But problems with unemployment, poverty, and AIDS present huge challenges for the government. In northern South Africa near Johannesburg, there is a cave formation called the Sterkfontein.
Within these caves, archaeologists have uncovered some of the earliest human fossils ever found. Some are more than two million years old.
The find earned the region the nickname "Cradle of Humankind. About 24, years ago, tribes of hunter-gatherers known as the San, or Bushmen, began moving into South Africa. Many San still live, much as their ancestors did, around the Kalahari Desert in the northwest. In the s, European ships heading to the Far East began stopping on the South African coast for supplies.
In , the Netherlands established the southern city of Cape Town, and Dutch farmers, called Boers, began settling in the areas around the city. In , wars in Europe left the British in control of the Cape Town colony. In , the British united four colonies in the region and created South Africa. They established laws that separated whites from black South Africans, a practice of segregation called apartheid, which led to decades of conflict.
In , Nelson Mandela, head of the anti-apartheid African National Congress, was given a life sentence in jail for "terrorist" activities. In , after 27 years behind bars, he was freed by President F. In , Mandela was elected president of South Africa and served until All rights reserved. Personality Quizzes. Funny Fill-In. Amazing Animals. Forced removals also took place from the Western Areas, after they were declared white group areas, and their Black residents were transferred to Meadowlands fig.
Whereas the preceding statement might give an impression of benevolence on the side of the state, that would be misleading. Rentals were charged for the sites and built accommodation, and defaulters were evicted.
In the Natives Urban Areas Act and other repressive Acts that related to Blacks in urban areas were grouped together in the Natives Urban Areas Consolidation Act, which was then amended from time to time Horrell, In terms of the provisions of this Act and its forerunner, the income-earning opportunities for self-employed Black people in the "townships" between and were severely restricted. There were only seven categories of self-employed businesses they could engage in, namely, general dealerships, "native" eating-houses, restaurants, milkshops, butcheries, greengrocers, and hawking, and then only in the townships.
The numbers of businesses that would be allowed in each township were, in any event, controlled and very limited Beavon, , p. Furthermore, occupation of a house in Soweto would in future be possible only if the occupier had worked continuously for one employer for 10 years. If the occupier took a job in another town, say somewhere on the Witwatersrand other than in Johannesburg, then their residence rights in Soweto could be placed in jeopardy Hlope, , p.
As such, the townships of Soweto grew by accretions and additions see fig. By the mids, when a generation of children who had been born and raised under apartheid lived in the south-western townships, the total population was estimated to be between 1 and 1. Occupancy of a typical "matchbox" house was put in the range of 7 Shuenyane et al.
The townships of Soweto soon belied the claim by National Party politicians that apartheid was a policy of "separate but equal. In addition, houses in those areas were assigned seriatim and so friendship ties and income, if not class differences, typical even in working-class white areas were not catered for. The dearth of permitted self-employment opportunities and restrictive licensing meant that there was a corresponding dearth of shops and services within the townships.
Consequently "illegal" or pirate dairies and butcheries operated in houses to the detriment of public health, and there were large numbers of hawkers offering foodstuffs for sale, particularly in the vicinity of transportation stopping points and termini Beavon and Rogerson, There were only two hotels and two cinemas Morris, , p.
Roads were unpaved and public open space was covered by coarse veld grass if it was covered at all. There was virtually no reticulation of electric power and only 20 per cent of houses were linked to the supply system by Morris, , p. Residents, therefore, not only were forced to shop in the white city but of necessity had to burn wood and coal for heating and cooking purposes.
As a result, in the early mornings and evenings the whole area would be covered in thick acrid smoke. The inhospitable environment, together with poverty, and aggravated by unemployment, was reflected in the infant mortality rates, which by were Rates of malnutrition and tuberculosis were also high in Soweto.
Wages were low and on average only one-third of those earned by whites Bureau of Market Research, In addition, restricted income-earning opportunities made ownership of a motor car almost impossible. Whereas car ownership amongst whites was 1. The result was that virtually all the working adults were dependent upon the slow, unreliable public transport system that had insufficient capacity to get them punctually to their places of work in what was now officially a white city.
With the all too visible and increasing differences between the comfortable and affluent lifestyles of white Johannesburg and black Soweto, and increasing resolve by organized black political groups to get rid of apartheid, it is surprising that the Soweto revolt of did not occur earlier. The uprising could have been ignited by any one of a number of privations and measures such as those cited above. When it came, the spark of revolt was dissatisfaction with Afrikaans-medium teaching in some of the schools: the first wave of confrontation in the streets on 16 June was led by schoolchildren and the first mortal casualty was Hector Petersen, a year-old schoolboy Kane-Berman, Although the Soweto revolt was followed by similar upheavals in many parts of the country, prompting the government to declare a general state of emergency, those matters fall outside the focus of this chapter.
What is important to note is that the uprising severely jolted the government and prodded it into a programme of urban reform, based on freedom of movement for urban workers without impairing their residence rights, as would have been the case before. Just prior to the events of 16 June , the state, in response to demands from Black leaders that their people should be free to do business in the Black townships, had lifted restrictions on the variety of self-employment activities open to Blacks from 7 to a paltry Following the uprising, and in an attempt to make reformist concessions while attempting to demonstrate its resolve that it would not capitulate to Black demands in general, the state increased the categories of self-employment allowed in the townships to 65, but then, realizing that such petty restrictions were pointless, it removed all of them by the end of Beavon, , a.
Theoretically, Black residential areas could now have the same range of businesses and services as occurred in the white suburban shopping centres and downtown. That said, however, the 44 years of severe limitations inevitably meant that Black entrepreneurs had been considerably disadvantaged in terms of developing businesses and business practices. Thus the dearth of business facilities in the townships could not be overcome overnight.
Significantly, however, reform in the realm of the taxi industry was to see the extremely limited number of licensed taxis in the form of mini-buses rise to 1. More noteworthy amongst the reforms was the acceptance that Blacks residing in the urban areas of South Africa would henceforth be there legally and permanently Hart, In the case of Soweto, plans were made to step up electrification of the suburb and improve the services.
Yet at the same time the state tightened up its influx controls Hindson, and attempted to accelerate its Bantustan programme of development by a carrot and stick approach.
The proverbial carrot took the form of huge amounts of capital poured into those puppet states Morris, , in order to create jobs and provide houses in an attempt to entice Black people away from the metropoles. At the same time, the state applied the stick by cutting down on, and eventually withdrawing entirely from, the provision of funds for building houses for Black people in the urban areas.
The net effect in Soweto as in other townships was a fall-off in housing provision and an escalation of the shortage fig. Alternative housing provided by the private sector proved both expensive and later problematical in terms of delivery Hendler, In the government announced its intention to sell a large percentage of its rental stock of "matchbox" houses in Black areas to the residents. The so-called Big Sale was promoted on the basis of ownership and secure tenure Mabin and Parnell, A year later, at the end of , it was clear the sale had been a failure.
The potential buyers were inter alia, suspicious of the state's intentions, they found that loan or mortgage bond repayments would be higher than the rents they were already paying, they believed that their many years of "rent" payments should be discounted against the purchase price, and they had serious doubts regarding the potential future resale of township houses given the low mobility amongst township residents Hardie and Hart, The point that emerges from this sketch of national events is that, despite recognizing Black residents in Soweto as permanent residents of Greater Johannesburg, and despite the removal of income-earning restrictions, the fact was that very little changed.
People continued to live in rented "matchboxes," and the upgrading of essential municipal services let alone education, health, etc. When garbage heaped up and sewers became blocked they were not attended to as a matter of urgency. Roads remained unpaved and unlit, while public transportation was inadequate in capacity, unreliable, and expensive, so the frustrations of the populace continued to rise. Part of the ineptitude of the local authorities originally the Johannesburg municipality, then in the s the central government, and later a Black, but puppet, local authority responsible for services in Soweto was that the township had no hope of developing a genuine tax base unless it was integrated with one of the white municipalities.
Because of racial controls on investment in Black areas and the long-running restrictions on Black income-earning opportunities, there were no industries and precious little in the way of formal retail premises in the township. Certainly there were no shopping malls of the kind that popped up like mushrooms in the northern white suburbs from the mids onwards. There were no office parks and the rental houses were state owned.
In short, there was no substantial profit-making or appreciating property base for assessment of rates to feed local authority finances. Furthermore, when political unrest broke out anew in , followed once again by the proclamation of a national state of emergency which included detention without trial, suspension of a variety of civil rights, and other draconian powers , popular protest moved up a gear and entered the arena of civil disobedience as new "civic" leaders and popular organizations of resistance emerged.
In the early s the apartheid regime had attempted to gain credibility for its "separate but equal" charade by establishing Black local authorities or BLAB in metropolitan "locations" or "townships. The fact that BLAs had "inherited" economically impoverished municipal realms, devoid of retail and service businesses and industry because of apartheid regulations, meant that they were unable to provide municipal services that might have "bribed" the "electorate" into accepting their legitimacy.
Instead the lack of service provision by the BLAs encouraged popular opposition. Local social movements accountable to the community emerged and were dubbed "civics. The leadership of the civics was overwhelmingly but not exclusively male. By contrast, the block and street committees that were the real engine-rooms of opposition to the apartheid state were fired and run mainly by women.
Although born to resist the apartheid state, civics also found themselves forced to find solutions to the problems of poor municipal services, the public housing shortage, and the lack of land. They therefore linked together and joined forces with other opposition groups in the black community to find ways of dismantling apartheid.
As the civics, they would later be prepared to engage in forums of discussion and planning that lay outside the formal apparatus of state administration see below Coovadia, ; Shubane, ; Development and Democracy, Inhabitants of the Black townships increasingly heeded the call of community or civic leaders and popular parties to refrain from paying rents, and any other form of taxes, to the "illegal" and repressive apparatuses of the state Hendler, Consequently boycott of rents and payments for water, electricity, and cleansing services escalated Swilling et al.
Today it is a cosmopolitan city of more than four million people, one of the few of its size in the world that is not located on a river or at the sea. Johannesburg has seen waves of different peoples occupying the area that is now the city: Stone Age ancestors dating back years; Bushmen from 1 years ago; year-old Iron Age furnaces belonging to Tswana people, and Boer farmhouses dating from the s.
But the city really started in when gold was discovered by Australian gold prospector George Harrison. Soon tents and wagons appeared, to be replaced by wood and iron structures, and again replaced by brick buildings. A town was demarcated, and a large, bustling market square.
Buildings got taller and taller, and today the city boasts one of the tallest buildings in Africa - the storey Carlton Centre, built in T T he gold rush saw prospectors from around the world trek up to the Witwatersrand, precipitating the Anglo-Boer or South African War of , in which the British fought the Boers over control of the then Transvaal and its gold.
After the war another wave of migrants entered Johannesburg - up to 60 Chinese labourers were imported to kick start the mines again, only to be repatriated six years later. But Chinese merchants had established themselves in the city, and still have a presence. The mines also brought European migrants to the burgeoning town. They provided the capital to reach deeper into the earth to get the gold, while black South Africans were recruited at low wages to mine the gold.
The first forced removals in the town in saw residents of Brickfields removed 25km down south after their brickmaking settlement in the town was burnt to the ground to contain a bubonic plague outbreak.
They were settled in Klipspruit. And so the segregated city was born. Another migrant appeared on the dusty streets of the town - Mahatma Gandhi. He fought for equal treatment for Indian and Chinese residents, developing Satyagraha or passive resistance, adopted by the African National Congress at its formation in In time, industries were established, and more and more people came seeking jobs and a slice of its wealth, especially after the Natives Land Act, which robbed black people of their land.
One of these suburbs was Sophiatown. Artist Gerard Sekoto lived in the suburb for a while, recording life on the streets in vivid colours. It was here that two giants of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela and Walter Sisulu, learnt the ropes of resistance.
It was on a dusty soccer field in Kliptown in that the Freedom Charter was ratified, bringing together people from around the country to express their desires for an equal society. The ANC was banned in , and turned to armed struggle. On 11 July the top leadership of the ANC was arrested at a farm on the outskirts of Joburg, at Liliesleaf, hatching a plan for armed resistance. The farmhouse is now a World Heritage site, documenting in graphic detail the events of the day.
Eight men were sentenced to life imprisonment for treason, among them Mandela and Sisulu. The resistance had been silenced. This catapulted Johannesburg and South Africa into the tumultuous s, when apartheid was rapidly unwinding. Soweto was often the battleground of that demise - police chased protestors into the Regina Mundi Church, where you can still see the bullet holes in the ceiling and walls. Soweto has become a sprawling township of more than one million people.
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