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On April 27, 1950, the Group Areas Act No. 41

was passed by the apartheid government of
South Africa. As a system, apartheid used long-
established race classifications to maintain the
dominance of the colonial occupation of the
country. The primary purpose of apartheid laws
was to promote the superiority of whites and to
establish and elevate the minority white regime.
A suite of legislative laws was passed to
accomplish this, including Group Areas Act No.
41, as well as the Land Act of 1913, the Mixed
Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality
Amendment Act of 1950: all of these were
created to separate the races and subjugate
nonwhite people.

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South African race categories were set up within

a few decades after the discovery of diamonds
and gold in the country during the mid-19th
century: native-born Africans ("Blacks," but also
called "kaffirs" or "Bantu"), Europeans or
European-descended ("Whites" or "Boers"),
Asians ("Indians") and mixed raced
("Coloured"). The 1960 South African census
showed that 68.3% of the population were
African, 19.3% were White, 9.4% Coloured, and
3.0% Indian.

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The Group Areas Act No 41 forced physical
separation and segregation between races by
creating different residential areas for each race.
Implementation started in 1954 when people
were first forcibly removed from living in
"wrong" areas, leading to the destruction of
communities.

The Act also restricted ownership and the

occupation of land to groups as permitted,
meaning that Africans could neither own nor
occupy land in European areas. The law was also
supposed to apply in reverse, but the result was
that land under Black ownership was taken by
the government for use by whites only.

The government set aside ten "homelands" for

relocated non-white residents, mostly scattered
bits of unwanted territories, based on ethnicity
among the Black communities. These homelands
were granted "independence" with limited self-
rule, the main purpose of which was to delete the
homeland residents as citizens of South Africa,
and cut back on the government's responsibility
for providing housing, hospitals, schools,
electricity, and water supplies.

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However, the Africans were a significant
economic source in South Africa, in particular as
a labor force in the cities. Pass Laws were
established to require non-whites to carry
passbooks, and later "reference books" (similar
to passports) to be eligible to enter the "white"
parts of the country. Worker's hostels were
established to accommodate temporary workers,
but between 1967 and 1976, the South African
government simply stopped building homes for
Africans at all, leading to severe housing
shortages.

The Group Areas Act allowed for the infamous

destruction of Sophiatown, a suburb of
Johannesburg. In February 1955, 2,000
policemen began removing Sophiatown residents
to Meadowlands, Soweto and established the
suburb as an area for whites only, newly called
Triomf (Victory). In some cases, the nonwhites
were loaded onto trucks and dumped into the
bush to fend for themselves. 

There were serious consequences for people who

didn't comply with the Group Areas Act. People
found in violation could receive a fine of up to
two hundred pounds, prison for up to two years,
or both. If they didn't comply with forced
eviction, they could be fined sixty pounds or face
six months in prison.

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Citizens tried to use the courts to overturn the
Group Areas Act, though they were unsuccessful
each time. Others decided to stage protests and
engage in civil disobedience, such as sit-ins at
restaurants, which took place across South Africa
during the early 1960s.

The Act hugely affected communities and

citizens across South Africa. By 1983, more than
600,000 people had been removed from their
homes and relocated.

Colored people suffered significantly because

housing for them was often postponed because
plans for zoning were primarily focused on races,
not mixed races. The Group Areas Act also hit
Indian South Africans especially hard because
many of them resided in other ethnic
communities as landlords and traders. In 1963,
approximately a quarter of Indian men and
women in the country were employed as traders.
The National Government turned a deaf ear to
the protests of the Indian citizens: in 1977, the
Minister of Community Development said that
he wasn't aware of any cases instances in which
Indian traders who were resettled that didn't like
their new homes.

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The Group Areas Act was repealed by President
Frederick Willem de Klerk on April 9, 1990. After
apartheid ended in 1994, the new African
National Congress (ANC) government headed by
Nelson Mandela was faced with an enormous
housing backlog. More than 1.5 million homes
and apartments in the urban areas were located
in informal settlements without property titles.
Millions of people in rural areas lived in terrible
conditions, and urban Blacks resided in hostels
and shacks. The ANC government promised to
build one million homes within five years, but
most of them were of necessity located in
developments on the outskirts of cities, which
have tended to sustain existing spatial
segregation and inequality.

Great strides have been undertaken in the

decades since apartheid ended, and today South
Africa is a modern country, with an advanced
highway system and modern homes and
apartment buildings in the cities available to all
residents. While nearly half of the population
was without formal housing in 1996, by 2011, 80
percent of the population had a home. But the
scars of inequality remain. 

>,"-5()
Bickford-Smith, Vivian. "Urban History in the New
South Africa: Continuity and Innovation since the End of
Apartheid." Urban History 35.2 (2008): 288–315. Print.

Christopher, A.J. "Apartheid Planning in South Africa:

The Case of Port Elizabeth." The Geographical Journal
153.2 (1987): 195–204. Print.

---. "Urban Segregation in Post-Apartheid South Africa."

Urban Studies 38.3 (2001): 449–66. Print.

Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger. "South Africa:

The Rise and Fall of Apartheid." 3rd ed. London:
Routledge, 2016. Print.

Maharaj, Brij. "Apartheid, Urban Segregation, and the

Local State: Durban and the Group Areas Act in South
Africa." Urban Geography 18.2 (1997): 135–54. Print.

---. "The Group Areas Act and Community Destruction in

South Africa." Urban Forum 5.2 (1994): 1–25. Print.

Newton, Caroline, and Nick Schuermans. "More Than

Twenty Years after the Repeal of the Group Areas Act:
Housing, Spatial Planning and Urban Development in
Post-Apartheid South Africa." Journal of Housing and
the Built Environment 28.4 (2013): 579–87. Print.

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