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Before 1822, the indigenous population of the central Highveld is estimated to have numbered some 150,000, many of whom lived in large settlements of up to 7000 persons (See pre-history). However, the ravages of the Difaqane, from 1822 to 1836, and the invasion of the region by Cape 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 major settlements were located 110km away, near Rustenburg. The ZAR’s subsequent unilateral 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, but most laboured on the mines.

The ethnic composition of these early African migrants in Johannesburg has rarely been considered in histories of the city. When it does come onto the radar, the migrants are lumped together with Africans from different parts of the country. Yet, because of their closer proximity to the city in pre-colonial times and during the colonial period, they tended to retain much of their rural ties and connections, regardless of the extent to which they became ‘urbanised’. This is particularly true of the Tswana groups found in the Magaliesberg and Rustenburg area at the time of the discovery of gold in 1886. This shaped their responses to developments in the 1930s through to the 1950s that either strengthened their claim as ‘the permanently urbanised’ or reinforced their ties, real and perceived, to their rural origins.

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 be provided with sleep-in quarters by their employers, the remainder had to fend for themselves. Almost from the outset, 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 which was not unique to the Transvaal, but was common to most other parts of southern Africa. Not only did it conform to existing ZAR 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 on the Kimberley diamond fields for security reasons to prevent the pilfering of gemstones, and was used to confine employees to their quarters for the duration of their labour contracts. 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 5000 workers each, was amended to a fan-shaped pattern, with buildings radiating out from a central access point.

This refinement was claimed by mine management to facilitate ‘riot control’, a 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 helped 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 7615 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.

The gold of migrant labour. Author: Ruth First. Article in Africa South Vol.5 No.3 Apr-Jun 1961 pages 7 to 31.To read some more related articles on Migrant and Mine labour visit the references and archive listing

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 Dutch farmers and transport-riders 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, and included Burgersdorp, a low-income area where many indigent Dutch transport riders 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 built in 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 business and mining interests had made repeated complaints about this area to the ZAR government. However Uitlander grievances in general usually fell upon deaf ears in Pretoria and little could be done during the war that followed. In 1902 the matter was reopened by the new British administration 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), 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, under the name of Pimville, it was cleared to make way for new housing developments.

A recent search identifying Soweto’s heritage sites has revealed that the ‘health camp’ was situated in Klipspruit, a township adjacent to Pimville. When the threat of bubonic plague receded and the suspected carriers returned to Johannesburg, the camp was taken over by turban-wearing Zulu ‘Ama Washa’. These were Zulu men who did laundry for Johannesburg’s White, single male residents, using the stream on the southwestern part of town for their washing. After 1906 the Johannesburg municipality regarded the use of the stream as a health hazard, forcing the Zulu Ama Washa to use the health camp in Klipspruit as an alternative.

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 South African conflict, and were imported by the British, together with bales of fodder for their horses. As a result, most of the recorded outbreaks took place in the Eastern Cape where the animals were landed.

However, it is clear that despite the obvious threat that the outbreak might have posed upon the general population, in reality its presence was limited largely to those workers who came into regular contact with the stores. Thus there must be a strong suspicion that the outbreak was used by the municipal authorities 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 South African war also saw a reduction in Johannesburg’s Black labour force, as many workers who had gone back to their rural homes following the closure of the mines now refused to return to employment on the Reef. The reasons they gave for this decision centred upon the harsh working conditions they encountered underground, as well as the brutal treatment they experienced at the hands of White supervisors. This induced the new British Administration to permit, in 1904, the introduction of indentured Chinese contract labour (See Chinese miners) in their stead, and by 1907 nearly 64,000 Chinese were employed on the mines.

This move provoked strong political opposition, both locally and in Britain, and following repeated protests by the citizens of Johannesburg, by the beginning of 1910 all Chinese workers had been returned to their homes. However, during their stay they had all been housed on mine property, and save for a few tombstones in Braamfontein Cemetery, their presence in Johannesburg left little mark upon the fabric of the town.

One area which, for a time, gained the fleeting reputation of being called Johannesburg’s own ‘Chinatown’, was located in Ferreira’s Town, where a number of Chinese families had settled early on, and continued to make a living by trading in staple goods. Their presence had no connection with the subsequent employment of Chinese miners on the Rand, each of whom was repatriated at the end of their three-year contracts.

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, and for many years the services available to this community remained rudimentary, 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 the homeless.

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 one thousand men. Two years later, between 1919 and 1922, a housing scheme to provide homes for 5000 people was completed in Western Native Township, but this was a small concession made following the influenza epidemic of 1918. By this stage the urban Black population of Johannesburg had risen to 116,120 people and these projects made little difference to the living conditions the majority of the town’s Black citizens were labouring under.

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 the children of mixed race marriages. 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, and was subsequently leveled and then used as a refuse tip.

By the 1920s, other townships, also suffering from poor infrastructural conditions, had arisen in places such as Sophiatown (1903), Newclare (1912), 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 repeatedly refused 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 re-housing.

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 upon the construction of family homes. However 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 Black residents had been introduced by the ZAR as early as 1890, and although it had been based upon a system previously used by the colonial administration of the Cape, it differed substantially in intent from the British model, where it was used as a ‘passport’, thereby recognising the existence of autonomous Black states beyond the boundaries of the Cape. The ZAR made no such distinction, and merely used the passport, whose name had now been shortened to a ‘pass’, as a means of controlling the movement of Black citizens within its borders.

Thus, although the 1925 figures showed the presence of 117,700 men 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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