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Inclou el nom: Luli Callinicos

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South Africa
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historian
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Review Article of
Who built Jozi ? Discovering memory at Wits Junction by Luli Callinicos for the Wits Alumna Review 2013
Published by Wits University Press, 2012

In October 2012, Wits Junction the newest and most ambitious of Wits residential complex in Parktown was officially opened on a warm Spring evening. The event was a celebration of commitment, vision, passion, and confidence on the part of many people. A new student residential complex spread over nine acres offers over 1200 students a home in Johannesburg. It is Wits’ largest single investment and developers, financiers, architects, urban planners, project managers, residence experts, heritage enthusiasts worked as a Wits team to turn a large Wits owned land holding in Parktown into a community located in a green setting with a distinctive character drawn from the geology, the geography and the century old history of this part of Parktown.

This prestige Wits Press book was launched at the opening of the Wits Junction. It brings to together memory, heritage, Wits history and the social history of the city. It presents a new, popular and accessible heritage history as it makes connections between the past and the transformative initiatives of the present. It suggests an explicit link between the lifestyles of an affluent Parktown and the often nameless migrants to the raw mining city.

A new interpretation of the layered past that is Johannesburg offered through the posing (and an attempt to answer) a key question who did build Jozi, Egoli or Gauteng and turn it from a mining camp into a modern African financial hub. In the process the work contributes to the construction of a new identity and a more inclusive, common history for the city. Calinicos moves from past to present and back again and uses only a very loose chronological framework. Her task is to recover forgotten people in complex historical landscape for a city with a short past and much rebuilding.

Parktown was a suburb for the elite of Johannesburg and dates back to 1892, when those mining magnates, led by the Florence Phillips, the wife of Lionel Phillips chose to build grand late Victorian mansions on larger sub urban estates to escape the older suburbs of Doornfontein or dusty down-town living. The Junction Avenue/ Park Lane corner of Parktown, to the south of Jubilee Road, was settled by professional and business such as the engineering entrepreneur Otto Lenz and the prominent architect Frank Emley. Many of the homes were altered through the years and some demolished. Muzi Yami , the Lenz home escaped demolition in the 1970s and survives as preserved and restored heritage Student Centre, eMzini Wami.

Calinicos’ skill and experience as a well known social historian of Johannesburg (with several books on workers’ history) is not simply to tell the story of elite Parktown but to blend the history of the rich of Parktown to the history of working class struggles of the poorer migrants and workers who lived in other parts of the town. She tells the stories of servants, miners, migrant labourers and by analyzing past exclusions present a more inclusive heritage for the future. For example, the story is told, based on very little documentary evidence of the family history of Gustave Sonn and a relationship with an unnamed Khoisan woman in Kimberley , with Percy Sonn, of cricket fame, being the descendant of that liaison.

New names for old Johannesburg streets are seen as a form of place making, victory , redress and healing. The naming of the streets within Wits Junction ( and this was proposed by Amanda Esterhuysen who is not unfortunately credited with the idea) now celebrates the origins of humankind and Wits’ pre-eminent archaeological and palaeontological research, the diverse people of Johannesburg through folk songs and songs of migration. The lilting words of many lovely songs are included in the book.

The historic Randjeslaagte surveyor’s beacon, marking one of the boundaries of the triangular nine square km layout of the old town is now a protected national historical monument within the Wits complex and has been represented in a mosaic map by Andrew Lindsay and his assistants. My favourite photograph is of the beacon and trhe rhythm of life ( photographer Alexia Webster) The 1896 Residents and Strangers’ Friend Plan of Johannesburg has been reproduced, spread over two pages. But the map shown has been truncated and does not show the complete Randjeslaagte triangle or indeed any of Parktown. It is on the original map, which became the distinctive cover of Anna Smiths classic, “Johannesburg Street Names”, so it looses its usefulness as an indicated of Parktown in relation to Braamfontein and Fordsburg.

An unusual selection of vivid photographs now links Meadowlands, Sophiatown and Parktown and gives the diverse migrants to Johannesburg a face and a place in the history of the city and at Wits. The photographs has been well chosen from key city and university archives. Contemporary topical , coloured photographs are mixed with older unusual Museum Africa sourced, black and white pictures. This makes for a sharp contrast of the “then” of early Johannesburg and the “now” of a transforming Jozi.

A further dimension of this social history explains how and why Wits emerged as an immigrant institution of higher-education , what its Parktown connections were and how scholars of international prominence and achievement , men such as Raymond Dart, Philip Tobias, W M Macmillan and Lee Berger, were the products of Wits or shaped Wits in setting consistently high standards in teaching and research. Remarkably, so many Wits graduates made internationally recognized contributions to scholarship from an early date. Wits University was rooted in the earlier Kimberly School of Mines was only founded in 1922 ( and should not be described as existing in 1904, a small slip). It was a city and reef town university ( too little is made of the Witwatersrand connection) and its graduates were the educated men and women who served the city as engineers, doctors, dentists, architects, teachers, scientists . The argument is made that Wits University did not come into being with handouts from above but as the creation of popular intervention and activism by civil society, but misses the point that then Mayor of Johannesburg , John O’Hara was a campaigner and champion of note ( he is not mentioned by name). I did not like the insert on the first remarkable Principal of Wits, J H Hofmeyr being headed “Mrs Deborah Hofmeyr and her son”. Hofmeyr deserves a fairer memorial and assessment as the first Principal. A chapter on Wits in the 1930s and 1940s neatly explores institutional attitudes towards various forms of discrimination based on race and sex . The political stance of Wits students concentrates on the 1940s and the more recent struggle history of Wits is missed.

The narrative switches back to what happened to Parktown in decline in the 1950s and juxtaposes the National Party’s triumphal redesign and bulldozing of old residences to make way for institutions such the new Johannesburg Hospital and the College of Education which now dominates the Parktown Ridge with the speculative commercial development of apartment blocks, private hospitals and offices. An irony of history is that it was the State’s expropriation of the nine acres of residential land lying between Ridge Road, Junction Avenue, Park Lane and Boundary Road for future educational development that led ultimately to the legal transfer of ownership to the University of the Witwatersrand in the early 1990s ( again this long depressing history of letting veld going back to the nature, dereliction and old houses decay is not related). The land was a magnificent gift and meant that when Wits entrepreneurially pushed to redevelop the site, the generous acres was a bonanza and formed something of a boundary between Houghton and Hillbrow. Wits did build small blocks of residences in the 1980s (Dan Robinson was the architect) with the development of Parktown Village II, and these smaller complexes have also been refurbished as part of the Wits Junction Project.

During the years of jostling political change alternative voices were fought for an audience.. The non-racial Junction Avenue theatre company, set up in old Junction Avenue houses , expressed dissent on the arts and made a memorable contribution to struggle theatre.

The name Wits Junction , makes a verbal play on the original central road through this precinct , Junction Avenue. The name recalls past roots but speaks to the future intersection of students lives in the new residence. That resounding Brecht poem with the opening line , Who built the seven gates of Thebes, reminds us that all too often traditional history celebrates the famous whereas the contributions of ordinary people are ignored. Callinicos draws a parallel with the development of Johannesburg or as she calls the city Jozi. Rebuilt so many time with each new spurt of mining expansion, a rising gold price and an immigrant influx , this book presents a richly textured history of people and places in reinventing memories. The layered history of Parktown is a metaphor for the sharp contrasts between the privileged affluent and underbelly of society, and the workers who underpinned the lifestyles of the rich.

Inequalities persist in the modern city. Post-apartheid Johannesburg continues to replicate patterns of social exclusion, inequality and high density living. Wits in an enterprising and imaginative development offers 1200 plus students, (the residence is mainly aimed at post graduate students) and visitors a well designed green complex. Landscaped gardens with old trees preserved link the three storey blocks. There is a multi cultural mix of students and Luli Calinicos’s book is a vivid social history. In publishing this unusual book (and I hope it will be given to every new resident in 2013) Wits welcomes a new generation of students Parktown and brings a new cultural input to the city. The work marks a celebratory moment in the 90 year saga of Wits and 127 year history of Johannesburg. It adds to a growing local history literature.
… (més)
 
Marcat
Africansky1 | Jul 4, 2013 |

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