WORKING-CLASS RESPECTABILITY: THE EXAMPLE OF THE WESTERN AREAS OF JOHANNESBURG, 1930–55

Abstract

This was no picturesque semi-fairy story. The drunken gambling merry makers in Bethlehem, heedless of the awful wonder of that night, might easily have been figures in a Sophiatown street scene on Christmas eve…Later while Mary, Joseph and the Holy Child were still in the stable, two Roman soldiers descended upon them – a take off of African Police, complete with assegais and notebook, demanding to know their tribe, place of birth, and reason for being in Bethlehem…

This description of a nativity play, complete with a send-up of the South African police, is one snapshot from the life of the Western Areas of Johannesburg. Others could include a large demonstration to back the wage demands of teachers and a home-grown police force. Such idiosyncratic and divergent portraits of community are the backdrop to this study. This article contends that, in their commitment to religion, education and law and order, the people of the Western Areas were deeply attached to respectability. The Western Areas was a cluster of townships – including the famous Sophiatown – which formed one of the most significant black centres of population in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. The removal of black people from the Western Areas between 1955 and 1962 constituted one of the most notorious acts of apartheid and ensured the district's place at the heart of protest against white domination. Consequently, to assert that respectability was essential to a working class district such as the Western Areas is to imply that it had a much wider significance.