ABSTRACT

KwaPoyinandi was the Zulu term for the Local Health Commission (LHC), a unique but now little-remembered form of local authority that governed the freehold community of Edendale and contiguous farms, townships, and informal settlements from 1942 to 1974. Its early mandate was to rehabilitate the once prosperous community within the social medicine paradigm (primary health care attentive to the social determinants of health) and with the promise of transition to self-governance. Through to the late 1950s, ‘monumental work’ toward that mandate was achieved, including a multiracial advisory board with an African majority and an African chair. KwaPoyinandi also bucked the national apartheid trend for longer than most, if not all, major urban centres in South Africa, with a racially diverse population well into the 1970s. The experiment was hamstrung and ultimately shut down due to its incompatibility with apartheid. I argue that Africans’ active engagement with KwaPoyinandi in diverse and complex ways was an important factor in its early relative success and that this history provides insights pertinent to current debates around the revitalisation of peri-urban communities around South Africa.

摘要

KwaPoyinandi 是祖鲁语，指的是地方卫生委员会 (LHC)，这是一种独特但现在鲜为人知的地方当局形式，从 1942 年到 1974 年管理着 Edendale 的永久产权社区和毗邻的农场、乡镇和非正式定居点。它的早期任务是在社会医学范式（关注健康的社会决定因素的初级保健）内恢复曾经繁荣的社区，并承诺过渡到自治。直到 1950 年代后期，为实现这一使命所做的“里程碑式的工作”已经完成，包括一个由非洲人占多数的多种族咨询委员会和一名非洲人主席。KwaPoyinandi 也比南非大多数（如果不是全部）主要城市中心更长时间地反抗国家种族隔离趋势，直到 1970 年代人口种族多样化。该实验因与种族隔离制度不相容而受阻并最终被关闭。我认为，非洲人以多样化和复杂的方式积极参与 KwaPoyinandi 是其早期相对成功的一个重要因素，并且这段历史提供了与当前围绕南非周边城市社区振兴的辩论相关的见解。