Townships for non-whites were also called 'locations' or 'lokasie' ( Afrikaans translation), and are often still referred to by that name in smaller towns. However some old townships have seen rapid development since 1994, with, for instance, wealthy, and middle-income areas growing up in parts of Soweto, Chatsworth etc. The new townships being built to house people forcibly removed from shack settlements have much smaller houses than those built under apartheid and are often, but not always, even further from city centres than apartheid era townships. In Cape Town and Durban this has given rise to mass resistance. The difference is that under apartheid all black people faced forced removals to townships while now it is only the poor living in shack settlements that face eviction to townships on the peripheries of cities.

Forced removal from city centres to townships has continued in post-apartheid South Africa.

Legislation that enabled the Apartheid government to do this included the Group Areas Act.

Townships were usually built on the periphery of towns and cities.ĭuring the Apartheid Era blacks were evicted from properties that were in areas designated as 'white only' and forced to move into townships. In South Africa, the term township usually refers to the (often underdeveloped) urban living areas that, under Apartheid, were reserved for non-whites (principally black Africans and Coloureds, but also working class Indians).

Townships definition south africa