Soweto, by Peter Magubane and Charlene Smith

Soweto, by Peter Magubane and Charlene Smith. Struik Publishers. Cape Town. South Africa, 2001. ISBN 1868725847

According to a Zulu proverb two people are always better than one: they are interdependent, as Johannesburg and Soweto are. This is on Soweto, by Peter Magubane and Charlene Smith.

Less than a century ago, Soweto did not exist. "Today's smoky stretch of densely packed people was just another patch of highveld, and few could have predicted the worldwide impact and historical significance that it was to have in the future. With the discovery of gold in 1886, Johannesburg grew rapidly and haphazardly. It was a wild town of few rules, its economy, ever hungry for cheap labour, dominated by gold, liquor and prostitution. Rural black people flocked to the town, some driven by the introduction of taxes that had to be paid, others drawn by the glinting prospect of wealth. Black men entered short-term contracts on the mines, leaving their families in rural areas while they lived in single-sex barracks on mining property. They also came to supply the other needs of the fledgling town, braving the squalor of the racially mixed slums around the city centre. In 1904, plague spread among the black residents of Vrededorp, one such suburb hugging the centre of Johannesburg, to the west of its produce market and abattoir. Seeing this as an opportunity to clear out the slums, the Johannesburg Town Council forced the ill to move to a sewage farm more than 10 kilo-metres to the south-west of Johannesburg. Here they lived in corrugated iron sewage tanks that had been sawn in half (43 years later those people were still living in the tanks). Klipspruit, as this new area was called, was the seed of Soweto, becoming the location of Pimville. The Land Act was introduced in 1913, dispossessing many black people of their land and increasing the now steady flow of migrants to Johannesburg. By the early 1920s there were more than 20,000 black people living in and around the city, the number doubling before the end of the decade. Despite their efforts, the town council was unsuccessful in keeping black people from living in the city centre. The council did not possess the finances to set up housing elsewhere for evicted inner-city black people, something that they were obliged by law to do. A change of law and an upswing in the gold price appeared to solve their problem; in 1931, a new area of low-cost housing was created for black people near Johannesburg. Orlando, named after Councillor Edwin Orlando Leake, the first chairman of the Native Affairs Committee, was close to Pimville, the two later forming the heart of Soweto. Between 1936 and 1946, the black population of Johannesburg increased by more than 100,000, the Second World War having a major impact on urbanisation. Many more people facing poverty and land confiscation moved to the cities with their families. Yet the council built fewer than 4,000 houses for black people during this time, a trend the apartheid government would continue. The rationale was that, if houses were not built for black people, who were not allowed to build in 'white' areas, they would eventually return to rural areas. Orlando rapidly became a sprawl of backyard shanties, as new-comers had no option but to rent space in the yards of those with houses. In 1944, an Orlando local, James 'Sofasonke' Mpanza gave up petitioning the Johannesburg Town Council for more houses for black people and led a large group of protesters from Orlando to erect shacks on open municipal land in an area that was to become Orlando West. Soon 25,000 shanties had sprung up. [...]

This is an excerpt from Soweto, by Peter Magubane and Charlene Smith.

Title: Soweto
Authors: Peter Magubane; Charlene Smith
Struik Publishers
Cape Town. South Africa, 2001
ISBN 1868725847
Softcover, 21 x 28 cm, 160 pages, throughout bw- and colour photos