ABSTRACT
When I first encountered Sophiatown, that legendary Johannesburg suburb, the real thing was already distant in time as well as space. At the Princes’ Theatre in London’s West End (and it must have been in the early 1960s), I saw the export version of King Kong, the musical, which, it has been said, “represented at once an ultimate achievement and final flowering of Sophiatown culture” (Coplan 1985: 175). And by then, Sophiatown itself was already gone, its people removed, its buildings erased, to make place for a different kind of neighborhood.
