The future Soweto was to be laid out on Klipspruit and the adjoining farm called Diepkloof. Pimville was next to Kliptown, the oldest Black residential district of Johannesburg and first laid out in 1891, on land which formed part of Klipspruit farm. Thereafter, the area was redeveloped as Newtown. The fire brigade then set the 1600 shacks and shops in Brickfields alight. The rest of them had to build their own shacks. Beforehand, most of the Africans living there were moved far out of town to the farm Klipspruit (later called Pimville), south-west of Johannesburg, where the council had erected iron barracks and a few triangular hutments. The town council decided to condemn the area and burn it down. In April 1904, there was a bubonic plague scare in the shanty town area of Brickfields. Kliptown and Pimville Klipspruit and Diepkloof, South-west of Johannesburg, laid out on Randjeslaagte In 2010, South Africa's oldest township hosted the FIFA World Cup Final and the attention of more than a billion soccer spectators from all over the world was focused on Soweto. Reforms followed, but riots flared up again in 1985 and continued until the first non-racial elections were held in April 1994. 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. It experienced civil unrest during the Apartheid regime. 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. The name Soweto was first used in 1963 and within a short period of time, following the 1976 uprising of students in the township, the name became internationally known. The city council settled for the acronym SOWETO (South West Townships). Among the names suggested to the city council was KwaMpanza, meaning Mpanza's place, invoking the name of Mpanza and his role in bringing the plight of Orlando sub tenants to the attention of the city council. People responded to this competition with great enthusiasm. He called for a competition to give a collective name to townships dotted around the South-west of Johannesburg. William Carr, chair of non-European affairs, initiated the naming of Soweto in 1949. This was carried out using the infamous Urban Areas Act of 1923. Blacks were moved away from Johannesburg, to an area separated from White suburbs by a so-called cordon sanitaire (or sanitary corridor) which was usually a river, railway track, industrial area or highway. Soweto was created in the 1930s when the White government started separating Blacks from Whites, creating black "townships". The government, who sought to differentiate the white working class from the black, laid out new suburbs for the Burghers (Whites), Coolies (Indians), Malays (Coloureds) and Black Africans (Africans), but the whole area simply stayed multiracial. Soon other working poor, Coloureds, Indians and Africans also settled there. Soon, the area was known either Brickfields or Veldschoendorp. The result was that many landless Dutch-speaking burghers (citizens) of the ZAR settled on the property and started making bricks. The government decided that more money was to be made from issuing brick maker's licences at five shillings per month. There were large quantities of clay, suitable for brickmaking, along the stream. In October 1887, the government of the South African Republic (ZAR) bought the south-eastern portion of the farm Braamfontein. They were of many races and nationalities. Within a decade of the discovery of gold in Johannesburg, 100,000 people flocked to this part of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek in search of riches. The fledgling town of Johannesburg was laid out on a triangular wedge of "uitvalgrond" (area excluded when the farms were surveyed) named Randjeslaagte, situated between the farms Doornfontein to the east, Braamfontein to the west and Turffontein to the south. George Harrison and George Walker are today credited as the men who discovered an outcrop of the Main Reef of gold on the farm Langlaagte in February 1886. Formerly a separate municipality, it is now incorporated in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, and one of the suburbs of Johannesburg. Its name is an English syllabic abbreviation for South Western Townships. Soweto ( / s ə ˈ w ɛ t oʊ, - ˈ w eɪ t-, - ˈ w iː t-/) is a township of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in Gauteng, South Africa, bordering the city's mining belt in the south.
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