Soweto () is a township of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in Gauteng, South Africa and one of the suburbs of Johannesburg, bordering the city's mining belt in the south. Its name is an English syllabic abbreviation for South Western Townships.Pirie, G.H. Letters, words, worlds: the naming of Soweto. African Studies, 43 (1984), 43–51. Formerly a separate municipality, it was incorporated in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in 2002.
History George Harrison and George Walker are today credited as the men who discovered an outcrop of the Main Reef of gold on the farm Langlaagte in February 1886.MJ Viljoen and WU Reimold, "An Introduction to South Africa's Geological and Mining Heritage", Mintek, Randburg, 1999 The fledgling town of Johannesburg was laid out on a triangular wedge of "uitvalgrond" (area excluded when the farms were surveyed) named Randjeslaagte, situated between the farms Doornfontein to the east, Braamfontein to the west and Turffontein to the south.
Within a decade of the discovery of gold in Johannesburg, 100,000 people flocked to this part of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek in search of riches. They were of many races and nationalities.Cammack, D., The Rand at War, University of Natal Press, 1990, p. 1. In October 1887, the government of the South African Republic (ZAR) bought the south-eastern portion of the farm Braamfontein. There were large quantities of clay, suitable for brickmaking, along the stream. The government decided that more money was to be made from issuing brick maker's licences at five shillings per month.E.L.P. Stals (editor), Afrikaners in die Goudstad, Hollandsche Afrikaansche Uitgevers, Pretoria, 1978, p. 51 The result was that many landless Dutch-speaking burghers (citizens) of the ZAR settled on the property and started making bricks. They also erected their shacks there. Soon, the area was known either Brickfields or Veldschoendorp.Stals, supra, p. 52. Soon other working poor, Coloureds, Indians and Africans also settled there. The government, which sought to differentiate the white working class from the black, laid out new suburbs for the Burghers (Whites), Coolies (Indians), Malays (Coloureds) and Black Africans (Africans), but the whole area simply stayed multiracial.Cammack, supra, p. 9. Terms used then are now regarded as offensive.
Soweto was created in the 1930s, when the White government started separating Blacks from Whites, to create black "townships". Blacks were moved away from Johannesburg, to an area separated from White suburbs by a so-called cordon sanitaire (or sanitary corridor) which was usually a river, railway track, industrial area or highway. This was carried out using the infamous Urban Areas Act of 1923.
William Carr, chair of non-European affairs, initiated the naming of Soweto in 1949. He called for a competition to give a collective name to townships dotted around the South-west of Johannesburg. People responded to this competition with great enthusiasm. Among the names suggested to the city council was KwaMpanza, meaning Mpanza's place, invoking the name of Mpanza and his role in bringing the plight of Orlando sub tenants to the attention of the city council. The city council settled for the acronym SOWETO (South West Townships). The name Soweto was first used in 1963 and within a short period of time, following the 1976 uprising of students in the township, the name became internationally known.
Soweto became the largest Black city in South Africa, but until 1976, its population could have status only as temporary residents, serving as a workforce for Johannesburg. It experienced civil unrest during the Apartheid regime. There were serious riots in 1976, sparked by a ruling that Afrikaans be used in African schools there; the riots were violently suppressed, with 176 students killed and more than 1,000 injured. Reforms followed, but riots flared up again in 1985 and continued until the first non-racial elections were held in April 1994. In 2010, South Africa's oldest township hosted the FIFA World Cup Final and the attention of more than a billion soccer spectators from all over the world was focused on Soweto.
Kliptown and Pimville
In April 1904, there was a bubonic plague scare in the shanty town area of Brickfields. The town council decided to condemn the area and burn it down. Beforehand, most of the Africans living there were moved far out of town to the farm Klipspruit (later called Pimville), south-west of Johannesburg, where the council had erected iron barracks and a few triangular hutments. The rest of them had to build their own shacks. The fire brigade then set the 1600 shacks and shops in Brickfields alight. Thereafter, the area was redeveloped as Newtown.John R Shorten, The Saga of Johannesburg, John R Shorten (Pty) Limited, Johannesburg, 1970, p. 240. Pimville was next to Kliptown, the oldest Black residential district of Johannesburg and first laid out in 1891, on land which formed part of Klipspruit farm. The future Soweto was to be laid out on Klipspruit and the adjoining farm called Diepkloof.
In the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and the subsequent Transvaal Colony, it was lawful for people of colour to own fixed property.Tshewu v Registrar of Deeds, 1905 T.S. 130. Consequently, the township of Sophiatown was laid out in 1903 and Blacks were encouraged to buy property there. For the same reasons, Alexandra, Gauteng was planned for Black ownership in 1912. The subsequent Natives Land Act of 1913 did not change the situation because it did not apply to land situated within municipal boundaries.Natives Land Act, No. 27 of 1913, section 8(1)(g) & (i).
Orlando, Moroka and Jabavu In 1923, the Parliament of the Union of South Africa passed the Natives (Urban Areas) Act. The purpose of the Act was to provide for improved conditions of residence for natives in urban areas, to control their ingress into such areas and to restrict their access to intoxicating liquor. The Act required local authorities to provide accommodation for Natives (then the polite term for Africans or Blacks) lawfully employed and resident within the area of their jurisdiction. Pursuant to this Act, the Johannesburg town council formed a Municipal Native Affairs Department in 1927. It bought 1 300 morgen of land on the farm Klipspruit No. 8 and the first houses in what was to become Orlando Location were built there in the latter half of 1930. The township was named after the chairman of the Native Affairs committee, Mr. Edwin Orlando Leake.French, Kevin John, James Mpanza and the Sofasonke Party in the development of local politics in Soweto, unpublished M.A. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1983, p. 28. In the end, some 10,311 houses were built there by the municipality. In addition, it built 4,045 temporary single-room shelters.Stark, Felix, Seventy Golden Years, 1886–1956, Municipal Public Relations Bureau, 1956, p. 525.
In about 1934, James Sofasonke Mpanza moved to 957 Pheele Street, Orlando, and lived there for the rest of his life.French, supra, p. 37. A year after his arrival in Orlando, he formed his own political party, the Sofasonke Party. He also became very active in the affairs of the Advisory Board for Orlando.French, supra, p. 45. Towards the end of World War II, there was an acute shortage of housing for Blacks in Johannesburg. By the end of 1943, the Sofasonke Party advised its members to put up their own squatters' shacks on municipal property.French, supra, p.67. On Saturday 25 March 1944, the squat began. Hundreds of homeless people from Orlando and elsewhere joined Mpanza in marching to a vacant lot in Orlando West and starting a squatters camp.French, supra, p. 78. The city council's resistance crumbled. After feverish consultations with the relevant government department, it was agreed that an emergency camp, which could house 991 families, be erected. It was to be called Central Western Jabavu. The next wave of land invasions took place in September 1946. Some 30,000 squatters congregated west of Orlando. Early the next year, the city council proclaimed a new emergency camp. It was called Moroka. 10,000 sites were made available immediately.Bonner, Philip & Segal, Lauren, Soweto – A History, Maskew Miller Longman, 1998, p.27. Moroka became Johannesburg's worst slum area. Residents erected their shanties on plots measuring six metres by six metres. There were only communal bucket-system toilets and very few taps. The camps were meant to be used for a maximum of five years, but when they were eventually demolished in 1955, Moroka and Jabavu housed 89,000 people.Bonner & Segal, supra, p. 27.
Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital In 1941, the British Government built a military hospital next to the road between Johannesburg and Potchefstroom. The place was to be at the 8th milestone near the old Wayside Inn, owned by a Cornishman called John Albert Baragwanath. It was called The Imperial Military Hospital, Baragwanath. After the war, the Transvaal Provincial Administration bought the hospital for £1 million. On 1 April 1948, the Black section of Johannesburg Hospital (known as Non-European Hospital or NEH) was transferred to Baragwanath Hospital. In 1997, the facility was renamed Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital after former General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, Chris Hani.
Apartheid The National Party won the general election of 1948 and formed a new government. The party's policy was called apartheid, the Afrikaans word meaning separateness. They thought they could separate the various racial groups in South Africa. In those days, the Johannesburg City Council did not support the National Party. The city council and the central government competed to control the Black townships of Johannesburg.
1948 to 1976 Following the election of the new government, some 7,000 new houses were built in the first two or three years, but very little was done thereafter. In 1952, there was a breakthrough. Firstly, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research came up with a standard design for low-cost, four-roomed, forty-square-metre houses. In 1951, the Parliament passed the Building Workers Act, which permitted Blacks to be trained as artisans in the building trade. In 1952, it passed the Bantu Services Levy Act, which imposed a levy on employers of African workers and the levy was used to finance basic services in Black townships.Bonner & Segal, supra, p.28. In 1954, the City Council built 5,100 houses in Jabavu and 1,450 in Mofolo.Stark, supra, p. 527.
The city council's pride and joy was its economic scheme known as Dube Village. It was intended "primarily for the thoroughly urbanised and economically advanced Native". Stands, varying in size from fifty by hundred feet to forty by 70 feet, were made available on a thirty-year leasehold tenure. Tenants could erect their own dwellings in conformity with approved plans.
In June 1955, Kliptown was the home of an unprecedented Congress of the People, which adopted the Freedom Charter.
From the onset, the Apartheid government purposed Soweto to house the bulk of the labour force which was needed by Johannesburg. Africans used to live in areas surrounding the city, so the authorities felt it would be more expedient to concentrate black workers in one district that could be easily controlled.