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CHAPTER TWO

A RIGHT TO LIVE IN THE CITY

ALTHOUGH HE BECAME A PROMINENT FIGURE IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF Soweto, very little is known about James Mpanza’s life prior to his emergence as the leader of a big squatter movement. Mpanza was born in Natal on 15 May 1889. In Pietermaritzburg he attended an Indian school and learnt to speak English and an Indian dialect but, like many of his generation, he was forced to leave school to find work. Through his education he found a job as a clerk at the Durban harbour, and later he worked in Pinetown. It was here that he killed an Indian shopkeeper and was imprisoned in Pietermaritzburg to be executed. But his sentence was first commuted to life and then he was released early. During his imprisonment, the future messianic leader of squatters converted to Christianity. After his release from prison, Mpanza moved to Johannesburg and, like many other new arrivals, he lived in one of the city’s slums. In 1934 he moved to Orlando, where he lived at Number 957 Pheele Street. Soon after his arrival in the township, Mpanza was elected onto the advisory board and he emerged as the voice of the growing class of sub-tenants, desperate for their own homes, who had been lobbying the central government and the Johannesburg authorities for years – to no avail – to deal with the shortage of housing.

Frustrated by the lack of response from the authorities, Mpanza mooted the idea of mobilising sub-tenants to occupy open spaces in the location to highlight their plight. His proposal received the cold shoulder from members of the Communist Party, who viewed him with suspicion, but the young members of the African National Congress, who were to become leading figures in the ANC Youth League, were more receptive. Walter Sisulu, one of the founders and leading members of the Youth League, lived with his family in Orlando East. In the book A Place in the City: The Rand on the Eve of Apartheid, Walter Sisulu says, ‘Mpanza spoke to me and Nelson [Mandela], and said let’s pass a resolution at the Orlando Residents’ Association. It must be moved by Nelson and seconded by me; in which, he says, that on the 29th January we the residents of Orlando shall evict the sub-tenants. That resolution was moved; and that strategy moved the City Council.’

Source: Wits Historical Papers

James ‘Sofasonke’ Mpanza, the ‘father’ of Soweto

Mpanza’s slogan of ‘Housing and Shelter for All’ quickly rallied hundreds of sub-tenants, and on 20 March 1944 he led a group of subtenants to occupy an empty space on the periphery of Orlando East. There they erected 250 shacks. The act of defiance immediately attracted huge support – the number of families joining the squatter movement increased by 300 a day and within weeks there were 4 000 shacks in the area. Wilfred Thabethe, like many older residents, reveres the role played by Mpanza.

We used to call that place Zama-Mpanza sacks, because he was the man who was a leader at that time. He is the man who actually started the shacks … This man came, Sofasonke Mpanza, he said there were many people who wanted houses. So he asked all the people who actually wanted houses to come out and build their shacks there, so that the authorities must see that too many people wanted houses. Yes.

Residents called the area ‘Masakeng’, the place of sacks, because the structures put up by the squatters were made of hessian sacks. The council was now desperate to stave off any further squatting and aimed to wrest control of Masakeng from Mpanza and his Sofasonke Movement by setting up a temporary camp close to Mpanza’s shantytown. The temporary camp comprised the most basic accommodation structures, nine metres square, made of breeze blocks, with asbestos roofs but without chimneys or window panes. Mpanza refused to move until the authorities guaranteed to provide permanent housing for the people. But a determined council began to tear down shacks and remove squatters to the new settlement. According to the historian Alf Stadler, ‘By the end of May 1944, 200 rooms had been built. By October 1945, 4 042 had been built to accommodate 20 000 people, and the last of the squatters’ shacks in “Shantytown”, as Mpanza’s camp came to be called, had been demolished.’

The squatter movement nonetheless left an indelible mark on urban politics in Johannesburg, showing that direct action by poor black people could force the authorities to respond to their demands. The sub-tenants of Orlando demonstrated unequivocally their determination to have rights in the city, and the most urgent of their rights was access to housing.

Source: Museum Africa

‘Masakeng’ — Place of Sacks

The houses built by the council still did not meet the housing needs of the growing population of homeless urban Africans. In January 1946, Mpanza led a second movement of squatters to occupy the incomplete houses in Orlando West. Similar squatter movements sprang up simultaneously across the Reef and, inspired by the example of Mpanza, local leaders from Alexandra, Evaton (Benoni) and other parts of Soweto led land occupations. Squatter movements from Pimville (led by Abel Ntoi), Orlando East (led by Oriel Monongoaha) and Alexandra (led by Schreiner Bhaduza) occupied empty space around Orlando. By the end of 1946, the number of squatters in the area numbered nearly 30 000. The council responded by putting up a number of emergency camps, such as Moroka, and setting aside more land for further housing. More than a thousand families were moved in April 1946 to Jabavu, where another major construction programme consisting of breeze-block houses was started.

The first twenty years of Wilfred Thabethe’s life reflected the trials and tribulations of thousands of African families who struggled to make a life for themselves in the city of gold. He was born in 1936 in Bertrams, after which his family moved to Alexandra, probably during the city’s clearance of inner city slums. Both his parents were domestic workers in a nursing home. In 1942, the Thabethe family moved to Orlando where they lived as subtenants and joined Mpanza’s movement to fight for a house of their own. But conditions in the settlements were harsh. Wilfred has vivid and lasting memories of the impact of the Highveld rain on their makeshift home:

In fact we did not realise how bad it was because, truly speaking, we had to stay in the shanty shelters which were called Masakeng. And when it was raining we could not sleep, we had to stand up for the whole night, because of the sacks. Do you understand? It was not roofed with corrugated iron, it was with a sack. And when it was raining the water, the rain, used to come inside the house to the extent that we had to wake up and stand up for the whole night, up until the morning. I felt sorry for my father because he had to go to work the following day. If it was raining for three days, for those three days we could not sleep. We could not sleep … We used to take some lime, we used to go to the mines and collect some lime to paint the parts of the roof sacks to prevent water from coming in … And then the lime, if you got a drop of it, was dangerous, because it was burning. It could burn a skin. It was hard, then.

At the first opportunity, the Thabethe family moved from Masakeng to the new settlement, which residents called eMaplatini (plots). According to Wilfred Thabethe, ‘It was the shelters built by the government. All this area next to Orlando station … were shelters Number Two, Number Three and Number Four shelters. They were divided just below Orlando Stadium on the side of the rail, that was now the shelters. It was in 1947.’ Despite promises from the authorities, the amenities, such as toilets and taps, were very limited. ‘At the shelters where we stayed,’ says Wilfred,‘there were no toilets for five years despite everything. We had toilets but they were public toilets, and they were far … next to the shanty township. So we used to walk to the toilets.’

Source: Museum Africa

People queue for homes in Orlando

The Thabethe family lived in the area from 1947 to 1954. ‘It is then,’ recalls Wilfred, ‘that the other part of Soweto was [built]. That was Dlamini, Molapo, and other areas. In 1954 my family moved to Dlamini. The stand that we had was a formal house. A four roomed house, with a toilet.’

People came to Orlando and Soweto from all over, journeying to settle in what was to become the country’s largest African township. The Matthews’ family history highlights the kinds of experiences that typified the lives of urban Africans. Mrs Matthews has talked about her early life:

I was born in 1921, here in Johannesburg, at a place called Prospect Township. But originally my parents were from Delmas, ja. Then we came to Prospect Township, right next to Heidelberg Road. This area was occupied by multinational groups, coloureds, whites, boers, everybody. They were moved from Prospect to Orlando East. And life was good there, but we struggled with shopping. The shops were very far. We had to travel a long distance. Jeppe was our nearest town for shopping. So, I was still very young when my parents moved to Orlando. My father was Paul Nkoane and used to travel by horses, selling vegetables to the boers. And my mother was Anna Nkoane, the first born of the Thlolwes. She was a domestic worker. We walked to school in Albert Street School at the Wesleyan Church. From there I went to George Goch for my higher primary. Most of the schools were held in church buildings back then. I was introduced to Mr [Philip] Matthews by Khala Andries, his friend. They were both from Kimberley. So, we dated until we got married. We stayed in Sophiatown. From Sophiatown we went to Mzimhlophe, then to Orlando West.

Many families followed a similar route. They would first find a foothold in one of the city’s slums, where it was easier to avoid detection by the state. Then they would find their way to one or other of the municipal locations, such as Orlando. Older residents from Orlando West often remember the creation of Masakeng as the time when they moved to the area. Nokuthula Ramoitheki was born in Orlando West in 1949, at 8357 Twala Street. Her mother came from Bizana in the old Transkei and her father from Natal.

When my grandparents came here they stayed at the plots … it is where my mother used to stay with her parents. She was pregnant with me when she was staying at the plots. When the boers removed them there, Mr Sofasonke brought them here. This is my grandmother’s house. I was born here. My mother came here and stayed here. During the process of the removals my father was killed there. I did not know that then. I don’t know him. He was killed there.

It appears that, as followers of Mpanza, the Ramoitheki family were part of the movement that occupied the newly built houses in Orlando West in 1946. As the authorities had not yet sold these houses, the new occupants claimed ownership over them. Houses in Orlando West were bigger than those in Orlando East and must have appeared quite luxurious to those living on the government plots. The Mazibuko brothers, whose family hailed from Reitz in the ‘Vrystaat’, recall the crammed conditions in Orlando East:

Yes, it was one room at first and as you looked at it you thought how do I sleep in a one room, but we slept like that. As we grew up then we decided to divide the one room to have kitchen space … In other words you had to build for yourself. If you did not build for yourself it was when you did not have money, and all you did was to divide by a sheet to make a partition. You will then have a room for you and your wife, and the kids sleep in the kitchen.

Not surprisingly, Orlando West quickly became a magnet. Sydney Ramokgopa explains how his family ended up in Orlando West, where he was born in 1950:

My parents they are from what we call today Limpopo province, from a place called Zoekmekaar … my parents came to Johannesburg I think around 1929. They stayed in Alexandra with one of our relatives and then from Alexandra they got a house in Orlando East … and then, while they were in Orlando East, it was the time when they were building Orlando West, yes. So they came in after Orlando East was completed. Because I was made to understand that the superintendent at the time, he told this old man, that area in Orlando West, the houses are bigger than the ones in Orlando East. In Orlando East it was only two rooms, you see. So then they moved from Orlando East to here. That is why most of the people particularly in this area, this side to Mandela side and Sisulu, most of them they are from Orlando East. Yes, they are from Orlando East because they were told that these houses are bigger than those ones in Orlando East, so they came this side.

From the 1940s, Orlando West became one of the sought-after locations. In the early 1940s Walter Sisulu qualified for a house in Phomolong (Number 7372), the new residential area that would develop into Orlando West. As Elinor Sisulu, writing about her parents-in-law, was to say, the new four-roomed house was bigger than the Sisulus’ house in Orlando East. ‘It had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a small room, which, though it had no bathtub, they called a bathroom because it had a shower enclosure … the Phomolong house had a tap in the backyard … cement floors and a ceiling.’ Walter Sisulu’s comrade, Nelson Mandela, also qualified for a house after the birth of his and his first wife’s son in 1946. By the early 1950s Orlando West had assumed the features of a more settled community, as more and more families created homes there.

The electoral victory of the National Party in 1948, however, ushered in a period of mounting uncertainty for urban Africans.

The urban experiences of black people and of Africans in particular were characterised under successive white governments by exclusion, marginalisation and removals. The state promoted the migrant labour system and therefore sought to limit and control the presence of Africans in urban areas. In other words, the presence of African labour was deemed necessary only insofar as it was required to tend to the needs of white people, and a pivotal part of the state’s strategy throughout the twentieth century was to limit African urbanisation through influx control. Those Africans who lived in urban areas were subjected to strict controls, were placed in regimented spaces such as compounds and municipal locations. The policy, which controlled migration from the rural areas and maintained order in the locations, enjoyed limited success until the late 1930s, but after that, as African urbanisation surged ahead, locations were transformed from places intended to exemplify state domination into areas of contestation where urban black working class culture and politics were being forged – and they were to become locales of protest and challenge to white control. As Bonner’s and Nieftagodien’s research on Alexandra and Ekurhuleni (on the East Rand) shows, popular protest for housing, against pass controls, high rents and bus fare hikes affected locations across the Reef in the 1940s.

Source: Museum Africa

Houses in Orlando West were in demand

In response to the upsurge of location-based popular struggles and a wave of industrial actions in the 1940s, the state attempted to re-assert control over the urban black population. It was in fact a salient feature, from 1948 onwards, of the apartheid government, which pursued the policies of urban reconfiguration – forced removals, creation of group areas and townships – with much greater determination than had its predecessors. A key aim behind the creation of new townships was to establish basic conditions for the stabilisation of urban African labour, such as the provision of accommodation and elementary education. In this way, the growing demand by industry for reliable and cheap unskilled and semi-skilled labour could more easily be met. State policies in the 1950s were premised on the recognition that some Africans could be permanently urbanised, so the National Party ideologues emphasised – and aimed to entrench – a distinction between African urban ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. ‘Insiders’, from the perspective of the apartheid government, were those Africans who qualified under the so-called ‘Section 10’ laws to work and live legitimately in urban areas where they were given access to public housing in segregated townships. According to ‘Section 10’ of the Natives Laws Amendment Act of 1952, Africans qualified for the right to residence in urban areas if they met certain conditions, such as working continuously for the same employer for a decade or being born and living continuously in an urban area for at least fifteen years. Their right to a degree of permanence in the urban areas was based on the state’s belief, at the time, that some Africans could be ‘detribalised’ and thus permanently urbanised. By contrast, ‘outsiders’ were deemed to be ‘tribal’ (implying ‘rural’) and were consigned to a life of migrancy. Their presence in the urban areas depended on work contracts of specified durations, which means they were required to return to the ‘homelands’, the rural areas, when their contracts expired. The state’s acceptance of the permanent presence of some Africans in the urban areas was a qualified concession. It was also a policy shift, in response to the growing demands for labour from the booming secondary economy and also, critically, to the struggles waged by urban Africans in the 1940s, in which the squatter movements played a pivotal role. On the one hand, industry required a reliable and relatively cheap workforce. On the other hand, the state was determined to break urban political militancy. Both wanted the urban African working class brought under control.

One of the strategies the government used to achieve this objective was the establishment of new townships. HF Verwoerd, who was at the time the minister of native affairs, and has become known as the ‘architect of apartheid’, explained the government’s views in a press release announcing the formation of the Mentz Committee in 1952.

Squatter chaos, overcrowding of existing Native plots, illegal lodging in white yards, the removal of those who refuse to work and thus don’t belong in the city, can only be combated once large enough legal townships for Natives are established close to the towns … The most complicated problem of this character in the Union, exists in the area from the north in Pretoria to the Vaal River, and in the east from Springs till far in the west to Krugersdorp and Randfontein …

From the 1950s, the state embarked on a massive programme of reconfiguring the urban areas along racial lines. It appointed the Mentz Commission (also known as the ‘black spots’ commission) to formulate a plan. The commission recommended that all so-called black spots be removed and replaced with what it called regional group areas and townships. What this meant was that old locations such as Sophiatown, Dukathole and Cato Manor, where urban black people had built communities for several decades, would be destroyed and their residents relocated to racially defined areas such as Soweto, Lenasia and Eldorado Park. Perhaps the best-known example was the forced removal of thousands of people from Sophiatown to Meadowlands in 1954/55. From the state’s perspective, the creation of what it called ‘regional model townships’ was the most effective way of monitoring and therefore controlling large African populations, and careful planning went into the creation of new townships.

In 1952, in a speech to the Senate, Verwoerd set out the government’s vision for the future siting and planning of African townships. The site should be at an adequate distance from the European town and should preferably adjoin the location of a neighbouring town, so as to decrease rather than increase the number of Native areas. The site should preferably be separated from the European area by an industrial buffer, where industries existed or were being planned. The site should have provision for an adequate hinterland for expansion, stretching away from the European area, and it should be within easy distance of the town or city for transport purposes – by rail rather than by road. There should be a road, preferably running through the industrial areas, connecting the location site with the city. The location site should possess open buffer zones around it, the breadth of which would depend on whether the location bordered upon a densely or sparsely occupied European area. Finally, it should be at a considerable distance from main, and more particularly national, roads, ‘the use of which as local transport routes for the location should be totally discouraged’.