women, like Whites, Coloureds, and Asians, were settling permanently in
the towns.i" The most pregnant social process in South Africa in the first
half of the twentieth century was this massive relocation of Africans, push-
ed out from the impoverished reserves and the gradually mechanizing
white farms and pulled into the towns by the prospect of jobs in the
burgeoning manufacturing and service industries. Economic forces were
counteracting government policies that had aimed to keep Africans out of
the towns, except as migrant laborers with domicile in the reserves.76
The government tried but failed to stop increased African settlement in
the towns. And because neither the government, nor the urban authorities,
nor industry provided housing for the influx, the Africans built shacks of
sacks, wood, corrugated iron, and cardboard on the outskirts of the towns
and improvised their own methods of social control. This squatting move-
ment was especially effectiveoutside Johannesburg. During the second half
of the 1940s, between sixty thousand and ninety thousand Africans settled
in squatter camps there, mainly in the area beyond the city's southwestern
borders that later became know as Soweto. As Oriel Monongoaha, one of