The Apartheid City and Beyond

Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa

David M. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415076012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134902965
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Apartheid as legislated racial separation substantially changed the South African urban scene. Race group areas' remodelled the cities, while the creation of homelands', mini-states and the pass laws' controlling population migration constrained urbanization itself. In the mid-1980s the old system - having proved economically inefficient and politically divisive - was replaced by a new policy of orderly urbanization'. This sought to accelerate industrialization and cultural change by relaxing the constraints on urbanization imposed by state planning. The result was further political instability and a quarter of the black (or African) population housed in shanty towns. Negotiations between the Nationalist government and the African National Congress are working towards the end of the old apartheid system. Yet the negation of apartheid is only the beginning of the creation of a new society. The vested interests and entrenched ideologies behind the existing pattern of property ownership survive the abolition of apartheid laws. Beyond race, class and ethnicity will continue to divide urban life. If the cities of South Africa are to serve all the people, the accelerating process of urbanization must be brought under control and harnessed to a new purpose. The contributors to this volume draw on a broad range of experience and disciplines to present a variety of perspectives on urban South Africa.

PART ONE

Background

The first two chapters provide broad overviews, to act as background for those in subsequent parts of the book.

In the first essay (Chapter 1), Mabin sets urbanization in South Africa in its historical context. He links population movement to the towns and cities to a long-standing practice on the part of African people to seek employment away from their traditional tribal reserves, often oscillating between rural and urban residence. Added to this have been various state and private strategies of dispossession, which have forced Africans off their land. Individual households have often deliberately separated, to maintain both a rural and an urban base for securing the means of subsistence, inextricably binding the one to the other. As new forms of urbanization arise from the impossibility of maintaining a rigid separation between town or city and country, core and periphery, most obviously in the expansion of peri-urban informal settlements, the meaning of ‘urban’ in South Africa continues to challenge conventional interpretations.

McCarthy (Chapter 2) addresses the issue of urban and regional government, central to the control of urbanization. He argues that these levels of administration tend to have been neglected in the literature, in favour of an interpretation of apartheid which stresses the role of the central state. His emphasis on sub-national processes echoes Mabin's argument concerning the role of local popular resistance to central government. The contradictions built into classical apartheid have required new spatial structures of control, some of which will carry over into the post-apartheid state in the management of metropolitan regions.

1

Dispossession, exploitation and struggle: an historical overview of South African urbanization

ALAN MABIN

The tendency for urban scholars to dismiss South African urbanization as an aberration has a strong following. To most casual observers, apartheid shaped the country's peculiar forms of urbanism. Its uniqueness arises from the result of the mapping of white political power onto the country. This standard view contains considerable dangers. Politically, the result is to emphasize ideology and the state (at the expense of economics and daily life) as the primary spheres of struggle against the oppressive order. Intellectually, the consequences include an aversion to probing the real material conditions and social character of urbanization.

This chapter seeks to place material issues at the core of a view of South African urbanization¹ over more than a century. It makes no claim to being definitive; but it does hope to provide a coherent account which can inform understanding of the dynamics of contemporary urban processes in the country, and thus, debates over their future.

The origins of urban South Africa

Legal slavery ended in the Cape Colony with the British imperial emancipation of 1834. Until that time such towns as existed in southern Africa were few and tiny; the largest concentrated, non-rural settlements probably consisted of the enormous residential ‘villages’ of Tswana chiefdoms and perhaps the large capitals of the Zulu kingdom. But both were devoid of the commercial and financial institutions which grew rapidly in colonial ports such as Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and country towns like Graaff-Reinet and Beaufort West from the 1830s onwards (Mabin 1984). Such institutions were replicated in Boer centres like Potchefstroom from the 1840s (Christopher 1976). Rapidly expanding exports of staple products —wine to begin with, then wool—fuelled the growth of trading centres. White expansion into more remote reaches of the interior brought conflict with established polities. For the African communities already settled in these areas and subjected to colonial and Boer expansion, the results generally meant anything from declining independence of the chiefdoms to forced labour for white settlers. The pressures of land loss, military exigency and a growing commercialization of exchange relationships rendered both individuals and whole communities susceptible to involvement in the growing wage-labour economy of the towns by the 1850s.

Urban—rural migration on any scale is often taken to have begun in South Africa with conscious attempts on the part of white colonial and Boer republican authorities to extract labour for farms and mines late in the nineteenth century. However, recent historiography shows that rural people in South Africa have engaged in substantial migration to non-rural activities and places for well over a century (Delius 1980; Harries 1980). A generation or more before colonial authorities achieved direct military, political and economic control over the Pedi, Zulu, Mpondo, Ndebele and Venda, Africans began in growing numbers to join others who found themselves pressured to seek wage work on docks, in railway works, at warehouses and in the small manufacturing enterprises of the towns.

From the 1850s onwards, a number of economic changes wrought a revolution in the urban pattern. An influx of foreign investment occurred, a massive expansion of economic activity began, and a new export— diamonds—rapidly grew to the status of the leading staple, surpassing wool by the late 1870s. By then not only the town most closely associated with diamonds, Kimberley, but also the ports, transport points in between, and agricultural-commercial centres supplying produce to Kimberley had begun to change both in size and character more rapidly than before. To the opportunity for pressured rural communities to tap into a small urban economy which the towns had provided prior to the 1870s was added a new phenomenon: aggressive recruiting for mining, construction and other urban activities (Jeeves 1985).

Thus, in rural-to-urban migration up to 1880, the period which migrants spent at urban destinations varied greatly, ranging from very short to lifetime terms. This variety has persisted to the present day, and encouraged Simkins (1983) to deny the usefulness of the simplistic permanentversus-temporary distinction. Equally, household or family participation in such migration has also varied, involving parties from individuals to whole extended families (Murray 1987a). The vital point is that entire households have frequently not migrated as a whole, and while a base has been maintained by some members in rural (more recently simply non-formally-urban) areas, other household members have moved to town for longer or shorter periods. This simple fact meant that the reproduction of the workforce did not take place completely within urban (including mining) environments, making urban areas to some extent dependent on the reproductive functions of rural areas. In summary, from mid nineteenth century onwards a part of the African population always lived in essentially urban households which by varied means provided for their own reproduction in that environment. Many urban households, however, combined resources from both urban and rural activities (Martin and Beittel 1987).

The corporate economy and urbanization

If the changes wrought in South African society prior to 1880 were substantial, they seem dwarfed by the revolution which private companies initiated during the decade of the 1880s. Hastened by speculative collapse and severe depression, diamond mining companies centralized and merged so rapidly that De Beers Consolidated Mines monopolized the industry by 1889. Corporate endeavour moved on to open the gold-fields of the Transvaal: first at Barberton and then on the Witwatersrand in the latter half of the decade. The scale and pace of foreign investment, of technological change, of infrastructural development and of urban growth went far beyond anything previously experienced.

Furthermore, this economic expansion took place under governments with rapidly increasing capacity to rule their territories effectively. Not a single part of rural South Africa reached the turn of the present century with a substantial body of people able to escape the pressures of incorporation into a rapidly growing capitalist economy. Most were deprived of independent control of what they saw as their land, and most rural households henceforth found it difficult to avoid participation in the urban economy through selling the labour of one or more of their members in the towns or mines.

Nevertheless, and importantly, most South African households remained based in rural areas, in actual occupation if not legal possession of some piece of land. This particular combination of powerlessness and possession of land strengthened a circular system of migration which gained support and eventually enforcement from large companies and the state.

Rural dispossession and urbanization

The South African War of 1899–1902, resulting in the defeat of the Boer republics and their annexation to Britain, opened the path to constructing a still more effective state. The government of the Union of South Africa, with its racist constitution providing for an almost exclusively white vote, took control of its million-square-kilometre territory in 1910. Among its explicit intentions was to give effect to the recommendations of the inter-colonial Native Affairs Commission report of 1904. In coordinating ‘native policy’, the corner-stone was to be a land policy. The policy arrived at, although not fully legislated (let alone implemented) until the late 1930s, had the long-term effect of further entrenching the circular migration system.

Prior to union, all four colonies which came together in 1910 had some division of land between Africans and other inhabitants. Areas of greatly varied size, mostly small, had been retained or set aside as ‘reserves’, within which only African people could live. The intention of the 1913 Land Act was in part to continue a process of adding land to the reserves which the Native Affairs Commission had begun. For most of the period since 1913, outside (as well as at some places inside) the reserves, much of the African population occupied land as tenants or squatters. On farms outside the reserves, some labour went to production on the farm of residence, sometimes allocated by the household itself under sharecropping or rental arrangements. The subjection of labour to control by the landowner or manager was the focus of intense struggle throughout rural South Africa, particularly in the 1920s (Bradford 1987).

Whatever the pattern of resistance, however, ‘farmers’ assisted by the state increasingly determined part of the labour allocation of rural households through labour tenancy or wage relationships (Van der Horst 1943). Decreasing ability to cultivate crops and run cattle on most non-reserve farms of residence encouraged households to attempt to export labour to other markets, with the result that the numbers of migrant workers originating from rural areas other than the reserves grew rapidly. According to estimates by Nattrass (1981), even in 1970 the number of migrant workers with homes in white-owned rural areas working in the non-agricultural parts of the economy exceeded 400,000—and prior to that date, the numbers may have been even larger. The idea that the reserves supported the remainder of the economy through assumption of reproduction functions would, if not already dubious, receive a serious blow from the admission of the fact that rural, non-reserve households supplied a large proportion of migrant labour to urban areas throughout the twentieth century, and especially from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Evictions from private farms and a variety of measures adopted in the reserves, including the replanning of agricultural communities known as ‘betterment’, had the effect of creating a large landless population by the time the National Party government of D.F.Malan came to power in 1948. In many reserve areas, ‘miserable’, ‘bleak and bare’ settlements of the landless began to develop (Walker 1948), from which, inevitably, most households had to send members to participate in the urban economy. During the 1950s the pace of rural eviction began to increase, and it accelerated greatly in the 1960s and 1970s, until literally millions of people had directly experienced eviction from land on which, in most cases, their family histories were much longer than those of the titular owners (Platzky and Walker 1985).

It should not be assumed that these evictions affected Africans alone. Many thousands of coloured and Indian households also experienced eviction as did some whites. The effect on the urban population was, of course, profound. By the start of the Second World War two-thirds of Indians and whites were living in urban areas, half of coloureds, but only a fifth of Africans (Cilliers and Groenewald 1982).

From the 1930s, informal settlement on the fringes of the cities and many towns began to become common. In 1938, the central state's Ministry of Health initiated an enquiry into ‘areas which are becoming urbanised’ but which fell outside local authority boundaries. Its main report was completed only in 1941, by which time the exigencies of the war economy precluded much action being taken. Despite the amount of deliberation which the Smuts (United Party) government gave to urban issues in a spirit of reconstruction at the end of the war, the state took few positive actions, while overcrowding and informal residence developed apace. In some respects apartheid was a (racist) response to previous failure to develop coherent urbanization policy.

The apartheid era

Inadequate urbanization policy threatened the system of municipally-controlled passes which had been instituted from 1923 onwards under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act. Yet little housing of any kind was constructed during the war years, so that overcrowding in existing areas, especially in the African ‘locations’, reached extreme levels by 1945. The result was a series of land invasions and the development of other forms of informal urbanization (Bonner 1990), a situation which the National Party promised to attend to in its manifesto of 1948. Once in government it did so through a series of measures which strengthened the pass system and the police force, while at the same time it adopted policies which channelled the expanding landless population into both non-agricultural settlements in the reserves and into urban townships. In many cases, of course, the same households divided themselves between one or more rural bases and some form of access to shelter in the urban townships.

Especially after 1960, both the possibility and the utility of remaining on farms outside the reserves declined more precipitously, though with considerable spatial variation. Though eviction and relocation to the reserves were central, the reasons for this massive relative and absolute population shift were, and continue to be, by no means simple. Most accounts have stressed an ideologically-based role of the apartheid state (Baldwin 1975; Platzky and Walker 1985; Unterhalter 1987). But changes in the character of agricultural production yielded pressures towards evictions of tenants and other resident labour. Thus the 1960s became the decade of massive but not necessarily state-sponsored removals of labour tenants and squatters— ‘removals of a quiet kind’ (Donald 1984) which continue today.

In the bantustans, increasing numbers of households had little or no involvement in agriculture under their own aegis and growing dependence on wages from members finding work in towns or industries. The obvious question, then, is why these rural but largely non-agricultural households established and maintained bases in the reserves and did not move completely to towns. The answer may be more elusive than a purely state-centred analysis would suggest and has changed substantially over time.

In the first instance, many ex-farm households (or some of their members) probably did move more or less directly to the towns, though more so in the 1950s than the 1960s. In so doing households followed individuals who had already migrated to seek work. Considerable housing construction in new townships from Daveyton and Soweto to Guguletu and Zwide made it possible for such people to find shelter, even though that new housing also had to absorb many forcibly relocated (for example, from the old locations) under the increasingly strict urban segregation practices of the era. But in the townships, two further aspects of the new regime of apartheid gradually made life more difficult. The passage of control over urbanward movement out of the hands of local authorities and into the hands of the central state ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• THE APARTHEID CITY AND BEYOND
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE Background
• PART TWO Housing and community under apartheid
• PART THREE Informal settlement
• PART FOUR Servicing the cities
• PART FIVE Towards a post-apartheid city
• Conclusion
• Index