Then, following the general election of 1948 which established apartheid as the centerpiece of racial policy, the South African government began officially classifying people into distinct groups (black, white, colored, Indian), and precipitously ramped up the forcible relocation of people to residential areas matching their group. Though initially serving as an evacuation camp, Soweto was later designated to house black laborers who worked in British-operated mines and industrial sites away from the city center.įrom 1904 onwards, black South Africans were systematically relocated to Soweto to make room for incoming white settlers under a system of government-mandated segregation. A quintessential example of segregationist planning, Soweto initially was the result of mass evictions and evacuations of black residents of the city of Brickfields by the British colonial authorities in the first years of the 20th Century. Soweto, an acronym for “South Western Townships,” is a grouping of townships scattered across twenty kilometers southwest of Johannesburg, South Africa.
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