CULTURE IN TRANSITION IN SOUTH AFRICA
LECTURE 1: THE APARTHEID CITY
INTRODUCTION
The origins of the Apartheid city precede the establishment of the Apartheid state in 1948, and probably have their roots in the Anglo-Dutch colonial system. The Dutch proceeded from the beginning from a concept of racial separation and their towns and villages in the Transvaal and Orange Free State were invariably spatially segregated. The British, on the other hand, had no clear policy regarding segregation and various sectors of English society adopted differing values.
The Military, for example, allowed black servants to find their own quarters in camp, and camp followers, mostly women, were allowed to make their homes in the area immediately outside the fort. In Port Elizabeth industrialists preferred to have their workers close to their workplace, while merchants liked to give their customers easy access to their wares. Their families, on the other hand, preferred a policy of separation, using arguments of health and hygiene to motivate for segregated suburbs. Nonetheless persons wishing to marry across the colour line could do so with impunity until 1924, and the practice was not finally outlawed until 1948. Thus, while the more affluent suburbs remained largely white, with a few black citizens, the black suburbs were openly integrated.
The first moves towards formal segregation took place in 1901-3, when the British importation of grazing from Argentina also caused the import of plague-bearing rats. The resultant outbreak of bubonic plague hit all the major centres countrywide and the people most affected were black servants charged with looking after the horses. As a result, the people who bore the brunt of plague regulations were black; many were transported to “health” camps outside town, and their homes and possessions were torched without compensation. As, in most cases, they were not allowed to return to their former homes until well after the plague had abated, many opted to settle on their new grounds. The historical beginnings of a segregated city can thus be laid at the door of Argentinian rats. This may not have been stated policy, but it rapidly became “custom” and once the precedent was established, it became the rule.
This stands starkly in opposition to French and Italian colonial city planning elsewhere in Africa, where immigrant and indigenous suburbs were located at either end of a central business core, on the understanding that, eventually, a growing mixed-race group would take over and spread out from the central area.
Nonetheless, it must be understood that, regardless of its origins, the Apartheid city stood for much more than mere segregation. The architects of Apartheid, most notably Verwoerd and Vorster, understood Marxist class principles, and set out, quite deliberately, to create an underclass that would be forever poor and forever black.
They also understood that, eventually, racist dogma and discrimination could not form a sustainable base for national government and that an adjustment to their policies would have to be made. They thus planned for a gradual upward movement of an educated and affluent black elite, while extending a safety net for poor whites. The mechanism they chose for this project in social engineering, was the Apartheid city, and it says much for their planning, that today, 13 years after the first democratic government was elected, many of their schemes have become reality. Today, the middle and upper middle class suburbs show a smattering of black families, the lower income suburbs have become predominantly black, and the old black suburbs remain monolithically black and poverty-bound. Verwoerd would have liked this new South Africa.
IDENTIFICATION OF THE APARTHEID CITY
Apartheid city planning is marked by a number of features which, read in a historical context, could be interpreted as part of a segregationist residential policy. Taken as a whole, however, they fall into a pattern that reveals a wider ideological intent. These characteristics may be summarised as follows:
a. Segregation of Residential Areas. Selected residential suburbs were set aside for the exclusive use of specific communities. This segregation did not only take place along racial lines but, in some cases, was extended to perceived "ethnic" groupings in the black community itself. As a result certain areas of Soweto, near Johannesburg, were set aside for Nguni, Sotho, Tswana and Venda language groups, and even the Nguni suburbs made allowance for Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Tsonga sub-divisions. In the case of black/white segregation, this was regulated by legislation which controlled so-called "Group Areas", miscegenation and intermarriage between the races. On the other hand, the separation of "ethnic groups" was entrusted to white bureaucrats with little knowledge of anthropology, or empathy for indigenous value systems. Separation between white and not-white citizens was strictly enforced, often by brutal police action, whilst little attention appears to have been paid to residential mixing and integration within the not-white group.
b. Use of Buffer Zones. Group areas were separated by means of buffer zones, which were 100m minimum width, but in some cases, could be as much as 250m. In the case of some smaller municipalities the mandatory existence of buffer zones had a negative effect upon the growth of white residential and business areas, leading these to openly ignore regulations promulgated under an ideology they officially espoused.
c. Use of Natural Features. In many instances planners were allowed to incorporate natural features, or areas where construction was difficult, into their buffer zones.
d. Industrial Belts as Buffer Zones. Although buffer zones were used to create and reinforce racial segregation, this land was invariably retained under white municipal control and in many cases was developed as industrial townships. Thus although businesses in these areas employed workers from the nearby black suburbs, their rates and taxes were paid to the white municipality under whose control they fell. The factories were therefore contributing to the tax base of the white municipality, and subsidising its white infrastructure.
e. Extended City Planning. Black residential suburbs were invariably removed from the CBD, an obvious link with the colonial Segregated City. The distance from the city centre varies from instance to instance. Soweto, for example, was the product of apartheid planners who originally wished to locate it in the vicinity of Newcastle, in Natal. It was their intention to link it to the Witwatersrand by a high-speed railway system (as yet not invented), which would have covered the distance in under two hours. Although this proposal was successfully blocked by the Johannesburg Council, the location of Soweto was ultimately guided by the establishment of Kliptown and Nancefield in 1904 to the south-east of Johannesburg.
f. Extended Road Links. One of the most noticeable features of the Apartheid City is the wide spread of its residential suburbs linked by a relatively long travel links. An integrated city on the other hand, would probably have developed along more compact lines.
g. Military Control. Many black residential suburbs established during and after the 1950s are also marked by their proximity to military bases and airfields. It is not an accident that the Lenz Military Camp and the Baragwanath Military Airfield are located in close proximity to Soweto.
h. Radial Street Planning. Similarly many black towns were planned to facilitate military operations within their streets. This is not a recent paranoia, but dates back to the time when Verwoerd was Minister of Native Affairs. The results are etched in the road plan of Soweto, whose radial streets connect a series of vacant hubs. The theory was that, in times of civil unrest, nests of sub-machine guns could be located on this land, covering the radial roads and enabling troops to isolate trouble spots in a series of pincer movements. Although the student uprising of 1976 exposed the weakness of such thinking, military interference in urban planning has not ceased and up to comparatively recent times plans for new black residential suburbs had to be scrutinised, and vetted, by the local military.
i. Single access, single exit planning. A military and totalitarian mindset is also revealed by the limited number of access points provided to black suburbs, to facilitate sealing off an area during times of civil unrest. A major urban centre such as Soweto, with a population of 1.5 million people, can only be accessed by motor vehicles at four points. The planning of radial roadways and the provision of limited access to an area was not the invention of the architects of apartheid, but is a salient feature of mine compound planning.
j. Social Infrastructure. The development of separate residential areas must also be read in the context of prevailing white political philosophy. Nationalist thinking perceived South Africa's black citizens to be perpetually rural, and any access they might have to an urban area was only temporary. Their homes were therefore a reflection of such impermanent status, and their suburbs were not permitted to develop features of any permanence. For this reason social amenities were usually neither plentiful nor well equipped.
k. Housing. Stands were kept deliberately small, usually at less than 300 square metres, whilst the white equivalent was kept at 700-800 square metres. Black housing was small, poorly built, devoid of internal doors, ceilings and internal services. Most housing stock consisted of the state-built four-room homes less than 50m in area. These were not sold, but were retained in government ownership and rented out. The state also refused to conduct any maintenance upon their properties, and would not allow residents to extend or improve these, even at their own expense. Services were kept to a minimum, with rudimentary roads, water and sewage reticulation, and no provision was made for electricity or telephone.
Despite the fact that houses were built using a conventional technology, the textures of the townships remained consistent with those of an informal settlement. The housing process included no consultation with client communities, and plans were designed at a ministerial level, by politicians whose outside expertise lay in farming and the law.
THE JOHANNESBURG CASE STUDY
Following the discovery of gold on the farm Langlaagte in April 1886, the Witwatersrand saw an almost immediate influx of people. This was not limited to those directly involved in mining activity, but included a large number of other men and women offering a variety of skills and services of the kind necessary to the establishment of human settlement. By August 1886 Johannesburg could already boast of some 3000 inhabitants, most of whom were white, and on 4 October 1886 the site of present-day central Johannesburg was declared a township. The first building plots were subdivided on a grid-iron pattern and sold by public auction two months later, in December of that year.
The sub-division of what became the new town's central district was a typical product of nineteenth century mining camp planning, and was made with impermanence of settlement in mind. Even after it was realised that the gold reef ran both deep and wide, and the introduction of the cyanide process made deep level mining economically feasible, the general consensus of the time was that Johannesburg's life span would not exceed 25 years.
Residential development. For the first seventy years of its life, Johannesburg's white residential development occurred predominantly north of the Main Reef, which runs east-west, south of the Witwatersrand Ridge, which gives shelter to residential land to its north. This trend was based upon geographical and climatic factors, as well as the fact that the main gold reef ran southward, thus creating an industrial belt spanning from east to west, which formed an effective barrier between the town's northern and southern areas. Consequently most of the black mine worker’s compounds as well as the early black settlements were located south of the main reef. This division was reinforced over time by the development of a road and rail transport system alongside the main reef. Meanwhile, lower income white suburbs also developed alongside the east-west axis, but on the northern side of the reef.
Another factor, which also reinforced the east-west division, was the development of sand dumps as a by-product of mining activity, which, under windy conditions, gave rise to an unpleasant pollution problem, most particularly in the southern suburbs.
Early population growth. Within a year of the discovery of gold in Johannesburg, the whole Reef was estimated to have some 7000 people, with 3000 residing in Johannesburg itself. By 1890, a scant four years after the discovery of gold, it had multiplied ten-fold, and by 1895, Johannesburg held 102,000 people, this number being equally divided between white and black residents. By 1902 the total black population on the Rand was 64,664, of which only 7615 were women.
Early Johannesburg did not offer its black citizens much in the way of housing. While the mines generally looked after their own, and most domestics could expect to have sleep-in quarters, the remainder had to fend for themselves. Almost from the onset, when the town was first laid out, separate suburbs, or "locations" as they were known, were allocated for black, Malay and Asian occupation, in conformance with existing Transvaal Republic policies.
Early maps of Johannesburg show its "locations" to have been sited on the outskirts of white-designated suburbs, on land commonly known as Brickfields, a poorly drained piece of ground which had originally served as a brickyard, providing the materials for many of Johannesburg's first brick buildings.
Considering the rudimentary methods of waste disposal available there, and the clay nature of the soil, it did not take long for a serious health hazard to develop. In 1902 the matter was reopened and a Sanitary Commission was appointed to investigate the Brickfields, but this was overtaken by events on 19 March 1904 when an outbreak of bubonic plague took place in Burgersdorp. Virtually overnight the inhabitants of Brickfields were evacuated, the area was fenced off with corrugated iron sheeting and everything within fired to the ground by the Fire Brigade. It was subsequently renamed Newtown and redeveloped as a suburb for light industrial use.
Following these events, the residents of Brickfields were moved to a "health camp" near the Klipspruit Sewage Farm, some 20km from the town centre. Some were accommodated in corrugated iron dwellings, but most were simply provided with materials to build their own homes. Although this settlement was intended to be of a temporary nature, it remained in existence until the mid 1970s, when it was cleared to make way for new housing developments.
Despite having been dispossessed of their homes in the Brickfields, the residents of the resettlement camp near Klipspruit were given no compensation for their properties, nor were they provided with a sanitary infrastructure. The services available to this community remained rudimentary for many years, affecting its quality of life. It must be assumed that, because they had now been removed from the town centre, their welfare had ceased to be of direct concern to its citizens.
The first “Black” suburbs. Before the Second World War little was done to house Johannesburg’s Black families, and although areas were set aside for development, by 1939 only some 8900 houses had been provided for 244,000 people, with a male to female ratio slightly less than 3:1.
The next five years were an important period in the history of Johannesburg's black residential sector. With most of the white labour force engaged in overseas war duties, increasing demands were made upon local skilled and unskilled labour. The war effort not only boosted the industrial and manufacturing sector, but its demands for material production broke down many old prohibitions upon the use of black labour. As a result more black workers were brought into urban centres, effectively sensitising them to labour and other economic issues, and forging them into a well-politicised industrial proletariat. The effects of this were only felt fully during the 1950s, once the ANC and PAC began organising campaigns of resistance against continued white political, cultural and economic domination. By the end of the War, Johannesburg's black population had increased to 395,231, with a male to female ratio of nearly 2:1. Over 20% of this population consisted of young children, a clear indication that many families had cut their rural links and were forging a new urban society. It also meant that the needs of education would henceforth also have to be taken into account when planning for the infrastructural needs of the black community.
The informal housing sector. By 1945 a total of 9573 low income housing units had been built to house a black population of over 400,000, giving formal housing to only some 55,000 persons. The remainder had to make do as best they might, and although some people worked and slept over in the white suburbs, few could claim a home of their own. The majority were forced to move illegally into vacant tracts of land in such areas as Orlando, Pimville, Dube, Newclare and Alexandra where informal suburbs sprang up virtually overnight. The lack of sanitation and the overcrowding of housing in these areas caused the overload of an already meagre infrastructure. In time these communities also began to demand other facilities, such as schooling, which was either rudimentary or non-existent, or was being withheld by the authorities as a matter of policy.
Although conditions here were squalid, such areas as Sophiatown gave rise to a thriving cultural life, giving such musicians as Miriam Makeba and artists like Gerard Sekoto their first public exposure. Not unnaturally, such conditions also gave rise to a generation of political leaders and socially involved persons who voiced the grievances of black workers. Most prominent among them were Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Robert Sobukwe.
Thus the planning and implementation of urban housing programs in Johannesburg after 1945 had to take into account the existence of an expanding and permanent urban black population. However a realisation that demographic changes had taken place was slow in percolating through to the civic decision-making process, and of the 10,730 house contracts placed between 1940 and 1947, only 1538 were built. Instead it was thought that relief for squatters could be found in a policy of temporary housing. Although some units were built on a short-term basis, they were experimental in nature and suffered from some notable technical and planning flaws. Further housing activity took place between 1947 and 1951, when a total of 6788 units were built. It was not until 1951 when two acts, designed to ease the nation-wide housing crisis, were promulgated. The "Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act" was the first of over one hundred pieces of similar legislation designed to give local authorities the means of removing squatters from land; the "Native Building Workers Act" authorised the utilization of skilled black labour on low-income housing schemes. The combination of the two, together with a large infusion of State funds, allowed Municipal housing agencies to initiate new and large-scale housing programs in Johannesburg's black residential areas.
Low cost housing developments in the post-war era. The immediate effect of the "Native Building Workers Act" was the formation of a Housing Division within the City Council. With the assistance of Governmental subsidies, and a series of loans raised from Anglo-American, the Housing Division was able to implement a number of site-and-service schemes which eased the crisis to a small degree. By the time building operations reached their peak in Johannesburg in 1958, the Housing Division was handing over 40 houses per day, and by 1969 a total of 65,564 houses had been built in Soweto alone.
The houses were built as the result of research conducted by the National Building Research Institute (NBRI) between 1948 and 1951, and are generally acknowledged to be the result of the work of two architects: Douglas Calderwood, who subsequently became Dean of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, and Barrie Biermann, who became professor of Architecture at the University of Natal and who has since become better known for his research in Cape Dutch architecture. Although the houses were small and rudimentary, without ceilings or internal doors, their design needs to be read in the context of white opinions prevailing at that time. In April 1950, the Minister of Native Affairs, Dr EG Jansen stated in Parliament that it was a:
"... wrong notion that the Native who has barely left his primitive conditions should be provided with a house which to him resembles a palace and with conveniences which he cannot appreciate and which he will not require for many years to come."
Calderwood's work for the NBRI in the early 1950s was therefore designed to meet such governmental standards and, ironically, formed the basis for Nationalist housing policy right up to the mid-1980s.
The planning of Soweto incorporated a number of important features. There is no doubt that its town planners were inspired by "garden city" theories current in Europe at that time. Its streets broke with the grid-iron pattern common in other parts of Johannesburg, and were designed to promote a hierarchy of traffic routes. Suburbs were laid out to create neighbourhoods, and green areas and civic spaces were integrated into the overall plan. Ironically such planning came to be read in the context of an oppressive Apartheid system, and its shortage of direct through routes, a radial road system, and its lack of suitable entry and exit points have all been interpreted as part of a larger plan to control its inhabitants.
THE PORT ELIZABETH CASE STUDY
The first structure to be built by immigrants in Port Elizabeth was erected by the British in August 1799. Named Fort Frederick, after Frederick, Duke of York, its main function was to guard the landing place and water supplies at Algoa Bay. It is also probable that the British intended to establish a military presence in the region to deter potential Dutch uprisings in the district of Graaff-Reinet, and to protect Cape Town, and hence the India sea route, from possible French attack. The township of Port Elizabeth was laid out in 1815, but was not developed until 1820 when some 5000 British settlers arrived in the Eastern Cape.
Initial settlement focused upon the harbour as the town's major area of economic activity. However as the bay's micro-climatic factors began to exert themselves, so then white residential areas began to move to the cooler and less humid higher ground overlooking the bay, and into areas that provided a measure of shelter from its persistent, year-round winds.
At its onset Port Elizabeth served predominantly as a service centre for the agricultural hinterland of the Eastern Cape. Its basic function was to handle, and later process, goods and materials passing through its harbour. However developments elsewhere in the southern African interior provided economic stimulus to the new town, and by the 1860s it had overtaken Cape Town as the Colony's premier port. The growth of an ostrich feather industry in Graaff-Reinet, Oudtshoorn and the Albany, the discovery of diamonds in the northern Cape and of gold in the Transvaal, and the outbreak of successive wars against the Sotho, the Griqua, the Pedi, the Tswana and the Boer Republics, were all to benefit Port Elizabeth. As a result numerous manufacturing industries began to be established locally, and during the early years of the twentieth Century the town became a focal point for food processing, motor vehicle assembly, and a variety of associated industries, which created extensive employment opportunities. This, as well as increasing rural poverty in the region, attracted many workers to the town to the point that, until the 1960s, it maintained its place as South Africa's third largest urban centre.
Colonial segregation. Port Elizabeth, as it stands today, owes its form to a number of physical and historical constraints. However, since the early 1900s, colonial segregation planning and a policy of statutory racial separation implemented after 1950, has resulted in what has become a prototypical model of the "apartheid city".
The early population of Port Elizabeth consisted, in the main, of Europeans. Initially few members of the indigenous population were attracted to the town and, almost from the onset, economic status was related to skin colour. Whites held a virtual monopoly over higher paid jobs and consequently could afford better housing in areas physically removed from "other" groups. Thus segregation was an integral part of early Port Elizabeth.
As a rising number of black workers began to enter Port Elizabeth seeking employment, so then a number of so-called "locations" began to be established on the outskirts of the white suburbs. The pattern was first established in 1834 when the Colonial Government made a grant of land to the London Missionary Society to provide a burial ground and residential area for "Hottentots and other coloured people who were members of the Church". Other workers however chose to erect their homes closer to their places of employment, or where a supply of potable water was available.
With few exceptions these Black suburbs were informal in nature, and residents there were forced to endure living conditions which contemporary observers described as being squalid. Many whites considered them to be unhealthy and petitions were repeatedly organised demanding that they be removed to the outskirts of the town. These requests were in direct opposition to the needs of the growing commercial and industrial sectors which preferred to locate their labour sources close to the harbour and the inner city area. These conflicting vested interests created political tension within the Port Elizabeth Council, which were only resolved in 1885 when the Municipality adopted its first set of markedly segregationist regulations.
As a result suburbs for the exclusive use of black residents who were not housed by employers, and who could not afford to purchase property, were established on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth. Most prominent amongst them was New Brighton, some 10km north of the city center. In 1901 an outbreak of Bubonic plague struck the town. In 1902 most of Port Elizabeth's old locations were demolished, their resident's personal belongings were arbitrarily destroyed, and restrictions were imposed upon inter-town travel. Although these curbs might initially have been necessary, they were only loosely applied to whites, and were maintained upon the lives of black residents well after they were eased elsewhere, this in spite of repeated complaints by the community's leaders.
During the colonial period therefore, the location system created a pattern of residential segregation based upon perceived racial and economic differences. However such divisions proved to be only partial, and it was only the implementation of Group Areas legislation after 1950 which brought about a structural separation of Port Elizabeth's residential areas. None-the-less it was during this time that the seeds of the Apartheid City were sown.
Post-colonial segregation: 1910-1950. By 1950 the population of New Brighton had grown from 3,650 in 1911 to 35,000. Almost all of it was black. This polarisation was reinforced by the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 which required municipalities to establish separate locations for their black citizens, and made black residents in "white" areas subject to a permit system. The Native Land and Trust Act of 1936 also precluded blacks from purchasing land outside designated areas.
Existing suburbs, as well as new housing projects for whites, began to include racially restrictive clauses in their title deeds. In this way most of Port Elizabeth's western suburbs were reserved for exclusive white residence.
CONCLUSIONS
The histories that I have outlined here can be repeated, with a few local variations, for almost every other major urban center in South Africa, the two notable exceptions being Cape Town, which has always conducted its own special kind of politics, and Durban, where a deeply etched topography made “Grand Apartheid” almost impossible to implement. However, despite the fact that South Africa has had a democratically-elected government since 1994, the past thirteen years have seen few changes in the demographic make up of our formerly segregated residential areas. Given the inertia suffered by local governments, many of the professional designers who actively opposed Apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s are beginning to despair at the entrenchment of urban poverty and social inequality which our cities continue to provide. The Apartheid City, it seems, may yet be the real racist dragon that we have yet to slay.
POSTSCRIPT
This was the first of four lectures on the subject of Culture in Transition in South Africa, delivered to the Faculty of Architecture and Society, Campus Leonardo, at the Politecnico of Milano, Italy, on 15 May 2007, and was entitled La Citta della Esclusione. It has been reproduced here in both Italian and English for the benefit of Italian-speaking students who attended the course. I am grateful to Prof Santa Nipoti, of Bologna who, not only did the bulk of this translation, but also put forward a number of positive suggestions aimed at making these ideas more comprehensible to an Italian audience.