REVIEW ARTICLES

 

Memory and the City: the Fruits of Imagination

 

 

Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

History Department, University of the Western Cape

 

 

A City Imagined edited by Steven Watson (Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2005). 216 pp. ISBN 10: 0-1430-2473-6

Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town edited by Sean Field, Renate Meyer And Felicity Swanson. (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 248 pp. ISBN 10: 0-7969-2179-2

Over the last decade and a half, several scholars such as Christopher Saunders, Paul Maylam, Susan Parnell and Alan Mabin, and more recently Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall as well as Bill Freund have provided thoughtful reflections on South African urban historiography.¹ They focus on the period from what Saunders identifies as an early spark in the late 1960s through to over two decades of a more sustained period of research and writing from the late 1970s onwards. Saunders particularly highlights the work of the social historians in the late 1970s as contributing to 'the great expansion in, and reorientation of, urban history.'² Freund concurs that 'The History Workshop represents the apex of late twentieth-century urban history writing in South Africa.'³

These scholars have identified some of the key themes and areas of focus of urban historiography. Understanding racial segregation and the ultimate creation of the apartheid city has been a central thrust of many works with several questions asked. If compounds, locations and townships were established for black people why was this so? Did urban policy in the apartheid era mark a crucial rupture from the earlier period of the 1920s to 1940s? What was the weight of material forces in pushing forward segregation as opposed to disease, white fears and control? From which interest groups did pressure for segregation come? Was urban policy (which included segregation measures as well as restricted access to the city for Africans) shaped by central government, local government, ratepayers or capital? What impact did urban policy have?⁴ Saunders noted that the social historians made a key shift from questions of policy to 'the everyday experiences and consciousness of "ordinary" residents of towns'.⁵ Writings also focused on migration, the links between urban and rural, ethnicity, popular urban culture as well as resistance to urban policy.⁶

Academics have gone beyond simply identifying themes, they have also pointed to the limitations of urban historiography. Maylam argued 'it has been largely Afrocentric' - the focus has been on one section of the urban population - the ones most legislated against.⁷ Mbembe and Nuttall argued that the city is almost always represented as 'a theatre of capitalist accumulation and exploitation'.⁸Parnell and Mabin pointed to the 'implicit acceptance of "race" as the primary category of inquiry'. This, in their opinion, has 'impoverished understandings of towns and cities.' They argue instead for an understanding of modernism and planning to understand the shape that cities took.⁹ Scholars have also commented that the research has focused on the major cities to the neglect of smaller towns; that there have been too few works of synthesis. General, adequate, histories of one city were lacking.¹⁰

There are more recent reservations in some quarters that urban history may be yielding, in the context of growing tourism, to heritage studies.¹¹ Others fear that with the end of apartheid, urban history which was stimulated by various urban struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, may suffer a sad end.¹² Scholars have argued for new directions of research - the post-colonial context has made new approaches to writing the urban past more urgent. Saunders suggested that the city needs to be seen as an 'integrated whole'. He urged consideration of new questions - how could pre-colonial urban settlements be included in histories of urbanisation? He called for histories of suburbs not just those of the townships and squatter settlements. The shaping of the city could be understood, he argued, by understanding fiscal issues and how decisions about expenditure were resolved; by looking at the impact of the development of major communication and transport networks; by examining the role of housing companies and developers and speculators. Finally, he argued, there needed to be more comprehensive studies of leisure and popular culture. ¹³

Mbembe and Nuttall have more recently provided a much more challenging appeal for new directions. They argue for the need to 'speak of the city on terms that warrant comparison with other cities in the world'. This is much more than an appeal for comparative history (eg. comparing the township with the Amercian ghetto or the South American favela or looking for similarities as well as differences with world cities), which other academics have also argued for. Focusing on Johannesburg specifically, Mbembe and Nuttall urge that one should think of its urban formation outside of South African studies or African studies. They note that the city can be seen as an 'aesthetic project', that 'cartographies of affluence' are as worthy of study as places of poverty, that interconnections between township and city need to be explored. They, in particular, argue for the need to explore ideas of 'citiness'. What does it mean to be in a city and experience city life? In contrast to the bleakness of inequality and poverty and deprivation that urban studies seem to have focussed on, they argue that the city can be represented differently as a place 'of manifold rhythms, a world of sounds, private freedom, pleasures and sensa-tions.'¹⁴

Bill Freund also makes one crucially important point. Past studies concentrated on divided spaces and separate experiences but

It is no doubt in certain kinds of urban spaces, despite segregation, that common experiences (inclusive of conflict), helped to shape consciousness. And of course cities inevitably demanded new forms of organisation, new ways that people shaped communities. I think we could perhaps put more emphasis on thinking about a kind of citizen-consciousness shaped by urbaness, even in its twisted and fragmented form which was all that the system allowed, that transgressed the racial and cultural boundaries posited by authority. This is a way of informing historical research that transcends the apartheid era.

'Cities' Freund argued, 'were also places where people came together . I would posit that there is some common South Africanness that emerged as a re-sult'.¹⁵

It is against these very thoughtful reflections and hopes for a new exciting future for urban history that I would like to consider A City Imagined edited by Stephen Watson and Imagining the City: Memories and Culture in Cape Town edited by Sean Field, Renate Meyer and Felicity Swanson. To what extent do they take our understandings of Cape Town further? To what extent can they and do they move beyond the themes of past?

Both books indeed set out new challenges. Watson, a poet, has previously written about Cape Town. His collection titled In this City deals variously with experience, longing, desire and confusion within a city space dominated by the mountain, 'full of sky' and lashed by winds and rains.¹⁶ Watson explains the motivation behind A City Imagined. There were no books on Cape Town that could satisfy his quest to understand 'the particular spirit of the place, the genius loci that is inalienably Cape Town's own and like no other on this planet.' He thus asked nineteen literary figures who have a distinguished record of publication to make a personal contribution where they 'take the measure of the place and ... define its meaning for them' (p.1-2).

In some ways Watson's project echoes that of Heidi Holland's and Adam Roberts's book, also published by Penguin five years ago. Sixty short contributions from established writers reflected on some aspect of life or spaces in Johannesburg: 'gyms, malls, casinos, sport stadiums, townships, herbal markets and restless nights pushed up against an old Chinese community, memories of treason trials and evidence of ancient man.'¹⁷ These deal too with the walls of suburbia and with experiences of violent crime.

Ivan Vladislavic in his most recent and brilliantly written reflections on contemporary Johannesburg comments: 'In Johannesburg . the back-drop is always a man-made one . For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places.'¹⁸ Not surprisingly contributions in the Holland and Roberts book do deal with how human beings have made Johannesburg's physicality. We have in Sue Armstrong's words 'scruffy yellow mine-dumps, the thin thrusting skyscrapers and the glinting glass of central Johannesburg, the snaking motorways encircling the city, the turquoise spangles of swimming pools and the psychedelic splashes of bougainvillaea in suburban gardens ....' ¹⁹ Lindsay Bremner explores the creation of spaces like Monte Casino or Melrose Arch - spaces of the imagination representing an idea of the urban unconnected to reality.²⁰ The past glory of the Carlton Centre features in other writings.²¹

The subject matter of Watson's book turns out to be different. Watson explains that Cape Town is a city defined by its natural physicality. The city has not conquered, subdued or eliminated its natural world but exists alongside it (p.207). Few of his contributors can resist writing about the mountain, the sea or sky. P.R. Anderson explains : 'the mountain . stands for what is unlikely about Cape Town ... Nothing is so unlikely to me ... as this wilderness at the centre of things (p.89). It is what is constant about Cape Town while all else changes, writes Damon Galgut (p.15).

To Watson's and his contributors' credit they move beyond contemporary tourist imaginings of Cape Town. As Finaula Dowling, asks of imaginary tourists 'would you let me try to make the picture postcard come to life? Ask me anything.' (p.22) Focussing on Kalk Bay she writes about people, places, homes, experiences, the minutae of lives lived. Fire on the mountain, a dead body found on a walk, news of three suicides, a rape all shatter the postcard. Jenefer Shute contrasts the tourist guidebooks with her memories. 'The covers of my guidebooks are resplen-dently blue - mountain, sea, sky- but I don't recognise the sparkling place they promise me. My Cape Town was dismal, inclement; it drizzled, it raged, it poured. Atrocity was our weather, it walled us in' (p.78). In a haunting essay on homes and shelters, Henrietta Rose Innes takes us beyond what is visible in beautiful places such as Sandy Bay to hidden surfaces - to homes in 'unlikely places' made by those who live marginal lives barely clinging to the city (p.55 ff.).

Mike Nicol contrasts an eighteenth century panaroma of Cape Town with a more contemporary one thus effectively revealing some of the layers of history that lie below the high vantage point. He writes about graves, death by execution, slavery and violence (pp.128-41). Against a backdrop of beauty, Mark Behr writes about the gruesome murder in 2003 of nine men at Sizzlers, a gay sex parlour.

Moving beyond the physicality of the place some writers define Cape Town by its people and the spaces they made. Thus Jeremy Cronin writes about 'the mixedness, the Creole reality of Cape Town' (p.51). For Andre Brink it is the Malay Quarter inhabited by those of slave descent that 'truly spells Cape Town for me'(p.122). It is when he hears the distinctive and humourous speech of 'coloured' workers at the harbour that he is hit by a sensation: this is home (p.120).

The book deals centrally with questions of memory and lived experiences. Watson notes 'this is the place formed by the entanglements of reality and imagination ... As with any city that has been truly lived in, loved, and at times suffered, it is a space coloured by memory, ambivalences , disaffections, obsession.' Hence the title of the book, 'A City Imagined' (pp.9-10). Writers draw on their childhood memories of Cape Town. Sindiwe Magona writes about the city of her imaginings and the real city she encountered in Blomvlei on the Flats (p.107 ff). Anthony Sher draws on his childhood in Sea Point and a more recent visit to Cape Town (p.97 ff). Jenefer Shute writes about her memories of life in Cape Town as a student in the 1970s. That is her small Cape Town 'a narrow circuit from UCT to Rondebosch, Mowbray , Observatory, with occasional expeditions to the Labia or the Space' (p.80). Marlene van Niekerk writes about childhood visits from Caledon to the opthalmologist in Cape Town (p.142 ff). Mark Behr draws on a farewell from a balcony in Sea Point - a tale of denial of gay love (p.128 ff).

There are some fascinating new views of the city. One notable contribution is by Michiel Heyns who writes about the city's public toilets over the period 1960s to 1980s. More specifically this is about cottaging - the use by gays of public toilets for sex (pp.31 ff). Another view of the city is presented by Hedley Twidle and Sean Christie who take one on a mini-bus taxi journey along Main Road from the Castle down through numerous southern suburbs ultimately reaching Muizenberg and Simonstown. Can all this difference really be part of one city they ask (pp.166 ff)?

Watson's central challenge to the historiography is the existing dominating image of Cape Town as the city divided: spaces hugging the mountain and lying in proximity to the sea are constantly contrasted with the spaces occupied on the Cape Flats. Wealth and privilege are constantly contrasted with poverty and dispossession. Is Cape Town, Watson asks, simply 'a tale of two cities'? His book shows that there are no 'simple truths' and that Cape Town is 'a tale not of two cities, but of nineteen' (pp.3-5). More contributions, he argues, would have yielded more representations. This approach is more than welcome and Watson almost pulls it off. Yet this book represents for its most part the imaginings of white males - in fact middle-aged white males. Through their accounts we do see many Cape Towns. However, in the few black contributions, notably that of Sindiwe Magona and Nkululeko Mabandla (pp.184 ff), the image of the divided city resurfaces strongly. Can blacks only see the divided city? What personal trawls might the reader have ventured into had Watson approached writers of the calibre of Gabeeba Baderoon, Mary Watson and Ronnie Govender to name just a few?

At a symposium on urban history in 2003 Vivian Bickford-Smith noted that within the History Department at the University of Cape Town, the collective study of Cape Town history 'had all but collapsed' but that the Centre for Popular Memory founded in 2001 continued to work in the area. Members of the History Department had been responsible for producing the seven volumes of the Studies in the History of Cape Town series between 1979 and 1988 and a two volume history of Cape Town published in 1998 and 1999 respectively.²² Sean Field, the Director of the Centre for Popular Memory who is also staff member in the History Department, edited a book on memories of forced removals²³ and co-edited an issue of African Studies drawing on oral histories of the city.²⁴ Imagining the City thus marks the Centre's third major contribution. While the African Studies issue was mainly about demonstrating the value of oral history to urban history and aimed to contribute to knowledge about Cape Town's past, Imagining the City is bolder in its handling of memory and knowledge production.

Field may be regarded as one of the leading scholars of oral history. He goes beyond an empirical use of oral history and has, in most of his writings, reflected on the process of memory construction and the past-present relationship.²⁵ Imagining the City represents an extension of that approach. It was no doubt - at least in its title - partly inspired by Watson's book. It includes several contributions from young and previously unpublished scholars. While the book draws on oral interviews with people in Cape Town, the editors choose not to use the phrase 'ordinary people', so common to oral history and social history endeavours. A phrase that now can only be, at its worst, terribly condescending. Their interviewees are 'people who live, work and creatively express themselves in the city' (pp.v, vii).

The editors also dispel notions that their work represents 'views from below'. Instead, 'They represent a kaleidoscope of imaginings and remembering, constructed from differing vantage points in time and space' (p.8). Avoiding yet another tendency of oral history practioners, they do not claim to give 'voice to the voiceless' (p. 11). They seek to reflect back the images and memories captured. Sometimes in their purest form, at other times the interviewer distils these by constructing, interpreting and debating them (p.12).

The editors warn against a search for facts - a 'positivistic' use of oral history. Memory, they stress, involves a process of making, of selection and of forgetting. This is a central theme of the book and guides all the individual contributions -sometimes with maddening repetition. The editors explain:

The driving motive of popular memory, then, is not to retain everything ... but to consciously and unconsciously work through this information, via selection and construction. This requires ongoing acts of imagination. These acts of imagination help people make sense of past and present information. In the process, mental words, images and feelings are included and excluded, to fit visual and narrative frames of understanding.

The act of imagining becomes central in how people 'construct, contest and maintain a material and emotionally secure sense of place and identity in Cape Town' (p.8).

The editors see their work as a direct challenge to urban historians who employ 'rigorous empirical' methodology. South African urban historians, they argue, are guilty of being wedded to two isms: historicism and logocentrism. The former refers to the belief that history is a 'process inexorably marching across time in a linear fashion, leaving behind historical "facts" that are waiting to be discovered by historians.' The latter reflects the way that historians have privileged 'the word' (written and oral). With regard to this they argue - following the pioneering work of visual historians such as Patricia Hayes - that 'Images, both photographic stills and moving images, should be accredited as equally appropriate and valid historical sources' (pp.9, 15). Such visual sources must also be seen as sources within which memory works itself through. The book, however, in my opinion, barring Thabo Manetsi's and Renate Meyer's joint contribution, does not go far enough to explore this dimension.

Apart from one essay on memory and District Six which does not add much more to our understandings of representations of District Six in the museum (pp.37 ff),²⁶ many new themes for the urban scholar are opened up by the book. Felicity Swanson makes a contribution towards understanding white masculinity in her essay which draws on interviews with those former rugby players who remembered the hey-day of intervarsity rugby matches in the 1960s and 1970s (pp.207 ff). This provides an insider insight into the world of rugby. Colin Miller (a jazz musician himself) makes a solid contribution on the history of jazz musicians in Cape Town as apartheid unfolded and spaces closed down within the city (pp.133 ff), while Ncedisa Nkonyeni traces the evolution of rap music in the 1980s and 1990s (pp.151 ff). Nkonyeni's piece does for the Cape Flats what Eddie Koch's well-known essay on marabi culture did for understanding the slumyards of Johannesburg in the 1920s and 1930s. ²⁷ Rappers, however, moved beyond the Flats into central city spaces. Nkonyeni detects within the growth of hip hop culture (of which rapping was part) many elements of youth (male and female) resistance. It had an 'activist potential' (p.168).

Gabeba Baderoon strengthens the sections on popular culture with an interesting essay on Muslim food (pp.115 ff), which does not shy away from the difficulties of defining what is Muslim food. She reflects on her methodology and takes us beyond the association of halaal with Muslim food. She asks questions about how people learn to cook, how recipes are shared or not, how and what people eat at different occasions and what generational differences there might be to food.

Thabo Manetsi and Renate Meyer move one to the contemporary period by providing a succinct and interesting essay on what it means to be a township artist in the city. Drawing on interviews with several artists they focus on 'the process of making art in a city': the inspirations and the rewards or lack thereof (pp.191ff). Iyonawan Masade focuses on Nigerian migrants in contemporary Cape Town and is concerned to understand how, given transnational existences and experiences, the idea of home is understood by migrants. This otherwise solid piece could have been strengthened had it specifically focussed on the meaning of Cape Town to these migrants. In most of their interviews they speak in vague terms about being in South Africa rather than in one of South Africa's distinctive cities.

Renate Meyer and Anastasia Maw separately tackle the subject of urban terror by focussing on the bombs that went off in Cape Town between 1998 and 2000 and the experience of survivors (pp.57-92). These, like the contributions in Watson's book, take one beyond the tourist images of beauty to the hard reality of times when urban spaces were imbued with fear. We have narratives of those who experienced the blasts and there are moving testimonies of how they discovered the extent of the damage to their bodies and the long process of recovery. Maw specifically identifies different narrative threads and sees the process of narration as one leading to some 'mastery' over the event and as a form of 'recovery' (p.85). This is one issue that merits greater discussion since Field and Swanson assert elsewhere that narration of experience, which can employ myths, does not lead to healing (p.11).

In one of the finest essays of the volume, Louise Green takes us to a deeper and different understanding of Table Mountain (pp.173 ff). It is not just that which gives Cape Town its distinctiveness, nor is it just a space of recreation, but it is significantly also a place of work. She has very moving interviews with workers who explain why they migrated from the rural areas to the city. Their employment by the municipality ensured that the mountain remained approachable by the city's residents and tourists. These are the people who looked after the paths, planted trees and removed alien vegetation. We have descriptions of how people learnt skills and the relationship between various spaces in these workers lives. The impact of globalisation and changes that followed in the lives of these workers when the South African National Parks Board took over are analysed.

Sean Field's chapter on memories and sites of significance in Langa, such as the pass office, is guided by the need for scholars to do more work on memory, specific sites and landscapes (p.24). He argues that the field of heritage conservation should not be focussed solely on the material and the physical, but that peoples' memories, in all their diversity, should also be given a place (p.31).

Overall, this is an excellent collection. My one criticism is that, barring a few contributors such as Colin Miller, most of the authors do not provide the dates of their interviews in their references. The reader is simply told these exist in the Centre for Popular Memory. This is a strangely cavalier approach from oral history practioners who understand the context of time in memory formation. At a recent workshop on oral history methodology, Phil Bonner warned that the oral historian needs to be meticulous in how he/she cites interviews - if necessary even page numbers of transcripts should be cited.²⁸ Given the interplay between the past and the present, it is important to know when interviews were conducted. When the Congolese refuge rails against Capetonians for not being welcoming, the date of his/her interview is important. When the Langa resident indicates that Cape Town and not the Transkei is the locality of his/her greatest knowledge, the date of that interview is also significant. Further, while the book urges oral history practioners to veer away from a search for facts, the book may indeed be searched and read for facts by readers.

Both Watson's collection and that by Field, Meyer and Swanson contribute towards our understanding of Cape Town and take us in newer directions. Urban history, far from being in danger, is alive to these new directions. The books lead to an understanding of citiness, experience and place. They point to how the urban historian can explore such subjects. John Coetzee's autobiographical reflections, can become an interesting source for the historian of Cape Town. ²⁹ We know from many memoirs what it meant to live in District Six and other such places. What did it mean to live in Plumstead after an early start in Worcester? What do his memoirs tell of Coetzee's school life in Rondebosch? What did it mean to be a student living in Mowbray in the 1960s? The urban historian can draw much from sources like these and new questions can be asked of interviewees. Understanding the distinc-tiveness of Cape Town also opens the way for comparison with other coastal cities or cities that are not blessed by seas or rivers or mountains, but have to artificially create a meaningful urban form. These two books bear witness to the fruits of the imagination and make for two good, thought-provoking reads.

 

 

1 See C. Saunders, Writing History : South Africa's Urban Past and Other Essays (Pretoria: HSRC, 1992), 9-42; P. Maylam, 'Explaining the apartheid city : 20 years of South African urban historiography', Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 21 (1), 1995, 19-38; S. Parnell and A. Mabin, 'Rethinking urban South Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. .21 (1), 1995 ; A. Mbembe and S. Nuttall, 'Writing the world from an African metropolis', Public Culture, Vol. 16 (3), 2004, 347-72; B. Freund, 'Urban history in South Africa', South African Historical Journal, Vol. 52, 2005, 19-31.
2 Saunders, Writing History, 12-13 .
3 Freund 'Urban history', 26.
4 This derives mainly from Maylam, 'Explaining the apartheid city'.
5 Saunders, Writing History, 14.
6 Freund, 'Urban history', 24
7 Maylam, 'Explaining the apartheid city', 21
8 Mbembe and Nuttall, 'Writing the world', 356.
9 Quoted in Freund, 'Urban history', 26.
10 Maylam, 'Explaining the apartheid city', 21 and Saunders, Writing History, 22.
11 See V. Bickford-Smith, 'Report on session on writing and teaching urban history in Africa in the twentieth century', South African Historical Journal, Vol. 50, 2004, 243, The comment was made by Elizabeth van Heyningen.
12 Freund, 'Urban history', 31.
13 Saunders, Writing History, 35-36.
14 Mbembe and Nuttall, 'Writing the world', 356 ff.
15 Freund, 'Urban history', 30-31.
16 S. Watson, In This City (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1986), see for example.1-2, 13, 16-17, 27-28, 34.
17 H. Holland and A. Roberts (eds), Jo'burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa's Infamous City (Sandton: Penguin, 2002), 13.
18 I Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys: Joburg and What-What (Roggebaai : Umuzi, 2006), 94.
19 S Armstrong 'As old as history itself' in Holland and Roberts, Jo'burg to Jozi, 22.
20 L. Bremner, 'A quick tour around contemporary Johannesburg', in Holland and Roberts, Jo'burg to Jozi, 54-56.
21 R. Bhengu, 'Romance' and C. Hope, 'Jo'Burg blues' in Holland and Roberts, Jo'burg to Jozi, 45, 118. See also Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys, 28-30.
22 See Bickford-Smith , 'Report', 243. The two volumes were edited by N. Worden, V. Bickford-Smith and E. van Heyningen, Cape Town the Making of a City (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998) and Cape Town in the Twentieth Century (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999).
23 S. Field (ed), Lost Communities, Living Memories : Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001)
24 See African Studies, Vol. 60 (1), 2001.
25 See, for instance, S. Field, 'From the peaceful past to the violent present : Memory, myth and identity in Guguletu' in A. Norval and D. Howarth (eds), South Africa in Transition (London : Macmillan, 1998).
26 While Sofie Geschier argues that narratives about District Six as communicated by museum facilitators to young children are selective and neglect the negative, the idealization in District Six narratives has been considered by Soudien and Lalu Meltzer. See their chapters in C. Rassool and S. Prosalendis , Recalling Community in Cape Town (Cape Town, District Six Museum, 2001), 66-73, 97-105. Geschier's focus is distinctively on the communication within the museum staff and the young visitors and I think her work would have made a greater contribution had it focused on the youth and how they absorb and use these narratives.
27 E. Koch, 'Without visible means of subsistence: Slumyard culture in Johannesburg 1918-1940' in B. Bozzoli (ed), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response (Johannesburg : Ravan Press, 1983), 151 ff.
28 P. Bonner, opening address to Oral Histoiy Workshop, 26 March 2007, Robben Island Museum.
29 J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997) and Youth (London: Secker and Warburg, 2002)