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CHAPTER ONE

ORIGINS

SOWETO AND JOHANESBURG, INEXTRICABLY LINKED. THEIR SEPARATE histories cast light on each other.

Formally established in 1886 after the discovery of gold, Johannesburg grew rapidly over the next couple of decades to become South Africa’s main economic centre and its most populous city. In 1887, the mining town set up to accommodate early mine diggers contained a mere 3 000 souls, but as the gold rush gathered momentum its population exploded. Immigrants poured in – from the region and from all over the world. By 1899 there were 100 000 people in Johannesburg. And in 1911, only a quarter of a century after the founding of the city, there were about 240 000. Johannesburg’s rate of growth was exceeded only by New York’s.

The name Soweto was only adopted in 1963, after the rapid expansion of townships in the south-western areas of Johannesburg from the 1950s. Before then, the city’s non-mining African people, like many other poor inhabitants of this rapidly expanding ‘city of gold’, were to be found in the inner city slums and municipal locations. But the origins of Soweto go back to the turn of the twentieth century. There were three pivotal moments in the pre-apartheid development of the township: the 1904 plague, the establishment of Orlando in 1930, and Mpanza’s squatter movement of the mid 1940s. Each of these contributed in its own way to making Soweto the pre-eminent location of Johannesburg’s African population.

At the end of the Anglo-Boer War, the newly appointed engineer of Johannesburg, Major WAJ O’Meara, expressed outrage over the slumyards in the north-west of the city. There was no public housing, and Burghersdorp, Brickfields, Fordsburg, ‘Kaffir Location’ and ‘Coolie Location’ had become the main residential sites for the city’s poor working class. It was ‘Coolie Location’ that most angered city officials, not only because they saw it as a risk to the health of the town, but also because Indian traders living in the location were perceived as a threat to white small businesses. Writing recently about the contestations that preceded the early founding of what was to become Soweto, the medical historian Howard Phillips has explained that the city authorities proposed to deal with these ‘problems’ by an improvement scheme, the primary aim of which was to re-order ‘the racial, social and sanitary geography of a key part of Johannesburg, which it now damningly labelled “the insanitary area”.’ A commission established to consider the future of this area proposed the destruction of the location and removal of its inhabitants to racially segregated areas.

The Public Health Committee was appalled that ‘the Malays, Indians and Kaffirs were jumbled all over the place … [alongside] men and women of various colours and nationalities’. What the planners, engineers and doctors who ran the committee aspired to, argues Phillips, was ‘a modern, ordered city, with its population clearly sorted by race, class and ethnicity once and for all.’ Johannesburg was to be properly segregated for the benefit of its white population. ‘The existence and future of Johannesburg as a white man’s town in a white man’s country,’ stated the committee, ‘is, in our opinion, involved … [as] the proper development of the European population would be endangered by the present state of things.’

Source: Wits Historical Papers

Early Johannesburg, 1886–1888

Source: Wits Historical Papers

Johannesburg, c1900?

Source: Wits Historical Papers

Johannesburg, 1911

The opportunity to realise this vision of the city, a white man’s town in a white man’s country, arose in March 1904 with the outbreak of pneumonic plague in ‘Coolie Location’. Indian and African residents were blamed, and although none of the more than one thousand African residents of the location succumbed to the disease (it was probably imported from outside the country), the authorities moved swiftly to destroy the slum. On 20 March, a police cordon surrounded the location to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. Plans were then implemented to move the residents to a quarantined site, and finally ‘Coolie Location’ was demolished by fire. All of this took place in a matter of days.

The authorities wanted to move coloureds and Indians to an area around Fordsburg and Mayfair, but strident objections from white residents thwarted that plan and so it was decided to move all ‘Coolie Location’s’ population to Klipspruit Farm, about twelve miles from the city. Klipspruit Farm’s main connection to the city had been as the proposed site of a sewage farm. The city, though, owned the Klipspruit, and the main railway line ran past it. In September 1904, the Johannesburg Council decided to declare Klipspruit a permanent settlement for the city’s African population – or at least for those not living in compounds or in backrooms on their employers’ properties. In 1906, residents of ‘Kaffir Location’ were moved to Klipspruit. By 1908, the number of African people in the new location stood at 2 500. Indians were relocated to ‘Malay Location’, which was situated near the old ‘Coolie Location’.

The primary objective behind this early urban segregation project was succinctly captured by the Public Health Committee: ‘The advantages of keeping the native quarters completely away from the white population will be obvious to everyone, whether one considers the interests of the native or those of the poorer class of Europeans.’ Keeping the ‘races’ apart was supposedly desirable for everyone, but especially for poor whites who tended to live and mix with poor blacks in the urban slums.

But despite this removal scheme only a small percentage of the city’s African population not residing in compounds was relocated to Klipspruit. The rest continued to live in and around the city and, after the formation of Union in 1910, which united the British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the Afrikaaner Republics of the Free State and Transvaal into a single country, they also set up homes in freehold and municipal locations.

Johannesburg’s African population after the First World War was in the region of 105 000 persons, nearly half of them working on the mines and accommodated in prison-like compounds. A further 30 000 were domestic workers who lived on the premises of their employers, and a mere 4 000 lived in municipal locations such as Klipspruit. Then there were a further estimated 17 000 Africans crammed into the insalubrious slums dotted across the city. The discrepancy between the populations of the official municipal locations and the slums reflected both the tardiness in the state’s provision of formal housing to urban Africans, and the preference of people to live close to the city.

In the post-war period there was a continued influx into the urban areas and, in the absence of housing, more and more people were forced to settle in the already overcrowded slums. By 1927 the overall population of these settlements had increased to 40 000. It was this steadily growing urban African working class, desperately struggling to establish roots in the city, that caused consternation for the authorities. From the perspective of the state, slums were sites of all sorts of antisocial behaviour, including oppositional politics. Its response was to plan for the systematic elimination of the slums, and to move Africans to better controlled municipal locations.

Until the end of the First World War, urban growth proceeded unevenly and haphazardly, and the authorities tended to respond to urban crises in an ad hoc way, as they happened. But under the impact of a wave of militant struggles by black workers, and in the context of the devastating impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic, the state was spurred into more decisive action. Some town planners attempted to import the notion of the ‘garden city’ which would provide more public direction over the mainly uncontrolled private development that characterised urban life in the early part of the century. Above all, the state was determined to better manage the movement of Africans into the urban areas and to place them in properly controlled locations when they settled in the cities.

Source: Wits Historical Papers

Inner city slum removals

Source: Wits Historical Papers

Prospect Location, 1937

The promulgation of the Native (Urban) Areas Act of 1923 was intended to meet these objectives. The Act was a hybrid piece of legislation. On the one hand, it espoused the principles enunciated by the Stallard Commission of 1922, which had infamously declared that an African ‘should only be allowed into the urban areas, which are essentially the white man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the white man, and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister’. On the other hand, when it empowered local authorities to set aside land for black residential purposes it recognised the need to create conditions for the settlement of an urban African population in order to provide a reliable supply of labour to secondary industry.

The growing demand for housing and the desire to eliminate slums led the government to establish Orlando (named after the chairman of the Native Affairs Committee, Edwin Orlando Leake) in the early 1930s. The promulgation of the Slums Act in 1934 gave the government the legislative muscle to act decisively against urban slums, with the result that thousands of African families were evicted from areas in and around the city centre. For example, in the late 1930s approximately 7 000 African residents of Prospect Township on the south-eastern outskirts of Johannesburg’s central business district, were removed and offered accommodation in Orlando.

When the original Orlando (Orlando East) was established in 1931, the authorities described it as a ‘model native township’ that was supposedly planned along the lines of a garden city. The new location, it promised, would be characterised by tree-lined streets, business opportunities and recreation facilities. So impressed were town planners with this new scheme that the plans for Orlando won a town-planning competition. Reflecting the views of a somewhat conservative section of the African urban elite, the popular African newspaper Bantu World, predicted on 14 May 1932 that the new township ‘will undoubtedly be somewhat of a paradise [that] will enhance the status of the Bantu within the ambit of progress and civilisation.’

In reality, the new municipal location was only a ‘model township’ from the perspective of the authorities. It fell far short of providing its residents with even the basic amenities required for decent living. In the book Soweto – A History, Nelson Botile, a resident of Orlando, vividly described the condition of the house his family moved into:

The walls were not plastered, they were rough and the floor was just grass. It was not cemented. My father started plastering the house once we were inside. The houses had no taps. We didn’t have sewerage – we had what was called the bucket system and we had these people coming at night to remove the sanitation. The streets were not tarred and they had no names. The houses only had numbers.

Source: Wits Historical Papers

New housing in Orlando

The low standard of housing erected in Orlando prefigured the massive housing development in ‘model townships’ under apartheid. In his 2004 work Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City, the urban geographer Keith Beavon describes the township that emerged to the south west of Johannesburg after 1940 as ‘a large, sprawling urbanised area without true urban amenities. It was threaded through by dusty, unpaved roads along which were erected monotonous ranks of identical, small, temporary, single storey “matchbox” houses (predominantly between 40m² and 44m² in size) lit by candles and oil lamps, where cooking was done on paraffin and coal stoves. All but the barest of daily necessities had to be bought in Johannesburg and carted back on the inadequate public transport system from the white city.’

In the mid-1930s, the authorities may have imagined that they had achieved a degree of control over the lives of urban Africans: slums were successfully being eliminated and municipal locations appeared to be functioning relatively well. Although the African population of Johannesburg continued to grow, the rate of increase was rather modest and at the start of the Second World War the number of African people living in locations had increased to just over 100 000 (importantly from the perspective of the authorities, nearly half of this number, according to Beavon, lived in Pimville and Orlando). But these official figures obscured the profound transformation that was already under way in the country’s urban areas.

From the late 1930s, South Africa underwent a massive economic transformation that was spurred on by the Second World War. By the end of the war secondary industry had eclipsed mining as the main contributor to the national economy. In the decade from 1936 to 1946, the number of factories in the country grew by nearly fifty per cent, creating an unprecedented demand for labour, especially cheap African labour. Consequently, the influx of Africans to the urban areas grew fast during this time. It was also spurred on by growing impoverishment in the rural areas. From the late 1930s, there was a critical shift in the profile of Africans living in urban areas: between 1936 and 1946 the African urban population increased from just over a million to nearly two million. And, critically, the number of African women in the urban areas rose from about 350 000 to about 650 000 during the same period.

Paradoxically, the state’s programme of housing delivery for Africans that followed slum clearance in the early to mid-1930s was rapidly winding down – precisely when the demand for housing was soaring. At the height of the influx of African workers to the cities in 1944, the state did not build any houses for Africans, causing a severe national housing crisis that was most concentrated on the Reef, the area, stretching west and east from Johannesburg, where gold-bearing rock was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. The number of African families living without accommodation outside locations more than doubled between 1936 and 1951, from 86 000 to 176 000. The historian Doug Hindson has recorded that the Department of Native Affairs in 1947 estimated that an additional 154 185 family houses and 106 877 units for single male workers were required in the urban areas.

These national trends were also reflected in Orlando, which, despite being about thirteen kilometres from the city centre, was emerging as a sought-after location for Johannesburg’s growing African urban population. In 1936 the population of the township was estimated at just over 12 000. The official housing waiting list in 1939 stood at a modest 143, suggesting that overcrowding was not a problem, but these figures probably underestimate the actual population, especially the growing number of tenants and subtenants, who rented rooms in the houses and backyards of Orlando. One figure cited by Beavon, suggests that the population of Orlando in 1939 was about 35 000. But whatever the precise size of the population in Orlando on the eve of the war, the scale of the housing crisis exploded over the next few years. By 1941 the official housing waiting list had increased to 4 500 and by the end of the war it was 16 000. The number of sub-tenants alone, in the early 1940s, stood at 8 000. Wilfred Thabethe, a Soweto resident, has recalled how this affected households:

You see, what was happening during those times is that under one roof we used to have extended families – one family. You’d find that you were staying with your uncle from your mother’s side and your uncle from your father’s side, and your cousins all in one [house], under one roof, you see … you’d actually find three families under one roof.

Overcrowding and the growing demand for housing laid the basis for the eruption of a squatter movement that forced the dire housing situation facing urban Africans onto the national agenda and prompted the Johannesburg Council and national government to act decisively. The most prominent figure in the squatter movement of Orlando was the charismatic James Mpanza, leader of the Sofasonke Movement.

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