Editing Soweto (section)

===Orlando, Moroka and Jabavu===
In 1923, the Parliament of the Union of South Africa passed the [[Natives (Urban Areas) Act]]. The purpose of the Act was to provide for improved conditions of residence for natives in urban areas, to control their ingress into such areas and to restrict their access to intoxicating liquor. The Act required local authorities to provide accommodation for Natives (then the polite term for Africans or Blacks) lawfully employed and resident within the area of their jurisdiction. Pursuant to this Act, the Johannesburg town council formed a Municipal Native Affairs Department in 1927. It bought 1 300 morgen of land on the farm Klipspruit No. 8 and the first houses in what was to become Orlando Location were built there in the latter half of 1930. The township was named after the chairman of the Native Affairs committee, Mr. Edwin Orlando Leake.<ref>French, Kevin John, James Mpanza and the Sofasonke Party in the development of local politics in Soweto, unpublished M.A. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1983, p. 28.</ref> In the end, some 10,311 houses were built there by the municipality. In addition, it built 4,045 temporary single-room shelters.<ref>Stark, Felix, Seventy Golden Years, 1886–1956, Municipal Public Relations Bureau, 1956, p. 525.</ref>

[[File:JM-House-2.jpg|thumb|[[James Mpanza House]] in Orlando]]
In about 1934, [[James Mpanza|James Sofasonke Mpanza]] moved to 957 Pheele Street, Orlando, and lived there for the rest of his life.<ref>French, supra, p. 37.</ref> A year after his arrival in Orlando, he formed his own political party, the Sofasonke Party. He also became very active in the affairs of the Advisory Board for Orlando.<ref>French, supra, p. 45.</ref> Towards the end of World War II, there was an acute shortage of housing for Blacks in Johannesburg. By the end of 1943, the Sofasonke Party advised its members to put up their own squatters' shacks on municipal property.<ref>French, supra, p.67.</ref> On Saturday 25 March 1944, the squat began. Hundreds of homeless people from Orlando and elsewhere joined Mpanza in marching to a vacant lot in Orlando West and starting a squatters camp.<ref>French, supra, p. 78.</ref> The city council's resistance crumbled. After feverish consultations with the relevant government department, it was agreed that an emergency camp, which could house 991 families, be erected. It was to be called Central Western Jabavu. The next wave of land invasions took place in September 1946. Some 30,000 squatters congregated west of Orlando. Early the next year, the city council proclaimed a new emergency camp. It was called Moroka. 10,000 sites were made available immediately.<ref>Bonner, Philip & Segal, Lauren, Soweto – A History, Maskew Miller Longman, 1998, p.27.</ref> Moroka became Johannesburg's worst slum area. Residents erected their shanties on plots measuring six metres by six metres. There were only communal bucket-system toilets and very few taps. The camps were meant to be used for a maximum of five years, but when they were eventually demolished in 1955, Moroka and Jabavu housed 89,000 people.<ref>Bonner & Segal, supra, p. 27.</ref>