Group Areas Act 1950

• Group Areas Acts


  Series of acts from 1950 that had a damaging effect on black communities in cities
• African locations/townships were built by municipalities on the edge of town
• There remained areas close to the city centre where Coloured, Indian and African people owned houses, shops or businesses or where properties owned by whites were let out to black people
• Group Areas


  Provided the powers to eradicate these mixed areas so that the central parts of the cities and the closer suburbs would be very largely in white hands
• Zones eradicated by Group Areas

  • Sophiatown in Johannesburg
  • District Six in Cape Town
  • Cato Manor in Durban
• Sophiatown in Johannesburg was first to fall victim to apartheid planners
• Sophiatown housed nearly 60,000 people, with wealthier professionals, such as former African National Congress (ANC) President Dr Xuma, living side by side with poor tenants in squalid back-yard shacks
• Sophiatown attracted writers and journalists working for Drum magazine who recorded the hard-drinking, racy urban lifestyle for which it became celebrated
• Planning for the removal of Sophiatown began in 1950 and within six years, despite intense resistance, it was largely gone - bulldozed into rubble
• Drum magazine


  Started as African Drum in 1951, originally had a paternalistic attitude to black Africans but under new editors quickly re-focused on the growing townships and became in many ways their mouthpiece
• In 1949, African people attacked Indians who they felt were exploiting them as landlords and storekeepers in Cato Manor
• In the 1950s, the government imposed the Group Areas Act and by 1965 the shacks had largely been removed from Cato Manor and tens of thousands of African people sent to far-flung townships
• About 41,000 Indian people had also been moved from the central areas, mostly to an exclusively Indian zone south of the city
• District Six was a multi-racial, largely Coloured, residential and business area near the heart of Cape Town city centre
• Group Areas was enforced in District Six from 1966, about 60,000 people were forcibly removed and resettled on the distant Cape flats and the District Six buildings were bulldozed
• Apartheid enforced a hierarchy of rights and attempted to separate public space, with the typical symbols being the reservation of benches, buses and beaches
• The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) entrenched and broadened this principle and made it legal to provide separate facilities for black people which were not of an equal quality
• Influx control


  A central element in Afrikaner nationalist policy to reduce African migration to the cities
• Before 1948, pass laws forced all African men travelling outside the reserves to carry a pass
• The National Party built on this legislation with the Natives Abolition of Passes Act (1952) which required a reference book for each African adult, which they had to present on demand
• Only a minority of African people who had been in town for ten years, or lived there for 15 years, had the right to stay in urban areas
• African families were not able to buy houses or land in the cities, even in the townships, which hugely undermined their security and capacity to accumulate family wealth
• The pass laws were ferociously policed and deeply resented by African people, causing abrasive encounters with the police on a daily basis
• Convictions under the pass laws increased from 164,324 in 1952 to 384,497 in 1962, with about three million people turned into criminals for trying to exercise their right to move