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 Periodical article |
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| Title: | Working-Class Respectability: The Example of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1930-1955 |
| Author: | Goodhew, David |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | The Journal of African History |
| Volume: | 41 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Period: | June |
| Pages: | 241-266 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | townships customs social history Economics and Trade Labor and Employment Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Ethnic and Race Relations Urbanization and Migration History and Exploration Politics and Government |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/183435 |
| Abstract: | This article explores the nature of black working-class life in a district in South Africa, the Western Areas of Johannesburg, between 1930 and 1955. The district comprised three townships - Sophiatown, Newclare and Western Native Township - which became notorious as a centre of resistance to the apartheid State in the 1950s. The article shows that there was a powerful culture of respectability in the Western Areas which permeated much of the area's life and fuelled its resistance to apartheid. Respectability entailed a stress on economic independence, education, orderliness, cleanliness and fidelity in sexual relations. It was often, though not always, linked to religion. The article first looks at the material conditions of the Western Areas, which saw poverty and a coercive labour market flattening out economic divisions. Then the role of religion, education and law and order are discussed as qualities epitomizing respectability. As resistance towards the State grew in the 1940s and 1950s, respectability fed into conflict with the State, whilst less respectable strands of society could be used by the State to undermine opposition. Such a view of respectability runs against the grain of much writing on South African social history, which assumes respectable culture to be petit bourgeois and liable to cooptation by the State. Ref., sum. |
