ABOUT THE CAPE TOWN AREA
Since 1934, the word township had been used to define a newly developed area set aside for non-whites. Prior to that year, townships were generally referred to as locations. However, in the thirties of the last century there was no law in the largest province of South-Africa – the Cape Province - that forbade non-whites to live wherever they wanted. On the contrary, practically every town and village in the Cape area had neighbourhoods where people of colour and white people lived together. However, after the introduction of apartheid in 1948, this changed. The 1950 infamous Group Areas Act decided that every community had to have its own living area. The act caused a huge number of forced removals that seriously affected the brown and black communities in particular.
In the period until 1980, one out of every four brown South-Africans were forced to move.
Only one out of 666 white South-Africans did.
At a ferocious rate, new townships were built outside of the ‘white’ cities. Indeed, in most cases, a geographical dividing line created a truly physical segregation a mountain, a valley or a barren plain. However, in some cases, only a road or a railroad track separated the white from the non-white area. It is understood that practically none of the people involved left their houses and homes voluntarily, to move to the new townships.
Now in 2020, a popular misconception is that the entire population of the townships is poor. In reality, in the large Cape townships, e.g. Langa (“Sun”), Gugulethu (“Our Pride”) and Khayelitsha (“New Home”) – together accounting for over a million residents – you will find a large variety of dwellings, from shacks built from wood, corrugated sheets and cardboard, to modern stone-built houses, multi-storey houses that would not have been out of place in a former ‘white Cape residential area.
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