JOZI -
A HISTORY OF BLACK JOHANNESBURG
Franco Frescura
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Before 1822 the indigenous population of the Highveld is estimated to have numbered some 150,000, many of whom lived in large settlements of up to 7000 persons. However, the ravages of the Difaqane, from 1822 to 1836, and the invasion of the region by land-hungry Dutch farmers in 1836 forced many families to leave their ancestral lands. By the time gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, their nearest homesteads were located 110km away, near Rustenburg. The ZAR's subsequent imposition of a "hut tax" forced many rural residents to enter into White employment and the colonial cash economy. Johannesburg offered both work and higher wages and within a few years the town had become the home of a large, unskilled and predominantly male labour force. Some found jobs as domestic workers in the suburbs, but most laboured on the mines.
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. This is an aspect of colonial town planning which was not unique to the Transvaal, but was common to many other parts of southern Africa. Not only did it conform to existing ZAR policies, but the idea of separate residential areas for Black and White also suited the mining companies who had recently adopted the "compound" as a means of housing their black labourers.
The concept derived its name from the Malay word "kampong", meaning an enclosure. It was initially implemented for security reasons on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, and was used to confine employees to their quarters for the duration of their labour contracts. However, its application on the Witwatersrand was not as harsh. Compounds consisted of single-sex hostels housing between eight and sixteen men per room. Early buildings were set about a central square accessed through a single gateway. The planning of later complexes, which could house up to 5000 workers each, was amended to a fan-shaped pattern, with buildings radiating out from a central access point. This refinement was claimed by mine management to facilitate "riot control", an euphemism used to denote labour disputes which arose from time to time, and which mining companies had little compunction in settling through the use of force. Although apologists for the compound system have pointed out at great length the advantages of living in such communities, it is evident that, almost from the beginning, this programme gave rise to a number of social problems. Alcohol abuse, venereal disease and prostitution were common occurrences among mine labourers of that time. Matters were not assisted by the general male-female ratio which, in Johannesburg, remained high right up to the late 1930s. In 1902, for example, the total Black population on the Rand was 64,664, of which only 7615 were women.
After 1909 the mines began to obtain the bulk of their labour through the enrolment of migrant workers. In time it became evident that this system imposed a number of hardships upon the labour force, and that compounds played a strong contributory role in these abuses. These included the destabilisation of the rural economy, the destruction of the rural family, culture shock, and the gradual impoverishment of the rural proletariat for the benefit of a small class of urban capitalists.
It is apparent that some of these problems were also common to the White farming community, where a series of droughts, locust plagues and the rinderpest increased rural poverty and forced many Dutch-speaking farmers to seek employment on the mines.
Early maps of Johannesburg show its "locations" to have been sited on the outskirts of white-designated suburbs, on land commonly known as Brickfields (illustration 1). It included Burgersdorp, a low income area where many indigent Afrikaners had made their homes. This was a poorly drained piece of ground which had originally served as a brickyard, providing the materials for many of Johannesburg's first brick buildings. Early photographs show that most houses in this area were of a square plan, with clay walls and corrugated iron roofs. A few thatched dwellings were interspersed between them.
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. Before 1899 Johannesburg's White community had made repeated complaints about this area to the ZAR Government. However Uitlander grievances fell upon deaf ears in Pretoria and little could be done during the hostilities. In 1902 the matter was reopened and a Sanitary Commission was appointed to investigate the Brickfields. In November 1903 its report was tabled, recommending that the site be expropriated and redeveloped. These findings were overtaken by events on 19 March 1904 when an outbreak of bubonic plague is reported to have taken 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 industry.
Following these events, the residents of Brickfields were moved to a "health camp" near the Klipspruit Sewage Farm, present-day Kliptown, 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.
The occurrence of bubonic plague on the Witwatersrand in 1904 is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty. It is true that its outbreak was indeed substantiated by medical records, but the time elapsed between its hypothetical identification and the evacuation of the Brickfields can be measured in terms of hours rather than days. It also took place at a time when the town's newly elected municipality had been in office a scant three months, and was just beginning to come to terms with the numerous problems it inherited from eighteen years of disinterested ZAR government.
It is true that outbreaks of bubonic plague had taken place elsewhere in southern Africa before this time. Some of them had been quite severe, but the disease itself was not local. It originated from plague-infected rats accidentally brought into the country from Argentina during the South African War of 1899-1902. They were imported by the British, together with bales of fodder for their horses, and most of the recorded outbreaks took place in the Eastern Cape where the fodder was landed. Thus there must exist a strong suspicion that the plague, or a vague threat of its presence, may have been used by the municipality as a convenient lever to remove a voteless and indigent community, rapidly and without fuss, from an area which urban expansion had brought uncomfortably close to the town centre.
The period following the South African War also saw a reduction in Johannesburg's black labour force. Many workers returned to their rural homes following the closure of the mines and, at the end of hostilities, refused to return to employment on the Reef. The reasons they gave for this decision centered upon the harsh working conditions they encountered underground, as well as the brutality of White overseers. This induced the new British Administration of the Transvaal to permit, in 1904, the introduction in their stead of indentured Chinese labour. By 1907 nearly 58,000 Chinese were working on the mines. However, political opposition to this move proved too powerful and, following repeated protests by the citizens of Johannesburg, nearly all of them were repatriated by 1909.
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 people of Klipspruit were not alone in this plight and generally very little was done by the authorities of early Johannesburg to improve the housing conditions of Black workers (illustration 11). A small measure of relief was afforded in 1917 when a disused compound on the Salisbury Jubilee Mine was rented by the Town Council and converted to a single-sex hostel to house one thousand men. Two years later, between 1919 and 1922, a housing scheme to provide homes for 5000 people was completed in Western Native Township (illustration 17), but this was a small concession made following the influenza epidemic of 1918. By this stage the black urban population of Johannesburg had risen to 116,120 people and these projects made little difference to the living conditions enjoyed by the majority of the town's black citizens.
There is no doubt that the question of land ownership was a major issue in the housing of black workers. The "Gold Laws", inherited from the ZAR, precluded "persons of colour" from owning land in virtually the whole of Johannesburg. This included citizens from a wide range of backgrounds, including Black, Indian, Malay, Chinese and mixed race. Thus the reservation of prime business and residential land for the exclusive use of Whites became a political issue at an early stage of the town's history. Western Native, for example, had not been claimed for White use as its land had previously been used as a brickfield, which was subsequently levelled and used as a refuse tip.
By the 1920s other townships, also suffering from poor infrastuctural conditions, had arisen in such places as Newclare, Sophiatown, Prospect and the Malay Location. A number of other areas were also considered to be slums by public officials. However officers from the MOH's department refused repeatedly to condemn them or to have them cleared, knowing full well that the vast majority of their inhabitants were Black and that no other facilities existed for their rehousing.
In 1925 a single men's hostel was built at Wemmer. At this stage the ratio between men and women had dropped only minimally to 6:1. Therefore official emphasis was still upon the provision of single sex compounds, rather than in the construction of family homes. However it is probable that official figures failed to reflect the true state of affairs. A form of "influx control" and the carrying of passes for Blacks had been introduced by the ZAR as early as 1890. Thus although the 1925 figures showed the presence of 117,700 men as against 19,000 women, it is probable that there were far more Black women in Johannesburg than was officially indicated. It is credible that, in time, many workers began to bring their families to the town. Being illegal residents their presence could not be declared, and their numbers thus increased the pressure upon an already overloaded informal infrastructure.
Much of the blame for these conditions must lie with the Johannesburg Town Council. By this stage many smaller towns in South Africa had already established their own separate departments to handle what they called Native Affairs. Johannesburg, on the other hand, waited until 1927 before taking any action, and only set up a Committee of Native Affairs in 1928. Before then the affairs of native administration had been handled by the Department of Parks and Recreation.
THE FIRST BLACK SUBURBS
By 1930 large extensions had been made to Western Native Township, and the new suburb of Eastern Native had also been established. The latter was never permitted to grow to any significant size and today survives only as a Municipal single men's hostel. In the same year 2500 acres were purchased near Klipspruit, and in 1931 a start was made on the suburb of Orlando, named after Councillor Edwin Orlando Leake (illustration 12). However progress was slow, and by 1939, Johannesburg could only boast a total of 8900 houses and hostel accommodation for 6700 single men (illustration 17). By then the black population was 244,000 with a male to female ratio slightly below 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 WW2, 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.
A factor which became increasingly manifest during this period, was the failure of the Johannesburg Municipality to cope internally with the health problems that its own Department of Non-European Affairs (NEAD) was generating. During the 1930s the work of the MOH had been severely hampered by labour shortages. This was aggravated by the massive housing backlog and rapid rate at which urbanization was taking place, which made attempts at establishing a sanitary infrastructure virtually impossible. An attempt to bring order to the situation was made in 1935 when the Murray Thornton Commission managed to institute some changes in the organizational structure of the Health Department. However, by the end of WW2, the housing shortage was again reaching such proportions that it was not uncommon to find dwellings so overcrowded that one family was being accommodated in each room.
THE INFORMAL HOUSING MOVEMENT
Between 1936 and 1946 Johannesburg's Black population grew by 59% to a total of nearly 400,000. During the same period the comparative growth of the White sector was 29%. However, by the end of the War, the Municipality had only erected 9573 low income housing units and made available 7270 beds in male, single sex, hostels (illustration 17). This means that officially, only some 55,000 persons were being housed in municipal residences. Unofficially, of course, the figure was much higher. 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 settlements sprang up virtually overnight. When the largest of these camps was eventually cleared in 1955, it was found to have housed an estimated 60,000 persons. 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.
Over the years the quality of life available to residents in these areas has become a matter of some debate. Liberal commentators have pointed out, with some reason, to the richness and variety of sub-cultures which existed in places such as Sophiatown. It is true that these informal settlements gave rise to some of this country's most notable Black poets, writers, artists, singers, musicians and political leaders. It is also true, however, that they suffered from a high crime rate, and that residents were generally at the mercy of profiteers, slum-lords, farmers of shacks and any carpet-bagger unscrupulous enough to exploit the despair and plight of others. Richard Rive has pointed out that, contrary to the romantic image that White liberals have painted about District Six, in Cape Town, the residents themselves considered it to have been a slum and often "could not wait to get out". The same sentiments were also expressed by the people of Pageview, or Vietas, prior to the demolition of this area.
Not unnaturally, such conditions also gave rise to a generation of political leaders and socially involved persons who voiced the grievances of Black workers. Patrick Lewis has called them "leaders outside the law" and, in view of subsequent events, it is significant that the City Council of that time found itself powerless to act against them. It was only the coming to power of the Nationalist Party in 1948 which temporarily stilled the voices of legitimate Black protest and forced many of its leaders into exile or jail. The Communist Party was banned in 1952, and following eight years of sustained political protest, the ANC and PAC were also banned in 1960. The formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe the subsequent year marked the beginnings of an armed struggle against White oppression.
Predictably a riot did eventually occur in August 1947 when municipal offices were attacked and threeWhite policemen were killed. The Council's attitude at the time may be best summed up by a memo they submitted to the Governmental Commission of Enquiry into this event. Under the heading of "Fundamental Causes", they claimed that:
"In the submission of the Council, the fundamental cause of the riot is the attitude of mind produced in the urban native population by the series of squatter movements which have occurred in Johannesburg since 1944 and which may best be summarized as one of contempt for authority and for constitutional methods in favour of direct action, however illegal and violent, coupled with growing political and national consciousness of the urban Native population".
Writing some 19 years later, Patrick Lewis, a self-professed liberal and a Johannesburg City Councillor during that period, also attempted to dismiss the social and political realities of the squatter movements. He claimed that their leaders were acting as the agents of financially motivated profiteers and slum lords, a naive assertion which indicates, if nothing else, an ignorance of local housing conditions, and of the needs and aspirations of urban Black residents.
The period between 1939 and 1945 is also significant for it marks a time when the economic and residential make-up of Johannesburg's urban Black population underwent final and irrevocable change. Before WW2 this community was marked by a sizeable component which retained seasonal links to the rural areas. This was owed to the rotational nature of the migrant labour system, which brought rural workers to the city on eleven month contracts and then expected them to return home for a month, until the cycle was repeated the following year. After 1945 the make-up of urban Black society changed to included a greater proportion of children (illustration 18). This indicated a tendency on the part of Black families to sever their rural roots and to establish permanent homes in urban areas. In 1948 the Nationalist Government attempted to reverse this trend by introducing a policy of forced "repatriation" to "independent states" having a predominantly agrarian economic base. This promoted a myth of "rural ethnicity" which sought to deny the existence of an industrial proletariat, a position which the Government only abandoned in the 1980s.
Thus the planning and implementation of urban housing programmes 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 the homeless 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. The concrete-roofed houses of Jabavu, or "White City", are an example of one such project. Almost inevitably these have also become permanent in nature and, in time, have degraded to the point of becoming unfit for habitation. 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 homeless families 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 Johannesburg's mining companies, most specifically Sir Ernest Oppenheimer of 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, 40 houses per day were being handed over for occupation by the Housing Division, and by 1969 a total of 65,564 houses had been built in Soweto alone (illustration).
The houses were built as the result of research conducted by the National Building Research Institute (NBRI) between 1948 and 1951. Although this project is generally considered to have been the result of group effort, much of it revolved around the ideas of Douglas Calderwood, a young architect working at the NBRI at the time. He subsequently incorporated his work into two academic dissertations for which he was awarded a MArch and, later, a PhD, by the Department of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand (illustration). The dwellings were probably designed by Barrie Biermann, another young architect employed by the NBRI at the time, who has since become better known for his research in Cape Dutch architecture. Biermann's knowledge of the Cape vernacular is evident from the plan of the average Soweto house, a four-roomed unit which resembled a double- pile lang huis. It became generally known as the NE 51/6, where "NE" stood for Non-European, "51" was 1951, the year of Calderwood's doctoral thesis, and "6" was the drawing's number in the thesis (illustration). Other designs included the NE 51/7, consisting of a pair of semi-detached NE 51/6s (illustration), and the NE 51/9, a slightly larger version of the NE 51/6 with an internal bathroom (illustration 22). In later years Johannesburg's Housing Division also evolved their own versions of the NE 51/9, which they called the "Type L" (illustration 23) and the "Type M" (illustrations 24 and 25) respectively. Few of these, however, are known to have ever been built.
These designs, however, should not be read in isolation 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."
Jansen, who went on to become Governor-General of the Union of South Africa, was, in many ways, echoing the sentiments of previous colonial governments. In 1894, during the planning stages of Vrededorp and the nearby Malay Location, for example, President Kruger is reputed to have slashed the size of plots down to 250 sq ft, claiming that:
"Ek sal hulle nie plase gee nie, maar net sitplekke". (I will not give them farms, but only places to squat)
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 NE 51/6 included two bedrooms, a lounge and a kitchen beneath a simple, end-gabled ridged roof. Rudimentary toilet facilities were provided in a separate external WC located to the rear of the stand. The walls were 150mm wide, usually constructed out of cement-ash blocks laid on a minimal 75mm concrete foundation, and roofed over with asbestos-cement fibre corrugated sheeting. There were no ceilings or internal doors, and costs were budgeted at about £250 per unit. Although building was conducted by a number of contractors, the major share of the work fell upon Roberts Construction, while the main suppliers of materials were the South African Rapid Block Company for the blocks, and Everite for the roof sheeting (illustration 20).
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. Houses were detached and each was set on its own plot of land (illustration 26).
The idealism of the planners however, was offset by the unavoidable fact that Soweto was the brainchild of racist and segregationist thinking. This manifested itself in a number of ways:
- When the residents of informal settlements were forcibly resettled in Soweto, there was no attempt to respect existing social structures and neighbourhood units. Instead these were deliberately split up, seemingly as an act of bureaucratic terrorism aimed at breaking the spirit of the community.
- Vehicular access to Soweto was limited to three major arterial routes and one small gravel road. The intention here was to restrict movement in and out of the area in times of civil insurgency.
- Many of the older suburbs of Soweto, such as Orlando East and Meadowlands, were laid out on a "honeycomb" pattern. Calderwood tells that this was done on the specific instructions of Hendrik Verwoerd, then Minister of Native Affairs and acknowledged architect of "grand Apartheid". The intention here was to locate police stations and nests of machine-guns at the hubs in order to control any potential civil insurrections (pers com, 1966). In many ways this attitude is a continuation of the philosophy which created radially-planned, single-sex compounds on the gold mines (illustration 27).
- Soweto was also divided into "ethnically" predetermined suburbs separated by open pieces of veld, on the assumption that if the various "tribal groups" were not set physically apart, they would be at each others throats at the slightest provocation.
- No provisions were made for the creation of business districts, or for the establishment of industrial and manufacturing areas. There was no intention of allowing Soweto to break its "company store" relationship with White Johannesburg.
- Stands were kept deliberately small and of an uniform size to prevent any distinctions arising between professional and working classes.
- Most of the open spaces, designated as "green" areas on town planning maps, were no more than utopian dreams included for liberal public consumption which the government had little intention of realising. In virtually every case these have remained open pieces of undeveloped veld, dumping grounds for car wrecks and havens for vagrants and criminals.
One of the more lunatic proposals put forward by the newly elected Nationalist Government in 1948 would have located Soweto, or whatever its name might then have become, near Newcastle, in Natal. The theory then was that high-speed trains (as yet to be invented) would have commuted workers into Johannesburg on a daily basis. In spite its final location in proximity to Johannesburg, the Nationalist Government never intended Soweto to be anything other than a temporary dormitory suburb. The name "Soweto" itself is little more than a cold acronym, invented by a faceless apartheid bureaucrat to denote the words "South Western Township".
The growth and development of Soweto may be summed up by the tabulation below. The year refers to the date of the suburb's declaration; the population and housing figures reflect the numbers as they stood on 30 June 1964. This data has been drawn from official NEAD reports of that time.
TOWNSHIP YEAR POPULATION HOUSING
Pimville 1906 29,088 1,232
Eastern Native Township 1926 3,968 627
Orlando 1930 65,593 11,314
Jabavu 1948 25,468 5,100
Dube 1948 12,727 1,957
Mofolo 1954 28,284 4,543
Central Western Jabavu 1954 25,468 1,432
Moroka North 1955 15,207 2,693
Molapo 1956 8,188 1,466
Moletsane 1956 10,360 1,962
Tladi 1956 10,000 1,860
Dhlamini 1956 9,015 1,422
Tshiawelo (Chiawelo) 1956 20,152 3,989
Zondi 1956 8,861 1,548
Phiri 1956 11,332 2,190
Mapetla 1956 11,476 2,105
Jabulani 1956 11,721 2,039
Naledi 1956 19,923 4,043
Senaoane 1958 8,732 1,511
Zola 1958 30,630 5,572
Emdeni 1958 11,680 2,298
TOTAL 360 994 60,902
Many of Soweto's suburbs also owe their birth to the destruction of other Black residential areas, such as Western Native, Eastern Native, Sophiatown and the Moroka informal settlement. Each of these, in its own time, represented a pocket of political resistance against White racism and segregationist ideology. Each was destroyed in its turn, willfully and systematically, by a governmental bureaucracy bent upon breaking down existing social structures and democratic political movements. Resettlement was therefore used as a political weapon, deliberately dispersing neighbourhood units and support groups, separating families and neighbours, as a means of maximising the shocks of removal and dispossession. Soweto is the spawn of apartheid, and its location, planning and architecture serve as constant reminders of this fact to its residents.
After 1963 Municipal housing activities in Soweto began to wind down and after 1969 these came to a virtual standstill. In 1973 the West Rand Administration Board (WRAB) took over the control and day-to-day administration of Soweto from the Johannesburg's NEAD. However, by 1976, housing had, once again, become a major political issue in Johannesburg's lack community. This may be ascribed to a number of factors, including:
- WRAB's failure since 1973 to provide additional "official" housing in Soweto.
- WRAB's refusal to conduct, or even condone, maintenance work upon their own houses.
- WRAB's continued use of former municipal liquor outlets and beer halls as a means of funding the implementation of an apartheid infrastructure (illustration 17).
- Central Government's obsessive attempts to implement a policy of separate "homeland" development, which sought to decentralise industry and remove all Blacks residents of urban areas to a series of euphemistically-named "self-governing states". The intention was to make all urban blacks "temporary residents" and, at one stage or another, resettle them, with or without their own permission, to an "ethnically" predetermined rural area. Their "temporary" status gave their housing needs low priority, and governmental funds for new house construction were only made available to those who voluntarily endorsed themselves out of their urban area. This scheme is recorded to have suited some elderly persons wishing to retire on pension, but few others are known to have availed themselves of this opportunity.
- Because all urban Blacks were regarded as being "temporary", applications for the construction of privately-funded housing in black-designated suburbs were not entertained.
- For the same reason, residents of these areas were also not permitted to gain ownership of their properties. This failure to grant residents security of tenure discouraged even basic, self-initiated, maintenance work upon existing housing units. This resulted in a steady degradation of existing urban environments. Although attempts were made in the early 1980s to implement a scheme permitting a limited 30-year tenure, this was resisted politically by residents who opted for an "all or nothing" attitude. As a result, less than 10% of homes in Johannesburg's Black suburbs are known to have been purchased under this dispensation.
Although the 1976 Soweto student uprising was sparked off primarily by dissatisfaction with current standards of Black education, popular grievances with local housing conditions were important lateral issues in the conflict that ensued.
Soweto's next stage of development also begins in 1976, and coincides with the inauguration of the Urban Foundation. This is an agency funded by the private business sector for the specific purpose of conducting housing and development work in Black urban areas. As a result of its involvement, a number of major housing and community projects were undertaken. Among the first was the provision of an electrical infrastructure over the area, a project which was not initiated out of civic altruism, but out of a necessity to reduce current levels of air pollution over Johannesburg as a whole. Much of this can be traced back to Soweto's innumerable wood fires, most particularly in winter when local temperature inversions and southerly winds combine to carry these fumes northward to Johannesburg's White residential suburbs.
During the early 1980s conditions regarding the construction of privately funded housing were relaxed, allowing banks and building societies to enter the Black housing market. This, together with the availability of small pockets of land, have allowed a modest amount of middle income housing activity to take place. However normal population expansion, an existing housing backlog, and the relaxation of rural influx laws ensured that the housing crisis remained as pressing as it had been forty years ago. As a result informal settlements once again began to develop in such places as Kliptown, and on White-owned farms bordering on Soweto. The majority of shack dwellers could not afford conventional housing of any kind, and their needs were not being met by either government, Urban Foundation or the private sector. The result was been the creation of yet another housing emergency.
By the 1980s Soweto appeared to be reaching yet another stage in its development. With the Government's homeland policy coming to a predictable standstill, the status of the urban black community is under constant revision. The initial emergency, based upon a shortage of basic sanitary infrastructural needs, had now been met. Since 1966 however, little progress had been made to meet other community needs, such as security of tenure and land control. The next emergency, therefore, began to focus upon such issues as access to land, and the redistribution of resources, thus being part of a wider social and political debate having implications for South Africa as a whole. Soweto was now estimated to have reached optimum lateral growth and, during the early 1980s, plans for high rise residential development were mooted.
An important factor in the development of Johannesburg's Black residential sector was the promulgation of influx control regulations governing the movement of rural residents into urban areas. This legislation was repealed in 1983 and is now generally considered to have failed, for although it probably retarded urban drift, it did not altogether stop it. Ultimately it proved to be a purely prohibitive measure which did nothing to promote a parallel programme of rural development, or to encourage farmers to remain on their land. No matter how overcrowded facilities have become in the city, these were deemed to be preferable to the poverty, squalor and even starvation of a rural and overcrowded "homeland". Thus overcrowded housing conditions did not become a deterrent to urban migration; but were stoically accepted as unavoidable components of daily urban life. The 1974 census established that the Black population of Johannesburg was 741,094 persons, but officials have admitted that, because of the Influx Control Laws, the "lie factor" could have been at least 30%. Other authorities, however, have estimated this error to be as high as 60%. This means that, by the mid-1970s, Johannesburg's Black population was over 1,2m persons.
The provision of road and rail services to Johannesburg's Black suburban residential areas underwent considerable improvement during the 1980s, but still remained inadequate to cope with the needs of their residents. Even then it was becoming obvious that the urban planning concepts being applied to the Black residential sector would have to undergo serious reevaluation in order to separate them from their historical racist and separatist intent.
OTHER BLACK SUBURBS
Many of the Black residential areas closest to White suburbia have undergone radical change since the 1950's. The original residents of Western Native Township have long relocated to Soweto. In the 1950s it was rezoned under the Group Areas Act, renamed Western Coloured Township and given over to Coloured occupation. By the 1980s it had undergone extensive redevelopment and has since been incorporated into a wider grouping of Coloured suburbs, including Bosmont, Newclare, Coronationville and Claremont. The provision of official housing specifically for Coloureds did not begin until 1937 when Coronationville was established. Noordgesig followed in 1940, but with the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in 1950, it was consolidated with Newclare into a sector for the exclusive occupation of Coloured families.
Sophiatown, one of Johannesburg's original Black suburbs, was gradually transformed, and by the 1950s had become a mixed area inhabited by all races, becoming a symbol of how a non-racial South Africa could be made to work. This was not something which the Nationalist government could permit at a time when its programmes of social engineering and racial segregation were in their initial stages of implementation. Therefore, in 1955, its land was rezoned for White occupation, its houses were bulldozed to the ground, and the area was redeveloped as a White residential suburb. Ironically, its new name was Triomf, an Afrikaans term used deliberately to signify the triumph of the White Afrikaner race over the forces of liberalism and miscegenation.
Until a few years ago Alexandria was one of the last remaining suburbs on the Witwatersrand where Black families retained the right to own land. During the 1960s and 1970s it underwent a period of indecision and anxiety regarding its future for it seemed that the whole area would be redeveloped as a series of gigantic, single-sex hostels. After a long legal and political battle involving citizens of Johannesburg from all walks of life, this community won the right to remain on its own land. By the 1980s the suburb had entered into a process of renewal as many of its older parts were slowly being upgraded or rebuilt.
By then, also, Eastern Native Township survived only as a municipal single-sex hostel.
Johannesburg's Indian community can probably be described as having two major components belonging respectively to the Hindu, and the Muslim faiths. The latter also includes a small "Malay" contingent, descendants of slaves imported to the Cape by the Dutch during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many instances, however, such distinctions are invidious and difficult to maintain, most specifically when dealing with historical records which make reference to "Malays", "Indians", "Coolies" or even just "Asiatics". It is not known whether the last two also included Chinese in their definition. In such cases therefore it becomes well-nigh impossible to establish which group is being referred to and thus the discussion which follows must be seen to be highly generalised and incomplete.
Persons of "Indian" origin have been residents of the Reef since its earliest days and their presence probably played an important role in the development of Johannesburg's CBD. When the mining camp's first stands were auctioned off in December 1886, plots located in the central area were reserved forWhite ownership. However Indians were permitted to purchase erven on the outskirts, which were deemed to be less favourably located. This permitted the development of a small business and residential component which in later years became known as the Diagonal Street area.
It would appear that by 1897 a sizeable Indian community had also grown up in what had become known as the Coolie Location, a portion of the Brickfields adjoining the Kaffir Location, where many of them ran Native Concession stores. It is probable that, following the plague scare of 1904, when all residents of Brickfields, Black and White, were removed to Klipspruit, this community became divided. One section chose to settle near the health camp, continuing with their concession stores and forming the core of what was to become the Kliptown business centre. The other chose to return to the central area with its thriving commercial district.
A third Indian or, more likely Malay, community also made their homes immediately to the north and west of the Brickfields. A map of Johannesburg for 1897 refers to it simply as a "Location", although other sources have also described it as the "Malay Location". In later years it was to become known as Pageview, although most Johannesburg residents knew it as Vrededorp or, more simply, as Vietas. This area was extensively damaged by the Braamfontein dynamite explosion of 1896, as a result of which it had to be rebuilt. However it does not appear to have been involved in the plague scare eight years later. The character and demographic composition of this suburb changed considerably between 1900 and the 1960s, when its original Malay residents slowly gave way to Indian, and predominantly Muslim families. The mechanics of this changeover are not clear, but would appear to center on the Malay custom of conducting large, and hence expensive, weddings. As a result of this, many Malay families entered into debt with Indian businessmen and forfeited their properties when they failed to meet their repayments. In the late 1970s, Pageview was rezoned as a White suburb. Its residents were then forced out, their properties were expropriated, demolished, and redeveloped as low-income housing for White occupation.
As the result of the ZAR's Gold Laws, which prohibited persons of colour from owning land in areas which might be gold-bearing, small pockets of Indian residence were also created on the fringes of suburbs such as Doornfontein, New Doornfontein and Fordsburg. When Johannesburg spread further east and west, these groups were incorporated into the urban fabric of the new suburbs. Although, in time, these areas developed a predominantly White, working class character, their Indian residents managed to retain their homes until the 1980s. This did not take place without some degree of White resistance which, in some cases, became quite voluble. In Vrededorp, for example, White residents were agitating for the removal of their Malay and Indian neighbours in Pageview from as early as the 1920s. It is ironic to note that, when the two groups were still residing alongside each other in the late 1970s, it was the Indian families who would not permit their children to fraternize with local Whites, considering them to be ill-mannered and hence a bad influence upon their education.
Since the 1950s the expansion of Johannesburg's CBD and the government's implementation of Group Areas legislation has forced many Indian residents out of their homes in the central city. As a result, in 1955, a suburb for the exclusive use of Indians was established some 32km south of Johannesburg, near the Lenz military camp. Its name, Lenasia, was probably derived by combining the names "Lenz" and "Asian". The originator of this literary gem has never been identified. Although Indian families were at first unwilling to relocate to this remote location, government pressure and decreasing residential options in central Johannesburg ensured the gradual development of Lenasia. In time the suburb grew to an extent that, by the 1980s, land was no longer available. This has forced many persons employed in Johannesburg to either make their homes illegally in White suburbs like Mayfair, or to seek residence further afield in places such as Laudium, in Pretoria. The removal of Indian families from Pageview only served to aggravate this situation. It has also meant that, in many cases, industrious and relatively affluent Indian families fortunate enough to find a White landlord "altruistic" enough to break the law on their behalf, have also been forced to pay exorbitant rents for the privilege of having a roof over their heads.
CONCLUSIONS
Development of Johannesburg's Black residential sector has taken place predominantly to the south of the CBD. The initial reasons for this do not appear to have been the outcome of deliberate policy decisions so much as a series of historical and geographical coincidences. Certainly areas south of the Braamfontein ridge have always been considered to be colder, more windy, and hence less desirable for residential purposes than land to its north. This was aggravated by the growth of a mining industrial belt and the ensuing dust pollution which it generated. However Soweto's present location is the result of the plague scare of 1904. This allowed the authorities to resettle the bulk of Johannesburg's Black community to the Klipspruit health camp where water and sewage facilities were readily available. Circumstances dictated that these were located south of the town, but they could just as easily have been to its north. The subsequent development of an industrial and mining belt along the Reef also made it sensible to erect any new worker housing south of this line.
Faced with this set of self-reinforcing elements, it is probable that Johannesburg's early town planners and subsequent Apartheid bureaucrats found their decisions easy to make. Given the segregationist mind-set of most people at that time, it would not have concerned them over-much that the town's southern areas were remote and not as comfortable as their northern counterparts. In this way the planners continued to pile one disadvantage upon the next until they created a physical and material gulf between the affluent northern suburbs and the indigent south, a gap which persists to present times. Read individually the negative factors mean little; taken as a whole they create a damning indictment of White Johannesburg. The first Black township was built on the structurally unsound soil of a rubbish dump; Klipspruit was the site of a sewage works, with all its attendant smells; Soweto is remote from town and for many years was poorly served by transport; little housing was provided until 1951; the south is cold, windy and subject to twisters, temperature inversions, violent thundershowers and hail storms; the area is heavily undermined and prone to wall-cracking earth tremors; land in some parts is given to heaving clay and is therefore expensive to build upon. This list is long and by no means complete.
There is no doubt that then, as now, economics have played a major role in the planning process. The initial purchase price for land in Soweto, for example, was R16 per acre, a figure considered to be low even by standards of that time. Until recently Soweto was still regarded as a "temporary" dormitory town and families who were resettled there in the 1950s were generally not in an economic position to acquire homes or land outright. Thus their housing was 100% subsidised and had to be economical out of necessity. The questions of social justice, and of a moral partnership between White capital and Black labour had yet to impinge upon Johannesburg's civic consciousness.
POSTSCRIPT
This paper is an offspring of another paper entitled The Spatial Geography of Urban Apartheid. AFTER APARTHEID: Vol 2, CULTURE IN THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA. Editors Robert Kriger and Abebe Zegeye, 2001. 65-90. It has never been published in this format, and its development ceased in about 1986, when I migrated from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth. For this reason, I have not given my bibliographical sources. As a result some of its narrative has since become a little dated, although events described before the 1980s I believe to be historically accurate. Perhaps, one of these days, I will get around to completing it in the time-honoured academic manner, but, until then, I offer it in its present form, for the use of my colleagues.