When was johannesburg general hospital built

The De Villiers tender for the setting out of stands at 10s each is accepted. On the same day, Johann Rissik, Acting Surveyor General, issues De Villiers with a portion of the plan, including instructions that the government offices are to be located on one of the squares.

The task is completed on 3 November, and a report is presented on 5 November. At this time his survey includes stands in two consolidated areas north and south of the mining claims. By 8 December this number had increased to He is told that he might put such a notice in his office, but could not take away licenses already paid for.

A Special Landdrost is appointed for Johannesburg. The sale of stands is postponed to Wednesday 8 December. They object to the sale of stands embracing any of these claims. Sales continue until the Friday by which stage some stands were fetching barely more than 3s each, with about 50 stands remaining unsold. The auctioneers are to be the Pretoria Auction Agency. February, President Kruger visits Johannesburg for the first time.

An official market is opened on Market Square. April, At the beginning of the month, WH Auret Pritchard prepares two plans for the central land, one for the auctioneer, the other for the Mining Commissioner. April, the first telegraph office is opened in Johannesburg. W Sauer. June, The first postal pillar box is erected in Johannesburg. Later on, this is extended to Krugersdorp in the west and to Springs in the east.

May, Thethe MacArthur-Forrest cyanide process of gold extraction is introduced, thus which givesing a new lease of life to the gold mines, whose surface diggings had begun to run out..

November, The first Hospital building is opened by J. The first units are horse-drawn, but are later replaced by electrically powered trams in This plant is in operation until when new works are completed at Cottesloe.

The incidence of the disease increases steadily from April onwards and only begins to play itself out towards the end of the year. October, Severe water shortages are experienced from March onwards. Restrictions are imposed in Johannesburg on 23 October, and the drought is broken on 6 November. They are intercepted by Republican forces at Doornkop on 2 January , and after a brief skirmish he, together with most of his troops, is taken prisoner.

May, The rinderpest epidemic, which affected livestock, spreads to Johannesburg, and its district is declared an infected area. This was followed soon after by a second plague of locusts. November, The first house-to-house postal delivery service is instituted in Johannesburg. Johannesburg is then raised to the status of a town. Timeline: Johannesburg 25 April, Johannesburg is shaken by a large explosion, as the local plant of Begbie's Iron Foundry is sabotaged.

This is an important contributor to the Republican war effort. Dr Krause is also credited with preventing the destruction of the gold mines shortly before the British take-over. A Sanitary Commission is appointed to investigate the area known as the "Brickfields".

The area of Johannesburg increases from 5 to November, Elections are held for Johannesburg's first elected Municipal Council. The Johannesburg Insanitary Area Improvement Scheme Commission tables its report, which leads to the expropriation of the area now known as Newtown. The area of Johannesburg increases to In , this area becomes known as Pimville. The Native Affairs Commission criticizes the living conditions that Johannesburg's Black citizens are forced to live under.

These run for the first time from Market Square to the Siemert Road railway bridge. This is the first of many labour disputes which culminated in the General Strike of Industrial action spreads and by July the miners are preparing to declare a general strike. The Government attempts to prohibit the gathering after it had begun and scuffles break out between police and miners. The police are severely assaulted after strikers attack them with stones.

Workers then attempted to close down the tramways, the power station and the railways. Park Station is attacked and partly burnt down. The offices of The Star, a strongly pro-management newspaper, are similarly attacked and gutted by fire. By this stage, strikers are beginning to arm themselves and a number of shooting take place. Generals Botha and Smuts intervene personally and arrange for a truce, subsequent to which many of the strikers' demands were met.

The strike collapses and many of the leaders are forcibly placed aboard a mail-ship in Cape Town and illegally deported to Britain. None ever return to South Africa. This is converted to a hostel for men, and later becomes known as the Mai Mai Bazaar. Lady Dudley Source: Google Earth.

Old police barracks across the road from the fort Source: Marc Latilla. It was a laboratory providing a forensic chemical testing service for clients such as the SAPS and pathologists. Source: Marc Latilla. Part of the wall that surrounded the police parade ground still stands outside the old school buildings.

Part of the wall that surrounded the original police parade ground Source: Marc Latilla. The building was re-opened in as the Esselen Street Clinic with restoration work done by Ntsika Architects and is a national monument. Esselen Street residence Source: Google Earth. Since , it has been the Tswelopele Frail Care Centre. The date when the Princess closed is not known. In April work started to construct the high walls or ramparts around the goal.

The Fort was used to command Johannesburg during the Boer war Old fort from the early s Source: a Johannesburg Album. Front of the fort Source: Marc Latilla. Inside the fort early s underneath the coat-of-arms of the South African Republic. In it was proposed that the fort be demolished to allow easier access to the northern suburbs and a new goal built in Vrededorp.

This scheme was declined due to the depression at the time. It was a working prison up to except during the Boer war and throughout its history has imprisoned Boer generals, strike miners, Indian passive resisters including Gandhi , treason trialists including Nelson Mandela and various apartheid resistance fighters alongside common criminals. The fort was declared a national monument in In its early days before high-rise buildings, it was a commanding site and had clear views across Johannesburg.

Inside the fort Source: Marc Latilla. It officially opened in November and was a three-room brick and thatch structure possibly in Commissioner Street built by Col. It was viewed as a temporary solution and long-term prisoners were transferred to Pretoria. It was said that prisoners were more comfortable in the new goal than the commissioner in his galvanised structure.

Importantly, the gaol also served as the first hospital and the jailer, Barend Bruyn, looked after both prisoners and patients. In the mids it was being used as HQ for the now-defunct Parks police and for the Traffic police. Brick detailing around the windows Source: Marc Latilla. Space for a plaque or sign above the main entrance Source: Marc Latilla.

Inside the main entrance Source: Marc Latilla. Just below it, divided by a service road, where a parking lot for Constitution Hill now stands, used to be the old government mortuary which was commissioned by President Paul Kruger. This purely an assumption on my part as there was also a mortuary in the Hospital Hill complex built after The actual site of the mortuary is still to be confirmed. It was completed around the time the walls around the old fort were being built, but it remained outside of the fortress but was part of the jail complex.

It was a simple structure built to hold the dead until cremation or burial. It appears that the original building was demolished and replaced by a more modern building. If I were to guess, I would say the mortuary was rebuilt sometime in the s or s as it seems to compliment the maternity home just further down in the same block. The three-story block of flats behind the premises was a simple late art deco inspired building made up mostly of yellow-orange bricks that seem to define government buildings and police stations from that era.

Outside of the modern mortuary sometime before being demolished Source: Artslink. Constitution Hill parking replaced the mortuary Source: Marc Latilla. I spent a short time there while growing up and lived in flats at the back of the premises for a few months in and remember the layout vividly.

Below is a section of the old mortuary from an aerial picture from the late s. Note the empty space in the top right where the Civic Centre should be.

After it was unable to cope with constraints of the new society and was moved to the old non-European hospital around the corner. It was eventually demolished in and not incorporated into the museum and constitution Hill.

It is probably years old, estimated to have been built in , according to a report by heritage consultant Herbert Prins. The house originally consisted of three lounges, a passage lobby, dining room, five bedrooms, two fireplaces and bay windows.

Special features include a trough built into the west wall of one of the lounges, hipped ceilings, timber slatted ceilings and an attractive skylight in the hall. Sash windows have been replaced by metal ones. It was recently restored after years of neglect and fire damage. Originally the land and house were part of the Fort grounds.

Closer view of the exterior Source: Marc Latilla. It was designed by H. Battiscombe and built in and appears to have closed down in the s and turned into a block of flats.

Note the hitching posts on the pavement. The club was demolished in the s and was replaced by a building for the telephone department — possibly a telephone exchange building. This was again demolished and a new exchange in black marble with a clock tower went up in the early s. The building still stands although I suspect, not in use. Athenaeum Club shortly after completion.

A recently lost relic of early Johannesburg was the hitching posts which stood outside the club. Two of them were still standing on the pavement inWolamrans Street in , but have since been removed or recycled. Club showing hitching rails Source: Seventy Golden Years. Hitching rail c Source: Seventy Golden Years. Hitching rail plaque c Source: Seventy Golden Years. Some questions in the comments section will be answered by the list.

Norwich, O. I, A Johannesburg album-Historical postcards. Johannesburg: AD. Van Rensburg, C, Johannesburg-One Hundred Years. Pretoria: Chris Van Rensburg Publications. Van Der Waal, G-M, From Mining Camp to Metropolis. Chipkin, C. M, Cape Town: David Philip. Johannesburg: STE Publishers. Beaconsfield, M, Kimberley: Nothern Cape Printers. Wits Medical School heritage. The next post on Hillbrow is coming soon. I welcome any additional info on some of these medical buildings and others I may have omitted.

Thank you for another informative article, Marc. She received excellent treatment there. Hi I am a student doing research on the South African Medical research Institute for the history component of my honours. I am trying to get plans of the building please help me anyone. They have plans for most of the buildings in JHB. Pingback: History of Hillbrow Pt. Pingback: Doornfontein Pt. I am busy making baby blankets for this home now. Thank you in anticipation Zelda do Casal.

Hi, the Florence is not an orphanage but a hijacked building. Hello Marc, i have to ask- hijacked by whom? Thank you for your work here, i appreciate it very much!

Thanks for reading! Many buildings in town and Hillbrow were left deserted by their owners in the late 80s and early 90s. Some left the country, others just gave up and forgot about them or sold them really cheap with massive rate backlogs.

The state of the building would deteriorate to the point of it being condemned. By this time, the gangs had become so integrated with the building that it became difficult to remove them AND re-house the other people who lived there.

There have been some successes, but there are still many of these hijacked building around. There are other articles on the net if you search. The precinct contains one of the finest collections of historic buildings in Johannesburg. Part of the hospital Hill area includes the suburb of Argyll which was where the Argyll and Sutherland Regiment camped. The Critic, 3 July , p.

According to Mrs. Gray Commandant Schutte was born in Rustenburg in and arrived on the Rand in In June Messrs. Reference is made to this period in R. The men were encamped in a walled enclosure, called the Police Barracks, and the officers had some houses just outside the enclosure. During its stay at Johannesburg the 91st received great kindness from the Presbyterian church and the Caledonian Society.

The band and pipers played one afternoon a week in the Public Gardens. On May 4th. Russell wrote to the Town Clerk on 2 January to say that the township-owners gave the name to the street.

I was born on 21 March that year and I dearly would love to know what time etc and what I weighed as well. Can some kind person point me in the right direction or perhaps help me? Glynis Cock Millett-Clay from Benoni. Hi Glynis, I have no access to this kind of information.

Can I suggest you try the Dept. Request a vault copy of your birth certificate — this is the one your parents would have filled in by hand when you were born. The artist Dirk Meerkotter made two etchings with the centennial celebration of the Johanesburg General hospital. And around the same time was asked to restore the backdrop of scenary created by him.

The work was then mounted at a refectory in the new Johanbesburg General Hospital residences. I did see it around when meeting with the administration for improved Telkom connectivity. At the moment I am trying to locate these works of art as part of an effort to create and discuss his works.

I have a fb page ans Instagram account for this purpose. Transgressors were arrested and deported back to the homelands and warned never to return unless they could show that they were employed in the city.

This did not apply to residents of the rest of the townships. It established links with various homeland governments, allowing chiefs to pay regular visits to Diepkloof and Meadowlands to hold meetings with their subjects. The NRB established a venue in Meadowlands that was used by chiefs visiting their subjects in the townships. No similar measures applied to residents of the other townships in Soweto. After , Municipal housing activities in Soweto began to wind down, and after these came to a virtual standstill.

This may be ascribed to a number of factors, including:. Although the Soweto student uprising was sparked off primarily by dissatisfaction with current standards of Black education, popular grievances with local housing conditions were important lateral issues in the conflict that ensued. This was an agency founded by concerned members of the White business community as a direct response to the student-led uprising for the specific purpose of conducting housing and development work in Black urban areas.

As a result of its involvement, a number of major housing and community projects were undertaken. Among the first was the provision of an electrical infrastructure over the area, a project which was not necessarily initiated out of civic altruism, but out of a necessity to reduce current levels of air pollution over Johannesburg as a whole.

Much of this can be traced back to Soweto's innumerable wood fires, most particularly in winter when local temperature inversions and southerly winds combine to carry these fumes northward to Johannesburg's White residential suburbs.

During the early s, conditions regarding the construction of privately funded housing were relaxed, allowing banks and building societies to enter the Black housing market for the first time. This, together with the availability of small pockets of land, then allowed a modest amount of middle income housing activity to take place. However, normal population expansion, an existing housing backlog, and the relaxation of rural influx laws ensured that, by , the housing crisis remained as pressing as it had been forty years previously.

As a result, informal housing settlements once again began to develop in such places as Kliptown, and on a number of White-owned farms bordering on Soweto. This has continued to the present day as government agencies have struggled to meet their own deadlines. The original residents of Western Native Township have long been relocated to Soweto, after the suburb was rezoned in under the Group Areas Act, and given over to Coloured occupation.

Today it is undergoing extensive redevelopment and has been incorporated into a wider grouping of officially-designated Coloured suburbs, including Bosmont, Newclare, Coronationville and Claremont. The provision of housing specifically for Coloureds did not begin until when Coronationville was established.

Noordgesig followed in , but with the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in , it was consolidated with Newclare into a sector for the exclusive occupation of Coloureds. This was not something which the Nationalist government could permit at a time when its programmes of social engineering and racial segregation were in their initial stages of implementation. Therefore, in , the land was rezoned for White occupation, its houses were bulldozed to the ground, and the area was redeveloped as a White residential suburb.

With the destruction of Sophiatown completed in and residents resettled in different parts of Soweto, the NRB turned its attention to Alexandra Township. Hundreds, probably thousands of Alexandra families were resettled in Diepkloof and Meadowlands between and The NRB stopped this process sometime in or early in And for the rest of the s forced removals from Alexandra Township were suspended.

During the s Alexandra underwent a period of indecision and anxiety regarding its future for it seemed that the whole area would be forcibly expropriated by Government and redeveloped as a series of gigantic, single-sex hostels. After a protracted legal and political battle involving citizens of Johannesburg from all walks of life, this community won the right to remain on their own land. Today the suburb is in the process of renewal as many of its older parts are slowly being upgraded or rebuilt.

Until a few years ago, Alexandrawas one of the last remaining suburbs on the Witwatersrand where Black residents retained the right to own land. Persons of Indian origin have been residents of the Reef since its earliest days, when their presence probably played an important role in the development of Johannesburg's CBD.

It is probable that, following the plague scare of , when all residents of Brickfields, Black and White, were removed to Klipspruit, this community became divided.

One section chose to settle near the health camp, continuing with their concession stores and forming the core of what was to become the Kliptown business centre. The other chose to return to the central area with its thriving commercial district. It should be noted that one of the buildings to have been demolished arbitrarily in was a well-appointed mosque. A third Indian community, more commonly described as Malay, also made their home immediately to the north and west of the Brickfields.

In later years it was to become known as Pageview, although most Johannesburg residents knew it as Vrededorp or, more simply, as Fietas. This area was extensively damaged by the Braamfontein dynamite explosion of , as a result of which it had to be rebuilt. However it does not appear to have been involved in the plague scare eight years later and, mercifully, it was not involved in the wholesale destruction of housing that followed.

The character and demographic composition of this suburb changed considerably between and the s, when its original Malay residents slowly gave way to Indian and predominantly Muslim families. The mechanics of this changeover are not clear, but would appear to centre on the Malay custom of conducting large, and hence expensive, weddings. As a result of this, many Malay families entered into debt with Indian businessmen and forfeited their properties when they failed to meet their repayments.

In the late s, Pageview was rezoned as a White suburb. Its residents were then forced out, their properties were expropriated and demolished, and have since been redeveloped as low-income housing for Whites.

When Johannesburg spread further east and west, these groups were incorporated into the urban fabric of the new suburbs. Although in time these areas developed a predominantly White, working class character, their Indian residents managed to retain their homes until the s. This did not take place without some degree of White resistance which, in some cases, became quite voluble.

In Vrededorp, for example, White residents were agitating for the removal of their Malay and Indian neighbours in Pageview from as early as the s. It is ironic to note that, when the two groups were still residing alongside each other in the late s, it was the Indian families who would not permit their children to fraternise with their White counterparts, considering them to be ill-mannered and hence a bad influence.

As a result, in , a suburb for the exclusive use of Indians was established some 32km south of Johannesburg, near the Lenz military camp. Although Indian families were at first unwilling to relocate to this remote location, government pressure and decreasing residential options in central Johannesburg ensured the gradual development of the suburb, and in time it has grown to an extent that land for its expansion is no longer available.

This forced many persons employed in Johannesburg to either make their homes illegally in White suburbs such as Mayfair and Fordsburg, or to seek residence further afield in places such as Laudium, in Pretoria.

The removal of Indian families from Pageview in the s served to aggravate this situation. The initial reasons for this do not appear to have been the outcome of deliberate policy decisions so much as a series of historical and geographical coincidences.

Certainly areas south of the Braamfontein ridge have always been considered to be colder, windier, and hence less desirable for residential purposes than land to its north. This was aggravated by the growth of a mining industrial belt and the ensuing dust pollution it generated. Circumstances dictated that these were located south of the town, but they could just as easily have been to its north. The subsequent development of an industrial and mining belt along the Reef also made it sensible to erect any new worker housing south of this line.

In this way, planners continued to pile one disadvantage upon the next until they created a physical and material gulf between the affluent northern suburbs and the indigent south, a gap which generally persists to the present day. Read individually, the negative factors mean little; taken as a whole they create a damning indictment of White Johannesburg.

The first Black township was built on the structurally unsound soil of a rubbish dump; Klipspruit was the site of a sewage works, with all its attendant smells; Soweto is remote from town and, for many years, remained poorly served by transport; little housing was provided until ; the south is cold, windy and subject to twisters, temperature inversions, violent thundershowers and hailstorms; the area is heavily undermined and prone to wall-cracking earth tremors; in some parts land is given to heaving clay and is therefore expensive to build upon.

This list is long and by no means complete. There is no doubt that then, as now, economics have played a major role in the planning process. The initial purchase price for land in Soweto, for example, was R16 per acre, a figure considered to have been low even by standards of that time. Initially it grew about two major nodes, one medical, and one educational in nature.

The first was established on 29 March when the Johannesburg General Hospital was officially opened on Hospital Hill, subsequently known as Hillbrow, to cater for the needs of the rapidly expanding mining community. The second focused upon the University of the Witwatersrand, better known as Wits, which was established in as the South African School of Mines and Technology.

The sector remained relatively undefined up to the early s, when it began to undergo extensive development and consolidation, giving it a clear identity. By the s it included the following major components:. This sector begins to break down when it reaches the Hillbrow-Berea wedge where, over the years, the development of a high-rise residential suburb has made land too expensive for institutional use.

The Johannesburg Technikon campus, formerly in Braamfontein and since relocated to Doornfontein under the aegis of the University of Johannesburg, brings the eastern arm of this arc to a terminus. It is difficult to establish with any certainty whether the origins of an educational and institutional belt within Johannesburg's urban fabric were the result of historical coincidence or the pragmatic implementation of deliberate planning policies.

Certainly the establishment of a hospital on the Hillbrow Ridge in indicates that even then this area was capable of fulfilling the primary requirements for institutional land use.

The fact that, in subsequent years, other institutions were added to this area seems to confirm the judgment of early planners. Rightly or wrongly, the Afrikaner political establishment had always viewed the suburb as representative of the interests of British imperialism and Jewish finance, and had treated its residents with distrust, feeling uncomfortable with their Uitlander values and disliking the power they wielded in the South African economy.

This antipathy was transmitted, over the years, to new generations of administrators, and by the time the Nationalist Party was returned to power in , right-wing nationalist politicians felt ready to act. During the s the Government began to expropriate properties in Parktown and to demolish their houses, ostensibly to provide the Johannesburg College of Education, a small institution which numbered less than two thousand students, with sports facilities.

In these terms, the disappearance of large parts of Parktown cannot be seen in simple terms of the old making way for the new. It was rather the climax of four generations of rivalry between differing cultures and economic classes holding conflicting social and political ideologies. The subsequent redevelopment of the remaining parts of Parktown into a low-rise office park was thus no more than the completion of a process initiated by a bureaucracy fuelled by atavistic inferiority complexes and racial hatreds.

Ironically, in more recent times, the administrators of the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital are slowly replacing these playing fields with buildings of their own. It is doubtful that the growth of a suburban business district so close to the CBD-Braamfontein complex would have taken place of its own accord and without the interference of a central government.

The future of this sector does not appear to be easy to predict. The CBD has always been subject to the combined forces of rising land prices, limited land availability and intensive infrastructural development. However, in spite of the fact that institutional development is generally subject to relatively low building densities, this sector already represents a sizeable investment in terms of its specialised infrastructure.

Thus, in spite of being vulnerable to commercial redevelopment, it is probable that this sector will retain its institutional and educational character for many years to come. Pivotal to this has been the decision taken by Wits University in to remain in Braamfontein rather than relocate to a new campus on the perimeter of Johannesburg. A critical factor to these developments has also been the decision to make former mining land south of the CBD available for low-rise commercial, light industrial and warehousing facilities.

Unlike the s however, when the CBD could move into the relatively underdeveloped areas of Braamfontein and Doornfontein, commerce and business did not have a similar option open to them, and instead chose to leapfrog surrounding residential areas by moving into low-rise, decentralised office and retail developments in Rosebank, Sandton, Randburg, Bedfordview and, more recently, Halfway House Midrand.

As a result, land formerly zoned for agricultural use on either side of the M1 motorway has been taken over by office, commercial, small manufacturing and warehouse activity linking, with little break, the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria with an almost continuous ribbon of low-rise development. The initial gold rush and its accompanying economic boom placed a strain upon the local infrastructure and created shortages of water, food and fuel.

These, coupled with the exhaustion of the surface workings on the mines, produced a momentary economic slump. Improvements to the still rudimentary transport infrastructure, the discovery of coal on the East Rand and the introduction of a cyanide-based process in gold extraction encouraged the development of deep level mining.

Nonetheless minor slumps were still to occur in subsequent years, the most notable being the direct result of the Jameson Raid of , and of the South African War of that followed. Despite these events, gold production continued to rise, achieving an all-time high during World War II. This was due, in part, to the devaluation of South African currency following upon the economic downturn of the early s, which sustained the gold mines well into the s, when the War effort promoted the growth of a secondary industrial sector.

This is likely to have occurred during, and immediately after, World War II, when many industries engaged in the war effort began to diversify and expand. During this time the influx of workers, both White and Black, to the Johannesburg urban area increased to provide a skilled and unskilled labour pool, as well as a captive market for locally-manufactured goods. This does not appear to have been the result of any single event, but was rather the culmination of a series of factors which facilitated the change.

These include the following:. In some cases, the mining companies have begun to play an increasingly active role in property development as parcels of their former mining land are being cleared of their industrial superstructure and are being made available for light industrial and residential use. At the same time a small number of duplex flats were permitted in Sandown, a move which encouraged developers to apply for, and receive, more flat rights.

This gained further impetus during the s after the introduction nationally of sectional title ownership rights.

It is interesting to note that these residential developments north of Johannesburg are a continuation of the ribbon of middle and high-income townships originally established north of the Parktown Ridge. In more recent times, however, there has been a rising demand for smaller and more affordable erven in these areas.

The cost of living in Houghton, for example, has become prohibitive for most families owing to a combination of high municipal rates, labour and maintenance costs.

Other suburbs such as Melrose North have also followed suit. It was not uncommon during the apartheid era for a middle-class White family to employ two or even three live-in Black servants, while such behaviour has become virtually unheard of since The phenomenal growth experienced by the residential sector in areas surrounding Johannesburg was also boosted by parallel trends towards decentralisation of the business district.

In many ways, the Johannesburg City Council failed to plan for the tremendous expansion of both population and the CBD which took place during the s. This led many businesses and professional practices to move out of the central core, at first to Braamfontein, and later even further, to Parktown, Rosebank and the new municipalities of Randburg and Sandton. This trend has been complemented by the concept of regional retail outlets, which have reinforced the move away from the CBD and into the suburbs.

Originally the peri-urban areas, which have since become the municipalities of Randburg, Bedfordview and Sandton, were vociferous in their demands for inclusion within an extended Johannesburg municipal structure. However the Johannesburg City Council regarded this move as being potentially dangerous to its own tax base, and feared that the demand for new roads, lighting and sewerage would over-extend its municipal budget.

Ultimately a compromise was reached and new municipalities were established in all of these areas, although, to all intents and purposes, they are still regarded as falling within the suburban fabric of a larger metropolitan Johannesburg. It is clear that although the Group Areas Act was repealed in , the component elements of apartheid planning remained indelibly etched into the urban fabric of our cities.

It is probable that their effects will continue to be felt for many years to come, and that their traces may never be entirely expunged from the South African urban fabric. Changes are not likely to take place through a long-term, liberal, free-market exchange of land, but will probably require a series of stringent land and price controls orchestrated through a city government committed to strong democratic values, community empowerment and the generation of wealth.

It would be true to say that apartheid willfully set out to beggar the Black community for the benefit of the White. Consequently these families are now entitled to a form of restitution, and one of the ways in which this could take place is through an improved quality of housing, of life, and of economic opportunities.

To use an architectural metaphor, the edifice of apartheid was only made possible by a structure, scaffolding, of inter-supporting laws and edicts. Once the building was completed and could stand alone and unassisted, then the scaffolding could be dismantled and removed. It is true that, after 2 February , the Nationalist Government began to assiduously remove its legal props to apartheid, but the substantive structure of economic inequality inherited from that system is still very much in place in the fabric of our cities.

Its granite face will not be affected by rubber mallets, but will require a demolition tool made of sterner materials. Residential development in Johannesburg The first residential areas to develop in Johannesburg were located about around Church Square, soon to be renamed Government, and then Von Brandis Square, where the Mining Commissioner had his home. Click on image to enlarge Although early residential settlement was concentrated in specific parts of the first mining camp, it did not take long before lines of separation based upon social and economic factors emerged in the fabric of early Johannesburg.

Black residential development in Johannesburg Click on image to enlarge Before , the indigenous population of the central Highveld is estimated to have numbered some ,, many of whom lived in large settlements of up to persons See pre-history.

To read some more related articles on Migrant and Mine labour visit the references and archive listing It is apparent that some of these problems were also common to the white farming community, where a series of droughts, locust plagues and the rinderpest increased rural poverty and forced many Dutch farmers and transport-riders to seek employment on the mines.