A SURVEY CONDUCTED IN 2006/7 BY THE CENTRE FOR SOCIOLOGICAL Research found that two-thirds of Soweto's inhabitants described themselves as middle class. According to the research, residents of the township attach multiple meanings to the term middle class, associating it with a range of issues: with the ability to consume, with education, with employment, and with social mobility, as well as with being self-sufficient and responsible. It is a complex and fluid identity. Aspiring to be middle class is of course not new, especially not in Orlando where members of the educated elite were prominent among the first group of inhabitants in the 1940s. Historically, having an education and being respectable were key markers of an urban middle class or elite status. So, too, were having a house and professional employment.

These ideas permeated the settled urban African population for a long time. The white government, however, aimed to curtail the emergence of an African working class, at least until the late 1970s.

In his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela described the house he moved into at Number 8115 Orlando West, on the corner of Vilakazi and Ngakane Streets: ‘The house itself was identical to hundreds of others built on postage-stamp-size plots on dirt roads. It had the same standard tin roof, the same cement floor, a narrow kitchen, and a bucket toilet at the back. Although there were street lamps outside we used paraffin lamps as the homes were not yet electrified. The bedroom was so small that a double bed took up almost the entire floor space.’ Even though the house was ‘the opposite of grand’, Mandela was ‘mightily proud’ because it was his ‘first true home’. This was a sentiment shared by many people who moved into Orlando's new houses in the 1940s. Having a house symbolised the right of African families to be in the city. Built according to specifications, such as the ‘51/6 design on 40m² plot’, these municipal houses were not only monotonous but were intended to enforce uniformity among urban Africans, to limit social difference in the township. In fact, only a handful of relatively well-off families were allowed to own houses and even then on the basis of a thirty-year leasehold.