Respectability and Resistance

David Goodhew is an Anglican parish priest in York, England. He has studied at universities in Durham, Oxford, and Johannesburg. His research has centred on the history of modern South Africa and modern British Christianity. Goodhew has worked in diverse locations, including a nightshelter for the homeless and a Cambridge college.

Respectability and Resistance is the first major history of the black township of Sophiatown in western Johannesburg. Sophiatown, together with the neighboring townships of Newclare and Western Native Township, formed the center of black South African urban culture and politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Using a wealth of sources including oral history and much previously unknown archival material, Goodhew provides a detailed portrait of Sophiatown life. The widow turning to illegal liquor production to get her children a good education, the gang of miners who made common cause with the white police, the Communist Party's rather puritanical views on pleasure, and a nativity play satirizing state policy - these are just a few of the diverse strands of life that teemed through Sophiatown.With a social fabric always liable to fragment, the people of Sophiatown found a fragile unity through a culture of working class respectability. This, in turn, crucially fueled resistance to the state. Although respectability was undermined by state repression and popular militancy, it remains of significance. Goodhew's book joins the ranks of classic books on the working class in the tradition of E. P. Thompson. As such, Respectability and Resistance will be of interest to all labor and social historians.

ContentsContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsixMaps and IllustrationsxiAbbreviationsxiiiIntroductionxvWhy Sophiatown Matters xvWorking-Class Respectability? xviiRespectability and Resistance xxi1The Economics of Oppression, 1905-39 1The Origins of Community 2Laboring Men, Laboring Women 5The Un-Making of a Black Middle Class 8The Price of Land 102The Making of Working-Class Respectability, 1918-39 21A Religious Place 22The Sanctity of School 28Crime and Punishment 343The Limitations of Resistance: Politics in the Western Areas between the Wars 45Poverty and Protest during the Great Depression 46Fragmentary Politics: The mid-1930s 50The Radicalization of the Advisory Board, 1937-39 544"Nobody ever risked opening a bank in Sophiatown": Township Economics, 1939-55 65A People's Movement: Demographic Change and Continuity 66A Man's Work 67Working Women 70Teachers, Traders, and Educated Workers 72Owners, Tenants, and the State 745The Flowering of Working-Class Respectability, 1939-55 87The Faith of the People 88The Struggle over School 95Law and Disorder 996Communism, Apartheid, and Respectability, 1939-53 121The Pot Begins to Boil: Politics in the 1940s 122The Pot Boils Over: Politics, 1949-53 1267The Death of Sophiatown, 1953-55 145The Fight against Removal, 1953-55 146The Bantu Education Boycott 153Epilogue: Respectability and Resistance 167Bibliography173Index187