Page 16 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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setting up a Central Housing Board to which local authorities could apply for funds for this
purpose.

Although the housing constructed under such schemes fell far short of meeting the country’s
accommodation needs even for whites, it did for the first time establish the principle nation-

ally that the central government ought to intervene in the housing market in the interests of
the poor, a tenet which henceforth became a standard part of South African state policy. In

the wake of Black October, even the private sector bought into this idea, albeit selectively.

Led by a donation of £10,000 from its president, Richard Stuttaford, the Cape Town Chamber
of Commerce piloted the construction of a healthy, uncongested garden city for middle-

income Capetonians at Pinelands, while the Cape Times, set up a fund to provide bungalows
at the seaside where poor children could enjoy a holiday in a fresh, ozone-rich environment.

“Experience in the Epidemic showed what a woeful indifference to fresh air there is in the
congested areas of the city”, explained the founder of what became the Cape Times Fresh Air

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Fund.

Nor was the housing of urban Africans ignored by white authorities, though here the first

priority was that such accommodation should be separate from that of whites. Thus, follow-
ing in the path of Ndabeni, New Brighton, Ginsberg and Klipspruit after the bubonic/

pneumonic plague epidemic of 1901-1904, in the years after Black October had again under-

lined the poor conditions under which most urban Africans dwelt, yet further segregated
African locations were established, like Langa near Cape Town, Batho near Bloemfontein

and the Western Native Township near Johannesburg. The culmination of this long- develop-
ing policy towards urban Africans nationally came in 1923, with the passage of the segre-

gatory Natives (Urban Areas) Act. As the Prime Minister, General Smuts, argued five years

after Black October, “If the principles of that Bill…were fairly applied in South Africa, we
should remove what was today a grievance and a menace to health and decent living in this

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country.” The beginning of residential segregation that Yersinia pestis had facilitated, the
H1N1influenza virus hastened.

In this – as in so many other epidemics in South African history – the Spanish flu had acted

as an accelerator of important moves already in train in the society, like the creation of a

national system of public health, the construction of hospitals, the development of popular