Before 1822 the indigenous population of the former southern Transvaal province is estimated to have numbered some 150 000, many of whom lived in large settlements of up to 7 000 persons. However, the ravages of the Mfecane, from 1822 to 1837, and the invasion of the region by land-hungry Dutch farmers in 1836, forced many families to leave their ancestral lands. By the time gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, their nearest homesteads were located 110km away, near Rustenburg. The ZAR's subsequent imposition of a "hut tax" forced rural residents to enter into White employment. Johannesburg offered both work and higher wages and within a few years the town had become the home of a large, unskilled and predominantly male labour force. Some found jobs as domestic workers in the suburbs, most laboured on the mines.
Early Johannesburg did not offer its Black citizens much in the way of housing. While the mines generally looked after their own, and most domestics could expect to have sleep-in quarters, the remainder had to fend for themselves. Almost from the onset, when the town was first laid out, separate suburbs, or "locations" as they were known, were allocated for Black, Malay and Asian occupation. This is an aspect of colonial town planning that was not unique to the Transvaal, but was common to most other parts of southern Africa. Not only did it conform to existing Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), or Transvaal, policies, but the idea of separate residential areas for Black and White also suited the mining companies, who had recently adopted the "compound" as a means of housing their Black labourers.
The concept derived its name from the Malay word "kampong", meaning an enclosure. Originally it was implemented for security reasons and was used to confine employees to their quarters for the duration of their labour contracts. This system had previously been used on the Kimberley diamond fields to prevent the pilfering of gems. However, its application on the Witwatersrand was not as harsh. Compounds consisted of single-sex hostels housing between eight and sixteen men per room. Early buildings were set about a central square accessed through a single gateway. The planning of later complexes, which could house up to 5 000 workers each, was amended to a fan-shaped pattern, with buildings radiating out from a central access point. This refinement was claimed to facilitate "riot control" by mine management, an euphemism used to denote labour disputes which arose from time to time, and which mining companies had little compunction in settling through the use of force. Although apologists for the compound system have pointed out at great length the advantages of living in such communities, it is evident that, almost from the beginning, this programme gave rise to a number of social problems. Alcohol abuse, venereal disease and prostitution were common occurrences among mine labourers of that time. Matters were not assisted by the general male-female ratio, which remained high right up to the late 1930s. In 1902, for example, the total Black population on the Rand was 64 664, of which only 7 615 were women.
After 1909 the mines began to obtain the bulk of their labour through the enrolment of migrant workers. In time it became evident that this system imposed a number of hardships upon the labour force, and that compounds played a strong contributory role in these abuses. These included the destabilisation of the rural economy, the destruction of the rural family, culture shock, and the gradual impoverishment of the rural proletariat for the benefit of a small class of urban capitalists.
It is apparent that some of these problems were also common to the White farming community, where a series of droughts, locust plagues and the rinderpest increased rural poverty and forced many Afrikaners to seek employment on the mines.
Early maps of Johannesburg show its "locations" to have been sited on the outskirts of White-designated suburbs, on land commonly known as Brickfields. It included Burgersdorp, a low income area where many indigent Afrikaners had made their homes. This was a poorly drained piece of ground that had originally served as a brickyard, providing the materials for many of Johannesburg's first brick buildings. Early photographs show that most houses in this area were of a square plan, with clay walls and corrugated iron roofs. A few thatched dwellings were interspersed between them.
Considering the rudimentary methods of waste disposal available there, and the clay nature of the soil, it did not take long for a serious health hazard to develop. Before 1899 Johannesburg's White community had made repeated complaints about this area to the ZAR government. However Uitlander grievances fell upon deaf ears in Pretoria and little could be done during the hostilities. In 1902 the matter was reopened and a Sanitary Commission was appointed to investigate the Brickfields. In November 1903 its report was tabled, recommending that the site be expropriated and redeveloped. These findings were overtaken by events on 19 March 1904 when an outbreak of bubonic plague is reported to have taken place in Burgersdorp. Virtually overnight the inhabitants of Brickfields were evacuated, the area was fenced off with corrugated iron sheeting and everything within fired to the ground by the Fire Brigade. It was subsequently renamed Newtown and redeveloped as a suburb for light industry.
Following these events, the residents of Brickfields were moved to a "health camp" near the Klipspruit Sewage Farm (present-day Kliptown), some 20km from the town centre. Some were accommodated in corrugated iron dwellings, but most were simply provided with materials to build their own homes. Although this settlement was intended to be of a temporary nature, it remained in existence until the mid 1970s, when it was cleared to make way for new housing developments.
The occurrence of bubonic plague on the Witwatersrand in 1904 is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty. Its outbreak has never been substantiated by medical records, it is not known to have infected, hospitalised or killed anyone, the identity of its discoverer has never been revealed, and the time elapsed between its hypothetical identification and the evacuation of the Brickfields can be measured in terms of hours rather than days. It took place at a time when the town's newly elected municipality had been in office a scant three months, and was just beginning to come to terms with the numerous problems it inherited from 18 years of disinterested ZAR government.
It is true that outbreaks of bubonic plague had taken place elsewhere in southern Africa before this time. Some of them had been quite severe, but the disease itself was not local. It originated from plague-infected rats accidentally brought into the country from Argentina during the Second Anglo Boer War. They were imported by the British, together with bales of fodder for their horses, and most of the recorded outbreaks took place in the Eastern Cape, where the fodder was landed. Thus there must exist a strong suspicion that the plague, or a vague threat of its presence, may have been used by the municipality as a convenient lever to remove a voteless and indigent community, rapidly and without fuss, from an area which urban expansion had brought uncomfortably close to the town centre.
The period following the Anglo Boer conflict also saw a reduction in Johannesburg's Black labour force. Many workers returned to their rural homes following the closure of the mines and, at the end of hostilities, refused to return to employment on the Reef. The reasons they gave for this decision centered upon the harsh working conditions they encountered underground, as well as the brutality of White overseers. This induced the new British Administration of the Transvaal to permit, in 1904, the introduction in their stead of indentured Chinese labour. By 1907 nearly 58 000 Chinese people were working on the mines. However, political opposition to this move proved too powerful and, following repeated protests by the citizens of Johannesburg, nearly all of them were repatriated by 1909.
Despite having been dispossessed of their homes in the Brickfields, the residents of the resettlement camp near Klipspruit were given no compensation for their properties, nor were they provided with a sanitary infrastructure. The services available to this community remained rudimentary for many years, affecting its quality of life. It must be assumed that, because they had now been removed from the town centre, their welfare had ceased to be of direct concern to its citizens. The people of Klipspruit were not alone in this plight and generally very little was done by the authorities of early Johannesburg to improve the housing conditions of Black workers. A small measure of relief was afforded in 1917 when a disused compound on the Salisbury Jubilee Mine was rented by the Town Council and converted to a single-sex hostel to house 1 000 men. Two years later, between 1919 and 1922, a housing scheme to provide homes for 5 000 people was completed in Western Native Township, but this was a small concession made following the influenza epidemic of 1918. By this stage the Black urban population of Johannesburg had risen to 116 120 people and these projects made little difference to the living conditions enjoyed by the majority of the town's Black citizens.
There is no doubt that the question of land ownership was a major issue in the housing of Black workers. The "Gold Laws", inherited from the ZAR, precluded "persons of colour" from owning land in virtually the whole of Johannesburg. This included citizens from a wide range of backgrounds, including Black, Indian, Malay, Chinese and mixed race. Thus the reservation of prime business and residential land for the exclusive use of Whites became a political issue at an early stage of the town's history. Western Native Township, for example, had not been claimed for White use as its land had previously been used as a brickfield, which was subsequently levelled and used as a refuse tip.
By the 1920s other townships, also suffering from poor infrastructural conditions, had arisen in such places as Newclare, Sophiatown, Prospect and the Malay Location. A number of other areas were also considered to be slums by public officials. However officers from the MOH's department refused repeatedly to condemn them or to have them cleared, knowing full well that the vast majority of their inhabitants were Black and that no other facilities existed for their rehousing.
In 1925 a single men's hostel was built at Wemmer. At this stage the ratio between men and women had dropped only minimally to 6:1. Therefore official emphasis was still upon the provision of single sex compounds, rather than in the construction of family homes. It is probable that official figures failed to reflect the true state of affairs. A form of "influx control" and the carrying of passes for Blacks had been introduced by the ZAR as early as 1890. Thus, although the 1925 figures showed the presence of 117 700 men as against 19 000 women, it is probable that there were far more Black women in Johannesburg than was officially indicated. It is credible that, in time, many workers began to bring their families to the town. Being illegal residents their presence could not be declared, and their numbers thus increased the pressure upon an already overloaded informal infrastructure.
Much of the blame for these conditions must lie with the Johannesburg Town Council. By this stage many smaller towns in South Africa had already established their own separate departments to handle what they called "Native Affairs". Johannesburg, on the other hand, waited until 1927 before taking any action, and only set up a Committee of Native Affairs in 1928. Before then the affairs of "native administration" had been handled by the Department of Parks and Recreation.
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