Municipal Transformation in Soweto: Race, Politics, and Maladministration in Black Johannesburg

Abstract

The growth of Johannesburg is synonymous with that of South Africa's gold mining industry and the expansion of the metropolitan area from a ramshackle collection of huts to one of the continent's major urban concentrations attests to the impact of visions quickly accumulated wealth on patterns of human movement. This is particularly true of the city's early white community, the prospectors and later the purveyors of capital and mining technology, to whom the imminent possibility of riches compensated for the rigors of existence on the geographically featureless Witwatersrand. Yet similar imaginings of affluence also partially explain the historic drift of blacks to “N'goli” (the city of gold) where today they constitute the overwhelming majority of its population. The opening of the gold reefs in 1884 brought unprecedented wealth to white South Africa (if not to the legions of black labor responsible for the precious metal's extraction). At the same time the discovery of gold set in motion the process of black urbanization of which Johannesburg is the epitome. By 1896 approximately half of the fledgling town's population were blacks seeking refuge in mine wage labor from growing poverty in the country areas and by 1913, with rural dispossesion aggravated by the Natives Land Act, an irreversible momentum was set in motion. Twelve years after the striking of the first successful claims Johannesburg's population of 102,000 was roughly divided between black and white (Lewis, 1966: 3). A mere 80 years later, despite the barriers to black urban influx institutionalized by successive white governments, the racial distribution of population was of the order of 3 to 1 with blacks the predominant element of the ratio.