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Locating the location of a South African location:
the paradoxical pre-history of Soweto
HOWARD PHILLIPS
Urban History / Volume 41 / Issue 02 / May 2014, pp 311 - 332
DOI: 10.1017/S0963926813000291, Published online: 18 October 2013
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0963926813000291
How to cite this article:
HOWARD PHILLIPS (2014). Locating the location of a South African location: the
paradoxical pre-history of Soweto . Urban History, 41, pp 311-332 doi:10.1017/
S0963926813000291
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Urban History, 41, 2 (2014) doi:10.1017/S0963926813000291
First published online 18 October 2013
Locating the location of a South
African location: the paradoxical
pre-history of Soweto
H O WA R D P H I L L I P S ∗
c/o Dept of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3,
Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa
abstract: This article examines the decisive role of the pneumonic plague
epidemic of 1904 in re-shaping the racial geography of Johannesburg after the
South African War. The panic which this epidemic evoked swept away the obstacles
which had blocked such a step since 1901 and saw the Indian and African
inhabitants of the inner-city Coolie Location forcibly removed to Klipspruit Farm
12 miles outside of the city as a health emergency measure. There, the latter were
compelled to remain, even after the epidemic had waned, making it henceforth the
officially designated site for their residence. In 1963, now greatly expanded, it was
named Soweto. From small germs do mighty townships grow.
Location = township. Occasionally used of a residential area for any group which
was not white. ‘Location’ is now avoided by many, being replaced by ‘township’.1
The historiography of Soweto
What might be termed the pre-history of Soweto – the history of
the inception of the congeries of African townships south-west of
Johannesburg which were eventually bracketed together under the
acronym ‘Soweto’ in 1963 – is not a subject to which historians have
given much attention. To them, the dominant theme in the history of that
township and its predecessors has been the dramatic resistance offered by
residents to white rule, whether by James Mpanza’s squatter movement in
the 1940s, the Asinamali Party’s rent boycotters from 1954 to 1958, those
who enthusiastically accepted the Freedom Charter at Kliptown in 1955
or school pupils who raised the banner of revolt from 1976. Characteristic
of this emphasis is Walter Sisulu’s foreword to Soweto: A History, a book
which, he claimed,
∗
1
Sincere thanks to Laura Phillips and Anne Digby for comments and suggestions on an
earlier draft and to Laura Phillips for consulting on my behalf some of the source material
which is available only in Gauteng. ‘Die appel val nie ver van die boom nie.’
A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Oxford, 1996).
312
Urban History
bears testimony to the bold resilience of the people of this country to . . . survive
the extremities of repression and the violence of apartheid, but also to create a
vibrant, caring, communal environment that reinforced humanity in conditions of
pronounced inhumanity. The people of Soweto refused to let their spirit die, and
it is that spirit which contributed to the demise of apartheid . . . [a] spirit [which]
is also captured in the pages of this book.2
Accordingly, Soweto: A History devotes but one brief paragraph to the
beginnings of African settlement on the site which became Soweto,3 while
popular histories mention it even more fleetingly, usually with errors.4
Glumly, the only author to have begun to do justice to the complex
origin of Soweto’s location, the geographer Keith Beavon, noted in 2004,
‘Unfortunately, in relative terms very little primary research on Soweto
has been conducted . . . Given the resultant paucity of secondary literature,
more questions have been posed than have been answered.’5
This article will also pose questions about Soweto, in particular why
it is where it is and how its components came to be there in the
first place. However, it will seek to answer these too, not on the basis
of superficial, existing accounts, but by drawing on primary sources,
especially the published and unpublished records of the Johannesburg
Municipality and the Rand Plague Committee, the verbatim evidence
before the hearings into the Johannesburg Insanitary Area Improvement
Scheme Commission’s Report and, above all, contemporary newspapers
whose columns of daunting small print carry in great and illuminating
detail speeches at meetings, interviews and letters by contemporary actors.
Nor, as what follows will reveal, do these answers lack their own drama,
high-profile figures or even fire and ash. Moreover, as an outbreak of
pneumonic/bubonic plague played a not inconsiderable part, this inquiry
also allows us to revisit Maynard Swanson’s argument about the influence
of a ‘sanitation syndrome’ in official policy-making in early industrial
South Africa6 and, in the light of the findings in this rich case-study, to
analyse their relationship more deeply.
The wider context of Johannesburg in 1901, newly come under civilian
rule after nine months of military government by the British army during
2
3
4
5
6
P. Bonner and L. Segal, Soweto: A History (Cape Town, 1998), 7.
Ibid., 13. Note that the figure of 600 given on this page for Indians removed to Klipspruit is
wrong; it should be 1,612.
For instance, P.R.B. Lewis, A “City” Within a City: The Creation of Soweto (Johannesburg,
1969); J.R. Shorten, The Johannesburg Saga (Johannesburg, 1970), 240–1; P.C. Venter, Soweto:
Shadow City (Johannesburg, 1977); P. Magubane and M. Lee, Soweto (Cape Town, 1978); V.
Gorodonov, Soweto: Life and Struggles of a South African Township (Moscow, 1988); W.J.P. Carr,
Soweto: Its Creation, Life and Decline (Johannesburg, 1990); P. Magubane, D. Bristow and S.
Motjuwadi, Soweto: Portrait of a City (Cape Town, 1990); A. Braun and B. Dhlomo-Mautloa
(eds.), Soweto: A South African Legend (Stuttgart, 2001).
K. Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria and Leiden, 2004), 122.
Beavon’s own informed but not error-free coverage of this subject appears on 75–8.
M. Swanson, ‘The sanitation syndrome: bubonic plague and urban native policy in the
Cape Colony, 1900–1909’, Journal of African History, 18 (1977), 387–410.
The pre-history of Soweto
313
the South African War, is where this investigation into the pre-history of
Soweto must begin.
Johannesburg and post-war Reconstruction
The ‘city of gold’ lay at the centre of the Reconstruction project initiated by
the new governor of the Transvaal, Viscount Alfred Milner. This sought to
turn the former Boer republic into a modern, efficient and go-ahead state
under British direction, able to entice immigrants from Britain and well
geared to meeting the needs of the biggest gold producer in the world. If
Johannesburg, at the heart of this production, could be swiftly overhauled
and transformed into a model, English-style city administratively, fiscally,
infrastructurally and sanitarily – a Birmingham on the Highveld – then
Reconstruction would be off to an excellent start which could be emulated
elsewhere in the newly conquered colony. It was Milner’s aim, writes
the biographer of his appointee as town clerk of Johannesburg, ‘that
Johannesburg would lead the way to a British Transvaal governed on
modern lines . . . and even inform the ideal of a larger South Africa’.7
To this end, Milner appointed a cadre of hand-picked officials to pursue
his vision with gusto, including not only the bright young Oxford men
who made up his so-called ‘Kindergarten’, but also, for Johannesburg
specifically, several well-experienced professionals from England, in particular the town’s medical officer of health, Dr Charles Porter, and the town
engineer, Donald Leitch. As its acting mayor, Milner chose a civil engineer
still in uniform, Major W.A.J. O’Meara, who had already been filling an
executive mayor’s role since 1900, when the army had taken the city.
As an engineer, O’Meara was appalled by the disordered state of the
slumyards he found north-west of the city’s Market Square.8 His fellow
engineer, Leitch, did not think ‘anything parallel could be found in a
civilised town’.9 To add to this, his repugnance was intensified early in
1901 when the dreaded bubonic plague pandemic radiating from China
since 1894 reached Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, and seemed to be
poised to move inland, making him see (and smell) these squalid slums
with a sanitarian’s eye (and nose) too. Two doctors’ reports which he
commissioned condemned the so-called ‘Coolie Location’10 at the heart of
7
8
9
10
D. Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford,
1995), 35, 45.
Especially the areas known then as Burghersdorp, Brickfields, Fordsburg, Coolie Location
and Kaffir Location, most of which, today, are part of Newtown.
Transvaal (Colony), Report of the Johannesburg Insanitary Area Improvement Scheme
Commission, 1902–1903, with Minutes of Proceedings, Minutes of Evidence, and Annexures
(1903) (JIAISC Report), 99, #1766A.
This name had been given to the site when it had been set aside for Indians in 1893.
However, by 1904 its population consisted not only of some 1,600 Indian leaseholders, but
also of about 1,300 African and 140 Coloured tenants and sub-tenants (Rand Daily Mail, 1
Apr. 1904).
314
Urban History
Figure 1: Coolie Location and its neighbouring areas close to the centre
of Johannesburg. With acknowledgement to K.S. Beavon, Johannesburg:
The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria and Leiden, 2004).
the slums as ‘insanitary in no unqualified terms’.11 ‘I cannot too strongly
impress on you the danger [to the rest of Johannesburg] of such a place’,
wrote one,12 while the other went even further, recommending to O’Meara
‘that he should burn the whole place down’.13
Now perceiving Coolie Location (Figure 1) and its neighbouring areas
too as ‘a hot-bed for dissemination’ of plague,14 O’Meara referred the
issue to the town council’s new Public Health Committee where antiIndian sentiment on sanitary, cultural, racial and economic grounds was
as strong as in the rest of the white community. It quickly agreed that
Coolie Location posed a ‘great risk to the health of the town’ and urged
the ‘taking in hand [of] the removal of the locations with the least possible
delay’.15 However, touched by Milner’s grand vision, it went further,
enthusiastically broadening the scope of its brief beyond how to get rid of
individual slum spots to discussing a full-scale remodelling of the whole
district, using that favoured instrument of late Victorian social and sanitary
engineers, a comprehensive improvement scheme which drew heavily on
the ideas on slum clearance embodied in late nineteenth-century British
11
12
13
14
15
JIAISC Report, vii, #11.
Ibid., 15, #13.
Ibid., 170, #3715.
The Star, 21 Mar. 1904.
Cited in D. Cammack, The Rand at War, 1899–1902: The Witwatersrand and the Anglo-Boer
War (Pietermaritzburg, 1990), 190.
The pre-history of Soweto
315
housing legislation. Such a scheme, it intended, would be an effective tool
for re-ordering the racial, social and sanitary geography of a key part of
Johannesburg, which it now damningly labelled ‘the insanitary area’. At
a stroke, this would not only open up a district close to the city centre for
municipal and business development, but would also better safeguard the
health, racial identity and commercial activity of whites, all of which were
perceived to be at risk in a racially mixed district. As the Public Health
Committee saw it, these ‘dangers’ to whites were closely intertwined: the
Indian trader and hawker had an advantage over whites because ‘his lower
standard, in so far as cleanliness and the ordinary requirements of life are
concerned’ allowed him to undercut his pale-skinned competitors,16 while
‘To allow Asiatics to live cheek by jowl . . . with the poor whites, could not
be otherwise than harmful for both races’ in terms of both their health and
their morals.17
Taking a leaf out of O’Meara’s own Notes on the Proposed Reconstruction of
the Johannesburg Municipality,18 early in 1902 the Public Health Committee
tabled its full-scale Insanitary Area Improvement Scheme before the town
council, along with a draft Insanitary Area Expropriation Ordinance to
implement it. But these elicited such opposition from property-owners
in the area that – despite a damning report on the area’s insanitary
state by Dr Porter, the new medical officer of health19 – Milner felt
constrained to appoint a commission to investigate the basis of the
scheme’s recommendations and the validity of its proposed plan of action.
Before its five members, supporters and opponents locked horns with
ardour. While the objectors briefed a brace of top advocates to interrogate
proponents of the scheme, the Johannesburg Town Council underlined
that sanitation was to be its determining trope by calling six doctors to
pathologize the Insanitary Area and its inhabitants, especially those who
were not white-skinned. Leading them was the formidable Dr Porter –
‘no more diligent a recruit’ to Milner’s vision was there, observes a recent
author.20 Nor did Porter disappoint, not sparing his epithets in portraying
Coolie Location, in particular, as ‘slop-sodden and filth-bestrewn . . . as
crowded as a rabbit warren . . . [and] the very greatest and most terrible
source of possible danger . . . to the town . . . I shudder to think what would
occur if plague or cholera broke out in that place.’21 ‘There is no doubt
whatever’, he added with a flourish, ‘that I should take it upon myself to
advise the Council to authorise me, in the presence of plague or cholera, to
16
17
18
19
20
21
Rand Daily Mail, 30 Sep. 1904.
The Star, 13 Oct. 1904.
Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth, 38–9 and n. 69.
JIAISC Report, 62–5, #896. For biographical information on Porter, see Dictionary of South
African Biography, vol. III (Cape Town, 1977), 691–2
S.M. Parnell, ‘Johannesburg slums and racial segregation in South African cities, 1910–
1937’, unpublished University of the Witwatersrand Ph.D. thesis, 1993, 23.
JIAISC Report, 59, ##838, 840, 847, 846.
316
Urban History
demolish these buildings, whether we had any powers to do it or not.’22 A
contemporary in the Indian community commented perceptively that, to
Porter, ‘anything that fails to come up to the standard observed in London,
and is untidy or uncouth, is quite insanitary’.23
In even more dramatic style, a second medical witness declared that,
given such conditions, plague could only be avoided if ‘the place . . . [were]
wired in, and burned with its inhabitants’,24 while a third added, ‘[Y]ou
cannot make that place a fit place to live in unless you pull the houses down
and lay out the area in a proper way’,25 an opinion echoed by Leitch, the
town’s engineer, who provided the commissioners with a map in which
every one of Coolie Location’s six blocks bore a double circle indicating
‘Position of Buildings condemned as insanitary and past repairs.’26
Despite the efforts of opposing counsels to show that the town council’s
witnesses had focused only on unrepresentative parts of the area, the
weight that the well-orchestrated evidence of the medical and engineering
experts carried suggested that the writing was on the wall for Coolie
Location, and probably the rest of the Insanitary Area too. It came as
little surprise when the commission (which itself included one doctor)
concluded that all of the Insanitary Area’s inhabitants should be removed
to racially distinct zones and the Area itself cleared of all structures
and turned into a site for municipal, railway and tramway facilities and
businesses. An ordinance authorizing the expropriations necessary to
accomplish this was quickly passed, but when the town council sought to
make a start with the project by selecting land west of Vrededorp to resettle
the Area’s evicted Indian and African residents, what Porter angrily called
‘insurmountable difficulties and paralyzing obstacles’27 arose from outside
of these, the two most directly affected parties.
First, Milner’s government in Pretoria indicated that it had reservations
about approving the removal of Indians to a spot far from Johannesburg’s
centre of commercial activity lest the government of India object.28 This
was a mild snag, however, compared to the reaction of white workingclass residents in suburbs adjoining the proposed site, who rose up in a
fierce racist protest, in effect declaring ‘nimby’ (‘not in my back yard’). In
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Ibid., 61, #882.
www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html (accessed 6 Apr. 2011): The Collected Works of
Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book), New Delhi, Publication Division Government of India,
1999 (CWMG), vol. III, document 127, Indian Opinion, 13 Aug. 1903.
JIAISC Report, 193, #4469. When asked if he meant precisely what he had said, the doctor
added confusingly, ‘I should have burned everything they wore’ (#4471), before going
back to his previous extremist stance by answering counsel’s follow-up question, ‘But
you would keep them all in, and put a fence round and burn all those inside?’ with the
response, ‘Only for sanitary purposes’ (#4473).
Ibid., 218, #5130.
Ibid., Annexure 8 (Plan C).
Johannesburg Municipality, Minute of His Worship the Mayor for 1903–4, Report of the Medical
Officer of Health for 1903–4 (JMRMOH), 36.
Ibid., 37.
The pre-history of Soweto
317
a petition to the town council, 1,300 residents of Fordsburg, Mayfair and
Brixton objected strenuously to having the town’s Africans and Indians
as neighbours,29 a rejection in which they persisted volubly even when
the resettlement plans were modified to include erecting ‘an unclimbable
fence’ between the proposed Indian location and Brixton and staggering
the removal of Africans to the new site. A second mass meeting of hostile
whites in Brixton produced ‘a very drastic resolution’,30 something which
must have concentrated the minds of existing town councillors intending
to stand in the first municipal elections later in the year. Uneasily, one of
them warned his fellow councillors, ‘Unless they did their best to provide
a location somewhere else which would obviate the danger of creating
another insanitary area, the dwellers in the western suburbs would rightly
say that the Council was indifferent to the welfare of the western part of
the town.’31
The search for alternative sites further away from white suburbs – and
thus less likely to evoke whites’ opposition – therefore intensified. ‘The
further they removed the black men from the whites the better’, insisted
another councillor, before explaining reassuringly that a railway link from
there would certainly ensure that the city’s supply of African labour was
not disrupted.32 Land south of the Reef at Concordia or to the west at
Diepkloof Farm was identified as perhaps suitable and, consequently, both
sites were flagged for further investigation. Pending this, starting phase
one of the Insanitary Area Improvement Scheme was put on hold, to the
fury of Porter. In no uncertain terms, he publicly warned the mayor against
‘the possibility of any further delay in doing away with this place [i.e.
Coolie Location]’ because of the risk of a runaway epidemic breaking out
there. The immediate removal of its population was essential, he averred,
‘and although such action may not be without grounds of objection by
white residents in the vicinity, such objection . . . is entirely outweighed by
the gain to the town at large by the removal of the present exceedingly
dangerous location’.33
Next day, he bulldozed the Public Health Committee into ignoring these
objections and instead had them order 300 tents to accommodate Coolie
Location’s residents who would willy-nilly be moved, he had determined,
to the chosen site adjoining Brixton. Supremely certain that he did know
best, he unhesitatingly stated that he wished to make people live according
to his rules of health, and replied, when asked if he would do so by
force, ‘Yes, if necessary.’34 Here was a new breed of doctor talking, a
medical technocrat fully in the mould of the activist medical officer of
29
30
31
32
33
34
Transvaal (Colony), Rand Plague Committee: Report upon the Outbreak of Plague on the
Witwatersrand March 18th to July 31st, 1904 (1905) [RPC], v.
Rand Daily Mail, 21 Mar. 1904.
The Star, 16 Mar. 1904.
Ibid., 16 Mar. 1904.
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904.
JIAISC Report, 74, ##102, 103.
318
Urban History
health of Victorian Britain, whose confidence in bacteriology’s ability to
identify the causative pathogens of several high-profile diseases knew few
bounds thanks to the germ revolution of the late nineteenth century. Such
professional experts would have a significant say in the making of policy
in South Africa in the coming century.
Plague, Pakes and Coolie Location
If truth be told, Porter’s insistence on immediate action was not all the
product of his ‘I-know-best’ conviction. On this occasion, it was fuelled too
by his concern at what appeared to be a serious disease outbreak occurring
in Coolie Location. Since the beginning of March 1904, the number of
deaths there had been rising steadily. All were attributed to pneumonia,
despite the insistence by a prominent member of the Indian community,
the young lawyer, Mohandas K. Gandhi, that the cause of death was in
fact plague.35
But by the middle of March, Gandhi’s identification was looking
ominously accurate as 14 similar cases were reported on one day, all
showing symptoms of the ‘black plague’. In one compound, a local doctor
found eight very ill men ‘lying like so many beasts, all half-dying except
one, who was dead’.36 Gandhi immediately alerted the district surgeon
to this dire situation and, within 24 hours of what he called this ‘ocular
demonstration of the ghastly tragedy’,37 an emergency hospital had been
set up on the edge of the Location, houses where cases had been discovered
had been thoroughly disinfected and the Government Bacteriological
Laboratory had speedily come up with a diagnosis of the cause of death –
pneumonic plague.
Pneumonic plague is an airborne version of bubonic plague and is
caused by the same pathogenic bacillus, Yersinia pestis. It usually originates
from a case of bubonic plague in which the lungs of a victim have
become grossly infected, who then spreads the bacillus to others nearby
by coughing. Thereafter, transmission from person to person is airborne
and thus facilitated by crowded living conditions. Its symptoms closely
resemble those of acute pneumonia rather than plague, and its case
mortality rate is far higher than that of bubonic plague.38 Certainly, the
first rush of cases in Coolie Location fits into this mould very well: 57 of
them (or 88 per cent) displayed only broncho-pneumonic symptoms and
had occurred in a handful of densely packed, Indian-occupied homes in
35
36
37
38
CWMG, vol. III, letter 303, Indian Opinion, 9 Apr. 1904.
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904.
CWMG, vol. III, letter 303, Indian Opinion, 9 Apr. 1904.
K.F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge, 1993), 628–31;
Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary (Oxford, 2003), 538–9; A.B. Christie, Infectious Diseases:
Epidemiology and Clinical Practice, 3rd edn (Edinburgh, London and New York, 1980), 747–
67.
The pre-history of Soweto
319
the Location.39 It is telling – presumably of the effect of racially based
residential separation within Coolie Location itself – that, though over
1,000 Africans lived there too, barely any of them were reported to have
contracted the disease.40
Seeing that there is no evidence of cases of bubonic plague in Coolie
Location before this, it seems likely that pneumonic plague was brought
there directly from outside Johannesburg, perhaps by young Indian men
coming from a place in southern Africa where the bubonic plague epidemic
was still smouldering, like East London or Port Elizabeth.41 Certainly, at
least according to a claim by two local Indian community leaders, the first
case was ‘a Bombay Soorthy’ who had recently arrived on the Rand to
work as a surface labourer on a goldmine but had then fallen ill and come
to his brother’s house in the Location ‘sick with fever’ to try and recover.42
Not that this likely pathway of infection was understood at the time,
although biomedicine was at that moment in the midst of the germ
revolution, a radical sea-change in its understanding of disease. Certainly,
the development of bacteriology meant that it could identify Yersinia
pestis as the causative pathogen of plague, but ideas as to how it was
transmitted were still inchoate, welding the new germ theory onto older
miasmatic beliefs. Thus, erroneously, but no less firmly believed for all that,
contemporary medical opinion held that plague in all its manifestations
was due to Yersinia pestis somehow contracted from rats (the rat–flea–
human connection was still being debated);43 that rats thrived in dirt and
filth; that dirt and filth abounded in Coolie Location, to the extent of
having contaminated the soil which therefore provided a congenial home
for the germ; and that Coolie Location was synonymous with Indians. The
Rand Daily Mail, for instance, pathologized the Indian community ‘with
their filthy habits and gross perversion of the most elementary sanitary
rules’ and wrote disparagingly of how the ordinary Indian, ‘under any
circumstances, . . . makes filth, and surrounds his habitation with the germs
of every disease under the sun’.44 Nor were members of that community’s
business elite slow to feed this image as they sought to distance their
lifestyle from that of the ‘coolies’ and ‘Soorthys’ upon whom, they insisted,
39
40
41
42
43
44
RPC, 15, 20, 25, 39.
Ibid., 7–12, 15.
South African Medical Record, 2, 3 (15 Mar. 1904), 49.
Rand Daily Mail, 24 Mar. 1904 (letter from V.G. Naidoo and V. Kathanpillay, on behalf of
Madrassa and colonial-born Indians). ‘Soorthy’ (someone hailing from Surat in Gujarat)
was a pejorative term used by Indians from Madras for a menial labourer from Surat who
had come to southern Africa via Bombay. (My thanks to Professor Rajend Mesthrie of the
University of Cape Town for this information.)
J.N. Hays, Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History (Santa Barbara, 2005),
336.
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904 (editorial).
320
Urban History
it was impossible ‘to impress . . . principles of cleanliness and sanitation . . .
for they ascribe every thing [sic] to fate – even their insufferable filthiness’.45
Having been given a bad sanitary name for so long, Indians in general
and those in Coolie Location in particular were now automatically
scapegoated as fear of infection by a rampant plague epidemic engulfed
Johannesburg. With 43 deaths occurring within five days of the first
diagnosed case, ‘the proportions which . . . it was feared the outbreak might
assume’ were great and terrifying, admitted the city’s acting medical officer
of health.46 As Indian funeral followed Indian funeral in the Location,
frightened fingers were readily pointed at those alien ‘others’ par excellence,
the residents of Coolie Location, whom the South African Medical Record
felt were a ‘Sanitary Whipping Boy’.47 Confirming that such sanitary
demonization was not confined to lay circles, one Johannesburg doctor
asserted confidently that Indians’ ‘almost absolute disregard of sanitary
precautions [meant] it was not very surprising that a virulent disease
had at last broken out amongst them’.48 The disease and the person had
become all but indistinguishable. Just as other minorities living in plaguehit towns around the globe had discovered to their cost (for example the
Chinese communities of Honolulu and San Francisco), Johannesburg’s
Indians found that local health officials ‘readily conflated . . . [their] race
and the spread of bubonic plague in their health policies’.49
In the face of this sudden and dramatic outbreak – Dr Walter Pakes
who had taken over as medical officer of health from Porter at short
notice50 called it an ‘explosion’51 – with residents ‘full of fright’ fleeing the
Location for their lives52 and concerns mounting in mining houses on the
Rand that such reports might unsettle African miners in the compounds
and affect labour recruitment,53 the municipality and its health authorities
determined to act swiftly and decisively to demonstrate how a modern
British municipality dealt with a crisis in a scientific, professional and
business-like manner, as befitted men filled with a vision of making Britain
and its empire more efficient.54 For the new British administration of
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
Ibid., 28 Mar. 1904 (letter from C.M. Pillay, late secretary of Indian Congress Pretoria and
Johannesburg).
RPC, 2.
South African Medical Record, 2, 4 (15 Apr. 1904), 70.
Rand Daily Mail, 21 Mar. 1904.
N. Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemic and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley, 2001),
127.
To add to the drama, Porter had been laid low by a severe attack of typhoid fever on
17 Mar. (JMRMOH, 34). Only his stricken state would have prevented him from feeling
that his warnings for the last 18 months about the dire conditions in Coolie Location had
been vindicated with a vengeance.
RPC, 2. For biographical information on Pakes see his obituary in South African Medical
Journal, 9, 11 (8 Jun. 1935), 397.
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904.
The Star, 19 May 1904; Transvaal Chamber of Mines, Annual Report for 1904, Appendix
No. 1: Health of Miners, 148.
G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought
1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971).
The pre-history of Soweto
321
Johannesburg and the Transvaal, it was a test which would show its clear
superiority over its Boer predecessor.
Its response can be neatly summed up as consisting of four Cs within
a fifth: viz. contingency planning, containing the outbreak, combatting it
and countermining a recurrence, all to be performed with an eye on good
communication with the press to ensure that public morale did not falter.
As Pakes well knew, ‘The power of the press . . . is always an important
factor in all attempts to stay an epidemic.’55
Porter would not have been Porter had he not already devised
contingency plans against an outbreak of bubonic plague in Johannesburg
the moment he heard that this disease had broken out in Durban in
December 1902 in its second major intrusion into the sub-continent. Within
weeks, a small task team had identified a suitable site for a plague camp
near Rietfontein Lazaretto and had it fitted out, an extensive public
anti-rat campaign had been initiated (which offered 3d for every rat
brought to a municipal depot)56 and a set of steps devised, drawing on
an amalgam of the guidelines set out in the 1897 Venice International
Sanitary Protocol and older miasmatic ideas, what Alan Kraut has called
‘vestigial sanitarianism’.57 They laid down that, if an outbreak occurred in
a particular district of a town, that area would be cordoned off to prevent
cases, contacts and rats roaming around and spreading the disease, all
property within the cordon would be liberally treated with disinfectant,
confirmed cases would be sent to a lazaretto and all contacts would be
moved en masse to a quarantine camp and, finally, all infected structures at
the old site would be demolished or burnt to the ground.58
These pre-determined steps to contain, combat and countermine a
plague outbreak were thus ready and waiting in March 1904, so much
so that, even though Porter himself was not at the helm of the Municipal
Health Department because of his indisposition, the official response led
by Pakes bore his mark.
Cordoning, compulsion and conflagration
At 4 a.m. on Sunday 20 March, less than 12 hours after the presence of
pneumonic plague had been confirmed in the laboratory, a tight cordon
of policemen surrounded Coolie Location, allowing no one in or out and
thereby ensuring (or so the authorities believed) that the outbreak would
be contained there. ‘The sacred city of Lhasa is not more impenetrable to
55
56
57
58
RPC, 88.
Public take-up was, however, poor, so in Aug. 1903 an expert rat-catching team was
appointed (JMRMOH, 35).
A.M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and the ‘Immigrant Menace’ (New York, 1994), 85.
JMRMOH, 34. Porter’s concrete models for such steps were Bombay in 1896, Honolulu
in 1899/1900, Sydney in 1900, San Francisco in 1900/01, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth
in 1901 and Durban in 1902/03. M. Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of
Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York and London, 2007), passim.
322
Urban History
the ordinary person than the Coolie Location at present, unless he is armed
with the written authority of the acting medical officer of health’, observed
a Rand Daily Mail journalist in a tone which sounds deliberately reassuring.
‘The police cordon is drawn right round the marked area, constables armed
with rifles and well-stocked bandoliers, being placed at intervals of about
fifty yards, whilst native constables are on duty as well.’59 A resident who
tried to escape under cover of darkness was apprehended and returned
to the Location under guard,60 while another who had been out of the
Location when the cordon sanitaire had been imposed, was arrested for
trying to bribe a trooper to allow him in to join his family.61
Inside the cordon, investigators conducted house-to-house searches
for fresh cases which were hastily taken to the special plague camp at
Rietfontein, while rat-catching, rubbish removal and disinfection were
pursued with vigour to combat what were perceived as the direct sources
of the plague. Sanitary carts, sanitary inspectors and men carrying buckets
of lime filled the streets. The place ‘reeks of the smell of disinfectants’,
reported the Rand Daily Mail’s man-on-the spot.62
But the offensive against the plague had to go further if its perceived
sources were to be wholly rooted out. The next prescribed step in this
direction was therefore for all of Coolie Location’s residents to be removed
to a quarantine camp and for the Location to be ‘demolished by fire’,
as the Public Health Committee put it.63 It was ‘impossible to make the
location fit for habitation short of reconstructing it, and . . . in view of
the possibly wide-spread affection [sic], it was deemed wiser to treat all
the inhabitants . . . as suspects and not mere contacts’, Pakes explained.64
Before this fiery step – which was accepted without demur by Gandhi65 –
could be taken, however, sites to accommodate the 1,612 Indians, 1,420
Africans and 146 Coloureds in the Location when the cordon had been
thrown around it had to be found. This task, the town council assigned to
the new, Witwatersrand-embracing Rand Plague Committee which had
just been set up to co-ordinate the counter-offensive against the plague
along the entire Reef.
Initially, this Committee sought two separate sites, one for Africans and
one for Indians and Coloureds. However, after its efforts to find the latter
within a radius of 5–6 miles south or west of Johannesburg yielded nothing
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904.
Ibid., 23 Mar. 1904.
The Star, 28 Mar. 1904. By this time, 30 South African Constabulary troops had replaced the
policemen manning the cordon. The would-be incomer, Mr Maramattee, was sentenced to
14 days in prison with hard labour, the magistrate taking into account his ‘natural anxiety
to see his wife and children’.
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904.
The Star, 21 Mar. 1904.
RPC, 76.
CWMG, vol. II, letter 296, The Star, 21 Mar. 1904; Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904.
The pre-history of Soweto
323
Figure 2: Klipspruit (marked KS) 12 miles south-west of Johannesburg.
With acknowledgement to K.S. Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and
Shaping of the City (Pretoria and Leiden, 2004).
suitable,66 in desperation (and under intense pressure to act from anxious
whites living near Coolie Location)67 it opted to lodge both the Africans
and the Indians and Coloureds on Klipspruit farm, 12 miles from the city
centre (Figure 2).68 Not only was part of this farm already owned by the
Johannesburg Municipality – it had recently purchased its southern half
66
67
68
National Archives Repository, Pretoria (NARP), TAB, C 19 (Rand Plague Committee
Minutes), vol. 1, minutes of meeting, 22 Mar. 1904; The Star, 13 Oct. 1904.
The Star, 22 Mar. 1904.
NARP, TAB, C 19 (Rand Plague Committee Minutes), vol. 1, minutes of special meeting,
22 Mar. 1904.
324
Urban History
to serve as a sewage farm – but it also was on the new railway line to
Johannesburg.
This decision having been unilaterally made, two sites were prepared
a mile apart on the farm for the two groups from Coolie Location. While
the Indians were assured that in the resettlement ‘attention will be paid
to creeds and castes . . . as far as can be [respected] under the peculiar
circumstances of their enforced exodus’,69 the Africans were encouraged
to believe that ‘no doubt [the] sunshine [in the open at Klipspruit] will
destroy the germs of the plague’.70 The attention of neither group was,
however, drawn to an ominous plea to the town council by one of its
members at this time that ‘the natives and the Indians should not be
allowed to come back to the location’. Indeed, he went on, ‘This plague
might thus be a blessing in disguise. He hoped they would never have the
natives and the Indians back in the location’, a sentiment which elicited
applause from his fellow councillors.71
Over the next week, Coolie Location was systematically emptied of
its inhabitants who were first medically examined before being marched
down to a nearby railway siding under military escort. From there, they
were transported in special trucks to Klipspruit where they were put into
hastily erected huts and tents in two, racially distinct, isolation camps a
mile apart. Each camp was encircled by a contingent of troops to enforce
the quarantine strictly. Only clothing, bedding and utensils which had
been disinfected were allowed into the camps; all other possessions –
save laundry belonging to white customers72 – had to be left behind for
fumigation or burning. Such high-handed destruction was ‘more in order
to fire public imagination [that no chinks were being left in the anti-plague
offensive] . . . than to guard against the danger to public health’, observed
Gandhi shrewdly,73 while the cordon was ‘merely a fiction kept up to
satisfy – not the requirements of sanitation – but public sentiment’.74
By the end of March, Coolie Location had been cleared of all people;
only six African labourers remained on site to pack up belongings left
behind by the evacuees.75 This situation, the product jointly of whites’
fears, racial prejudice and scapegoating, officials’ contingency planning
and authoritarian efficiency and Indians’ complaisance (for which Gandhi
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
Rand Daily Mail, 23 Mar. 1904.
Ibid., 28 Mar. 1904.
The Star, 24 Mar. 1904.
Laundry belonging to white customers was retrieved from Indian laundrymen in Coolie
Location and disinfected before being returned to their owners (CWMG, vol. III, letter 305,
Indian Opinion, 9 Apr. 1904.)
CWMG, vol. IV, letter 108, Indian Opinion, 10 Dec. 1904.
CWMG, vol. III, letter 309, Indian Opinion, 16 Apr. 1904.
NARP, TAB, C 19 (Rand Plague Committee Minutes), vol. 1, minutes of meeting, 31 Mar.
1904. By then, destroying apparently infected premises by fire had already been applied
to several huts and the porter’s house at Johannesburg Hospital where plague victims had
been temporarily accommodated (Johannesburg Municipality, Minute of His Worship the
Mayor for 1903–4, Report of the Chief Officer, Fire Department for 1903–4, 64.)
The pre-history of Soweto
325
did not fail to take credit)76 opened the way for the coup de grâce against the
plague, countermining a recurrence from the same source by destroying
Coolie Location once and for all and replacing it with the salubrious layout
envisaged by the Insanitary Area Improvement Scheme.
For the next week, preparations to apply what one town councillor later
callously called ‘the fire cure’77 were undertaken. First, a corrugated iron
fence was erected around the empty Location to stop animals left behind
there from escaping. These –and any rats that could be discovered – were
then hunted down and killed by a team of municipal employees. (It may
or may not be coincidental that at this very time Dr Pakes noted swarms of
fleas in the warehouse housing goods left behind by the departed residents
and that, soon thereafter, cases of flea-borne bubonic plague began to
increase in the city.78 )
Then, the Johannesburg Fire Department was assigned the paradoxical
task of dousing Coolie Location in paraffin and setting it ablaze block
by block; any still surviving animals trying to flee were trapped by the
fence and killed. Anticipating a ‘rodential holocaust’,79 those present
were astonished when only one rat appeared among the dogs, cats and
chickens.80 Maybe it is an indication of the extent to which the press heeded
the wishes of the public health authorities that no newspaper commented
on this fact which so centrally challenged the latter’s premise that plague
had arisen from the rat infestation of Coolie Location. Gandhi did not pick
up this contradiction either, but he did draw attention to another anomaly,
viz. that the torching of Coolie Location was ‘essentially a theatrical display
calculated to fire the imagination of the people. While the buildings should
certainly have been gutted out, to think that, because they have been
burned down, the only source of infection is gone [is] quite contrary to
facts.’81 Other than by Jeyes fluid and sweeping brooms – ‘everywhere
one meets with disinfectant’ noticed one reporter82 – buildings and drains
in the rest of the Insanitary Area were left untouched.
The few structures still left standing in the razed Coolie Location were
consumed in an officially sanctioned follow-up fire three weeks later.
The Star’s vision of ‘shreds of shrivelled blackness which indicate where
the shanties . . . once stood’83 and its wish that ‘not a vestige of the Coolie
Location remains’84 – a vision and a wish shared by most of Johannesburg’s
whites for a variety of reasons – had finally come true.
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
www.cyberspacei.com/jesusi/authors/gandhi/autobiography/mg . . . (accessed 7 Apr.
2011): M.K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography, Part IV, ch.
XVII, p. 1.
CWMG, vol. IV, letter 103, Indian Opinion, 26 Nov. 1904.
RPC, 20, 76.
Rand Daily Mail, 8 Apr. 1904.
Ibid., 8 Apr. 1904.
CWMG, vol. III, letter 309, Indian Opinion, 16 Apr. 1904.
Rand Daily Mail, 25 Mar. 1904.
The Star, 25 Mar. 1904.
Ibid., 8 Apr. 1904.
326
Urban History
Yet, if Yersinia pestis had triggered a re-drawing of the city’s racial
geography, this was only partial and still very temporary. As the epidemic
on the Rand ebbed in the second week of April 1904, leaving 82 of the
113 cases struck by pneumonic or bubonic plague dead,85 the cordon
around what Gandhi called ‘the wilderness at Klipspruit’86 was lifted
and a growing number of those who had been forcibly removed there
began to filter back into Johannesburg, despite the authorities’ attempts
to curb this process and strictly monitor the sanitary quality of their new
accommodation in the city.
Turning a temporary camp into a permanent location
The ebbing of the epidemic also allowed minds in the municipality to
turn to thinking about how the partial and temporary character of the
re-location of some of the population during the epidemic crisis could
be extended. Lobbying to do so was coming from several quarters.
The colony’s Native Affairs Department urged the need for a prompt
settlement of where the city’s African population should live;87 the
Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce repeatedly voiced its wish for
‘Asiatic traders’ to be compelled to live and trade away from the city
centre;88 and the bulk of white residents were determined that there should
be no return to the residential status quo ante lest this threaten their health or
their commercial and economic activities. ‘We, as Europeans, must live up
to a certain standard’, announced one such racial supremacist confidently.
‘Oriental races, on the other hand, are contented to dwell and huddle
together in large numbers in hovels, and their living . . . is of the most
frugal kind . . . When an epidemic such as the present plague breaks out,
is it not notorious that it is always attacks the coloured classes, especially
the Orientals?’89 Nor was the English-language press on the Rand slow to
give its support to such views, also employing the dominant, topical trope
of sanitation. For example, the Rand Daily Mail declaimed, ‘[W]ith their
filthy habits and gross perversion of the most elementary sanitary rules . . .
keep those coolies as far away as possible from centres of population’,90
while The Star argued that ‘The advantages of keeping the native living
quarters completely away from the white population are at once apparent.
The wholesale removal of the natives from the town would place us in a
better position to protect ourselves against outbreaks of disease and would
lessen their frequency and virulence.’91
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
RPC, 12, 15.
CWMG, vol. IV, letter 70, Indian Opinion, 8 Oct. 1904.
Rand Daily Mail, 30 Sep. 1904.
The Star, 23 Apr. 1904, 27 Jul. 1904 and 25 Aug. 1904; Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce,
Annual Report for Year Ending 28 February 1905, 42.
The Star, 26 Mar. 1904, letter from ‘British Africander’.
Rand Daily Mail, 22 Mar. 1904, editorial.
The Star, 10 Oct. 1904, editorial.
The pre-history of Soweto
327
Under such pressures and in keeping with their own outlook, the
Johannesburg municipal authorities began to explore what the chairman
of the Public Health Committee felt should be ‘a proper, whole-hearted
treatment of this coloured question’ which would unscramble the way in
which ‘the Malays, Indians and Kaffirs were jumbled all over the place
. . . [alongside] men and women of various colours and nationalities’, all
under overcrowded and insanitary conditions.92 What these aspirant social
engineers wanted instead was a modern, ordered city, with its population
clearly sorted by race, class and ethnicity once and for all.
Such a city, they believed, would attract the respectable British
immigrants so necessary for the fulfilment of Milner’s Anglicization policy.
As things stood, argues a historian of Johannesburg’s white working-class,
‘the unhealthy conditions and the multiracial component of the area made
it thoroughly undesirable for the British workers’ who would have to
live in a manner that a witness before the Insanitary Area Improvement
Scheme Commission described as ‘repugnant to those who have been
used to associate with their equals’.93 Making residence in Johannesburg
appealing to these workers was so essential to the success of Milner’s
grand design that, as the city’s town clerk put it, ‘the British administration
cannot afford to neglect any measure likely to contribute to this end’.94
To achieve this, in September 1904 the town’s Public Health Committee
put forward a two-part scheme which, to some extent, resurrected the
stymied Insanitary Area Improvement Scheme of 1903. In terms of
its proposals, the Africans already at Klipspruit would remain there
permanently and would be joined by the rest of the city’s African
population, except for those dwelling in mine compounds or on their
employers’ premises. In effect, Klipspruit was to become the home to
most of Johannesburg’s African population, to which end, the committee
anticipated, accommodation there would be gradually expanded ‘in
order to keep pace with any increase in the number of natives’.95
The concentration of Africans at Klipspruit would mean the closure
of the so-called ‘Kaffir Location’ adjoining the now blackened site of
Coolie Location, as well as the host of private locations dotted around
Johannesburg.96 Moreover, such steps would fit in well with the Insanitary
Area Improvement Scheme as the removals which they involved would
free up more land close to the city centre for development in what was
already being labelled ‘Newtown’.97
92
93
Ibid., 13 Oct. 1904.
L. Lange, White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannesburg (Aldershot,
2003), 57.
94 Cited in ibid., 64.
95 Rand Daily Mail, 30 Sep. 1904.
96 About sanitary conditions in these private locations, Dr Pakes had been scathing: ‘If
the incidence of plague varies directly as the filth and overcrowding’, he declared, ‘it is
terrible to contemplate what might have happened had plague broken out in some of these
locations’ (RPC, 85).
97 Johannesburg Municipality, Mayor’s Minute for 1903–4, 5.
328
Urban History
Furthermore, unlike the situation in 1903 when the implementation
of the Scheme had been obstructed by an inability to find a suitable
site which did not trigger whites’ opposition, Klipspruit was so distant
and remote from white suburbs – it lay even beyond Johannesburg’s
far-flung municipal boundary – as to set no white alarm bells ringing.
‘The advantages of keeping the native quarters completely away from the
white population, will be obvious to everyone, whether one considers the
interests of the native or those of the poorer class of Europeans’, observed
the Public Health Committee patronizingly in words echoing The Star’s.
‘Many facilities for keeping order and for efficient sanitary control will
be afforded, which the present position of the [Kaffir] location renders far
from easy.’98 Certainly the ‘nimby-ites’ of Brixton, Vrededorp and Mayfair
agreed: their new North-West Suburbs Ratepayers’ Association passed a
resolution enthusiastically commending the proposal.99
Only those to be moved were unenthusiastic. Over 270 African residents
of the Kaffir Location objected to the proposal, declaring that it was ‘not
our desire nor wish to go to Klipspruit’. It was too far away, and ‘saying
that “There is [sic] Railway Trains” is not in our favour in this respect,
as we have to incur more expenses by paying for it’. However, if they
were forced to move, they submitted, the least that the town council ought
to do was to compensate them for their existing houses which would be
demolished.100 A decision on this last request the town council deferred,
pending receipt of an estimate of the cost involved.101
The second part of the Public Health Committee’s scheme addressed
the issue of how and where to accommodate the city’s other sanitary
scapegoat, its Indian population. Here, once more, a segregated location
(now labelled a ‘bazaar’ in a bout of misconceived Orientalism)102 was seen
as the answer on health, economic and racial grounds. To the committee,
Indians’ ‘deeply ingrained’ insanitary habits, their ‘unfair’ competition
with white shopkeepers and hawkers and the ‘deterioration of the white
man’ which resulted from ‘social intercourse between the two’ all pointed
in one direction, viz. ‘The existence and future of Johannesburg as a white
man’s town in a white man’s country . . . is, in our opinion, involved . . . [as]
the proper development of the European population would be endangered
by the present state of things.’103 Against such grave threats, Klipspruit
was also perceived as the only solution for white concerns, though this
time it was to be at a site a mile away from where the Africans had
98
99
100
101
102
103
Rand Daily Mail, 30 Sep. 1904.
The Star, 13 Oct. 1904.
Ibid., 13 Oct. 1904 (petition by T. Gumza, E. Trewn, L. Mahlamvu, E. Ntusi, J. Mtshula and
270 more).
Ibid., 13 Oct. 1904.
M. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg, 1985), 97.
Rand Daily Mail, 30 Sep. 1904.
The pre-history of Soweto
329
been dumped.104 Despite its up-beat listing of all the benefits to be gained
from concentrating the entire Indian population at an Asiatic Bazaar at
Klipspruit, Gandhi had no doubt as to the wish to secure white commercial
advantage in the scheme, ‘in naked terms, a policy of slow confiscation . . .
slow but sure arsenical poisoning, in the shape of cooping the community
up within an enclosure miles away from its scene of [commercial] activity,
and letting it die for want of nutrition’.105
When the Public Health Committee’s proposals came before the full
town council on 12 October 1904, Gandhi’s critique revived councillors’
concerns that, in legal terms, the municipality would face difficulties if it
tried to force Indians to dwell in a particular place except in an emergency,
and that the Transvaal government was unlikely to overturn this bar lest
it alienate the government of India thereby and so incur a veto from
Westminster.106 While the city’s legal advisors wrestled with this issue,
the city’s Indian population took the opportunity to vote with their feet
and permanently leave Klipspruit for Johannesburg, in particular for its
so-called ‘Malay Location’, just across the railway line from their former
Coolie Location. By January 1905, almost all the former Coolie Location
Indian residents had moved to Malay Location, comprising by then nearly
40 per cent of its population.107 During the next three years, 48 stands in
this Location were rented to Indians,108 giving it an increasingly Indian
character as it was transformed into Pageview.
To the Africans, stuck out at Klipspruit, no such legal loophole was
available. ‘If they allowed the natives to come back now’, warned one
town councillor, ‘they were simply going to let them be there for ever.’109
Nor was the legal means to keep them there lacking. In terms of a
municipal by-law passed at the beginning of the year, every African in
Johannesburg not staying on an employer’s premises had to live in a
designated location.110 Now, despite the Transvaal government’s concerns
that this would interfere with the steady supply of African labour to the
city,111 the Johannesburg Town Council announced that Klipspruit was to
be that designated location and that it would enforce the by-law with effect
from 1 April 1906. On that date, those Africans still at Kaffir Location were
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
Such was the extent to which Klipspruit was seen at this time as offering the solution
to all the white citizens’ concerns about the ‘colour question’ in Johannesburg that the
zealous social engineers expressed the hope that ‘locations for low class Asiatics, Syrians
and all other coloured people of similar habits will also be eventually provided at the
same place’ (Johannesburg Municipality, Mayor’s Minute for 1903–4, 39).
CWMG, vol. IV, letter 70, Indian Opinion, 8 Oct. 1904.
Union of South Africa, Report of Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Act Commission, U.G. 7–1934,
88, paras. 29–30; The Star, 13 Oct. 1904.
CWMG, vol. IV, letter 139, Indian Opinion, 28 Jan. 1905; N. Kagan, ‘African settlements
in the Johannesburg area, 1903–1928’, unpublished University of the Witwatersrand MA
thesis, 1978, 127.
N. Carrim, Fietas: A Social History of Pageview 1948–1988 (Johannesburg, 1990), 6–7.
The Star, 21 Jul. 1904.
Kagan, ‘African settlements’, 54–5.
Ibid., 56–7, 60.
330
Urban History
removed to Klipspruit, followed a few days later by those from elsewhere
in the city, under the watchful eye of Dr Porter who had been instructed by
the Public Health Committee to ‘shepherd’ them thither.112 By 1907, some
1,800 Africans were in residence there, and a year later, 2,500.113
From Klipspruit to Soweto
Despite its distance from Johannesburg, its proximity to a sewage farm
and its generally insalubrious living conditions, Klipspruit thereafter
remained a prime centre of residence for the city’s Africans, even after the
‘Western Native Township’ was established closer to central Johannesburg
after 1918, in the wake of another epidemic (that of ‘Spanish’ influenza).
Klipspruit’s chief appeal lay in the space for expansion which it continued
to offer.
Accordingly, when in 1930, the Johannesburg City Council decided to
build what it intended to be ‘the biggest and finest township in the Union
of South Africa’,114 it chose land adjoining Klipspruit for its new Orlando
Township. The southern part of Klipspruit, it renamed Pimville. Around
this nucleus, subsequent townships were constructed at an accelerating
pace after World War II to accommodate the thousands of Africans
flocking to Johannesburg, so that by the 1950s the central government’s
Native Areas Planning Committee proposed that, henceforth, ‘The native
residential areas [of Johannesburg] will be concentrated to the southwest of the City where the [Johannesburg City] Council already owns
6181 acres of land . . . to the west of which the Committee considers is
adequate vacant land to serve as a hinterland for future expansion.’115
This recommendation, the apartheid government accepted. With 26 such
residential townships in existence by 1959, housing close to half-a-million
Africans, the Johannesburg City Council decided that they needed the
corporate identity of an overarching name. In 1963, the Naming Committee
of the Council’s Department of Non-European affairs chose the acronym
‘Soweto’,116 at the heart of which lay the original Klipspruit Location dating
back to the hasty plague removal as a result of Yersinia pestis 59 years earlier.
From small germs do mighty townships grow.
Yet, if the line from Klipspruit to Soweto is clear – Beavon speaks of how
the selection of the former ‘effectively determined the future site for . . .
Soweto’117 – this article also reveals that the choice of Klipspruit was by
no means straightforward, carefully planned or without paradox.
112
113
114
115
116
117
Johannesburg Municipality, Report of Medical Officer of Health for 1904–6, 132.
Kagan, ‘African settlements’, 64.
Cited in Bonner and Segal, Soweto, 16.
Native Area Planning Committee report, 1957, cited in I. Evans, Bureaucracy and Race:
Native Administration in South Africa (Berkeley and London, 1997), 155.
Bonner and Segal, Soweto, 31.
Beavon, Johannesburg, 78.
The pre-history of Soweto
331
Not only was Klipspruit just one of several sites originally considered
– the committee ‘went east, west, north and south’ looking for a suitable
site, recalled one councillor118 – but it was finally selected in haste by a
short-lived, ad hoc committee representing not Johannesburg but the whole
of the Witwatersrand (the Rand Plague Committee), amidst the panic of
an outbreak of pneumonic plague and under pressure from fearful whites
living close to Coolie Location.
Moreover, although the 1,420 Africans removed to Klipspruit from
Coolie Location constituted but a fragment (less than 10 per cent of
the city’s Africans not living in a mine compound),119 their presence at
Klipspruit was used as justification for that place becoming the site of
municipal choice for settling all the city’s Africans not living on their
employers’ premises. The removal there of the African inhabitants of
Coolie Location was the thin edge of a segregationist wedge and a
precursor to many subsequent forced removals there. Taking this with
the equally paradoxical fact that they (and not the Indians who had been
far worse hit by the plague at Coolie Location) were compelled to remain at
Klipspruit points very strongly to full-scale segregation of Johannesburg’s
Africans being a deliberate long-term goal of the new, British-dominated
municipality and its advisors as they sought to re-shape the city and
thereby help transform the Transvaal into an efficient and loyal British
colony. For them, the plague crisis was an ideal opportunity to accomplish
this goal swiftly and without resistance, something which would not easily
have been possible under normal circumstances, as the events of 1903 had
shown.
The power of plague
This raises the question as to what was so potent about the plague crisis in
1904 that made such drastic action possible. Swanson has already argued
with regard to the creation of African locations in Cape Town and Port
Elizabeth during the bubonic plague outbreaks there three years earlier,
that disease was both a powerful ‘biological fact and a social metaphor’,120
something which the Johannesburg case strongly confirms. One only has to
recall the rhetoric cited above to recognize it as coming from fearful people
whose attitudes to others had been laid bare by the perceived threat to their
own lives.
To this explanation, the Johannesburg experience in 1904 does add two
dimensions, however. The one is that plague, in any form, had a peculiarly
terrifying effect on anyone raised in a European cultural tradition, thanks
to the ghastly tales of the ‘Black Death’ and Great Plague of London, which
118
119
120
The Star, 13 Oct. 1904.
Results of a Census of the Transvaal Colony and Swaziland, 17 April 1904 (London, 1906), 26–7,
390–1.
Swanson, ‘The sanitation syndrome’, 408.
332
Urban History
had impressed themselves on the European mind. Plague possesses the
‘richest genealogy of fear in the Western psyche’, notes a historian of its
impact on San Francisco.121 This component of all white Johannesburgers’
mentalité has to be factored into our understanding of their words and
actions in 1904.
Secondly, the fact that the outbreak occurred in 1904 is also significant,
for at this very time, the aetiology of the disease was being unravelled by
biomedicine as part of a global response to the pandemic which had begun
in earnest in 1894. By 1904, the causative pathogen had been identified
and its mode of transmission partly established. This gave to doctors like
Porter and Pakes unprecedented say in policy-making in an environment
in which an outbreak of plague was feared. If, even before the outbreak in
March 1904, what they said went, once it exploded, their words went even
further.
Their opinion and those of their fellow doctors were therefore critical
to the dramatic, draconian steps taken. The conjuncture of plague and
all that it connoted, the enhanced self-belief of the medical profession
and the newly acquired status which it enjoyed thanks to the germ
revolution combined to give them the first and last words on how to
handle the outbreak of plague. Only this combination made possible the
rapid, wholesale removal of over 3,000 inhabitants of Coolie Location to a
site 12 miles away, the torching of the Location and the subsequent closure
of Kaffir Location. These were the products of a new brand of medically
informed policy-making, one which made the old Transvaal Republic’s
haphazard delineation of locations for Johannesburg in the 1880s and
1890s look quite outmoded. ‘[I]ncomplete, ineffective and ignored’122 in
the modern, British, Johannesburg, these locations were to be superseded
by the products of social engineering on a vast scale.
In the light of these perspectives, it is perhaps necessary to revise the
glib conclusion in the first paragraph on page 21 thus: using the presence
of ovoid, 1.5 × 0.7 nanometre small, bacteriologically identified germs and
the folk memories and connotations which they triggered, determined and
powerful social engineers and doctors ignored logic, liberties and location
to reshape a city. A messier conclusion, to be sure, but one that more
accurately captures the paradoxes behind why Soweto is where it is.
121
122
S. Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis,
2000), 124.
Parnell, ‘Johannesburg slums and racial segregation in South African cities’, 18.