Wayne Dooling

Born in Cape Town, Wayne Dooling is a historian of South Africa and a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. His research interests, grounded in extensive use of documentary archives, span the period from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His earliest historical work was on the history slavery in the Cape Colony, after which he completed a study of the social and economic consequences of the ending of bonded labour there. His publications include Law and Community in a Slave Society: Stellenbosch District, South Africa, 1760-1820 (Cape Town, 1992) and Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (Ohio, 2007). He is a Senior Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London where he has also served as Director of the Centre of African Studies.

As a visiting fellow of the African Studies Centre Leiden, Dr Dooling will be engaged in writing a history of Cape Town covering the period from the era of emancipation in the early decades of the 19th century to the onset of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century. Guided by much historical work on urban Africa, and through the lens of the notion of respectability, this project examines the development of an underclass urban culture among the city’s black population. Keen to give real meaning to their emancipation, thousands of people freed from formal bondage made their way to Cape Town where they joined an existing ‘free black’ population. Here they pressed into the city’s first slums, the Victorian word coined to describe widespread overcrowding, deprivation, and criminality. Certainly, the youth gangs of twentieth-century Cape Town, with their fearsome reputation for exceptional violence compared to similar associations elsewhere on the African continent, had nineteenth-century origins. It is also clear that a small and fragile but important educated elite emerged in this cosmopolitan environment, keen to assert their place in the country’s political life and, not least, to claim their share of the city’s real estate. A key dimension to these processes of class formation were ties to the wider worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In time, this underclass was joined by African migrants, driven to the city from the Colony’s eastern districts by deepening poverty engendered by the segregationist policies of a new and unified racist state. Dreadful overcrowding, ill health, and shortened lifespans – all, to a greater or lesser extent, the consequences of a severe housing crisis – were the hallmarks of such poverty. Nevertheless, these underclasses actively pursued lifestyles that might be described as respectable. Ironically, attempts on the part of the apartheid state to destroy the cosmopolitanism of earlier periods simultaneously inhibited and facilitated the respectable lifestyles of the city’s black population as ambitious projects of housing reform enabled families to establish respectable households that had long evaded so many.