Abstract
This dissertation presents a history of the coloured township of Noordgesig, adjacent to Soweto, from its establishment in 1939 up to the end of apartheid in 1994. It made use of archival documents related to the township and inhabitants’ experiences of living there. The study therefore employed a qualitative framework to describe the multi-layered history of Noordgesig.
The township was established as a temporary home for the poorest class of coloureds removed from inner city slums. Moreover, the authorities considered the type of coloured people it housed comparable to blacks in terms of class, skin colour and identity. Additionally, Noordgesig’s geographical location next to Soweto and its temporary status, because it was only proclaimed a coloured group area in December 1988, were all major factors in its development.
The literature on coloured townships in South Africa is largely based on experiences encountered in the Cape region. However, while this literature concurs that coloured racial identity is heterogeneous, fewer studies regard other local constructions of the identity. Rather many of these studies make broader claims to a national character of colouredness based on these regional findings. This gap in the literature emphasizes the need for more local studies of coloured history in other parts of South Africa.
This is the first academic account of Noordgesig and the first recent study of a coloured township in Johannesburg. The research forms part of an exceedingly limited number of studies that seriously regard identity experiences in Johannesburg’s coloured townships. It shows the degree to which coloured experiences in Noordgesig were shaped by particular local circumstances. Therefore, I challenge the literature of coloured identity in South Africa because I show how research on another part of the country deviates with what is generally asserted about coloured history.
There are two other arguments that complicate, and show the nuances embedded within, the histories of coloured townships in South Africa. Firstly, in Noordgesig, the interrelation between race, ethnicity, class, and housing, influenced how local constructions of identity experiences were produced and what types of transformations these went through during the twentieth century. The people housed in the township tended to be darker skinned poorer coloureds marginalized by the state, other coloureds and the black people of Soweto...
M.A.