As the only part of the old Roodepoort West location to be spared demolition, Juliwe Cemetery became the centrepiece of a story of forced removals under apartheid which, for over 50 years, remained unknown to the wider public. This chapter explores the layered meanings attached to the cemetery as well as efforts to recognise the significance of the site, which has only recently begun to be acknowledged in the public sphere.

According to the historian Michelle Hay, ‘The cemetery is the ghost of Roodepoort West. It is the last vision of the vibrant African location that once stood where the suburban houses now stand. Like a ghost, the cemetery continues to haunt the people, now living miles away in Dobsonville, who remember its past’. When the rest of the old African location of Roodepoort West was destroyed in the eleven-year period from 1956 to 1967, the cemetery alone remained after threats of protest concerning the proposed destruction of the graves persuaded the authorities to leave it alone. After the rest of the location was erased and covered over by a whites-only township, the cemetery stood as evidence of an entire community forced to move to Dobsonville, which was merged into the vast, sprawling segregated African township of Soweto in 1994.

Roodepoort, located to the west of Johannesburg, began as a gold-mining village, and the Roodepoort–Maraisburg urban district became a municipality in 1904. By the 1950s and 1960s, during the heyday of apartheid, forced relocation of African communities was driven by the municipality under the banner of economic progress and development. These goals of economic growth and prosperity for the burgeoning white population – together with the expunging of African settlements – came to the fore in a long quest for official city status, which was eventually conferred on Roodepoort in 1977. Roodepoort was incorporated into the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council in the late 1990s, together with Randburg, Sandton and Soweto.

At a Heritage Month event hosted by the City of Johannesburg in 2017, ex-residents returned to the cemetery in the Roodepoort suburb of Horizon View. This old location cemetery is all that remains of the Roodepoort West township, which was called Juliwe by its residents. In an emotional ceremony, a memorial was inaugurated to acknowledge and interpret this black cemetery, now surrounded on all sides by residential development.