Ten years on, Soweto remains a blacks-only city

Published on Tuesday 7 September 2004 02:09

SOWETO grew from a 1923 law - the Natives (Urban Areas) Act - that withdrew the right of black people to live in the young city of Johannesburg, a rough frontier settlement which was growing fast after the discovery of gold less than 30 years earlier.

But somewhere had to be found for the mass of black mineworkers and other labourers on whose backs and with whose sweat the wealth of white Johannesburgers was built.

In 1936 the black city, some 20 miles beyond Johannesburg and set among huge mine waste dumps that to this day coat the streets of Soweto in a fine yellow dust, had a population of 12,000. Today it houses at least three million, with some estimates suggesting the figure is closer to five million.

For decades, until the time of South Africa’s first all-race election in 1994, Soweto was literally off the map.

While the street plans of the lush white suburbs were extending ever further to the north, Soweto was represented in map books by a blank space to the south-west between the mine bings and railway lines.

For a long time, the short journey from Johannesburg to Soweto was like visiting another continent - the bright lights disappeared, the tarred roads petered out into dusty tracks lined with tiny, undifferentiated ‘matchbox’ brick houses and shacks without electricity or proper sanitation.

The majority of people were desperately poor, but among them were families, such as the Mandelas and Sisulus, who were among the most remarkable leaders in all Africa and who would in due course change the face of their country.

Only a few white journalists, social rebels and communists crossed the great divide between white north and black south.

It was social taboo, as much as the actual laws of apartheid which came later, that kept whites away from Soweto’s parallel world. Eating and drinking with black people, let alone sexual intercourse, was seen as threatening the whole basis of society.

It was in Soweto in 1976 that the white world of perpetual privilege began to unravel when schoolchildren, singing the illegal anthem N’kosi Sikeleli Afrika (God Bless Africa), from Morris Isaacson and Orlando West High Schools, staged a massive demonstration against inferior education for blacks.

Police opened fire on the schoolchildren, and in the ensuing riots hundreds were killed and thousands injured. It marked the beginning of the end of apartheid.

Today Soweto is still a blacks-only city, with the exception of a lone white resident, Paul Verryn, the Methodist Bishop of Johannesburg.

FRED BRIDGLAND