Word: johannesburger
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under the Pillows. Johannesburg has always been a rowdy place. It began as a mining camp. But as the city has grown, throwing up tall buildings and sending a tide of suburban homes rolling across the surrounding veld, crime has grown with it. Today, the city's 350,000 whites fear its 500,000 natives; and this fear is reciprocated. Johannesburg is probably the tensest city in the world to live in. Altitude (5,750 feet) and glare (Johannesburg gets more sunshine than the Riviera) increase the tension. The dry air crackles with fear...
Behind the Barricade. This week and last, Johannesburg crime touched a new high. Incensed by the increase in rapes, murders, assaults and burglaries, whites have demanded longer prison sentences for Negro offenders, more corporal punishment, more death sentences, even public hangings. The South African Institute of Race Relations takes a different view. This week it declared: "Thousands of non-Europeans, because they have been unable to see any prospects of bettering themselves socially or economically, have turned in sheer hopelessness to the . . . lawless alternatives left to them. Threatened by the monster they have created, the European citizens of the larger...
...Johannesburg's half-million blacks are compelled to live in "locations," segregated from the white residential areas. White growth has pushed the locations farther & farther away from the center of the city, so that the blacks have to travel miles each day to & from work. Transport costs eat into their meager wages; most black workers have to rise at 4 a.m. to reach their work at 8, and do not get back home until 8 or 9 in the evening...
...last few years, the fearfully overcrowded locations have spilled about a fifth of Johannesburg's total black population over into shantytowns. The majority of the shanty-dwellers are officially described as "hardworking, respectable people who have been readily absorbed into industry but for whom no houses are available." Johannesburg is building at the rate of ?3,000,000 ($8,400,000) a month, but nearly all of it goes into new office blocks, white flats, white homes...
There is little money for black housing. The blacks have no political vote and no municipal voice. They can neither improve their wages nor persuade the municipal authorities to subsidize their housing adequately. To meet the problem, Johannesburg set aside land at a place called Moroka, where 60,000 natives have built their own homes, unaided. In Moroka, there is one lavatory seat for every 250 persons. In Jabavu, one of the better locations, houses are built in blocks of three. The inside walls do not reach the roof, so separate families have no privacy. Any key opens any door...