Sophiatown
Photograph of Sophiatown street.
The destruction of Sophiatown that began on 9 February 1955 and ended in November 1959 is regarded as a model for the NP's urban segregationist policy of the 1960s to the middle of the 1990s. Its basic features, the NP government had hoped, would be applied in cities and towns across the country. In many ways, Sophiatown has been a case study in understanding how Africans responded to Apartheid legislation as it evolved from the middle of the 1950s to the middle of the 1970s when the Soweto Revolt broke out.
An examination of social and economic activities like beer brewing, gangsters and their ways of earning a living and the emergence of artists, musicians and sports personalities are useful in the analysis of the community of Sophiatown's historical experience. Though widely documented since the early 1980s till present day, some key features of Sophiatown's history remain unexplored.
More significantly though, the end of Apartheid in 1994 and the advent of the democratic dispensation has had the effect of reversing the "triumph" that Triomf represented for the Verwoerdian policies to the non racial dispensation that characterizes South Africa today.
