Early African Urbanisation in Cape Town: Windermere in the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

The experience of African urbanisation in Cape Town has received remarkably little historical attention. This can be partly attributed to the relatively small size of the African population compared to the coloured population during the apartheid years in this region. This in turn is partly a legacy of the 1955 Coloured Labour Preference Policy which sought to minimise the number of African workers in the area. The African population of Cape Town was certainly until the 1980s predominantly migrant and this apparent impermanence has tended to push it to the margins of urban studies. The Witwatersrand with its much larger and more permanent African population has assumed centre stage in studies dealing with the African urban experience. This paper focuses on the Windermere squatter settlement during the 1940s and 1950s and seeks to contribute to the meagre literature on Africans in Cape Town and challenge the uncritical separation of urbanites from the amakhaya (migrant contract workers) so common to the historiography of Cape Town. This division was far more blurred and complex than is usually recognised. Very few Africans in Cape Town had a purely urban or purely rural identity by the 1950s. (excerpt)