CHAPTER SIX
Un-designing the ‘Black City’
Pfunzo Sidogi
The ‘Radical Imagination’ in TwentiethCentury South African Black art and the 1940s Squatter Movement Introduction In this chapter, I explore select artistic portrayals and the historical dynamics of the “black city” in South Africa. Commonly referred to as “townships” and/or “squatter camps,”1 black cities were conceived and designed by white politicians and urban planners who sought to cleanse the industrialised Western city and its suburban areas of a permanent black presence. However, black residents for whom the black city was created ‘un-designed’ it through their lived and representational practices. In order to fully appreciate the importance of the dissident and imaginative artistic remakes of black cities, I first outline how these racialised sites were systematically produced. This is achieved through a detailed reading of the development of Orlando near Johannesburg during the 1930s. Orlando would eventually become the South Western Townships (Soweto), the largest black city in South Africa. I then focus on the “radical imagination” and transgressive agency performed by black people who resided in this iconic black city during the 1940s. Finally, I discuss how this defiant imagination manifested in select works by black artists who depicted the black city in their art. While much of the history of the black city predates the apartheid years (1948-94), it was the apartheid regime that refined, perfected and ultimately massified the development of black cities throughout the country. Throughout the chapter, I evoke the notion of the radical imagination in order to make sense of the defiant feats – political and artistic – of residents of the black city during twentieth-century South Africa. In an assessment of slavery, colonialism and, more recently, apartheid, Anthony Bogues reminds us that, for the oppressed who lived through these histories, “the spectacle of violence Un-designing the ‘Black City’
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