june-2010

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show up. It’s a rough neighborhood, to be sure, known for its
dandyish gangsters, dressed smartly in fedoras, pin-striped
suits and two-tone Florsheim shoes imported from the U.S.
Stompie Manana is waiting at the Odin Cinema to see the
Kirk Douglas fl ick Young Man with a Horn about the American
jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke—which will inspire Manana to
pick up the trumpet himself and make it big. People are fi ling
into the 39 Steps, a shebeen, or social house, on Good Street,
where one of South Africa’s fi rst music stars, Dolly Rathebe,
is belting out a few songs.
Back then, music was all over Johannesburg, especially
the townships. But Sophiatown was the place to be.
African-infl ected jazz was everywhere, and clubs were
crowded with soon-to-be-discovered African jazz and jive
greats. A beloved singer named Ma Joel performed with a
percussionist on the street for pennies. Jazz record collectors
were everywhere, and a young Dorothy Masuka would
sit for hours in her friend Kwembo’s house, listening to
Ella Fitzgerald and Sophie Tucker records. Weddings and
funerals took over the town for hours, with hired brass
bands playing dirges as though it were Bourbon Street.
By the late 1950s, young Johannesburg talents such as
Manana, fellow trumpeter Hugh Masekela and trombonist
Jonas Gwangwa were appearing at the Modern Jazz Club on
Sundays before movies at the Odin.
“It was a din,” recalls longtime resident Victor Ntechane,
76, with a smile. “It was only when you went elsewhere that
you realized how quiet it was compared to Sophiatown.”
The way some describe Sophiatown in those days, it
CHOIR SERVICE
Opposite, inside
Christ the King
Church; above,
clockwise from
bottom left, a
Newtown mural; the
church exterior; the
chorus singing; Jonas
Gwangwa playing
piano at home
was like New Orleans in the ’30s,
Harlem in the ’40s and Memphis
in the ’50s, all rolled into one.
Founded in 1897 when a property
owner named Tobiansky created
his own suburb and named it after
his wife, Sophia, the town was
home to both blacks and whites,
all of them poor. By the 1940s,
writes author Don Mattera in his
1989 book Sophiatown: Coming of Age in South Africa, “it was
inhabited by an estimated 200,000 people of diff erent
ethnic backgrounds who lived tightly knit, mixing cultures,
traditions and superstitions in a manner perhaps unique in
Southern Africa. Every conceivable space was occupied by
a living thing—man or animal.” To outsiders, Sophiatown
wasn’t romantic at all, just a crowded town full of brick-andiron
shacks. “Some of the best-dressed people lived there,
and some of the most educated people lived there,” says
trumpeter Masekela, now an international star. “But it was
still run-down.”
WE’RE LOST.
EMMANUEL, A TAXI DRIVER,
FLAGS DOWN a sunburned, white-haired man walking
on the side of the road. Does he know how to get to the Trevor
Huddleston Memorial Centre in Sophiatown? The man looks
confused. “Oh!” he says suddenly. “You mean Triomf.”
Triomf. In Afrikaans, it means “triumph.” It’s the name
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM | JUNE 2010
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