choral music, makwaya, reflects the influence of westernisation in the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, John Knox Bokwe pioneered a new South African choral style widely known as makwaya. He strove to achieve a marriage of African and European compositional principles. The South African National Anthem, Nkosi Sikeleli Africa, is an excellent example of this idiom.

Formally, makwaya, even though based on the western hymn is not performed according to the western aesthetic system. This is a deliberate choice and is borne of syncretism. Congregational singing was attractive to westernising African communities. But, they negotiated this westernisation. African choirs made harmonies not on the basis of a dominant melodic line, but by polyphonically embellishing a bass ostinato. Melodic parts tend to follow the tonal patterns of the song words. Makwaya has, in turn, influenced new urban working class forms such as isicathamiya (made famous by Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo). It also influenced other forms of vocal and instrumentalised music, including working class vocal music such as isicathamiya, South African ragtime and early jazz, plus the rearrangement of indigenous folk songs for choral performance in four-part harmony.


Marimba music

Marimba music testifies to the continuing inventiveness of township culture. It was deliberately introduced into South Africa less than thirty years ago. This makes it younger than most urban African pop musical forms such as kwela and mbaqanga. [i]

David Dargie, a music educationist, is credited with introducing the marimba to South Africa between 1977 and 1979. Since then we have not looked back. Groups such as Amampondo have taken the instrument to new heights, by using it as a vehicle to explore a rich variety of African musical styles forging a new eclectic style. Marimba has ensured that musical conventions live on albeit in new form. These first South African marimbas were first tuned to reproduce scales on the traditional Uhadi musical bow, pentatonic scales and the Western diatonic scale.

Marimba has been subject to half-truths perpetuated in the interests of tourism. On face value, marimba music harkens back to an idealised rural past. It has been presented to tourists as a traditional idiom. Yet, in South Africa, Marimba performance is profoundly contemporary. It is not an ancient musical tradition, even though its best exponents, such as Amampondo, draw extensively and intelligently on a rich variety of African musical traditions.

* Valmont Layne was born in District Six in 1966. He and grew up in numerous townships in Cape Town: including Bontheheuwel, Hanover Park and Factreton. He studied at the University of Cape Town, and worked there for a number of years in the Student Affairs Department.
In the 1980s, he performed with a musical group called Raakwys. The group had a strong political message to youth on the Cape Flats: the townships of Cape Town.He is currently the Sound Archivist at the District Six Museum.

[i] Mbaqanga is the direct precursor to kwaito, the latest youth dance music craze.

Bibiography

David Coplan,‘Popular Music in South Africa’, in Ruth Stone (ed.) Garland - Encyclopedia of African Music, New York, Garland, 1997, pp. 759-780.

Dave Dargie, 'African methods of music education - some reflections', in Carol Muller (ed.), Papers presented at the tenth symposium on ethnomusicology, Music Department, Rhode University, 30 September to 2 - October 1991, pp.19-28.

Desmond Desai,‘The musical context of the Ratiep performance in relation to South African Islamic and Cape Malay music’, in Carol Muller ed., Papers Presented at the Eleventh Symposium on Ethnomusicology, University of Natal, 23-25 August 1993, Grahamstown, International Library of African Music, pp. 16-31.

Colin Howard, The No-Persons”: An Investigation into Aspects of Secular popular Music in Cape Town, MA Thesis, University of London, 1994.

		LOKISHINI Xhosa songs from the township of Langa by the Langa Traditional Singers Colophon Records Col.CD104
		KANALA Dutch songs from the Cape Town "Malay" community by the Cape Malay Group Colophon Records Col.CD105

3. Visiting a township

Several travel agencies and tour operators offer the traveller today the possibility of sightseeing tours in the townships, in Cape Town as well as in Johannesburg. But when poverty and humiliation get mixed up with business, the borders between a visit to a national park or a zoo on the one hand and a process of understanding and awareness on the other become confused, even suspicious.

It is therefore important for the traveller to make a conscious choice with which organisation the first step will be taken to gain an understanding of the unknown world of the township.

As veterans of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the former armed wing of the African National Congress, the organisers of Western Cape Action tour project, a small and dynamic organisation, have initiated a project of healing and peace. Through a programme of tolerance, communication, and appreciation they bring the visitors to explore the faultiness of South Africa's recent past, in ways that dignify Cape Town's townships, its people and their histories. The organisers invite people both foreign and local to participate with them in a process that will further healing, peace and reconstruction in areas once in the front-line of the Anti-Apartheid struggle. In the Western Cape, these areas bore the brunt of Apartheid's policies and brutality; they now stand as a living testimony to its failure.


Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory
PO Box 3168, Grand Central
Cape Town 8000

Telephone: +27-21-461-1371
Fax: +27-21-461-4387

E-mail: wcat@iafrica.com.
Website: www.dacpm.org.za