7 - The Importance of Being Educated: Strategies of an Urban Petit-Bourgeois Elite, South Africa, 1935—50

Summary

In 1935, the total population of the city of Cape Town numbered some 290,000 people. Five years later, for the first time since the early nineteenth century, the size of the black population exceeded that of the white. This statistic speaks to what has been termed the “push-pull” phenomenon in South African society: the “pull” of a rapidly developing urban industry requiring unlimited labor supplies and the “push” of ever-deepening rural poverty resulting in an unprecedented movement towards South African cities. Cape Town in the 1940s was in the process of transforming itself from a small commercial port into a modern industrial city. The instabilities of this emerging economy, combined with rapid urbanization and industrialization, created a city of extremes: precarious slum-dwellings, juvenile crime, poverty, and malnutrition as well as a prosperous white middle-class elite intent on establishing Cape Town as the political and cultural capital of South Africa. At the same time, a relatively relaxed war-time racial dispensation made for a social environment which was significantly less restricted and more open than most other South African cities. In certain respects—and as I do not wish to gloss over its very real inequalities—the city of Cape Town in the late 1930s and early 1940s stands as an example of racial mixing and cultural exchange which is unequalled in South African history, soon to be eliminated in the post-1948 period when Le Corbusier-inspired architects went to work on reshaping a vibrant urban landscape into one more attuned to the needs of a developing racial-capitalism. The city of Cape Town in the twenty-first century still bears the marks of this devastating process. In the 1940s, however, substantial communities of Africans and so-called “coloreds” still called it their home. As both the “gateway to Africa” and the “door between South Africa and the rest of the world,” this African city was also ideally positioned for a noteworthy and influential traffic in ideas. Cape Town's large immigrant population, many of whom were Eastern Europeans, both significantly diluted the dominant Englishness of the town, and offered a fascinating glimpse into the momentous changes occurring in other parts of the world. A pre-apartheid city, Cape Town in the early 1940s was also abuzz with radical ideas.