Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum is currently showing a striking collection of images capturing Cape Town at an extraordinary time of transition in the 1950s.
Taken by photographer Bryan Heseltine, they reveal how the rapid urbanisation of the 1940s provided a unique set of political tensions and conflicts in the South African city.
The Nationalist Party, elected in 1948, was just beginning to implement its policy of apartheid, which extended existing segregation with the ultimate aim of a society based on total racial separation.
They are also an important record of life in a number of townships and areas of the city: Windermere, named ironically after the English lake; the Bo-Kaap, home to Cape Town’s Malay community; District Six, site of the one of the most notorious forced removals of the apartheid period; and the black African townships of Langa and Nyanga.
Various aspects of social and cultural life are detailed, including the work of street craftsmen and the importance of beer brewing, music and dance. What emerges is the diversity of Cape Town’s inhabitants and how they adapted to an impoverished urban landscape.
The exhibition marks another chapter in a remarkable story of a photographic collection which was used first by the South African Institute of Race Relations in the cause of social reform and later, in England, by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the emerging anti-apartheid movement.
Today, in the post apartheid era, Heseltine’s photos are a potent record of the period that reflect the late photographer’s powerful engagement with his subjects.
More images from the exhibition:
- All images courtesy Oxford University
- Watch a slideshow of the images at www.prm.ox.ac.uk/heseltine.html
