SOWETO INFORMATION AND HISTORY

Soweto obtained its name from the first two letters of South Western Township which was the original description of the area, but some feel it came from the relocating residents asking "SoWhere To?"

The township was created to house mainly black labourers, who worked in mines and other industries in the city, away from the city centre.  The first residents of what is now known as Soweto were located into the area called Klipspriut in 1905 following their relocation from the centre of Johannesburg as a result of an outbreak of bubonic plague. The Johannesburg City Council took the opportunity to establish racially segregated residential areas. Only black families were located into Klipspruit and the housing was on a rental basis. Klipspruit was subsequently renamed Pimville.

Soweto began as a shanty town in the 1930s and became the largest black city in South Africa, but until 1976 its population could have status only as temporary residents, serving as a workforce for Johannesburg. Soweto has also been a hotbed of many political campaigns that took place in the country, the most memorable of which was the 1976 student uprising in which several students were shot at, and others killed.

The first student to fall –Hector Peterson can be remembered as a symbol of that struggle at the Hector Peterson Memorial which was set up not too far from where he was shot.

Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the municipal services of Soweto were administered by the Johannesburg Metropolitan Board, on which the people of Soweto have elected representatives.

The township has also produced the highest number of professional soccer teams in the country. Orlando Pirates, Kaizer Chiefs and Moroka Swallows all emerged from the township, and remain among the biggest soccer teams in the Premier Soccer League.

Soweto is the most populous black urban residential area in the country. Some call it a city within a city due to its proximity to Johannesburg. It is also the most metropolitan township in the country - setting trends in politics, fashion, music, dance and language.

SOWETO is getting a facelift, which will not only make it a greater tourist attraction, but will also make the city self-sustaining. With the recent opening of Maponya Mall, residents of the famous township will no longer have to spend money on transport to go to far away malls for their shopping.
Soweto will also become a tourist destination, with several B&B’s and restaurants already up and running, the residents of Soweto have found a way to turn a tumultuous history into an income generating tourist attraction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soweto

Soweto  is a township of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in Gauteng, South Africa, bordering the city's mining belt in the south. Its name is an English syllabic abbreviation for South Western Townships.

Formerly a separate municipality, it is now incorporated in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Suburbs of Johannesburg.

George Harrison and George Walker are today credited as the men who discovered an outcrop of the Main Reef of gold on the farm Langlaagte in February 1886.

The fledgling town of Johannesburg was laid out on a triangular wedge of "uitvalgrond" (area excluded when the farms were surveyed) named Randjeslaagte, situated between the farms Doornfontein to the east, Braamfontein to the west and Turffontein to the south

Within a decade of the discovery of gold in Johannesburg, 100,000 people flocked to this part of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republic in search of riches. They were of all races and all nationalities.

In October 1887 the government of the South African Republic (ZAR) bought the south-eastern portion of the farm Braamfontein. There were large quantities of clay, suitable for brickmaking, along the stream. The government decided that more money was to be made from issuing brick maker's licences at five shillings per month.

 The result was that many landless Dutch-speaking burghers (citizens) of the ZAR settled on the property and started making bricks. They also erected their shacks there. Soon the area was known either Brickfields or Veldschoendorp.

Soon other working poor, Coloureds, Indians and Africans also settled there. The government, who sought to differentiate the white working class from the black, laid out new suburbs for the Burghers (Whites), Coolies (Indians), Malays (Coloureds) and Black Africans (Africans), but the whole area simply stayed multiracial.

Soweto was created in the 1930s when the White government started separating Blacks from Whites, creating black "townships". Blacks were moved away from Johannesburg, to an area separated from White suburbs by a so-called cordon sanitaire (or sanitary corridor) this was usually a river, a railway track, an industrial area or a highway etc., they did this by using the infamous 'Urban Areas Act' in 1923.

William Carr, chair of non-European affairs, initiated the naming of Soweto in 1959. He called for a competition to give a collective name to townships dotted around the South-west of Johannesburg. People responded to this competition with great enthusiasm. Among the names suggested to the City Council was KwaMpanza, meaning Mpanza's place, invoking the name of Mpanza and his role in bringing the plight of Orlando sub tenants to the attention of the City Council. The City Council settled for the acronym SOWETO (South West Townships). The name Soweto was first used in 1963 and within a short period of time, following the 1976 uprising of students in the township, the name became internationally known

Soweto became the largest Black city in South Africa, but until 1976 its population could have status only as temporary residents, serving as a workforce for Johannesburg. It experienced civil unrest during the Apartheid regime. There were serious riots in 1976, sparked by a ruling that Afrikaans be used in African schools there; the riots were violently suppressed, with 176 striking students killed and more than 1,000 injured. Reforms followed, but riots flared up again in 1985 and continued until the first non-racial elections were held in April 1994.

In 2010, South Africa's oldest township hosted the final of the FIFA Soccer World Cup and the attention of more than a billion soccer spectators from all over the world was focused on Soweto.

Kliptown and Pimville

In April 1904 there was a bubonic plague scare in the shanty town area of Brickfields. The town council decided to condemn the area and burn it down. Beforehand most of the Africans living there were moved far out of town to the farm Klipspruit (later called Pimville), south-west of Johannesburg, where the council had erected iron barracks and a few triangular hutments. The rest of them had to build their own shacks. The fire brigade then set the 1600 shacks and shops in Brickfields alight. Thereafter the area was redeveloped as Newtown.

Pimville was next to Kliptown, the oldest Black residential district of Johannesburg and first laid out in 1891 on land which formed part of Klipspruit farm. The future Soweto was to be laid out on Klipspruit and the adjoining farm called Diepkloof.

In the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and the subsequent Transvaal Colony it was lawful for people of colour to own fixed property.

Consequently, the township of Sophiatown was laid out in 1903 and Blacks were encouraged to buy property there. For the same reasons Alexandra, Gauteng was planned for Black ownership in 1912. The subsequent Natives Land Act of 1913 did not change the situation because it did not apply to land situated within municipal boundaries.

Orlando, Moroka and Jabavu[edit]

In 1923 the Parliament of the Union of South Africa passed the Natives (Urban Areas) Act (Act No. 21 of 1923). The purpose of the Act was to provide for improved conditions of residence for natives in urban areas, to control their ingress into such areas and to restrict their access to intoxicating liquor. The Act required local authorities to provide accommodation for Natives (then the polite term for Africans or Blacks) lawfully employed and resident within the area of their jurisdiction. Pursuant to this Act the Johannesburg town council formed a Municipal Native Affairs Department in 1927. It bought 1 300 morgen of land on the farm Klipspruit No. 8 and the first houses in what was to become Orlando Location were built there in the latter half of 1930. The township was named after the chairman of the Native Affairs committee, Mr. Edwin Orlando Leake.[15] In the end some 10,311 houses were built there by the municipality. In addition it built 4,045 temporary single-room shelters.[16]

In about 1934 James Sofasonke Mpanza moved to 957 Pheele Street, Orlando, and lived there for the rest of his life.

 A year after his arrival in Orlando he formed his own political party, the Sofasonke Party. He also became very active in the affairs of the Advisory Board for Orlando.

Towards the end of World War II there was an acute shortage of housing for Blacks in Johannesburg. By the end of 1943 the Sofasonke Party advised its members to put up their own squatters' shacks on municipal property.

 On Saturday 25 March 1944 the squat began. Hundreds of homeless people from Orlando and elsewhere joined Mpanza in marching to a vacant lot in Orlando West and starting a squatters camp.

The City Council's resistance crumbled. After feverish consultations with the relevant government department, it was agreed that an emergency camp, which could house 991 families, be erected. It was to be called Central Western Jabavu. The next wave of land invasions took place in September 1946. Some 30,000 squatters congregated west of Orlando. Early the next year the City Council proclaimed a new emergency camp. It was called Moroka. 10,000 sites were made available immediately.

 Moroka became Johannesburg's worst slum area. Residents erected their shanties on plots measuring six metres by six metres. There were only communal bucket-system toilets and very few taps. The camps were meant to be used for a maximum of five years, but when they were eventually demolished in 1955, Moroka and Jabavu housed 89,000 people.

Soweto uprising

Soweto uprising Soweto came to the world's attention on 16 June 1976 with the Soweto Uprising, when mass protests erupted over the government's policy to enforce education in Afrikaans rather than their native language. Police opened fire in Orlando West on 10,000 students marching from Naledi High School to Orlando Stadium. The rioting continued and 23 people died on the first day in Soweto, 21 of whom were black, including the minor Hector Pieterson, as well as two white people, including Dr Melville Edelstein, a lifelong humanitarian.

The impact of the Soweto protests reverberated through the country and across the world. In their aftermath, economic and cultural sanctions were introduced from abroad. Political activists left the country to train for guerrilla resistance. Soweto and other townships became the stage for violent state repression. Since 1991 this date and the schoolchildren have been commemorated by the International Day of the African Child. Aftermath Diepmeadow Town Council, Greater Soweto. In response, the apartheid state started providing electricity to more Soweto homes, yet phased out financial support for building additional housing.

Soweto became an independent municipality with elected black councilors in 1983, in line with the Black Local Authorities Act. Previously the townships were governed by the Johannesburg council, but from the 1970s the state took control.

Black African councilors were not provided by the apartheid state with the finances to address housing and infrastructural problems. Township residents opposed the black councilors as puppet collaborators who personally benefited financially from an oppressive regime. Resistance was spurred by the exclusion of blacks from the newly formed tricameral Parliament (which did include Whites, Asians and Coloreds). Municipal elections in black, coloured, and Indian areas were subsequently widely boycotted, returning extremely low voting figures for years. Popular resistance to state structures dates back to the Advisory Boards (1950) that co-opted black residents to advise whites who managed the townships.

Housing

The area is mostly composed of old "matchbox" houses, or four-room houses built by the government, that were built to provide cheap accommodation for black workers during apartheid. However, there are a few smaller areas where prosperous Sowetans have built houses that are similar in stature to those in more affluent suburbs. Many people who still live in matchbox houses have improved and expanded their homes, and the City Council has enabled the planting of more trees and the improving of parks and green spaces in the area.

Hostels are another prominent physical feature of Soweto.Originally built to house male migrant workers, many have been improved as dwellings for couples and families. In 1996, the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality awarded tenders to Conrad Penny and his company Penny Brothers Brokers & Valuers (Pty) Ltd. for the valuation of the whole of Soweto (which at the time consisted of over 325 000 properties) for rating and taxing purpose. This was the single largest valuation ever undertaken in Africa