The Emergence of the South African Metropolis

The Emergence of the South African Metropolis
Author: Vivian Bickford-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107002931

A pioneering account of how South Africa's three leading cities were fashioned, experienced, promoted and perceived.

The Emergence of the South African Metropolis

The Emergence of the South African Metropolis
Author: Vivian Bickford-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316558576

Focusing on South Africa's three main cities - Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban - this book explores South African urban history from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, it examines the metropolitan perceptions and experiences of both black and white South Africans, as well as those of visitors, especially visitors from Britain and North America. Drawing on a rich array of city histories, travel writing, novels, films, newspapers, radio and television programs, and oral histories, Vivian Bickford-Smith focuses on the consequences of the depictions of the South African metropolis and the 'slums' they contained, and especially on how senses of urban belonging and geography helped create and reinforce South African ethnicities and nationalisms. This ambitious and pioneering account, spanning more than a century, will be welcomed by scholars and students of African history, urban history, and historical geography.

The African City

The African City
Author: Bill Freund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2007-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139459554

This book is comprehensive both in terms of time coverage, from before the Pharaohs to the present moment and in that it tries to consider cities from the entire continent, not just Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from factual information and rich description material culled from many sources, it looks at many issues from why urban life emerged in the first place to how present-day African cities cope in difficult times. Instead of seeing towns and cities as somehow extraneous to the real Africa, it views them as an inherent part of developing Africa, indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial and emphasizes the extent to which the future of African society and African culture will likely be played out mostly in cities. The book is written to appeal to students of history but equally to geographers, planners, sociologists and development specialists interested in urban problems.

The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures

The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures
Author: Archie L. Dick
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442695080

The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures shows how the common practice of reading can illuminate the social and political history of a culture. This ground-breaking study reveals resistance strategies in the reading and writing practices of South Africans; strategies that have been hidden until now for political reasons relating to the country's liberation struggles. By looking to records from a slave lodge, women's associations, army education units, universities, courts, libraries, prison departments, and political groups, Archie Dick exposes the key works of fiction and non-fiction, magazines, and newspapers that were read and discussed by political activists and prisoners. Uncovering the book and library schemes that elites used to regulate reading, Dick exposes incidences of intellectual fraud, book theft, censorship, and book burning. Through this innovative methodology, Dick aptly shows how South African readers used reading and books to resist unjust regimes and build community across South Africa's class and racial barriers.

The History of African Cities South of the Sahara

The History of African Cities South of the Sahara
Author: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2005
Genre: Africa, Sub-Saharan
ISBN:

Cities have existed in sub-Saharan Africa since antiquity. But only now are historians and archaeologists rediscovering their rich heritage: the ancient ruins of Great Zimbabwe and Congo, the harbor cities at the Indian Ocean, the capitals of the Bantu Kingdoms, the Atlantic cities from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and the urban revolutions in the 19th century. Mercantile cities opened Africa to the world, Islamic cities became centers of scholarship and the trans-Saharan trade, Creole cities appeared after the first contact with Europeans, and Bantu cities of the hinterland reacted against them. The author has gone through vast numbers of archival records and conducted independent field research to analyze and describe the rich history of African cities even long before imperial colonization began, and she continues her story until the time of urban reorganization during industrialization. The result is a colorful panorama of urban lifestyles including unique examples of architecture, and lasting traditions of ethnic, cultural, religious, and commercial forms of co-existence.

In Township Tonight!

In Township Tonight!
Author: David Bellin Coplan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN:

David B. Coplan's pioneering social history of black South Africa's urban music, dance, and theatre established itself as a classic soon after its publication in 1985. Now completely revised, expanded, and updated, this new edition takes account of developments over the last thirty years while reflecting on the massive changes in South African politics and society since the end of the apartheid era. In vivid detail, Coplan comprehensively explores more than three centuries of the diverse history of South Africa's black popular culture, taking readers from indigenous musical traditions into the world of slave orchestras, pennywhistlers, clergyman-composers, the gumboot dances of mineworkers, and touring minstrelsy and vaudeville acts.

Bulawayo Burning

Bulawayo Burning
Author: T. O. Ranger
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847010202

A unique and stylish contribution to the social history of African cities and Zimbabwean cultural life. NEW LOW PRICE This book is designed as a tribute and response to Yvonne Vera's famous novel Butterfly Burning, which is set in the Bulawayo townships in 1946 and dedicated to the author. It is an attempt to explorewhat historical research and reconstruction can add to the literary imagination. Responding as it does to a novel, this history imitates some fictional modes. Two of its chapters are in effect 'scenes', dealing with brief periods of intense activity. Others are in effect biographies of 'characters'. The book draws upon and quotes from a rich body of urban oral memory. In addition to this historical/literary interaction the book is a contribution to the historiography of southern African cities, bringing out the experiential and cultural dimensions, and combining black and white urban social history. TERENCE RANGER was Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxford and author of many books including Writing Revolt, Are we not also Men? (1995), Voices from the Rocks (1999) and was co-editor of Violence and Memory (2000). Zimbabwe: Weaver Press

Homes Apart

Homes Apart
Author: Anthony Lemon
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 56
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253333216

Well written and with an extensive bibliography and maps of the urban areas, the volume is an essential source for understanding South Africa's urban future as well as for documenting the legacy of apartheid on South African urbanization. --Choice... an illuminating look at one of the twentieth century's most ignominious failures in social engineering. --Journal of Interdisciplinary HistoryThis book examines the legacy of apartheid in nine of South Africa's major cities (including Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg, and Pretoria), the factors that have influenced their distinctive development, and the possible direction and patterns of urban change in a post-apartheid society.

The South Africa Reader

The South Africa Reader
Author: Clifton Crais
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2013-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822377454

The South Africa Reader is an extraordinarily rich guide to the history, culture, and politics of South Africa. With more than eighty absorbing selections, the Reader provides many perspectives on the country's diverse peoples, its first two decades as a democracy, and the forces that have shaped its history and continue to pose challenges to its future, particularly violence, inequality, and racial discrimination. Among the selections are folktales passed down through the centuries, statements by seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, the songs of mine workers, a widow's testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a photo essay featuring the acclaimed work of Santu Mofokeng. Cartoons, songs, and fiction are juxtaposed with iconic documents, such as "The Freedom Charter" adopted in 1955 by the African National Congress and its allies and Nelson Mandela's "Statement from the Dock" in 1964. Cacophonous voices—those of slaves and indentured workers, African chiefs and kings, presidents and revolutionaries—invite readers into ongoing debates about South Africa's past and present and what exactly it means to be South African.

Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood

Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood
Author: Rob Nixon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-10-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000631672

Originally published in 1994, Homelands, Harlem & Hollywood examines the anti-colonialist struggle against apartheid, and the ways in which American and South African culture have been fascinated with and influenced by one another. Rob Nixon’s wide-ranging analysis looks at Hollywood representations of the struggle for liberation, the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on the Sophiatown writers, the banning and censorship of television under apartheid, Mandela and messianic politics, the sports and cultural boycotts, ethnic nationalism, and the culture of violence. Nixon concludes with an investigation of how the collapse of communism and anti-communism and the rise of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had powerful implications for the shape of post-apartheid South Africa.