Not surprisingly, Orlando West quickly became a magnet. Sydney Ramokgopa explains how his family ended up in Orlando West, where he was born in 1950:
My parents they are from what we call today Limpopo province, from a place called Zoekmekaar … my parents came to Johannesburg I think around 1929. They stayed in Alexandra with one of our relatives and then from Alexandra they got a house in Orlando East … and then, while they were in Orlando East, it was the time when they were building Orlando West, yes. So they came in after Orlando East was completed. Because I was made to understand that the superintendent at the time, he told this old man, that area in Orlando West, the houses are bigger than the ones in Orlando East. In Orlando East it was only two rooms, you see. So then they moved from Orlando East to here. That is why most of the people particularly in this area, this side to Mandela side and Sisulu, most of them they are from Orlando East. Yes, they are from Orlando East because they were told that these houses are bigger than those ones in Orlando East, so they came this side.
From the 1940s, Orlando West became one of the sought-after locations. In the early 1940s Walter Sisulu qualified for a house in Phomolong (Number 7372), the new residential area that would develop into Orlando West. As Elinor Sisulu, writing about her parents-in-law, was to say, the new four-roomed house was bigger than the Sisulus’ house in Orlando East. ‘It had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a small room, which, though it had no bathtub, they called a bathroom because it had a shower enclosure … the Phomolong house had a tap in the backyard … cement floors and a ceiling.’ Walter Sisulu’s comrade, Nelson Mandela, also qualified for a house after the birth of his and his first wife’s son in 1946. By the early 1950s Orlando West had assumed the features of a more settled community, as more and more families created homes there.
The electoral victory of the National Party in 1948, however, ushered in a period of mounting uncertainty for urban Africans.
The urban experiences of black people and of Africans in particular were characterised under successive white governments by exclusion, marginalisation and removals. The state promoted the migrant labour system and therefore sought to limit and control the presence of Africans in urban areas. In other words, the presence of African labour was deemed necessary only insofar as it was required to tend to the needs of white people, and a pivotal part of the state’s strategy throughout the twentieth century was to limit African urbanisation through influx control. Those Africans who lived in urban areas were subjected to strict controls, were placed in regimented spaces such as compounds and municipal locations. The policy, which controlled migration from the rural areas and maintained order in the locations, enjoyed limited success until the late 1930s, but after that, as African urbanisation surged ahead, locations were transformed from places intended to exemplify state domination into areas of contestation where urban black working class culture and politics were being forged – and they were to become locales of protest and challenge to white control. As Bonner’s and Nieftagodien’s research on Alexandra and Ekurhuleni (on the East Rand) shows, popular protest for housing, against pass controls, high rents and bus fare hikes affected locations across the Reef in the 1940s.
Source: Museum Africa
Houses in Orlando West were in demand
In response to the upsurge of location-based popular struggles and a wave of industrial actions in the 1940s, the state attempted to re-assert control over the urban black population. It was in fact a salient feature, from 1948 onwards, of the apartheid government, which pursued the policies of urban reconfiguration – forced removals, creation of group areas and townships – with much greater determination than had its predecessors. A key aim behind the creation of new townships was to establish basic conditions for the stabilisation of urban African labour, such as the provision of accommodation and elementary education. In this way, the growing demand by industry for reliable and cheap unskilled and semi-skilled labour could more easily be met. State policies in the 1950s were premised on the recognition that some Africans could be permanently urbanised, so the National Party ideologues emphasised – and aimed to entrench – a distinction between African urban ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. ‘Insiders’, from the perspective of the apartheid government, were those Africans who qualified under the so-called ‘Section 10’ laws to work and live legitimately in urban areas where they were given access to public housing in segregated townships. According to ‘Section 10’ of the Natives Laws Amendment Act of 1952, Africans qualified for the right to residence in urban areas if they met certain conditions, such as working continuously for the same employer for a decade or being born and living continuously in an urban area for at least fifteen years. Their right to a degree of permanence in the urban areas was based on the state’s belief, at the time, that some Africans could be ‘detribalised’ and thus permanently urbanised. By contrast, ‘outsiders’ were deemed to be ‘tribal’ (implying ‘rural’) and were consigned to a life of migrancy. Their presence in the urban areas depended on work contracts of specified durations, which means they were required to return to the ‘homelands’, the rural areas, when their contracts expired. The state’s acceptance of the permanent presence of some Africans in the urban areas was a qualified concession. It was also a policy shift, in response to the growing demands for labour from the booming secondary economy and also, critically, to the struggles waged by urban Africans in the 1940s, in which the squatter movements played a pivotal role. On the one hand, industry required a reliable and relatively cheap workforce. On the other hand, the state was determined to break urban political militancy. Both wanted the urban African working class brought under control.
One of the strategies the government used to achieve this objective was the establishment of new townships. HF Verwoerd, who was at the time the minister of native affairs, and has become known as the ‘architect of apartheid’, explained the government’s views in a press release announcing the formation of the Mentz Committee in 1952.
Squatter chaos, overcrowding of existing Native plots, illegal lodging in white yards, the removal of those who refuse to work and thus don’t belong in the city, can only be combated once large enough legal townships for Natives are established close to the towns … The most complicated problem of this character in the Union, exists in the area from the north in Pretoria to the Vaal River, and in the east from Springs till far in the west to Krugersdorp and Randfontein …
From the 1950s, the state embarked on a massive programme of reconfiguring the urban areas along racial lines. It appointed the Mentz Commission (also known as the ‘black spots’ commission) to formulate a plan. The commission recommended that all so-called black spots be removed and replaced with what it called regional group areas and townships. What this meant was that old locations such as Sophiatown, Dukathole and Cato Manor, where urban black people had built communities for several decades, would be destroyed and their residents relocated to racially defined areas such as Soweto, Lenasia and Eldorado Park. Perhaps the best-known example was the forced removal of thousands of people from Sophiatown to Meadowlands in 1954/55. From the state’s perspective, the creation of what it called ‘regional model townships’ was the most effective way of monitoring and therefore controlling large African populations, and careful planning went into the creation of new townships.
In 1952, in a speech to the Senate, Verwoerd set out the government’s vision for the future siting and planning of African townships. The site should be at an adequate distance from the European town and should preferably adjoin the location of a neighbouring town, so as to decrease rather than increase the number of Native areas. The site should preferably be separated from the European area by an industrial buffer, where industries existed or were being planned. The site should have provision for an adequate hinterland for expansion, stretching away from the European area, and it should be within easy distance of the town or city for transport purposes – by rail rather than by road. There should be a road, preferably running through the industrial areas, connecting the location site with the city. The location site should possess open buffer zones around it, the breadth of which would depend on whether