The authorities celebrated Orlando as a “model location” that would have tree-lined streets, business opportunities, schools and recreational facilities. Orlando was one of several municipal locations established across the country in the 1930s and 1940s as a cornerstone of the government’s urban segregation project. Wikimedia Commons/The Heritage Portal, CC BY-SA James Mpanza House is today a heritage memorial site. But, as a recent exhibition to mark the anniversary revealed, Orlando also has a diverse and rich cultural and intellectual history. Orlando is particularly significant because it has always been an important centre of black protest politics. Much of this history has been marginalised in the democratic era’s emphasis on the history of the main liberation movements – the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the African National Congress (ANC).Īs a historian, I have published books on a number of black townships. Its history reveals a rich tapestry of experiences that the state attempted to suppress. Soon after its establishment, Orlando became a mecca of black urban culture and liberation politics. As one of the oldest parts of Soweto, Orlando has a longer history. Soweto is renowned as the site of the 1976 student uprising that shook apartheid – the country’s system of white minority rule – to its core. Soweto was the primary dormitory township for African people working in Johannesburg, which since its establishment as a mining town in 1886 has developed into the country’s economic hub. They were eventually amalgamated into Soweto, the country’s largest township. Several new townships were created, especially in the 1950s, in the same region. It was renamed Orlando East when Orlando West was established in the 1940s. Orlando was one of the first municipal locations – called townships under apartheid – established in 1932 for Africans under the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act. Orlando East, a working class community on the periphery of Johannesburg in South Africa, has turned 90 years old.
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