Focusing on South Africa's three main cities - Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban - this book explores South African urban history from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, it examines the metropolitan perceptions and experiences of both black and white South Africans, as well as those of visitors, especially visitors from Britain and North America. Drawing on a rich array of city histories, travel writing, novels, films, newspapers, radio and television programs, and oral histories, Vivian Bickford-Smith focuses on the consequences of the depictions of the South African metropolis and the 'slums' they contained, and especially on how senses of urban belonging and geography helped create and reinforce South African ethnicities and nationalisms. This ambitious and pioneering account, spanning more than a century, will be welcomed by scholars and students of African history, urban history, and historical geography.

Focusing on South Africa's three main cities - Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban - this book explores South African urban history from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, it examines the metropolitan perceptions and experiences of both black and white South Africans, as well as those of visitors, especially visitors from Britain and North America. Drawing on a rich array of city histories, travel writing, novels, films, newspapers, radio and television programs, and oral histories, Vivian Bickford-Smith focuses on the consequences of the depictions of the South African metropolis and the 'slums' they contained, and especially on how senses of urban belonging and geography helped create and reinforce South African ethnicities and nationalisms. This ambitious and pioneering account, spanning more than a century, will be welcomed by scholars and students of African history, urban history, and historical geography.

Nineteenth-century Cape Town was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa, largely because of the mitigating influences of its more liberal English merchants. Bickford-Smith disagrees: far from being liberal, the English generally shared the racial attitudes of their Afrikaner counterparts. But theirs was a peculiarly English discourse of race, mobilized around a "Clean Party" obsessed with sanitation and the threat of diseases posed by incoming non-white workers in the final years of the century. This original contribution to South African urban history draws on comparative material from other colonial port towns and on relevant studies of the Victorian city.

This richly illustrated history of Cape Town in the present century tells the story of its residents, the world they have inhabited and the city they have made. It begins with the British colonial town poised on the brink of the Anglo Boer War and ends with the modern African city, struggling with the legacy of social division and poverty yet approaching the new millennium with an undiminished sense of its beauty, history and identity.

"Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen" considers how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by a team of eminent international scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with major issues in the written history of Africa. Themes include the slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, racism, and anticolonial resistance. Many of the films will be familiar to readers: they include "Out of Africa," "Hotel Rwanda," "Breaker Morant," "Cry Freedom," "The Battle of Algiers," and "Chocolat."
This collection of essays is a highly original and useful contribution to African histography, as well as a significant addition to the growing body of work within the emerging subdiscipline of "film and history." It will appeal to those interested in African history and the ways in which films use the past to raise questions about the present.