AFRICAN SHANTY TOWNS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27151, 22 September 1953, Page 9

AFRICAN SHANTY TOWNS

“ENTIRELY ANOMALOUS POSITION ’’ (Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.)

(Rec. 8.30 p.m.) LONDON, Sept. 21. Discussing what he calls the “entirely anomalous position” of South Africa’s shanty-town dwellers, the Cape Town correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph” says that the country’s industrial prosperity rests on the native labour xorce, which accounts for 43 per cent, of this type of worker. Not counting migratory workers, these labourers and their dependents number many more than 2,000,000. “Yet there is ah instinctive reluctance to accept the natives as a permanent part of urban society,” says the correspondent. "Though the system of migratory labour adopted by the mines has not in itself been extended to factories and workshops, it has given rise to a habit of mind which regards the native worker as a visiting tribesman with no municipal rights. “The drift to the towns has been as irresistible here as in all industrial revolutions, and the result is that only a fraction of the native working population is adequately or even lawfully housed.

“According to the Native Affairs Department, the shortage of urban native houses last year amounted to 167,000, and was increasing at a rate which would require an expenditure of £100,000,000 during the next 10 years,” the correspondent says. “This makes the £1,600,000 authorised this year for sub-economic housing schemes look absurd.

“In Johannesburg, where in 1951 there was a shortage of 50,000 native houses, 76 were built in that year; in Cape Town, where the problem was next most acute, no houses at all were built.

“Legally natives are allowed to live only in woefully inadequate locations, and townships are provided for them often at great distances from their work, or if the natives are unmarried, m a few designated hostels. In fact, they fill all the available interstices of the white man’s impressive townscapes, where they constitute a chronic challenge to public order and health.

“Illegal shanty towns spring up on waste pieces of ground, eventually to receive a degree of reluctant recognition by the municipal authorities. The Government, to make things worse, proposes to close down certain townships within Johanpesburg where natives have long enjoyed freehold rights, but has not ensured that proper accommodation is available elsewhere,” says the correspondent.