Class, Race and Residence in Black ... - Wiley Online Library

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 18 No. 4 December 2005 ISSN 0952-1909

Class, Race and Residence in Black Johannesburg, 1923–1970 OWEN CRANKSHAW Abstract This study examines the relationship between social class and residential differentiation in Johannesburg’s African population on the eve of apartheid. During the high apartheid period, access by the African population to education, housing, jobs and even the right to live in the city bore little relationship to differences of social class. By contrast, in the 1940s and early 1950s, state policy on education, urbanisation and housing still differentiated the African population along the lines of social class. State control over housing for Africans was relatively unregulated, with the result that housing conditions varied tremendously by social class, ranging from squatter camps, rental accommodation in the form of slums and council housing, and even some respectable homes held in freehold title.

***** 1. Introduction This study examines the changing relationships between state policies towards Africans, on the one hand, and on the other, the actual character of the African population in terms of its occupational class structure and housing conditions. In doing so, the main purpose of the study is to integrate these different aspects of African urban life into a single, coherent discussion. Although these aspects of African life have already been researched quite thoroughly, they are nonetheless reported as quite separate spheres of life. For example, there is a literature on the political and labour struggles of the period.1 Similarly, there are studies of state housing policy and housing conditions for Africans.2 However, these studies do not concern themselves specifically with the relationships between urban rights, housing and occupational class and how they have changed. Where studies have concerned themselves with the relationship between housing, urban rights and social class, these studies are restricted to particular social classes, or to particular areas of Johannesburg.3 This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive account of these structural aspects of urban African life in Johannesburg from the late segregation period to the high apartheid period. Most studies of urban African life in the pre-apartheid period make the argument that the social divisions between working class and middle class Africans were relatively unimportant when com© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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pared to their shared racial oppression. The corollary of this argument is that the racial oppression of the apartheid period that followed it was simply more of the same. In line with this argument, these studies have also downplayed the social differences between Africans of different classes.4 With one exception, studies of African society during both the pre-apartheid and apartheid periods have therefore not paid adequate attention to the class character of racial discrimination during the pre-apartheid period and how it changed with the rise of apartheid.5 The central argument of this study is that racial discrimination against Africans in the pre-apartheid period recognised class differences among the African population and therefore accorded different urban rights to middle class and working class Africans. This is not to say that middle class Africans were not discriminated against. They certainly were, but the form of their discrimination was different. For example, middle class Africans could obtain access to elite educational institutions; they could become exempt from the pass laws that controlled African migration to the cities; they could be employed in jobs denied to other Africans and they could even become homeowners. Although these rights had already been whittled down over the decades, the apartheid period was marked by a qualitative shift in policy towards the African middle class. Under apartheid, the class divisions within urban African society were “compressed” by a range of policies that ignored occupational class divisions among Africans. Specifically, the “high” apartheid was characterised by urban policies that differentiated urban Africans, not by their level of education, their occupations or their wealth, but according to their legal urban status. Class characteristics were largely ignored with respect to the state’s policies on education, housing, employment and urban rights. In respect of education, the new National Party government abolished the mission school system and introduced the mass education system of “Bantu Education” during the 1950s. Similarly, new laws to control African urbanisation removed the exemptions given to middle class Africans on the basis of their professional status and ownership of property. In their place, new exemptions were introduced that were based on whether or not Africans were born in urban areas and how long they had resided and worked there. Homeownership rights for the African middle class were also removed by the government during the early apartheid period. In most cases, the state achieved this through expropriations, demolitions and forced removals. In the place of the freehold townships, their slums and the squatter camps, new official residential areas for Africans were built. These new “townships”, which were built and owned by the state, made little provision for class differences © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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among Africans. For the most part, the rich and poor alike were allocated standardised “matchbox” houses. Finally, in the realm of employment and business, new laws were introduced during the 1950s that aimed to exclude Africans from middle class occupations. New restrictions on African businessmen were introduced and job reservation prevented Africans from being employed in all white collar jobs, in the skilled trades and even in some semiskilled manual jobs. African urban society in the 1940s and 1950s had quite a different character to that of the high apartheid period of the early 1970s. Much of its differentiation in terms of geography, housing and class structure was eliminated by the homogenising policies of the first two decades of apartheid. My aim in this study is to flesh out some these characteristics of Johannesburg in the early apartheid period to show just how different it was to the high apartheid period that followed. In doing so, I will pay particular attention to the housing circumstances of Africans in the 1940s and 1950s and how they were related to the social dynamics of urbanisation and class formation. 2. High Apartheid in Black Johannesburg By the mid-1970s, apartheid policies that had the effect of compressing class relationships among urban Africans had reached their most extreme form. What was the social form of “class compression” in Johannesburg in the early 1970s? In terms of the right to live in an urban area, the apartheid period saw the erosion of class-based exemptions to the pass laws. These exemptions were given to middle class Africans if they owned property or were employed in a profession. From 1952, an amendment to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act prevented any further exemptions to the pass laws from being issued to middle class Africans. In 1964, the Bantu Laws Amendment Act finally cancelled all exemptions that had been issued before 1952.6 A striking example of how the middle class was affected by this change in policy is provided by the case of Vincent Mokgeledi.7 Born in Doornfontein and the son of a schoolmaster, Vincent Mokgeledi was a fully qualified professional. He attended St. Peter’s High School in Rosettenville, in the south of Johannesburg. He then studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he completed a Bachelor Degree in commerce. Thereafter he was employed as an accountant by a variety of institutions in Johannesburg. Since he was born in Johannesburg, Mokgeledi had the legal right to family accommodation and therefore rented a Council house in Jabavu, Soweto. His troubles began, however, when he went to live with his © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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parents in Kimberley, a town in the Cape. Upon arrival in Kimberley, he reported to the government official in charge of African affairs. To Mokgeledi’s “utter surprise”, the official did not grant him residence rights in Kimberley and gave him 72 hours to leave town: in terms of the law, Mokgeledi had urban rights in Johannesburg only. Mokgeledi refused to leave Kimberley and was later arrested at his parent’s home. He then paid his admission of guilt fine and appealed against the official’s decision. His appeal was turned down and he was instructed to go and live in a newly developed resettlement village of Pampierstad, some 220 kms to the north. Like many other such resettlement villages, Pampierstad was established within the boundaries of an African reserve to house people who were forcibly removed from white urban areas and farms.8 Defying the official, Mokgeledi returned to Johannesburg, only to find out that, because of the length of his absence, he had lost his legal right to live in the city of his birth. Most restrictions on the employment of Africans in middle class jobs had to do with keeping Africans out of jobs occupied by whites. For example, the Shops and Offices Amendment Act of 1960 stipulated that Africans could only be employed in clerical and sales work if their offices and toilets were segregated from white employees.9 Similarly, legislation to reserve specific occupations for whites was ready to be applied should white employees complain of competition from Africans. So, middle class Africans who ventured into institutions that employed whites and served the white public were the ones who were subject to restrictions. For example, when Joyce Sikakane worked as a journalist for the World, her official title was designated as a backroom “filing clerk”. In once incident, when she used the toilet facilities reserved for whites, her white colleagues physically dragged her off the toilet. To quote her, “a group of angry white women came and pulled me off the seat”.10 In residential terms, homeownership for Africans had almost disappeared. African-owned homes in the freehold townships were either demolished or expropriated by the state. In Alexandra, homes were expropriated by the state and their owners forced to become tenants. In the Western Areas, homeowners, along with their tenants, were forcibly removed to the township of Meadowlands in Soweto. In the new townships of Soweto, homeownership was restricted to 30-year leasehold in Dube, Rockville (Moroka) and “Beverley Hills” (Orlando West).11 Even this right was later withdrawn by the government in 1968. Although existing leasehold agreements were tolerated, no new leasehold agreements were permitted and leaseholds could only be transferred to the state.12 Housing provision by the state took the form of a standard design with little variation in size and tenure. Such was the size and stan© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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dardisation of these units, that they became known as “matchbox” houses. All these “matchbox” houses were owned by the state and leased to tenants on a monthly basis. The most common type of house, which made up 71 per cent of all houses in Soweto in the mid-1970s, is the “51/6”, so named after the date (1951) and the number (6) assigned to the prototype. This type measured 40 m2 and comprised two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room (Figure 1). It was usually built as a stand-alone structure but often as a semi-detached unit. The original houses were built to rudimentary standards with only earthen or ash floors and without internal doors and ceilings. Running water was provided by one outside tap and sanitation took the form of an outside lavatory connected to a waterborne sewerage system.13 This was the standard form of housing available to all classes of Africans. Only 1 per cent of houses in Soweto were owner built and were therefore larger and more luxurious than these standardised houses.14 As far as housing for the poor was concerned, the state had almost completely eliminated shack settlements in Johannesburg. By 1970, there were only 14 shacks in the whole of Soweto.15 This was achieved by the large-scale state provision of “matchbox” houses in the 1950s and early 1960s and had been maintained

Figure 1: Standardised Family Housing in Jabavu, Soweto, 1978. Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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since then by strict control over African urbanisation and settlement.16 However, by the early 1970s the national government’s decision to stop funding housing construction in 1968 had already resulted in a housing shortage of about 13,000 dwellings, which resulted in some overcrowding in council houses.17 This family housing in Soweto was available only to Africans who had secured full urban rights. Such rights were secured by being born in Johannesburg or by living and working in the city continuously for ten years for the same employer or by working for different employers for 15 years. Africans without full urban rights were not permitted to bring their families to live in Johannesburg. They were therefore forced to live in domestic servants’ rooms in white residential areas or in hostels provided by employers or the state. By 1970, there were 11 hostels in Johannesburg, seven of them in Soweto itself. Depending on different estimates, these hostels housed from 41,000 to 64,000 migrant workers, the vast majority of whom were men. In many respects, the early hostel units look a lot like the “matchbox” houses: they are also detached single storey structures which were built with the same stockbrick and asbestos roofs. The interior of each hostel unit, however, is quite different. The single external door leads into a central kitchen area. Two doors on either side of the kitchen lead into the two dormitories, which usually hold eight beds each. These dormitory units are usually arranged in serried ranks separated by bare earth or lawns. A typical hostel, such as Dube Hostel, comprises about 180 such hostel units, which would have accommodated about 3,000 migrant workers. Toilets and showers were usually provided in separate ablution buildings (Figure 2).18 This “class compression” of housing available for the African population also took a geographical form.19 By the early 1970s, the vast majority of family and hostel housing had been relocated from white residential and commercial areas to the townships of Soweto. The freehold townships of the Western Areas were demolished and the African residents relocated to Soweto. Even the numbers of domestic servants resident in white areas was restricted and many of them forced to live in hostels in Soweto.20 With the exception of the erstwhile freehold township of Alexandra, most Africans of all classes lived in Soweto (Figure 3). Although the mission school system was by no means a schooling system solely for the African elite, it nonetheless comprised some excellent schools that played an important role in the reproduction of the educated African middle class. In effect this system offered a good high school education for a few, a primary school education to about one third of the youth and no education at all for two-thirds of them.21 So, the destruction of the mission school © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Figure 2: Dube Hostel units in Soweto, 1978. Source: 12711 and P78/2569, Independent Newspapers, Gauteng

system in the 1950s and the creation of the “Bantu Education” system by the apartheid government had two consequences for class formation among urban Africans. The first consequence was that the opportunities for a high school education and for subsequent employment in middle class jobs were probably more limited after the 1950s. The second was that the opportunity to complete primary school was extended to most urban Africans from all social backgrounds. So, while the Bantu Education system restricted the African youth to a primary education, it was nonetheless available to all. This educational policy therefore had the effect of homogenising the educational qualifications of the urbanised African population. The example of Joyce Sikakane is a case in point.22 Born in 1943 in the township of Orlando, Joyce came from a typical middle class family. Her father was from Alexandra and had attended a Lutheran mission school in Roodepoort, a town immediately north of Orlando. Her mother was a schoolteacher from the town of Newcastle. Sikakane attended a mission school run by the parish of Christ the King in the freehold township of Sophiatown. This school was closed down during the 1950s and Sikakane was sent to a primary school run by the Roman Catholic Church in Durban. After completing primary school, she attended a private boarding © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Figure 3: African Residential Areas in High Apartheid Johannesburg.

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school. In 1961, she returned home to complete her schooling at the government-run Orlando High School. Since she was opposed to attending university at the racially segregated “Tribal Colleges”, she did not study further and instead began a career in journalism. The Bantu Education system dovetailed neatly with the most important feature of the high apartheid urban labour market: the expansion of semi-skilled manual work for Africans. Strong economic growth in the manufacturing sector during the first two decades of apartheid meant an expanding demand for labour, especially semi-skilled and skilled manual labour, which could not be met by the white population.23 The 1960s was a decade fraught with conflict between capitalists, white trade unions and the state over the solution to this problem. The compromise was the fragmentation and mechanisation (where possible) of the skilled trades as well as the extensive mechanisation of unskilled jobs. By the early 1970s, the class character of the African workforce had been transformed from one dominated by unskilled manual workers to one dominated by semi-skilled workers. At the same time, the occupational mobility of Africans into middle class jobs was only just beginning. So, the size of the African middle class relative to the working class was still small. In terms of occupational class structure, the African population was therefore at its most homogeneous during the high apartheid period. Although African entrepreneurs were tolerated by the apartheid government, they operated under harsh restrictions that prevented their expansion, both individually and as a social class.24 The first major restrictions came in 1955 with the application of the provisions of the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1945. Under Section 6 of this Act, African entrepreneurs were prohibited from occupying premises outside official African areas and were thus excluded from the Johannesburg central business district. In 1955, 160 “business and professional men” were refused permission to operate their enterprises in or near the central business district. They included general dealers, cobblers, tailors, herbalists, carpenters, restaurateurs, photographers and hairdressers whose businesses were located near the central beerhalls and bus stations. Others were doctors, attorneys, trade union leaders and other professionals whose offices were in or near the central business district.25 Almost a decade later, in 1963, more restrictions were imposed. African entrepreneurs were denied the right to own their business premises, which were leased to them by the state. Their access to loans and the expansion of their businesses was curtailed by prohibitions on the formation of African-owned financial institutions, companies or partnerships. Business opportuni© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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ties were further limited by prohibitions on manufacturing and wholesale enterprises. African entrepreneurs were also restricted to dealing only in essential, day to day, commodities. They were even limited to owning a single business. From 1968, yet more restrictions prohibited African entrepreneurs from operating at more than one site and from selling goods to non-Africans who lived outside official African townships. From this time on, the establishment of new African owned businesses in Johannesburg was also restricted. The distinctive feature of early-1970s Johannesburg was the compression of class divisions within the African population through urbanisation, housing, employment and educational policy. Instead of class differences, social differences in the population tended to correspond to the social division between those with full urban rights and those without them. This particular social structure was the outcome of strong state intervention over a period of two decades. These policies sprang from the particular class alliance among whites who supported the apartheid government. In specific terms, these policies protected working class and middle class whites from competition with Africans. Employers, for their part, accepted these policies because they were consistent with their demand for unskilled and semi-skilled African labour.26 It was only towards the end of the 1960s, when the shortage of skilled white labour forced employers to lobby for educational and employment reforms to allow for upward occupational mobility of Africans into skilled manual and white collar jobs. In contrast to the high apartheid period, occupational class divisions within African society in late-1940s Johannesburg were more likely to be reinforced by and associated with other social divisions concerned with housing, educational background and urban rights. In the discussion that follows, I will document the occupational class structure of Johannesburg’s African society in the 1940s and 1950s. 3. The occupational structure of Johannesburg’s African workforce in the 1940s Due largely to the expansion of the manufacturing industry, and official relaxation of the application of influx control in the major cities, the African population of Joburg grew rapidly during the immediate pre-apartheid period.27 The annual rate of growth of the African population rose from 2.7 per cent (between 1911 and 1921) to 4.6 per cent (between 1921 and 1936) and peaked at 5.3 per cent (between 1936 and 1946).28 Although most manufacturing industries in the 1940s were characterised by repetitive mass © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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production, which entailed a division of labour with significant numbers of African semi-skilled machine operatives, over threequarters of the African workforce was still employed in unskilled manual jobs.29 The main reason for this was that Johannesburg’s mining sector, which still employed slightly more workers than the manufacturing sector, and the building industry were both dominated by a division of labour between skilled white artisans and miners, on the one hand, and unskilled African labourers, on the other. The African working class was therefore employed mostly in unskilled jobs that entailed heavy manual work.30 On factory production lines, unskilled workers usually assisted semi-skilled machine operators in a variety of ways. Also on the factory floor, but in a supportive role to direct production, unskilled workers performed the tasks of lifting, moving, stacking and packaging raw materials and completed products. Other jobs, peripheral to production, included guarding, sweeping and cleaning the premises. In the steel foundries, unskilled African workers were employed to stoke the coal-fired furnaces by hand and to cast molten metal into the moulds that had been prepared by white artisans.31 Similarly, on the gold mines, unskilled African workers were employed in heavy manual jobs, such as clearing broken rocks and ore from the rock face after blasting, loading the ore into railway hoppers and then pushing them along underground tracks to the mineshafts. In the building industry, unskilled workers were also employed largely in excavation and the handling of materials. Such work included the tasks of loading and transporting building materials on site, digging foundation trenches and tamping to settle concrete or to consolidate rubble. Excavation was done by teams of workers who broke the ground with pickaxes, shovelled the loose soil into wheelbarrows, which they then pushed up ramps to tip the contents into waiting trucks. Concrete and mortar were mixed and transported in a similar manner. Workers settled concrete by agitating the mixture with long poles and consolidated rubble by stamping it with hand-held metal stampers. Bricks, delivered to the building site by truck, were unloaded by hand, and stacked one at a time. From there, workers distributed them to the bricklayers in wheelbarrows.32 In the service sector, African workers were mostly employed as domestic servants in private homes: in 1946, 62 per cent of African workers employed outside the agricultural, mining and manufacturing sectors were domestic servants.33 Private companies mostly employed Africans as waiters, cleaners, shelf packers and loaders.34 Any estimate of the extent of African employment in semi-skilled manual jobs during the 1940s is constrained by the absence of © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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statistics that specifically distinguish the skilled trades from semi-skilled jobs. Nonetheless, my interpretation of the occupational descriptions reported by the 1946 Population Census suggests that the small number of semi-skilled African workers in the manufacturing industry were mostly employed in the textile industry, and in smaller numbers in the food, metal, wood and furniture sectors. In the mining industry, the only semi-skilled jobs occupied by Africans entailed the operation of certain mechanical scrapers and pneumatic drills at the stope.35 The extent of their number remains unknown because these occupations were not distinguished from that of “mine labourer” in the 1946 Population Census. In the building industry, the skilled trades had yet to be formally fragmented into semi-skilled jobs. Nonetheless, because of the shortage of white artisans in the post-War period, non-apprenticed African workers were employed to perform various aspects of skilled work for the first time in the painting and bricklaying trades.36 By the 1930s, African workers had begun to make inroads into motor vehicle driving, with a “considerable” number “acting as chauffeurs . . . and a few for commercial houses as drivers of motor trucks”.37 Middle-class Africans were employed as school principals, teachers, interpreters, journalists, novelists, clerks, ministers, health inspectors, social workers, salespeople and small businessmen, with a smattering of lawyers, doctors and university lecturers.38 A striking feature of the African middle class at this time is that it was restricted to jobs that served the African population. For example, Africans were generally better represented in occupations such as post office sorters, postman, bus and train conductors, labour recruiters, clerks and salespersons.39 Clearly, most of these jobs are functions associated with racially segregated government authorities and services. As far as employment in clerical and sales work is concerned, a case study suggests that Africans were not employed to any significant extent in commercial and financial institutions in the private sector. Hellmann’s 1951 study of African employment in a large retail company in Johannesburg revealed that not one African was employed in clerical and sales work. Instead, Africans were restricted to jobs which entailed packing and loading goods, cleaning, sweeping, polishing and serving drinks and food.40 Correspondingly, a study of African workers employed by the Johannesburg City Council in 1957 showed that a substantially greater proportion of Africans were employed in higher grade work in the Non-European Affairs Department than in other Council Departments.41 © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Writing in the 1930s, Phillips identified a variety of small business activities owned and run by Africans. These enterprises included half a dozen herbalists who sold their wares from shops in the central business district. Another dozen “Native Eating Houses” in central Johannesburg were owned and run by Africans. A similar number of African building contractors also found business building homes for African homeowners in the freehold townships of Johannesburg. By far the most numerous, however, were retail grocers, who numbered about 400.42 By the 1950s, Africans no longer controlled the “Native Eating Houses”.43 Instead, many African traders ran their fast food enterprises from mobile “coffeecarts” that numbered about 700 in 1950.44 In all, there were about 1,700 licensed African traders operating in Johannesburg’s African townships in 1958.45 In quantitative terms, the vast majority of Africans (79 per cent) were employed in unskilled manual jobs and only a small minority were employed in semi-skilled manual jobs (8 per cent) and routine non-manual jobs (10 per cent). The size of the middle class, defined as the owners of businesses and those employed in managerial, professional, semi-professional, technical, clerical and sales occupations, amounted to only 2 per cent (Table 1). Although the absolute and relative size of the Africans middle class was extremely small, the evidence suggests that this class was readily distinguishable from the African working class by virtue of its educational and social background as well as its exemption from certain racist laws. Brandel-Syrier’s study of the African elite in “Reeftown” (a fictitious name for an official African township on the Witwatersrand) revealed that 80 per cent of them received their primary and secondary schooling from mission schools and colleges all over the country. Mission Colleges in-

Table 1: Occupational Distribution of Employed Africans in Johannesburg, 194646

Professionals, Managers & Proprietors Clerks & Salespeople Policemen, Soldiers & Other Non-manual Workers Semi-skilled Manual Workers Unskilled Manual Workers (incl. Domestic Servants) Total

Frequency Distribution

Percentage Distribution

3,712 3,128 26,096

1 1 10

22,911 213,841

8 79

269,688

100


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cluded St Matthew’s, St Peter’s, Kilnerton, Healdtown, Clarkbury, Lovedale, Wilberforce and Evaton.47 Like the African working class, most middle class Africans who lived in and around Joburg in the late 1940s and early 1950s were probably from rural backgrounds. In the case of the elite studied by Brandel-Syrier, most were rural born, although about half of them were nonetheless brought up on the Witwatersrand or in country towns where almost all of them attended mission schools.48 The significance of mission school education in this period is that it provided a high quality secondary education for Africans, which gave them access to tertiary education and professional qualifications. Since Reeftown’s elite were the offspring of successful peasant farmers, sharecroppers, capitalist farmers or white-collar and professional employees, the mission schools therefore played an important role in the transformation of a relatively wealthy peasanty into an urban middle class as well as the reproduction of the educated middle class.49 So, unlike the Bantu Education system of the 1960s, the top mission schools during this period played a role in differentiating the African middle class from the working class. 4. Government Urbanisation and Housing Policy for Africans in the Pre-Apartheid Period Prior to the passage of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act in 1923, the Government’s urbanisation policy did not distinguish between urbanised African families and rural African migrants: in other words the pass laws made no reference to birthplace or urban status. Instead, the pass laws differentiated Africans according to class characteristics: Africans could earn exemption from the pass laws if they owned property, had achieved a certain level of education, were employed in certain skilled and professional occupations or subscribed to Christian beliefs.50 In practice, this meant that it was Africans who belonged to the middle class who were eligible for exemption from the pass laws. So, it was shopkeepers, restaurateurs and professionals such as doctors, lawyers, ministers of religion, schoolteachers, nurses and clerks who could acquire an exemption certificate. The general policy of recognising class differences among urban Africans was mirrored in the liberal idea of “cultural adaptation” which was held by government officials of that period. They believed that Africans could and should be “uplifted” to white social standards, provided that they were segregated from whites.51 The Godley Report of 1922, for example, spelt out this logic when it recommended the exemption from the pass laws of “all natives of good character who have arrived at such a scale of civilisation and edu© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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cation as no longer to require special measures of protection and control, beyond those extended to other sections of the community”. These liberal elements of the Godley Report were incorporated, to some extent, into the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923.52 A significant feature of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 was that it still distinguished between “exempted” and “non-exempted” Africans. Only “non-exempted” Africans were forced to comply with its regulations concerning residential segregation and the pass laws. Africans who held “letters of exemption” granted under any law were automatically exempted. In addition, Africans who owned a house and lived in it were automatically exempted from living in official African townships. Such homeowners were also automatically exempted from complying with the pass laws. Furthermore, chiefs and headmen, ministers of religion who were marriage officers, teachers employed by the state and interpreters were also automatically exempt from the pass laws.53 So, Africans who were exempted from the Act on the basis of their class characteristics were able to secure employment and housing, to travel on public transport, and even establish businesses without legal obstacles. By the 1940s, these automatic exemptions for the middle class were still in place. In addition, Africans could also apply for certificates of exemption on the basis of educational qualifications or a record of continuous employment.54 How many exempted Africans lived in Johannesburg in the early years of apartheid? Between 1941 and 1945, the central pass office in Johannesburg issued almost 18,000 certificates of exemption.55 This figure amounts to about 7 per cent of the African workforce in 1946, a not insubstantial number that exceeds the size of African middle class as estimated by the Population Census.56 This high number of exempted Africans may be explained by the expansion of the criteria to include Africans in all occupations who could prove that they had record of “faithful and continuous service” with not more than two employers over a period of seven years: a definition that could also include members of the working class.57 Prior to 1923, there was little government control over African housing. Specifically, there were no general laws that prevented wealthy Africans from purchasing land and houses in urban areas. Neither was there any state subsidised provision of housing for the African poor. Consequently, most housing for Africans was built by their employers, landlords or African homeowners. The result was that African residential areas were highly differentiated. Within African areas developed prior to 1923, dwellings varied from “shacks built of sacking stretched over reeds to modern brick structures conforming to European ideas”.58 After 1923, the policy © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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of recognising class differences among the African population also influenced the government’s housing policy towards “unexempted” Africans.59 The Natives (Urban Areas) Act empowered local authorities to establish three different forms of accommodation for unexempted urban Africans and to force them to live there. Rural labour migrants, mostly employed in unskilled manual jobs during this period, who did not live under “conditions of family life”, were to be provided with “native hostels”. Urbanised families were to be housed differently, according to their means. Families who “could not afford more than the necessities of life” were provided with rental housing in “native locations”. Families belonging to the “more affluent section of the population whose employment was fixed and whose residence might be regarded as more or less permanent” were allowed to build their own homes on land owned under leasehold title in “native villages”.60 In the first debates over the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, the Smuts government envisaged that Africans in these “native villages” would own their properties in freehold title. However, political opposition meant that this proposal was watered down to allow for leasehold rights only.61 In any event, no such “native villages” were ever developed in Johannesburg.62 Instead, the municipality built hostels and “native locations” where Africans were provided with rental housing, thereby moving towards a social division based more on urban status, than on class. In a subsequent amendment to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1937 prohibited all Africans (exempted and un-exempted alike) from buying urban land from non-Africans.63 In effect, this Act prevented the expansion of property ownership among Africans. But Africans who already owned land prior to the promulgation of this Act could continue to do so. 5. Housing Conditions for Africans in the 1940s and 1950s The implementation of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act was a much delayed and piecemeal process.64 It was therefore only by the 1940s that official forms of accommodation became a significant feature of urban African life in Johannesburg. Even then, official family housing accommodated only one-fifth of the African population and official hostels housed about 4 per cent (Table 2). About one-third of the African population still lived in the freehold townships of Alexandra and the Western Areas (Sophiatown, Martindale and Newclare) and the remaining half lived in shack settlements, hostels and domestic servants’ rooms (Figure 4). By 1946, the local authority had built six single-sex hostels for working class men in central Johannesburg and had established © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Table 2: Residential Conditions of the African Population in greater Johannesburg, 194865 Population Frequency distribution

Official Townships: Orlando East Orlando West Pimville Western Native Township Eastern Native Township Shack and Site & Service Settlements: Orlando West, Moroka and Jabavu Hostels and other non-family accommodation: Wemmer Hostel, Wolhuter Hostel, Denver Hostel, Mai-Mai Hostel, Women’s Hostel Municipal Hostels Mine Hostels Industrial Hostels and other licensed premises such as schools and hospitals Domestic Servants Rooms Freehold Townships: Sophiatown/Martindale Newclare Malay Location (Pageview) Alexandra Peri-urban areas: Kliptown Other Total

Percentage distribution

Percentage Distribution of sub-totals 19

46,955 16,030 21,310 16,650 5,575

9 3 4 3 1 18

96,170

18 30

12,716

2

10,372 41,969 30,429

2 8 6

70,000

13

66,700 16,000 4,150 75,000

12 3 1 14

9,250 9,130

2 2

548,406

100

30

4

100

Percentages do not add up to exactly 100 because of rounding off

a number of official townships to accommodate African families. Two of the latter, Western Native Township and Eastern Native Township were located within 5 km of the CBD whereas the others, Orlando, Jabavu and Pimville were located about 15 km to the south west of central Johannesburg (Figures 1 and 5).66 With the exception of Pimville, where wealthier Africans leased land from the municipality and built their own homes, houses in these offi© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Figure 4: African Residential Areas in Johannesburg during the 1940s and 1950s.

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Figure 5: Western Native Township. Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg

cial townships were built by the municipality and rented out.67 The housing quality varied from township to township. In the early townships, the houses were small and rudimentary, comprising two rooms, only one outside door, no doors between rooms and without floors or ceilings. Over time, the building standards were raised. In Orlando, the most recently built at this time, the houses comprised three to four rooms, with water laid on, with interior doors and with floors (Figure 6).68 Houses in the freehold townships were built to individual designs and standards. They varied from small wood-and-iron cottages built in the early years of the century to terraced and semi-detached brick homes to larger detached brick homes built in the fashion of the 1920s with large Dutch gables (Figure 7). Up until the end of the 1930s, a significant proportion of Johannesburg’s African working class had lived as tenants in what were known as “slumyards” in the inner city areas of Braamfontein, Hillbrow, Berea, Burgersdorp, Fordsburg, Ferreirasdorp, Marshalltown, City and Suburban, Doornfontein, New Doornfontein and Jeppestown.69 These slumyards contained rooms that lined the perimeter of the property and were provided with communal © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Figure 6: Orlando Township. Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg

services (Figure 8). Although employers usually built them to house workers in the backyards of their industrial and commercial premises, many landlords also built such yards for the sole purpose of renting them out.70 For example, the Cold Storage Meat Supply Company in Newtown housed some of its African workers in a compound attached to the factory premises during the 1930s.71 During the same period, Doornfontein, located on the western side of the inner city, had six major slumyards. These were “Rooiyard”, “Makapan yard”, “Molefe yard”, “Mveyane yard”, “Magonyanye Yard” and “Brown Yard”.72 From the mid-1920s until the end of the 1930s, the Council demolished most of these slums, including Prospect Township, and relocated the residents to official townships and hostels (Figure 9).73 However, because most slum residents did not have legal rights to live in Johannesburg, they were not eligible for official accommodation and were therefore forced to either leave the city or to find alternative forms of accommodation that were not owned or managed by the state.74 The majority of these unofficially housed working-class Africans lived either in domestic servant’s quarters in the backyards of white residential areas or in hostels on the gold mines. Many other working class Africans lived as tenants in the freehold townships of Sophiatown, Martindale, Newclare and Alexandra or as tenants in the Malay © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Figure 7: Aerial view of houses in Sophiatown in the mid-1950s. Note: This photograph was taken to document the forced removal of residents from the Western Areas. Houses were demolished once the residents were removed, hence the empty stand on the right Source: E890, Rand Daily Mail 25th February 1955, Times Media Collection, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg

Location. The middle class and well-paid working class lived in the freehold townships (Table 2 and Figure 4). The rapid growth of the African population, coupled with the demolition of the inner city slums, led to a shortage of some 42,000 houses by 1946.75 This resulted in severe overcrowding in both the official and freehold townships. By 1950, the average number of families per stand in Sophiatown and Martindale was 8 and in Newclare it was 7.76 Overcrowding in the freehold townships took the form of what were called “backyard rooms”, which were for the most part, shacks erected in the backyards of the stands (Figure 10). Trevor Huddlestone, a priest who lived in Sophiatown during the 1940s and 1950s, described a particular “yard” in Edith Street in the following way. “[T]heir home was a row of corrugated iron shacks built in the very restricted area behind some else’s house. Each man had his family in one room and paid the landlord perhaps 30 shillings a month for it. It was not much of a home: hot in summer when the sun struck down on the iron roof and © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Figure 8: A slumyard in Doornfontein sometime in the 1930s. Source: Ellen Hellmann’s Photograph Album, A1419, Historical Papers Department, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand

Figure 9: A family is removed from Prospect Township. Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Figure 10: Backyard Shacks in Alexandra, 1958: The original formal house is visible in the background. Source: Rand Daily Mail 27 June 1958, Times Media Collection L919, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg

there was no ceiling to protect you; cold in winter, because the wind penetrated the joints and angles and there were no walls save the iron itself.”77 Less commonly, working class Africans built their shacks on vacant land between formal houses within the freehold townships. A prominent example was the shack settlement which occupied Reno Square and spilled over into Charles Phillips Square in Newclare. This settlement was built by refugees from gang wars (Figure 11).78 Even by 1940, the official townships of Orlando, Pimville, Western Native Township and Eastern Native Township showed signs of overcrowding. In these official townships, the average number of residents per house ranged from 6 to 7. Given that most of these houses comprised two (70 to 90 per cent) to three (10 to 30 per cent) rooms, this suggests a fairly high level of overcrowding.79 Stadler argues that this overcrowding was an important cause of the working-class squatter movements in the 1940s. During this period, sub-tenants from both official and freehold townships invaded areas of open land to establish substantial shack settlements. The first of these squatter movements was initiated by sub-tenants in the official township of Orlando, who © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Figure 11: Shacks in Newclare, probably in the early 1950s. Source: A2637/16.33, Department of Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand

settled on vacant land between the railway line and Orlando in 1944 (Figures 1 and 12). They were joined by others from the periurban settlement of Kliptown (just south of Pimville) and the freehold township of Newclare. At its height, the squatter camp (which became known as “Shanty Town”) housed about 20,000 people. The Johannesburg Council’s response was to build some 4,000 serviced rooms in nearby Jabavu to house the squatters (Figure 1). A second wave of land invasions near Orlando began in 1946. This time, squatters occupied newly built houses or occupied open land between houses under construction in the new township of Orlando West (Figure 1). The Council evicted these squatters and rehoused them in the temporary settlement in Jabavu. Later in 1946, a much larger squatter settlement was established near Jabavu. Named “Tobruk”, this squatter camp quickly grew to between 3,000 and 5,000 families. Since the Johannesburg Council was unable to forcibly remove such a large settlement, it introduced an “emergency scheme” that provided cheap land and services to homeless families. This site-and-service scheme was located in Moroka, adjacent to the existing temporary settlement in Jabavu (Figure 13). So, at the end of the 1940s, some 96,000 © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Figure 12: Squatter settlement in Orlando, 1944 (The official township of Orlando is in the background). Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg

Figure 13: Moroka Emergency Scheme. Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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people lived in squatter camps and site-and-service settlements in the townships of Orlando West, Moroka and Jabavu (Table 2). 6. Middle Class Home-Ownership Although the 1937 amendment to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act prevented Africans from buying property in Johannesburg, it did not prevent them from continuing to own land and houses that they had bought prior to the promulgation of the amendment.80 Moreover, exempted Africans could still sell their property to another exempted African. So, in spite of these restrictions, African homeownership survived into the early apartheid period. African homeowners in Johannesburg lived mostly in Alexandra, Sophiatown, Martindale and Newclare (Figure 4). These freehold townships were developed in the early years of the twentieth century. Although Alexandra was developed beyond the municipal boundaries of Johannesburg with the intention of selling land to Africans, Sophiatown was originally developed for white homeownership.81 However, because of Sophiatown’s proximity to Western Native Township and the municipal sewage works, white buyers could not be found in sufficient numbers. Consequently, the developers turned their attention to black customers and the title deed restrictions against coloured and African occupation were lifted. Martindale and Newclare were developed some years later when it had become clear that the neighbourhood was destined for African residential occupation. Consequently, there were no racial restrictions on the title deeds for Martindale and in Newclare. Instead, the area was designated for coloureds and the title deeds specifically excluded whites from the occupation of stands. Since African, coloured and Indian residents were denied property rights in most other areas of Johannesburg, they leapt at the opportunity of owning a home in these new townships.82 The first black residents of Alexandra and the Western Areas were therefore black home-owners and not tenants or sub-tenants.83 Although these freehold townships probably started out as fairly homogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods, they soon became a heterogeneous mix of social classes as more and more property owners let out their houses for multiple occupancy and as homeowners rented out shacks in their backyards and even rooms in their houses. It is evident from the 1950 household survey of the Western Areas that many home-owners owed large mortgages on their properties.84 Moreover, since building societies considered that African property owners were more likely to default on their repayments, they were charged higher than usual interest rates.85 To repay these loans, they rented out shacks in their backyards. © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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The Dakile family was probably typical. The husband and wife were both schoolteachers and had built their own face-brick house in Ray Street, Sophiatown. To help with the loan repayments, Jane Dakile reported that, “We had rooms at the back as was the custom in Sophiatown, we hired them out for 2 pounds and 10 shillings a month, which was not a lot. There was a Shangaan, a Tswana, a Zulu and a Coloured family living in the back and we lived happily together.”86 In order to pay back their loan, the Mphahlele family went so far as to rent out their formal house and live in a shack in their own backyard.87 Another factor in the expansion of the backyard tenant population was the proclamation of the whole of Johannesburg as a white area in 1933. One of the conditions under which the Minister of Native Affairs granted this proclamation was that African property holders and their tenants would be exempt from the proclamation.88 This meant that the Western Areas became a legal refuge for Africans who were unable, or unwilling, to secure accommodation in the official townships and hostels. As a consequence, the population of the Western Areas tripled from about 28,000 in 1937 to between 69,000 and 77,000 in 1950.89 Under these dual pressures of the demand for cheap rental housing and the need of homeowners to repay their loans, the Western Areas were transformed “into a landscape of solidly built brick houses interspersed with flimsy, ramshackle, corrugated iron and hessian hovels”.90 Don Mattera, a Sophiatown resident and novelists described the better houses as “beautiful” and sometimes “double-storied mansions” that were “locked in a fraternal embrace of filth and felony” with smaller cottages and rusty corrugated iron shacks.91 In 1950, housing in Sophiatown was described in similar, if less poetic, terms: “The type of house found on the stands varies from a well-built brick dwelling of four or more rooms, occupied by one or more families, to a single-roomed, extremely dilapidated shack built of odd scraps of tin and occupied by several persons. The rule rather than the exception is to find stands with more than one building. The buildings being of varying types of construction.”92

Such was the extent of rack renting that, by 1950, the Johannesburg City Council found that 93 per cent of all stands in the Western Areas had at least one structure that was classified as a slum.93 Just over half of all African households (51 per cent) lived in a dwelling that the Council considered fit for demolition. The remaining households lived in dwellings that were “in order or in need of reconstruction”.94 Furthermore, 70 percent of resident homeowners shared their accommodation with another house© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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hold.95 However, this does not mean that all respectable middle class houses had been turned into slums by the 1950s. Photographic evidence suggests that many of the main houses on the stands were still in good condition, even if their backyards were occupied by shacks that the Council classified as slums (Figures 7 and 14). This view of the Western Areas was put forward by Dr A. Xuma, a prominent professional, former president of the African National Congress and resident of Sophiatown: “The Europeans find these areas of ours desirable now. And well they may. They will find these areas well developed now, with all essential services and amenities provided, within easy reach of the centre of the city and with transport that can be improved with a minimum of expense. They will find roads macadamized, a piped water system, reticulated sewerage system, electric lights installed, and many homes at Sophiatown, which is designated for future European occupation, fit for immediate occupation and comparing favourably with homes in many an European residential area.”96

What was the extent of African home-ownership in the Western Areas? An analysis of the municipal evaluation rolls in 1951 revealed that 48 per cent of the 2,400 stands in the Western Areas

Figure 14: A middle class home in Sophiatown, 1955. Source: Box: “African Housing, Sophiatown, Pre-1970”, dated 31/1/1955, The Star Archive, Independent Newspapers, Johannesburg © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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were owned by Africans (Table 3). Just over half of the 1,500 standowners (55 per cent) were African, and a sizeable minority of them (21 per cent) owned more than one stand. So, “. . . the most talented African men and women from all walks of life – in spite of the hardships they had to encounter – came from Sophiatown. The best musicians, scholars, educationists [sic], singers, artists, doctors, lawyers, clergymen”.98 What statistical evidence is there concerning the class character of these black home-owners? A household survey conducted in 1950 revealed that 38 per cent of the African home-owners were traders or employed as schoolteachers, ministers, clerks and artisans (probably self-employed). About one-third was employed in the lower paid semi-skilled and unskilled occupations and the remaining 29 per cent probably included many retirees and widows (Table 4). Anecdotally, there is clear evidence that some homeowners were wealthy professionals and businessmen. A good example is the prominent figure of Dr. A. Xuma. To quote Cobley, “Dr Xuma was one of the wealthiest African property owners in Johannesburg. He owned several properties in Sophiatown from the beginning of the Table 3: Stand ownership among Africans in the Western Areas, 195197

Sophiatown Newclare Martindale All Areas

Percentage of Stand-Owners who were African

Percentage of Stands which were Owned by Africans:

Percentage of African Stand-Owners who Owned More than One Stand

69% 20% 44% 55%

63% 16% 38% 48%

22% 26% 14% 21%

Table 4: Occupations of Heads of Households, Western Areas 1950 (Percentage Distribution)99 Occupation of Household Professionals and Clerks Commercial Traders Skilled Manual Workers/Artisans Semi-skilled Manual Workers Unskilled Manual Workers Main source of income from rents, family or social services Total

Owners

All Household Heads

10 10 18 12 21 29

4 4 16 25 45 6

100

100


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1930s up to the time of its destruction in the 1950s. As both a professional man and a landowner he had resided comfortably with his family in the tiny upper stratum of the African petty bourgeoisie of the 1930s and 1940s. His house on Toby Street, his clinic at 104 End Street and his other properties were concrete expressions of his place at the top of a pyramid of social, economic and occupational status in the urban African community . . .”.100 Another example is provided by Mr S. Lethoba: “The most significant African stand holder . . . who, through his work as a builder and property speculator, had control of 58 rooms in Sophiatown, bringing in an income of £70 a month by 1935.”101 The life history of Gota Themeli, a village headman from what is known as the Limpopo Province today, provides us with an example of the opportunities available to African entrepreneurs.102 After working for a few years as a domestic servant and a packer in a meat packing factory, Themeli started his own hawking business. From 1936, he sold food and drink from a mobile cart, known as a “coffee cart”: essentially a small store mounted on bicycle wheels. His customers were mostly African workers who were employed in the central business district. Since Themeli was able to rent a room in a house in nearby Fordsburg, it was only a short distance between his home and trading area. After some ten years of hawking, Themeli had gathered sufficient funds to expand his business to include two restaurants, known as “eating houses” and two coffee carts. He rented a house in the inner city residential area of Fordsburg with a shop front from which he ran one restaurant. The other restaurant was located in Market Street in the central business district. Both coffee carts operated near the bus terminals in the central business district. At one point, Themeli employed eight people to help run his restaurants and coffee carts. To facilitate his business activities during the evening, Themeli applied for, and received exemption from the 9pm curfew. This document not only allowed him to undertake business trips during the evening, but also to travel in first-class train compartments that were otherwise reserved for whites. In 1953, Themeli’s successful business career was brought to an end when the state ordered him to move his businesses out of the areas proclaimed for whites. He was forced to move to the relatively remote African township of Orlando where his business failed because of insufficient customers. Another example is provided by the life history of J. Maketa Thema, a qualified plumber who ran his own business in Sophiatown during the 1930s.103 Thema was also born in what is known today as the Limpopo Province was and educated at St Andrews Mission School, Mamabolo, to Standard III, and then at the Kagiso © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Mission School in Pietersburg (where he lived with his aunt in the African location). While at school he became interested in the work of a German plumber in Pietersburg. He frequented the shop and became so useful that he was offered a job as an assistant and learned the trade of plumbing. In 1909 he obtained employment in the Artillery Barracks in Pretoria, caring for the mules. In 1914 he was promoted to a gunner and when war was declared, he fought in the East Africa campaign. When he returned from the war in 1918, he found employment as a plumber on the railways in Braamfontein, working in the Railway Travelling Plumbing Shop. He was in charge of two to fifty workers, depending on the job. In 1922, he was joined by a European plumber, a result of the “civilised” white labour policy on the railways. Thema remained in charge of the gang until 1925, at which point he was restricted to unskilled tasks. Consequently, he then left the railways to work for a private company in Johannesburg. From 1925 until 1931, Thema worked as a skilled plumber at a number of private companies in Braamfontein and the central business district. In 1931, he opened his own business in Sophiatown, at 59 Good Street, named “The Sophiatown Plumbing Works”. He worked on jobs for African, coloured and white building contractors and employed his own team of workers. Although there were, as yet, no laws preventing Thema from working as a skilled artisan, he was denied a license to allow him to connect sewerage pipes from dwellings to the municipal sewerage mains. This was the only artisan’s task that he was not permitted to carry out. Although he complained that “business is not too good”, he nonetheless owned a property in Pietersburg and a number of stands in Sophiatown. He lived in the one house with his wife and rented out the other five. Throughout the 1940s, the Council always stated that its intention was not to dispossess African home-owners. Rather, the Council wanted to restrict these freehold townships for the residence of “the better class of native” by removing the tenants and sub-tenants, which it saw as the root of its problems.104 This relatively accommodating attitude towards the African middle class persisted into the late 1940s. Brandel-Syrier’s “Reeftown”105 was established in 1949 to house both the residents of the “old location” (which the Council saw fit to demolish) and residents who lived on peri-urban farms and in domestic quarters in neighbouring white residential districts. However, unlike the townships built during the late 1950s, Reeftown was designed to accommodate the emerging class differences of the urban African population. To quote Brandel-Syrier: © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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“Whereas in the old location educated and illiterate, poor and rich, long-urbanized and newly-arrived residents had all lived together in the closest proximity, in the new township people of similar ways of life and leisure tended to seek accommodation among like-minded friends, and the increasing social differentiation was expressed and emphasized in residential differentiation.”106

This residential differentiation took the form of three different types of housing schemes which were geographically separate from one another. These were, (i) a home-ownership scheme, (ii) a sub-economic rental housing scheme and (iii) a site-and-service scheme. The home-ownership scheme was aimed at the more “wellto-do” residents of the “old location” who had previously rented Council houses or owned their own homes. The sub-economic rental housing was provided for those residents who could not afford to buy a home: these residents were usually the sub-tenants who lived in the backyards of the “old location”. Finally, the siteand-service scheme was aimed at the poorest urban Africans who had “little urban experience” and were employed in domestic service and lived on peri-urban farms.107 Reeftown’s home-owners comprised the small township elite who were either successful traders or were employed in clerical, semi-professional and professional occupations. The professionals among this elite were predominantly employed as school principals, schoolteachers and nurses. Other important middle class occupations were clerks, salespeople, court interpreters, health inspectors and ministers of religion. Only a very small minority were traders and medical doctors.108 These home-owners had been given the choice to either build a house of their own design or to follow the plans offered by the Municipality. Consequently, the size and design of these homes varied tremendously. At one extreme these houses were quite luxurious. Brandel-Syrier describes these as “large, seven- or eight-roomed houses, with wide and low windows, elaborate stoeps [verandas], heavy decorated imbuia front doors with ‘ding-dong’ bells . . . double garages built on to the house with detached servants” quarters’. The interiors were just as elaborate, with two bathrooms (one adjoining the main bedroom), wooden parquet floors, a separate entrance hall, a fully tiled “American kitchen” with built in cupboards, a stainless-steel sink, a refrigerator and an electric stove. At the other extreme, the homes were much smaller and cost only one-quarter of the most expensive houses. These cheaper houses were laid out in a simple “square block” design without a stoep. Instead of a garage, the family car was housed in a “lean-to” or a “pillared pergola”. The interiors were also less elaborate with the floors of polished cement and linoleum coverings instead of tiles.109 © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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This home-ownership scheme was later expanded by the municipality. This was achieved by allowing the tenants of Council houses adjacent to the home-owning neighbourhood to purchase their houses. The Council then loaned the new home-owners the money to extend these erstwhile Council houses. Consequently, the original small home-owning neighbourhood was augmented by newcomers such as “school principals and supervisors, the health inspectors and the top-grade municipal staff” who were drawn out of the sub-economic housing district.110 The state’s relatively accommodating approach towards African home-ownership, as exemplified by the administration of Reeftown, was not to last. Following on its victory in the 1948 national elections, the National Party’s influence began to impact on local government decisions. The case study of Dube nicely illustrates the effects of this shift in policy since it was the first home-ownership scheme for Africans that was developed after the National Party came to power. The creation of a home-ownership scheme in Dube, in what is now known as Soweto, was first proposed by the Johannesburg City Council in 1946. The Municipality’s proposal was motivated partly by the desire to save money and partly by the desire to lure the African middle class away from their homes in Sophiatown.111 In this way, the Johannesburg City Council could kill two birds with one stone. However, this proposal met with a technical obstacle in the form of the original farm’s title deed, which excluded Africans from owning the land. To get around this problem, the Council abandoned the idea of freehold ownership and instead tried to persuade prospective home-owners to accept 99-year leasehold title instead. Sceptical of the security of leasehold tenure, the African middle-class rejected the Dube home-ownership scheme: by 1951 the scheme had attracted only four takers. This failure of the scheme to attract African home-owners was seized upon by the Minister of Native Affairs, none other than H. F. Verwoed himself, who insisted that the Johannesburg City Council rezone Dube for greater residential density and that the leasehold be reduced from 99 to 30 years.112 Soon after this victory, the National Party government forced the Johannesburg City Council to apply ethnolinguistic zoning to Dube. From 1954, residence in Dube was restricted to members of the Nguni ethnic group.113 So, through the intervention of the National Party government, the United Party’s plans for a residentially differentiated and middle class Dube were partially thwarted. However, because of its 30-year leasehold titles, Dube did attain some distinctiveness from the rest of Soweto’s rental townships. This was due partly to intervention of philanthropic volunteer groups such as the British Ex© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Figure 15: An owner-built home in Dube. Source: 326:331.83, Museum Africa Photographic Library, Johannesburg

Servicemen’s League, which financed home loans for Africans. Consequently, some of Dube’s residents were “able to secure modest, but distinctively superior homes, in the otherwise monotonous dormitory township of Soweto” (Figure 15).114 7. Conclusion This study has shown that during the pre-apartheid and early apartheid period, occupational class differences among the African population were reinforced by state policies that recognised these class differences. This period stands in contrast to the “high” apartheid period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which state policies ignored class differences among Africans and, instead, sought to differentiate Africans in terms of whether or not they were born in Johannesburg. Class divisions in the African population during the preapartheid and early apartheid period were therefore expressed in a variety of ways. Middle class Africans were exempted from the racist regulations of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act that imposed the pass system on urban Africans and restricted their urban res© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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idence to hostels, domestic servant’s rooms and racially segregated official townships. Although the government had already begun to restrict African ownership of residential property, existing African homeowners had not yet been dispossessed. So, a small African middle class was still able to own homes in the townships of Alexandra and the Western Areas. The absence of state control over the education system also meant that small numbers of Africans could still gain access to a good high school education that would facilitate their access to employment in middle class occupations. So, the African middle class was also distinguished from the working class by its access to the better schools within the mission school system. At this time, the African middle class was still very small and the working class was comprised mostly of unskilled manual workers. The relatively large working class lived in rental accommodation under a variety of conditions. These conditions varied from family accommodation in fairly respectable Council houses to the overcrowed backyard shacks and slum housing in the freehold townships. Housing for single migrants took the form of hostels and of domestic servants’ rooms in white residential areas. The African middle class was found largely in freehold townships of Alexandra and the Western Areas. However, these freehold townships were not homogeneous middle class residential neighbourhoods. By the 1950s, a combination of social forces had transformed them into a mosaic of residential differentiation. Housing conditions in these townships ranged from respectable homes occupied by the wealthiest Africans in Johannesburg to backyard shacks and overcrowded slum housing. This class differentiated urban African society was transformed under the impact of twenty years of apartheid policies. Under high apartheid, the African middle class had no legal rights that distinguished them from the working class. Their access to education, homeownership, employment and even the right to live in the city itself were based upon the distinction between rural and urban birthplaces rather than on class. Housing provision by the state had produced a homogenised urban landscape where workers and the middle class lived in identical houses. The main residential division was no longer between shacks and houses but between standardised family housing for urbanites and single-sex hostels for rural migrants. Similarly, with only a few exceptions, educational opportunities in the city were restricted to primary schools. However, this state of affairs did not last very long. By the end of the 1970s, the apartheid state was facing resistance from a variety of quarters. In response, the state began to introduce piecemeal reforms that did away with many of the laws restricting urbanisa© 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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tion, employment, education and home-ownership among Africans, even before the democratic elections in 1994 that marked the official end of apartheid. As a result of these reforms, and the general withdrawal of the state from the control of African urban life, class differences among the African population began to express themselves again in residential terms as standardised Council housing gave way to backyard shacks, sprawling shantytowns, renovated “matchboxes” and new homeownership schemes.

Notes 1 For example, Alexander, P., Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid: Labour and politics in South Africa 1939–48 (James Currey, Oxford, 2000); Lewis, J., Industrialisation and Trade Union Organisation in South Africa, 1924–1955: The rise and fall of the South African Trades and Labour Council (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984). 2 For example, Beavon, K., Johannesburg: The making and shaping of the city (University of South Africa Press, Pretoria, 2004); Hellmann, E., Soweto: Johannesburg’s African city (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1971); Parnell, S. and Pirie, G. “Johannesburg”, in A. Lemon (ed.), Homes apart: South Africa’s segregated cities (Paul Chapman Publishing, London, 1991), pp. 129–145. 3 Bonner, P., “African Urbanisation on the Rand Between the 1930’s and 1960’s: Its social character and political consequences”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21(1), 1995, pp. 115–129; Bonner, P. and Segal, L., Soweto: A history (Maskew Miller/Longman, Cape Town, 1998); Cobley, A., Class and Consciousness: The black petty bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924–1950 (Greenwood Press, London, 1990); Goodhew, D., Respectability and Resistance: A history of Sophiatown (Praeger, Westport CT, 2004). 4 I use the concept of “class” in the sense of “occupational class” to identify positions in the occupational structure rather than to explain political behaviour. In this usage, the middle class includes white collar occupations (managers, professionals, salespeople and clerks) and small business owners). For a review of the theoretical debate over class boundaries and their application to South African society, see Crankshaw, O., Race, Class and the Changing Division of Labour Under Apartheid (Routledge, London, 1997) 5 The exception being Hindson’s work on the class character of controls over urbanisation: Hindson, D., Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1987). 6 Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat in South Africa, pp. 62 and 69. 7 Affidavit by Vincent Thomas Mokgeledi, Johannesburg Advice Office Records, 1968–1972, Black Sash Records (AE 862), Lcd 2.3, Church of the Province of South Africa Archives Collection, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 8 A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1967 (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1968), p. 181. 9 A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1959–1960 (South African Institute of Race Relations, Braamfontein, 1961), pp. 182–183.



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Sikakane, J., A Window on Soweto (International Defence and Aid Fund, London, 1977), pp. 54–58. 11 Morris, P., Soweto: A review of existing conditions and some guidelines for change (Urban Foundation, Johannesburg, 1980), pp. 54–55, 143. 12 This leasehold applied only to the house itself. The land was rented from the state. Morris, P., A History of Black Housing in South Africa (South Africa Foundation, Johannesburg, 1981), p. 132. 13 Morris, Soweto, pp. 142–3. 14 Swart, C., Swart Behuising: Deel 1, Gesinsbehuising in Soweto, Publication C21 (Instituut vir Stedelike Studies, Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg, 1979), p. 58. 15 Hellmann, E., Soweto: Johannesburg’s African city (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1971), p. 3. 16 From 1954 to 1965, about 45,000 “matchbox” houses were built. Lewis, P., “A City Within a City: The creation of Soweto”, Special Issue of The South African Geographical Journal, 1966, pp. 53–54. 17 Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1973 (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1974), p. 129. 18 Hellmann, Soweto, p. 28; Pirie, G. and da Silva, M., “Hostels for African Migrants in Greater Johannesburg”, GeoJournal 12(2), 1986, p. 175. 19 Bonner, P., “African Urbanisation on the Rand Between the 1930’s and 1960’s: Its social character and political consequences”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21(1), 1995, p. 128. 20 Mather, C., “Residential Segregation and Johannesburg’s ‘Locations in the Sky’ ”, South African Geographical Journal 69(2), 1987, pp. 119–128; A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1965 (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1966), p. 167. 21 Hyslop, J., “ ‘A Destruction Coming In’: Bantu Education as a response to social crisis”, P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (eds.), Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962 (Ravan Press, Braamfontein, 1993), pp. 396. 22 Sikakane, J., A Window on Soweto (International Defence & Aid Fund, London, 1977). 23 Nattrass, N., “Economic Growth and Transformation in the 1940s”, S. Dubow and A. Jeeves (eds.), South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of possibilities (Double Storey Books, Cape Town, 2005), pp. 24–26. 24 Hudson, P. and Sarakinsky, M., “Class Interests and Politics: The case of the Urban African bourgeoisie”, South African Review III (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1986), pp. 172–173; Southall, R., “African Capitalism in Contemporary South Africa”, Journal of Southern African Studies 7(1), 1980, pp. 43–44. 25 A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1955–1956 (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1956), p. 132. 26 Posel, D., The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and compromise (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991). 27 Bonner, “African Urbanisation on the Rand, pp. 115–129; Hindson”, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat, pp. 55–56; O’Meara, D., “The 1946 African Mineworkers’ Strike in the Political Economy of South Africa”, Journal of Commonwealth Studies and Comparative Politics 13(1), 1975, p. 149. 28 Beall, J., Crankshaw, O. and Parnell, S., “A Matter of Timing: Urbanisation and housing access in metropolitan Johannesburg”, D. Bryceson © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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and D. Potts (eds.), African Urban Economies (African Studies Centre, Leiden, forthcoming). 29 Crankshaw, Race, Class and the Changing Division of Labour, pp. 36–38; Posel, D., “Influx Control and Urban Labour Markets in the 1950s”, P. Bonner, P. Delius, D. Posel (eds.), Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962 (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1993), pp. 416–417. The 1946 Population Census report on occupations for Joburg does not explicitly distinguish between semi-skilled, unskilled and skilled manual labour. Nonetheless, if all “labourers”, “gardeners”, “porters”, and “domestic servants” are classified as unskilled workers, then 82 per cent of Johannesburg’s African workforce was employed in unskilled jobs. 30 This paragraph draws from Crankshaw, Race, Class and the Changing Division of Labour, p. 56. 31 Webster, E., “Workers Divided: Five faces from a hidden abode”, B. Bozzoli (ed), Class, Community and Conflict: South African perspectives (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1987), p. 488. 32 Crankshaw, Race, Class and the Changing Division of Labour, pp. 51 and 53–54. 33 Population Census 7th May 1946: Occupations and Industries of the European, Asiatic, Coloured and Native Population, Volume 5, UG 41/1954 (Union of South Africa, Pretoria, 1954), Table 13. 34 Hellmann, E., Sellgoods: A sociological survey of an African commercial labour force (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1953), p. 3. 35 Wilson, F., Labour in the South African Gold Mines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972), p. 19. 36 Crankshaw, O., “Apartheid and Economic Growth: Craft unions, capital and the State in the South African building industry, 1945–1975”, Journal of Southern African Studies 16(3), 1990, pp. 512–513; Population Census 7th May 1946: Occupations and Industries, Table 13. 37 Phillips, R., The Bantu in the City: A study of cultural adjustment on the Witwatersrand (Lovedale Press, Lovedale, 1938), p. 14. 38 Brandel-Syrier, M., Reeftown Elite: A study of social mobility in a modern African community on the reef (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1971), p. 65; Cobley, A., Class and Consciousness: The black petty bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924–1950 (Greenwood Press, London, 1990), pp. 43–44; Hellmann, E., “The Emerging African Middle Class in South Africa”, The Colonial Review 9, 1956, p. 145; Sherwood, R., “Motivational Analysis: A comparison of job attitudes among African and American professional and clerical workers”, Proceedings of the South African Psychological Association 7 & 8, 1956–7, pp. 27–28. 39 Population Census 7th May, 1946: Volume V, Occupations and Industries of the European, Asiatic, coloured and Native Population (Union of South Africa, Pretoria, 1955). 40 Hellmann, E., Sellgoods: A sociological survey of an African commercial labour force (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1953), p. 3. 41 An Investigation into the Utilisation of Native Labour Employed by the Johannesburg City Council (National Institute for Personnel Research, South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Braamfontein, 1957), p. 21. 42 Phillips, The Bantu in the City, pp. 15–19.



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Rogerson, C., “Shisha Nyama: The rise and fall of the native eating house trade in Johannesburg”, Social Dynamics 14, 1988, pp. 20–33. 44 Rogerson, C., “From Coffee Cart to Industrial Canteen: Feeding Johannesburg’s black workers, 1945–1965”, A. Mabin (ed.), Organisation and Economic Change: South African Studies Volume 5 (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1985), p. 170. 45 Southall, “African Capitalism in Contemporary South Africa”, p. 43. 46 Population Census 7th May 1946: Occupations and Industries, Table 13. 47 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, pp. 260–261. 48 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, p. 79. 49 Brandel-Syrier, M., “Coming Through”: The search for a new cultural identity (McGraw-Hill, Johannesburg, 1978), pp. 19–24; Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, pp. 75–77. 50 Hindson, D., Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat in South Africa, pp. 29–32 and 36. 51 Dubow, S., “Race, Civilisation and Culture: The elaboration of segregationist discourse in the inter-war years”, S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds.), The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (Longman, Harlow, 1987), pp. 86–89. 52 Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat in South Africa, p. 36. 53 Natives (Urban Areas) Act, 1923: Act No.21 of 1923, Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1923 (Government Printer, Cape Town, 1923), Sections 5 and 12, pp. 146–148 and pp. 159–164. 54 A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1949–1950 (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1951), pp. 39–40. 55 Cobley, Class and Consciousness, p. 68. 56 This estimate is confirmed by Alexander, Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid, footnote 137, p. 166. 57 A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1949–1950, pp. 39–40. 58 Hellmann, E. (ed.), Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa (Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1949), p. 252. 59 Maylam, P., “The Rise and Decline of Urban Apartheid in South Africa”, African Affairs 89(354), 1990, p. 30. 60 Hellmann, Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, p. 252. 61 Parnell, S., “Negotiating Segregation: Pre-parliamentary debate over the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923”, African Studies 57(2), 1998, pp. 153–154. 62 Hellmann, Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, p. 252. 63 Act No.46 of 1937, Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1937 (Government Printer, Cape Town, 1937), p. 664; Davenport, R., “African Townsmen? South African Natives (Urban Areas) legislation through the years”, African Affairs 68(271), 1969, p. 99. 64 Parnell, S., “Winning the Battles But Losing the War: The racial segregation of Johannesburg under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923”, Journal of Historical Geography 28(2), 2002, pp. 258–281. 65 Feldmann, G., Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950 (Non-European Affairs Department, City of Johannesburg, 1950), See table in Appendix, no page, no table number. 66 Hellmann, Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, p. 254; Pirie and da Silva, “Hostels for African Migrants”, p. 174.


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67

Pimville, originally known as Klipspruit, was renamed in 1934. Lewis, P., “A City Within a City: The creation of Soweto”, Special Issue of The South African Geographical Journal, 1966, p. 59. 68 Hellmann, Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, p. 254 69 Koch, E., “ ‘Without Visible Means of Subsistence’: Slumyard culture in Johannesburg, 1918–1940”, B. Bozzoli (ed.), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist penetration and popular response (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1983), p. 154. 70 Hellmann, E., Rooiyard: A sociological survey of an urban native slum yard (Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1948); Parnell, S. and Pirie, G. “Johannesburg”, in A. Lemon (ed.), Homes apart: South Africa’s segregated cities (Paul Chapman Publishing, London, 1991), pp. 129–145. 71 Davidson, L. and Leslie, K., “The Life History of a Venda Headman”, E. Preston-Whyte and C. Rogerson (eds.), South Africa’s Informal Economy (Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1991), p. 57. 72 Musiker, N. and Musiker, R., Historical Dictionary of Greater Johannesburg (Scarecrow Press, Oxford, 1999), p. 107. 73 Parnell, S., “Racial Segregation in Johannesburg: The Slums Act, 1934–1939”, South African Geographical Journal 70(2), 1988, pp. 112–126.; Parnell and Pirie, “Johannesburg”, p. 133; Stadler, A., “Birds in the Cornfield: Squatter movements in Johannesburg, 1944–1947”, Journal of Southern African Studies 6(1), 1979, p. 118. 74 Hart, D. and Pirie, G., “The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown”, Geographical Review 74(1), 1984, p. 39. 75 Parnell and Pirie, “Johannesburg”, p. 134. 76 Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, p. 21. 77 Huddlestone, T., Naught For Your Comfort (Collins, London, 1956), pp. 37–38. 78 Huddlestone, Naught For Your Comfort, pp. 112–115. 79 The following discussion of the squatter movements of the 1940s is drawn from Stadler, “Birds in the Cornfield”, pp. 93–123. 80 A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1955–1956, pp. 102–3; Davenport, R., “African Townsmen? South African Natives (Urban Areas) legislation through the years”, African Affairs 68(271), 1969, p. 99. 81 The Western Areas Removal Scheme: Facts and viewpoints (South African Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1953), p. 3. 82 Pirie, G. and Hart, D., “The Transformation of Johannesburg’s Black Western Areas”, Journal of Urban History 11(4), 1985, p. 388; Sarakinsky, M., Alexandra: From “freehold” to “model” township (Development Studies Group, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1984), p. i. 83 Proctor, A., “Class Struggle, Segregation and the City: A history of Sophiatown, 1905–1940”, B. Bozzoli (ed.), Labour Townships and Protest (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1979), pp. 57–58; Sarakinsky, Alexandra, p. ii. 84 Proctor, “Class Struggle, Segregation and the City”, p. 76. 85 van Tonder, D., “ ‘First win the war, then clear the slums’: The genesis of the Western Areas Removal Scheme, 1940–1949”, P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (eds.), Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962 (Ravan Press/Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 1993), pp. 319–320. 86 Stein, P. and Jacobson, R., Sophiatown Speaks (Junction Avenue Press, Johannesburg, 1986), p. 5. 87 Goodhew, D., Respectability and Resistance: A history of Sophiatown (Praeger, Westport CT, 2004), p. 11. © 2005 The Author. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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Proctor, “Class Struggle, Segregation and the City”, p. 64. Batson, E. and Feldmann, G., Report on a Sample Survey of the Native Population residing in the Western areas of Johannesburg, 1951 (NonEuropean Affairs Department, City of Johannesburg, 1955), p. 19; Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, p. 9. 90 Hart, D. and Pirie, G., “The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown”, Geographical Review 74(1), 1984, p. 39. 91 Hart and Pirie, “The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown”, pp. 41–42. 92 Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, pp. 24–25. 93 Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, p. 13. 94 Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, p. 74. 95 Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, p. 66. 96 Xuma, A., “African Reactions”, The Western Areas Removal Scheme: Facts and viewpoints (South African Institute for Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1953), p. 27. 97 Batson and Feldmann, Report on a Sample Survey of the Native Population, pp. 194–196. 98 Tlali, M., Muriel at Metropolitan (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1975), p. 70, cited in Hart and Pirie, “The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown”, p. 39. 99 Feldmann, Survey of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1950, p. 67. 100 Cobley, Class and Consciousness, p. 34. 101 Goodhew, Respectability and Resistance, pp. 11–12. 102 Davidson and Leslie, “The Life History of a Venda Headman”, pp. 57–62. 103 Phillips, The Bantu in the City, p. 19 and pp. 420–421. 104 Proctor, “Class Struggle, Segregation and the City”, p. 64. 105 The true name of this township is unknown, but it was probably an East Rand township. 106 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, p. 20. 107 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, p. 21. 108 These are the occupations of both wives and husbands: BrandelSyrier, Reeftown Elite, pp. 65 & 84; Charney, C., “Janus in Blackface? The African petite bourgeoisie in South Africa”, Con-Text 1, 1988, p. 9. 109 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, pp. 88–90. 110 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, p. 25. 111 Parnell, S., “The Ideology of African Home-Ownership: The establishment of Dube, Soweto, 1946–1955”, South African Geographical Journal 73, 1991, pp. 71–72. 112 Parnell, “The Ideology of African Home-Ownership”, pp. 69–73. 113 Parnell, “The Ideology of African Home-Ownership”, p. 74; Pirie, G., “Ethno-linguistic zoning in South African black townships”, Area, 16(4), 1984, p. 295. 114 Parnell, “The Ideology of African Home-Ownership”, p. 74. 89


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