SOWETO AND JOHANNESBURG, INEXTRICABLY LINKED. THEIR SEPARATE histories cast light on each other.

Formally established in 1886 after the discovery of gold, Johannesburg grew rapidly over the next couple of decades to become South Africa's main economic centre and its most populous city. In 1887, the mining town set up to accommodate early mine diggers contained a mere 3 000 souls, but as the gold rush gathered momentum its population exploded. Immigrants poured in – from the region and from all over the world. By 1899 there were 100 000 people in Johannesburg. And in 1911, only a quarter of a century after the founding of the city, there were about 240 000. Johannesburg's rate of growth was exceeded only by New York's.

The name Soweto was only adopted in 1963, after the rapid expansion of townships in the south-western areas of Johannesburg from the 1950s. Before then, the city's non-mining African people, like many other poor inhabitants of this rapidly expanding ‘city of gold’, were to be found in the inner city slums and municipal locations. But the origins of Soweto go back to the turn of the twentieth century. There were three pivotal moments in the pre-apartheid development of the township: the 1904 plague, the establishment of Orlando in 1930, and Mpanza's squatter movement of the mid 1940s. Each of these contributed in its own way to making Soweto the pre-eminent location of Johannesburg's African population.

At the end of the Anglo-Boer War, the newly appointed engineer of Johannesburg, Major WAJ O'Meara, expressed outrage over the slumyards