new municipal location was only a ‘model township’ from the perspective of the authorities. It fell far short of providing its residents with even the basic amenities required for decent living. In the book Soweto – A History, Nelson Botile, a resident of Orlando, vividly described the condition of the house his family moved into:
The walls were not plastered, they were rough and the floor was just grass. It was not cemented. My father started plastering the house once we were inside. The houses had no taps. We didn’t have sewerage – we had what was called the bucket system and we had these people coming at night to remove the sanitation. The streets were not tarred and they had no names. The houses only had numbers.
Source: Wits Historical Papers
New housing in Orlando
The low standard of housing erected in Orlando prefigured the massive housing development in ‘model townships’ under apartheid. In his 2004 work Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City, the urban geographer Keith Beavon describes the township that emerged to the south west of Johannesburg after 1940 as ‘a large, sprawling urbanised area without true urban amenities. It was threaded through by dusty, unpaved roads along which were erected monotonous ranks of identical, small, temporary, single storey “matchbox” houses (predominantly between 40m2 and 44m2 in size) lit by candles and oil lamps, where cooking was done on paraffin and coal stoves. All but the barest of daily necessities had to be bought in Johannesburg and carted back on the inadequate public transport system from the white city.’
In the mid-1930s, the authorities may have imagined that they had achieved a degree of control over the lives of urban Africans: slums were successfully being eliminated and municipal locations appeared to be functioning relatively well. Although the African population of Johannesburg continued to grow, the rate of increase was rather modest and at the start of the Second World War the number of African people living in locations had increased to just over 100 000 (importantly from the perspective of the authorities, nearly half of this number, according to Beavon, lived in Pimville and Orlando). But these official figures obscured the profound transformation that was already under way in the country’s urban areas.
From the late 1930s, South Africa underwent a massive economic transformation that was spurred on by the Second World War. By the end of the war secondary industry had eclipsed mining as the main contributor to the national economy. In the decade from 1936 to 1946, the number of factories in the country grew by nearly fifty per cent, creating an unprecedented demand for labour, especially cheap African labour. Consequently, the influx of Africans to the urban areas grew fast during this time. It was also spurred on by growing impoverishment in the rural areas. From the late 1930s, there was a critical shift in the profile of Africans living in urban areas: between 1936 and 1946 the African urban population increased from just over a million to nearly two million. And, critically, the number of African women in the urban areas rose from about 350 000 to about 650 000 during the same period.
Paradoxically, the state’s programme of housing delivery for Africans that followed slum clearance in the early to mid-1930s was rapidly winding down – precisely when the demand for housing was soaring. At the height of the influx of African workers to the cities in 1944, the state did not build any houses for Africans, causing a severe national housing crisis that was most concentrated on the Reef, the area, stretching west and east from Johannesburg, where gold-bearing rock was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. The number of African families living without accommodation outside locations more than doubled between 1936 and 1951, from 86 000 to 176 000. The historian Doug Hindson has recorded that the Department of Native Affairs in 1947 estimated that an additional 154 185 family houses and 106 877 units for single male workers were required in the urban areas.
These national trends were also reflected in Orlando, which, despite being about thirteen kilometres from the city centre, was emerging as a sought-after location for Johannesburg’s growing African urban population. In 1936 the population of the township was estimated at just over 12 000. The official housing waiting list in 1939 stood at a modest 143, suggesting that overcrowding was not a problem, but these figures probably underestimate the actual population, especially the growing number of tenants and subtenants, who rented rooms in the houses and backyards of Orlando. One figure cited by Beavon, suggests that the population of Orlando in 1939 was about 35 000. But whatever the precise size of the population in Orlando on the eve of the war, the scale of the housing crisis exploded over the next few years. By 1941 the official housing waiting list had increased to 4 500 and by the end of the war it was 16 000. The number of sub-tenants alone, in the early 1940s, stood at 8 000. Wilfred Thabethe, a Soweto resident, has recalled how this affected households:
You see, what was happening during those times is that under one roof we used to have extended families – one family. You’d find that you were staying with your uncle from your mother’s side and your uncle from your father’s side, and your cousins all in one [house], under one roof, you see … you’d actually find three families under one roof.
Overcrowding and the growing demand for housing laid the basis for the eruption of a squatter movement that forced the dire housing situation facing urban Africans onto the national agenda and prompted the Johannesburg Council and national government to act decisively. The most prominent figure in the squatter movement of Orlando was the charismatic James Mpanza, leader of the Sofasonke Movement.
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
CHAPTER TWO
A RIGHT TO LIVE IN THE CITY
ALTHOUGH HE BECAME A PROMINENT FIGURE IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF Soweto, very little is known about James Mpanza’s life prior to his emergence as the leader of a big squatter movement. Mpanza was born in Natal on 15 May 1889. In Pietermaritzburg he attended an Indian school and learnt to speak English and an Indian dialect but, like many of his generation, he was forced to leave school to find work. Through his education he found a job as a clerk at the Durban harbour, and later he worked in Pinetown. It was here that he killed an Indian shopkeeper and was imprisoned in Pietermaritzburg to be executed. But his sentence was first commuted to life and then he was released early. During his imprisonment, the future messianic leader of squatters converted to Christianity. After his release from prison, Mpanza moved to Johannesburg and, like many other new arrivals, he lived in one of the city’s slums. In 1934 he moved to Orlando, where he lived at Number 957 Pheele Street. Soon after his arrival in the township, Mpanza was elected onto the advisory board and he emerged as the voice of the growing class of sub-tenants, desperate for their own homes, who had been lobbying the central government and the Johannesburg authorities for years – to no avail – to deal with the shortage of housing.
Frustrated by the lack of response from the authorities, Mpanza mooted the idea of mobilising sub-tenants to occupy open spaces in the location to highlight their plight. His proposal received the cold shoulder from members of the Communist Party, who viewed him with suspicion, but the young members of the African National Congress, who were to become leading figures in the ANC Youth League, were more receptive. Walter Sisulu, one of the founders and leading members of the Youth League, lived with his family in Orlando East. In the book A Place in the City: The Rand on the Eve of Apartheid, Walter Sisulu says, ‘Mpanza spoke to me and Nelson [Mandela], and said let’s pass a resolution at the Orlando Residents’ Association. It must be moved by Nelson and seconded by me; in which, he says, that on the 29th January we the residents of Orlando shall evict the sub-tenants. That resolution was moved; and that strategy moved the City Council.’
Source: Wits Historical Papers
James ‘Sofasonke’ Mpanza, the ‘father’ of Soweto
Mpanza’s slogan of ‘Housing and Shelter for All’ quickly rallied hundreds of sub-tenants, and on 20 March 1944 he led a group of subtenants to occupy an empty space on the periphery of Orlando East. There they erected 250 shacks. The act of defiance immediately