The very poor of twentieth-century Africa showed much continuity with earlier periods. Most were either those made destitute by famine or those unable to work and neglected by others. The able-bodied, even when deprived of land or other resources, generally found work to avert extreme poverty, except at moments of conjunctural unemployment.

In southern Africa, however, new patterns of poverty emerged during the later twentieth century. The very poor of the past survived, but to them were added victims of structural rather than conjunctural unemployment: able-bodied men and women who could not compensate for their lack of resources by working for others, because no such work existed. For them, to belong to a large family could be a reason for poverty rather than a source of wealth as in the past. Southern Africans began to suffer the land-scarce family poverty long predominant in more densely peopled continents. They suffered it especially severely because the South African government sought, with considerable but incomplete success, to remove and confine the poor to the most remote countryside.

The National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948 with a determination to check African urbanisation, redirect labour to farms, and ensure that those Africans indispensable in towns should live not in freehold townships or squatter settlements but in segregated, orderly, and easily controlled locations. This required not merely urban reform but almost total urban rebuilding. The Group Areas Act of 1950 gave power to relocate population groups.