Soweto has been in the news for the enormous changes it has undergone in recent years. More than 40 years ago, I found myself entering Soweto for the first time as a doctoral student beginning a study of African independent churches.
I took many photographs during the two years I was in Soweto. These have lain dormant for nearly 40 years and have now been brought to life in an exhibition which opened last month at UCT – Amabandla Ama-Afrika: African Independent Churches of Soweto 1969-71. The photos recall a very different Soweto in the very depths of apartheid, just before the uprising in 1976.
I had been planning to work in rural Namaqualand when the opportunity arose for a study of the African independent churches in South Africa, funded by the Christian Institute of Southern Africa. The Christian Institute was founded in 1963 by Reverend Beyers Naudé as an ecumenical body to help bring about reconciliation through interracial dialogue.
These aims were the reason some leaders of African independent churches in Soweto felt able to approach Naudé for assistance.
To compile information about the churches, he asked Professor Monica Wilson of UCT if she could find somebody to do some research on the subject.
She recommended me and I happily changed direction, embarking on two years of fieldwork in Soweto studying a range of churches to understand how they operated and why they were so successful.
This work was presented for a PhD in 1972, and was followed in 1975 by my book Bishops and Prophets in a Black City.
Soweto was home to about 900 independent churches. It was often called a city, but it had no industry, no shopping centres, no restaurants, no cinemas and no security of tenure. There was one petrol station, a few shops, a few beer halls controlled by the municipality, and not enough schools or clinics. It did have plenty of shebeens, plenty of “blackjacks” (black-uniformed municipal police) and above all, plenty of churches.
Soweto was essentially an artificially created dormitory suburb, with an estimated population of close to 1 million residents, serving as a vast labour pool for the Witwatersrand. The people of Soweto, then as now, were remarkable in their variety.
Drawn from all over South Africa and speaking many languages, there were business executives and highly trained professionals, artists and musicians, scholars and gangsters, and much more.
There was a small middle class and a few pockets of modest wealth, but mostly there were ordinary working people living in endless rows of “matchbox” houses. Everyone was subject to all the harshness of apartheid rule, but the poor were particularly vulnerable.
There was a lot of poverty. A 1967 survey found that two-thirds of all Soweto families earned less than the effective minimum level of income needed to support a family of five. It was also one of the most dangerous places to live: in 1969 another survey found that as many as 30 percent of respondents had been attacked in the street at some time, and many had been burgled or robbed.
There was a very high rate of murder and other serious crime, and much insecurity.
My initial problem was access to Soweto. Classified as “white”, I needed a permit to enter and it was no foregone conclusion that I would get permission, with my UCT background and my involvement in national student politics.
Most of Soweto was administered by the Non-European Affairs Department (Nead) of the Joburg City Council. This was marginally less hostile than the Bantu Affairs Department, which administered the adjacent areas of Meadowlands and Diepkloof.
Naudé had a contact in the Nead who gave me a permit to enter Soweto during daylight hours to undertake “missionary work”; he suggested that this subterfuge would cause fewer problems with officials than mentioning “research”.
Fortunately this worked and I was asked for my permit only twice. I appealed against a prohibition on being in Soweto after noon on Saturdays and was eventually granted a dusk-to-dawn permit, seven days a week, and permission (after interrogation) to be in Soweto overnight, to attend midnight services which were usually followed by dawn river baptisms. I soon learnt my way around the back streets of Soweto and largely avoided the main thoroughfares and other haunts of officialdom.
I slowly built up a wide network of contacts. I visited over 50 churches, attended countless services, and had many conversations with church members.
I had a warm reception wherever I went and was invited both to services and to the homes of leaders.
With repeated visits over two years, my presence became routine. I tried to photograph as unobtrusively as possible, and people soon ignored the camera, or at least stopped posing for me. In fact, my camera was welcomed: my photographs were appreciated as gifts and I was often invited to special occasions in order to have them photographed.
Soweto contained the full spectrum of independent churches, defined as autonomous groups with an all-African membership and leadership.
There were congregations of some of the huge churches with national membership in the hundreds of thousands, but the typical congregation would number 20 or 30 people, meeting in a converted garage or hired classroom.
The one characteristic they all shared was that their individual memberships were drawn from across the ethnic/linguistic groups into which Soweto was rather fancifully divided by the ideologues of apartheid.
In fact, I never attended a service, however small, that did not use two languages throughout (including translating sermons) – usually Zulu or Xhosa, and Northern or Southern Sotho.
At one end of the spectrum were a few independent churches whose origins were essentially political, stemming from a desire for African leadership and control over their own affairs. They were essentially the same as their parent churches, often using exactly the same liturgy and structure.
At the other end of the spectrum are the numerous “Churches of the Spirit”, known mainly as Zionists or Apostolics.
They encompass a wide variety, and are identified by their colourful uniforms and their concentration on healing, prophets and spirit possession.
They were fundamentally churches of the poor and least educated, aware that they were looked down on by many other Sowetans, and apt to keep to themselves. In their healing and other rituals, they combined African and Christian symbols in new ways. They supported their members both materially and spiritually, and were open to all.
They restored dignity and were for many “a place to feel at home”.
l Emeritus Professor Martin West retired from UCT in 2008 after serving with distinction for 17 years as a deputy vice-chancellor and then vice-principal. He started at UCT as a student in 1964, and he held the Chair of Social Anthropology from 1978 to 1991. He received an Honorary Doctorate in Literature from UCT on June 10.
His exhibition, curated by Paul Weinberg at the Centre for African Studies Gallery at UCT, runs until August 3
.