Race, Power and Urban Control: Johannesburg's Inner City Slum-yards, 1910–1923

From Johannesburg's origins as a mining camp, the principal and general white discourse of urban segregation for Africans was not questioned. However, no blueprint existed for how to enforce urban segregation prior to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. Contestation over the details of how to manage African shelter in Johannesburg around the time of Union reveals that, despite powerful segregationist legislation and political consensus among the ruling white population, municipal strategies for managing African settlement were more contingent. The argument presented here is that the Council's shift in policy, from initially condoning and facilitating inner city slum yards to the subsequent vilification of the ‘African slum problem’ reflects in part a change in the balance of power between manufacturing and mining interests, and in part the reassertion of a popular white discourse connecting ‘race’ with disease, criminality and drunkenness, propagated in particular by working class ratepayers.