Soweto is an urban settlement or 'township' in South Africa,
southwest of Johannesburg, with a population of approximately 1.3
million (2008, Joburg archive).
Soweto was created in the 1930s
when the White government started seperating Blacks from Whites. Blacks
were moved away from Johannesburg, to an area separated from White
suburbs by a so-called cordon sanitaire (or sanitary corridor)
this was usually a river, a railway track, an industrial area or a
highway etc., they did this by using the infamous 'Urban Areas Act' in 1923.
Soweto
became the largest Black city in South Africa, but until 1976 its
population could have status only as temporary residents, serving as a
workforce for Johannesburg. It experienced civil unrest during the
Apartheid regime. There were serious riots in 1976,
sparked by a ruling that Afrikaans be used in African schools there;
the riots were violently suppressed, with 176 striking students killed
and more than 1,000 injured. Reforms followed, but riots flared up again
in 1985 and continued until the first multiracial elections were held
in April 1994.
In 2010, South Africa's oldest township hosted the
FIFA Soccer World Cup final and the attention of more than a billion
soccer spectators from all over the world was focused on Soweto.