Full Description
Imonti Modern seeks to recount a previously untold narrative of East London's Coloured and African locations after the Second World War and before these communities were ripped apart in the early 1960s by apartheid-era forced removals. Photographs, poems and oral accounts by former residents portray their public and cultural life in the city's locations on the East and West Banks of the Buffalo River. In their own words and through their own pictures, these stories reveal how African residents created their own styles and forms of dress, music, leisure and home-making to forge a unique urban culture. How they created and occupied public spaces at the beach, in the dance hall, on the rugby pitch, in the boxing ring and at church and school. How they forged new social identities from the forms of consumption and aspiration that they found in the surrounding city. It also shows how their popular imagination was fired by the cultural and political example of black America, which offered hope for greater civic participation in a modern, developing world.
This volume describes how a black urban world within a white city, a ghetto, became mobilised culturally, socially and politically to lay claim to the city as a whole, demanding full citizenship and equal rights for residents, before they were cast aside. The authors' hope is that this history, this book, like the photographs and oral accounts upon which it relies, will restore the past to its previously marginalised subjects - fostering a new sense of belonging after the pain of dislocation and a dynamic of inclusivity that may shape East London's future as a city.
Contents
Introduction
East London's Hidden History
Contested Histories
A Lens on the Location
The Pictorial Record
On Restitution
Chapter One
From Location Life to Forced Removal
A City Divided
Birth of a Slum
Urban Life Shattered
Removals and the Pain of Displacement
Chapter Two
African Nationalism and Resistance
The Politics of Place
The Rise of African Nationalism
The East Bank Massacre
Chapter Three
Locations & Ghettos in Comparative Perspective
Townships and Locations
The Jewish Ghetto and the African Location
The Black American Ghetto: A Trans-Atlantic
Perspective
The Charisma of East Bank and West Bank
Chapter Four
East Bank, West Bank: Social Life and Cultural Connections
A Dozen Essays:
1. West Bank: United by Difference
2. East Bank: A Multicultural Future Denied
3. Music: This is the Modern World
4. Style Wars: Panama Hats and Italian Spats
5. Flags, Festivals and Fairs: Claiming Public Space
6. Sunday Scene: Rituals of Community
7. Home-making: Sunbeam Mums and Lux Ladies
8. Boxing's Tradition: Golden Gloves and City Slums
9. Motor City: Subversive Car Culture
10. Bathing While Black: The Freedom of Beach Culture
11. The Rural in the Urban: Custom, Ethnicity and
Tradition
12. Revolutionary Cowboys: Sobukwe's Soldiers
Chapter Five
The Destruction Of A Community And The Afterlife Of Land Restitution
After 1964: The Forced Removals
After 1994: A Socio-economic Predicament
The Myth of a City
Bibliography
Index
