Apartheid History

There is a story of a riot with much blood in the early history of the Dube Township in Soweto. It happened 11 months after the Dube hostel opened its doors on 1 October 1956. The Dube Hostel was the first government hostel in Soweto (then called the South Western Townships).

Dube Hostel (via Google Maps)

The government hostel scheme was for South African permit holders from the then so-called Homelands / Bantustans / rural areas working in Johannesburg on contract since the urbanisation – in this case to Greater Soweto / Alexandra – of South African Blacks was no option.

The first group of Zulu migrants in the Dube Hostel included migrants who used to live in Johannesburg in what the press called locations in the sky. These were so-called 'boys' working as cleaners, gardeners, even manjingelanes (night watch men) and accommodated in rooms provided by their employers – landlords owning the buildings – mainly located at the top of Johannesburg flat and office complexes.

Hostel development was in compliance with the hostel law adopted in 1955 to support the 1950 Groups Areas Act in terms of which all racial groups had to live separately in designated areas. Hostels therefore had to be provided for the mentioned 'boys' – as commonly referred to – also for domestic workers (garden boys and kitchen girls) living in...

Having graduated with the double Bachelor's degree MB Bch in 1959 after 6 years of study, I was now a brand-new Doctor.

The Medical training program at the time called for 2 more years of practical work under supervision, in a teaching hospital of one's choice before being officially qualified to practice. This was a bit like an Apprenticeship but called an Internship. Ironically we were not called Interns but Housemen or House Surgeons.

It was late afternoon on April 9, 1960. Two of us - my fellow House Surgeon Willy Krom and I - were working in the Trauma Unit. This is a specialised unit that deals purely with injuries, accidents, and assaults of whatever kind.  Until that moment all had been peaceful and quiet. The Rand Easter Show was about to start and Johannesburg was in a festive mood.

A scene from the Rand Show

A bizarre call came through that a white male had been admitted to one of the Medical Wards with injuries sustained at the Show. Medical Ward? Injuries? Medical Wards deal with the discipline of Internal Medicine, which is the management of general diseases such as Hypertension, Diabetes, Heart Failure, Diagnostic conundrums etc. NEVER physical Injury. Besides, WE were the Trauma unit.

Our superior, the Registrar, told us we had better go and...

The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.

On May Ist, 1989, Maggie Friedman and her partner David Webster, well known anti apartheid activist, parked their bakkie outside their home at 13 Eleanor St, Troyeville. As David walked to the back of the car to release their dogs, a shotgun blast from a passing car hit him in the chest. He fell to the pavement and died shortly afterwards. The two had been living together for four and a half years during the vicious eighties. With David, Maggie believed she had found the ideal future. Maggie agreed to talk because, she said, people need to remember their heroes. This is Maggie’s story, this is David’s story, this is their story:

David Webster House Troyeville (The Heritage Portal)

I met David through Bruce Murray, of the history department at Wits. I came down to Johannesburg in 79, I think it was, and Bruce was the only person I knew. David was one of his peers, his contemporaries at Wits, and it was through him that I met David. I came from Zimbabwe...

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the history and significance of the landmark Magistrates' Courts in Johannesburg. The article was first published on the City of Joburg's website on 7 June 2007. Click here to view more of Davie's writing.

Twenty years ago this year two car bombs went off outside the Magistrates’ Courts in downtown Joburg. Three policemen died, and 15 were injured.
 
On 20 May, 1987 a decoy blast took place, and policemen from the then John Vorster Square (now the Central Police Station), six or seven blocks away, rushed to the scene. The second, more powerful blast killed three of those policemen.
 
These were the 11th and 12th bomb blasts in Johannesburg that year. Some of the others that occurred in the city were at the Sanlam Centre in Eloff Street, Sandton, the Civic Centre, Cosatu House and the Carlton Centre.

Carlton Centre (The Heritage Portal)

Twenty-four-year-old Hein Grosskopf, a member of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, was responsible for planting the bombs. He also placed bombs outside the Krugersdorp Magistrates’ Courts and the Witwatersrand Command in Quartz Street. Two military personnel died in the Krugersdorp blast.
 
Bomb blasts through the 1980s escalated until by...

The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.

Irving Lissoos earns his living as a highly respected, specialist urologist. He consults and operates from Milpark Hospital. But his life embraces other enthusiasms, among them a love of Johannesburg, partially illustrated by his membership of the Parktown and Westcliff Heritage Trust. Lissoos’s guided tours through Joburg’s old cemeteries in Braamfontein and Brixton are always sell outs. Lissoos lives in Victory Park. He grew up in Berea, attended Yeoville Boys’ and King Edward’s schools. I arrived in his rooms one day armed with a tape recorder and one or two simple questions, asking him to talk about his early life. Nothing had been planned. He quite spontaneously and easily advanced down ‘memory lane.’ He told me with many chuckles and obvious reminiscent enjoyment, about a social existence, the world of his childhood and youth, which no longer exists:

Braamfontein Cemetery (The Heritage Portal)

‘My mom was born in London. Her father was a cabinet maker who came to Johannesburg just after the turn of the 20th century. She went to school in London but never got a chance to...

“The cemetery is the ghost of Roodepoort West. It is the last vision of the vibrant African location that once stood where the suburban houses now stand. Like a ghost, the cemetery continues to haunt the people, now living miles away in Dobsonville, who remember its past." - Michelle Hay. 

This paper explores the layered meanings attached to Juliwe Cemetery, and efforts to recognise the significance of the site. As the only piece of the old Roodepoort West Location to be spared demolition, the cemetery became a centre-piece of a story of forced removals which for over 50 years remained unknown to the wider public, and which has only recently  begun to be acknowledged in the public sphere.

When the rest of the old African location of Roodepoort West was destroyed from 1956-1967, the cemetery remained after threats of protest caused by its proposed destruction of the graves persuaded the authorities to leave it alone. With the rest of the location having been erased and covered over by a whites-only township, the cemetery remains as evidence of a community which was made to move to Dobsonville.

At a Heritage Month event hosted by the City of Johannesburg in 2017, ex-residents returned to the old location cemetery which is all that remains of Roodepoort West Township, called Juliwe by its people. In an emotional ceremony, a memorial was inaugurated to acknowledge and interpret this black cemetery, now surrounded on all sides by the suburb of Horizon View.

Near the edge of the cemetery, a blue heritage...

For reasons that I have never fully understood, between about 1968 and 1972, the Wits campus underwent a period where posters of all colours and sizes proliferated, advertising everything from Rag Ball to intervarsity rugby, from Nusas teach-ins to visiting lecturers, and from Fresher’s Reception to rock and roll festivals. Every now and again the apartheid thugs that ran the country would provoke a rash of political posters, and the SRC elections were always an active time for poster artists. Poster season normally began in February, with student registration, and ended just as suddenly in September, when the SRC elections marked the end of extra-mural activities for the year and the start of serious, last minute swotting. As the saying goes, if you had not started your revision by the time the campus fruit trees came into blossom, then you had left matters too late. I suspect that it was also a time of the year when religious societies started attracting new converts.

Political Poster

Why it all happened is probably worthy of a small dissertation in its own right. In that era, student affairs came under the management of strong and capable SRCs, led by intelligent leaders, such as John Kane-Burman, Robin Margo and Mark Orkin. The tradition might have continued had Rex Heinke remained in the country, but after he...

In May 2018 Robyn Keet, our picture library manager at the time, teamed up with the PhotoZA Gallery in Rosebank Mall, Johannesburg, to create an exhibition of photography that covered the apartheid period in South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. DocuFest Africa: The Exhibition, showcased at times rare and unusual images of life in South Africa taken by leading photographers at the height of apartheid. Curated by Reney Warrington, the Exhibition was drawn from collections represented by Africa Media Online. It covered a broad cross-section of society at the time, from the woman’s movement and boys on the border to protest action, the trade union movement and the development of Johannesburg.

The collection of images was at one time unfamiliar – speaking to us from a different time, a different political reality – and familiar, with so many of the challenges faced then being still with us in 2018. The exhibition included images from the Tiso Blackstar group Collection, Paul Weinberg, Gille De Vlieg, George Hallet, Eric Miller, Graeme Williams and a single image by me, David Larsen.

On Saturday, May 12, 2018 veteran Black Sash activist and photographer, Gille De Vlieg, conducted a walkabout of the DocuFest Africa exhibition, particularly...

In the early 1960s the Apartheid Government declared Pageview a white suburb (using the Groups Areas Act) and a decade later the bulldozers began their work. Residents were removed to Lenasia while many traders took up space at the Oriental Plaza. It was during this time that Franco Frescura set out to document some of the spaces, places and people of the area. Below are a few photos from 1973 that may interest readers. No captions have been added. If you recognise a person or building please post a comment below the article.

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The Soweto Theatre is a landmark structure built in an area with a powerful history. In the article below, Johannesburg enthusiast and well-known journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the details behind the theatre's design and construction. She also reveals the significance of the Jabulani Amphitheatre next door. The article was originally published on the City of Johannesburg's website on 12 June 2012. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

If there ever was a building that could speak, the Soweto Theatre would speak loudly, and in many languages. The theatre consists of three large colourful boxes – in red, yellow and blue – contained within two soaring concave buttress walls on either side. The foyer faces south through an expansive glass frontage, overlooking the vastness of Soweto. The entrance is finished with a huge canvas roof, complementing the curves of the buttress walls.
 
Different textures, different materials, different angles, different shapes... but all talking to one another in harmony in a building that makes a bold statement in Jabulani, a suburb that is undergoing a lift-off.
 
“We have let the boxes be pure shapes,” says Tony de Oliveira, senior technologist at Chibwe Afritects, the firm that won the tender to design the theatre. Each box contains a theatre. It opened a month ago with the superb production The Suitcase.
 
The red box greets the visitor in the foyer – covered in a 15m high wall of red gleaming tiles, reaching up and over the roof but also into the basement, visible...