Before 1948 the area that is now Soweto consisted of shantytowns occupied by blacks from rural areas who came to work in the gold mines around Johannesburg. Demand for labor increased during World War II (1939-1945) and the black population grew rapidly, creating a severe shortage of black housing. To concentrate the growing black population in a segregated neighborhood, the government built tens of thousands of small, cheap houses after 1948, creating the South-Western Townships, or Soweto. The population continued to grow, spurred by the forced relocation of blacks from other areas of metropolitan Johannesburg, migration from rural areas, and natural increase. Forced relocation from the slum areas west of Johannesburg began in the early 1950s, when the government moved 58,000 blacks to the Meadowlands and Diepkloof areas of Soweto. Blacks were also moved from Sophiatown and several other western suburbs to make way for the new white neighborhood of Triomf.
Soweto came to the forefront of the antiapartheid struggle in 1976, when a spontaneous and predominantly youthful uprising was sparked by the government's decision to impose Afrikaans, in place of English, as the language of instruction for half the subjects in township schools. Afrikaans was the primary language of Afrikaners, the white minority who controlled South Africa and had imposed the system of apartheid. The riots subsequently spread to other townships—at least 575 people were killed, almost half of them in Soweto alone. A period of prolonged, politically inspired violence in the townships between 1984 and 1986 was accompanied by an almost total school and rent boycott in Soweto. These events strengthened the resolve of black youths and, by focusing international attention on South Africa, greatly increased pressure on the national government to dismantle apartheid. The rent boycott ended in 1990 only when the government wrote off large amounts of unpaid rent owed by Sowetans.
