Trevor Huddleston Museum

A despised black spot

Sent from Britain in 1943, Huddleston was charged by his religious community to minister to the thriving black communities of Sophiatown, Orlando and Pimville. However, it is with Sophiatown that the name Trevor Huddleston is most closely associated. The blond-haired, black-frocked father was a much loved priest and confidant to thousands of Sophiatown’s residents who numbered as many as 70 000 by the mid-1950s. He responded to their social, spiritual and educational needs and interceded on their behalf with authorities who, especially after the rise to power of the National Party in 1948, despised this free-hold, overcrowded ‘black spot’ of humanity, so close to the centre of Johannesburg.

People lived up to 80 per stand in those days; overcrowding was rife and services poor.  But Sophiatown was ‘free’ – unregulated by the hated ‘superintendents’ of other ‘locations’.  Sof’town had  gangsters and speakeasies rubbing alongside  politicians, musicians, writers and ordinary people from all over the country struggling to live ordinary lives with their families in increasingly extra-ordinary times. Priests like Trevor Huddleston (whose church schools were at the heart of this tumultuous community) were part of the glue that held this fabric together – until February 1955 – when police armed “with sten guns, rifles and knobkieries” arrived to forcibly remove and disperse the people of Sophiatown.

Dumped by law, bulldozers and trucks

Many thousands of residents of Sophiatown were dumped in a bleak far-off place called Meadowlands; the community dismembered by legislation, bulldozers and trucks. In accordance with apartheid ideology, coloured residents were removed to Westbury and Newlands, Indians to Lenasia and Chinese to yet another site.  Hundreds more were sent to rural ‘homelands’, deprived of permission to be in Joburg at all.

Father Huddleston vociferously championed the campaign against the physical and ideological destruction of Sophiatown and in June 1955 was awarded the highest honour of the People – the Isitwalandwe medal.  He was not in South Africa to witness Sophiatown’s final chapter (it took the authorities until 1962 to move the last of the area’s residents). In December 1955, with his church growing increasingly anxious about his safety, Huddleston was recalled to Britain. Determined to highlight the atrocities of racism and the loss of Sophiatown, he made sure that the world came to know of the struggle in his moving book, Naught For Your Comfort.  It made headline news in the US and Europe.  At the United Nations he spoke of his experiences in this tumultuous community and its suffering, as a symbol of what would happen all over the country.  Other forced removals followed as he predicted, such as Cape Town’s District Six and Durban’s Cato Manor.

Overseas Huddleston became a bishop and the president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In 1991 he returned to the area that had been given over to whites-only housing and so sardonically renamed Triomf (Triumph), expressing the wish to see it renamed. He did not live to see that wish fulfilled, but after his death in 1998, was afforded a state funeral and buried in his beloved Sophiatown, which was renamed in 2006. 

In 1999 the Trevor Huddleston CR Memorial Centre was established and today provides a heart for the community vision to revive the suburb, drawing on the legacy of the original heartbeat of urban African culture.   The Centre offers a community library, computer training centre, an art and design centre, entrepreneurial centre and a home from home for scores of local children. It is located in a heritage site, (previously a children’s home) set in a shaded oasis with gorgeous views south to the city of Johannesburg.

The Centre runs the Sophiatown Heritage Experience including an original 1930’s Sophiatown house, owned by an early ANC president, Dr A B Xuma.  The Heritage Tours include stories of jazz bands, shebeen queens, and lives lived to the full.

Born in Sophiatown in 1945, Victor Mokhine was moved with his family to Meadowlands in 1956. He was old enough then to recall the sense of being uprooted and the sense of losing one’s home. Working as an historian and senior heritage practitioner at the centre, he is a living, lively link with the sad history of Sophiatown; someone who knows intimately about its unique place in South African history.

An influx of foreign visitors

Victor explains that the centre has recently enjoyed “an influx” of foreign visitors and says that he has no doubt that TEP has helped to place it on the map. “The cluster concept is really helping us to broaden knowledge of the centre,” says Victor. “By putting us together with other organisations we can rely not only TEP’s channels but on the opportunities to work with these other organisations to tell people about the memorial centre. TEP have helped us with SWOT analyses and, we believe, will help market us to corporates and abroad; we won’t just have to rely on the centre’s website.”

Patiently and animatedly explaining the exhibits in the Centre’s intimate museum to a group of history students from the nearby University of Johannesburg, Victor pauses to talk about the significance of the heritage centre: “It is just so important that everyone, South Africans and people from all over the world, can learn that here in Sophiatown we were a mixed community, and how and why that was destroyed.  Now we are rebuilding that reality of living side by side in our diversity, because from the turmoil of the past we can build an amazing future. If we are able to learn from those mistakes, from the suffering of ordinary people, we can revive the spirit of humanity which connects us all.  I like to believe that that is what the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, thanks to all its partners, is achieving.”

• Trevor Huddleston’s ashes are interred in a memorial site in the grounds of the Christ the King church from which he ministered.
• The ‘A B Xuma’ house opens as part of the heritage centre in late 2009, and is one of only two houses not destroyed in the removals on 1955-1962.  The house is owned by the City of Joburg for the nation and is under the care of the Huddleston Centre.
• Tours are run every day except Sunday from 10am or earlier by appointment and can be geared to meet specific interests eg school learners, families and academics.