How apartheid built, and still shapes, South African cities

This page argues that South Africa’s present-day geography is the lasting form of the apartheid project, not its residue. The laws were repealed in name. The lines they drew still decide who lives where, who has work, who has water. The four visualisations below carry that claim from different angles. The maps and timelines hold the spatial record: where the boundaries went, when, and on whose authority, from the founding of Johannesburg in 1890 to today. The photograph and the drawing hold the lived reality the maps are a record of, what it actually means to be on one side of a line the 1913 Land Act or the 1950 Group Areas Act drew. They sit on the same page on purpose. The maps show the geometry of the injury. The artwork shows what it feels like to still be inside it.

01 · Timeline & Map

#timeline

Apartheid · Spatial History of South Africa

Twelve moments, 1890 → present. Click a dot or use ← / → keys.

  1. 1890
  2. 1913
  3. 1948
  4. 1950
  5. 1955
  6. 1960
  7. 1966
  8. 1976
  9. 1985
  10. 1994
  11. 2001
  12. 2010→
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1890Urbanisation

Founding of Johannesburg & the mining grid

Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Within four years of the 1886 discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, the tent camp at Ferreira's Camp had become the largest city in southern Africa. By 1890 a tight rectilinear cadastre had been laid out across the reef, narrow stand-sized blocks oriented to the gold-bearing strike, with mining compounds, rail sidings, and a white administrative core already physically separated from the migrant labour barracks. This is the first South African city built from scratch around the logic of segregated labour, and almost every spatial pattern that apartheid would later codify is already legible in its first survey diagrams.

  • Goldfields proclaimed September 1886; first stands auctioned December 1886.
  • Population passes 100,000 by 1896, fastest urban growth on the continent at the time.
  • Mining compounds (single-sex, fenced, employer-controlled) house African migrant labour from the start.
  • Rail corridors (1892 Cape line, 1895 Delagoa Bay line) lock the Witwatersrand into a national extractive grid.
  • Early cadastral maps already separate the white commercial core from 'Coolie Location', 'Malay Location' and 'Kaffir Location', the prototype of group-area zoning.

Images

Ferreira's Gold Mine, Johannesburg, 1886
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Pritchard Street, Johannesburg, 1896
Wellcome Collection · CC-BY
Robinson Deep Gold Mine, near Johannesburg, 1896
Wellcome Collection · CC-BY
First train into Johannesburg, the rail spine of the mining grid
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

02 · The segregating city, layer by layer

#vis-2

Scrub from 1900 to 2026 and watch apartheid’s spatial plan crystallise on top of the City of Cape Town’s aerial photography archive: near-annual sub-metre aerials from 1980 onward, sparser CBD-only frames back to 1926, with Esri Wayback covering 2026. Use the lower “zoom in” slider to scrub the modern era at finer resolution. Townships, forced-removal zones, informal settlements and whites-only Group Areas appear as they were proclaimed: Ndabeni 1901, Langa 1923, Nyanga 1948, Group Areas Act 1950, the Atlantic Seaboard and Southern Suburbs declared white in 1957, District Six declared white in 1966, Mitchells Plain 1971, Crossroads 1975, Khayelitsha 1983. The apartheid spatial machinery builds itself in front of you. Click any feature for its history and the source for both its boundary and its date.

Cape Town under apartheid: satellite imagery and segregation features by year, 1900 → 2026

Imagery: none available before 1926. Showing modern OSM basemap for spatial context

13 features2026
zoom in
198019902000201020202026
2026
Township (forced settlement)Forced removal zoneInformal settlementDesignated Group AreaWhites-only Group AreaLegal milestone
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Boundaries are approximate. See panel for source per feature.

03 · The spatial legacy from above

#vis-3

The previous section showed the boundaries on a map. This is what one of those boundaries looks like from the air. Photographer Johnny Miller’s “Unequal Scenes” project captures the line where Bloubosrand’s gardens and swimming pools end and Kya Sands’ corrugated-iron shacks begin, separated by nothing more than a road. That road is one of the lines the 1950 Group Areas Act drew. The Act was repealed in 1991. The road is still doing what it was put there to do, sorting people by race into property and the absence of property, and a generation born after apartheid still wakes up on one side of it or the other. The data tells you the line exists. The photograph tells you the line is still working.

One road, two worlds: Bloubosrand & Kya Sands

Aerial photograph by Johnny Miller / Unequal Scenes. A middle-class suburb and an informal settlement separated by a single road in Johannesburg.

Unequal Scenes · Johannesburg
the dividing road
Middle-class suburb
Bloubosrand
Informal settlement
Kya Sands
Middle-class suburbBloubosrand

Spacious plots, paved roads, swimming pools

  • Large houses with private gardens and driveways
  • Mature tree canopy shading every street
  • Swimming pools, sports facilities, parking lots
  • Gridded roads with kerbs and stormwater drainage
Informal settlementKya Sands

Self-built shelters on unserviced land

  • Corrugated-iron shacks packed wall-to-wall
  • No paved roads, only footpaths between structures
  • Almost no trees, open space or public services
  • One road away from the suburb, a world apart
Photograph by Johnny Miller / Unequal Scenes. Bloubosrand and Kya Sands share the same hilltop in northern Johannesburg: one a suburb with pools and gardens, the other an informal settlement of corrugated-iron shacks. A single road is all that separates them. The spatial geometry of the 1950 Group Areas Act is still visible from the air, decades after its repeal.

04 · Native Land Act, 1913

#vis-4

A drawing about the 1913 Natives Land Act. It set aside about 7% of South Africa for the Black majority, who were already roughly two-thirds of the population, and made it illegal for them to own or rent land anywhere else. The 1936 Native Trust and Land Act later widened that allocation to about 13%. Whites, around a fifth of the population, kept the rest. If “natural” supremacy needs laws to hold it up, the sketch says, then it isn’t natural. The binkie line is how that system sounds when somebody calls it out.

Hand-drawn sketch titled 'Native Land Act, 1913'. A baby points out that the Black majority, roughly two-thirds of the population, was forced into 7% of the country's land, and argues that this is dispossession by law rather than anything natural. Another speech bubble replies dismissively: 'Pretty soon you'll need a binkie.'
The Natives Land Act (Act No. 27 of 1913) was the first big piece of segregationist land law in the Union of South Africa. Most of what the rest of this page covers, including the 1950 Group Areas Act, was built on top of it.
Peanuts comic panel: Linus shouts, 'If your presidency can be destroyed by releasing the Epstein files, it deserves to be destroyed by releasing the Epstein files.'
Inspiration for the drawing. The Linus panel makes an argument that doubles back on itself. If admitting what is happening is enough to topple the thing, nothing legitimate was propping it up. Most of the laws documented elsewhere on this page worked the same way, holding together only as long as nobody said the obvious out loud. Two-thirds of the population, seven percent of the country. Once a child says it, the only reply available is to call the child a child.