African Urbanisation on the Rand between the 1930s and 1960s: Its Social Character and Political Consequences

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Periodical article

Title:	African Urbanisation on the Rand between the 1930s and 1960s: Its Social Character and Political Consequences
Author:	Bonner, Philip
Year:	1995
Periodical:	Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:	21
Issue:	1
Period:	March
Pages:	115-129
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	urbanization economic history Urbanization and Migration Ethnic and Race Relations Politics and Government History and Exploration
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637334
Abstract:	This paper investigates the process of African urbanization on the Witwatersrand between the 1930s and 1960s. It suggests that much of the existing literature on urbanization in South Africa has tended to neglect first-generation immigration into the towns and has preferred to focus instead on migrant labour and second-generation African urbanites. It argues that the large-scale settlement of first-generation immigrants on the Witwatersrand which took place in the 1930s and 1940s was a product of a complex combination of factors, notably the independent movement of women into the towns, the changing residential ecology of the Rand and the forms in which industrial wages were paid. It goes on to trace some of the journeys which brought the new immigrants to the Rand and the parochial, heterogeneous and often ethnically inflected associations which these immigrants formed in order to survive in their new environment. It concludes by examining the political implications of these transformations. Ref., sum.