Race and Residence in Colonial Port Elizabeth

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Abstract
Port Elizabeth was founded and developed as a British colonial port. Although designed as a White settler town it housed a population which became increasingly complex in ethnic composition during the course of the nineteenth century. The indigenous population was only loosely integrated into the structure of the town and legislative and administrative measures were increasingly applied to segregate them residentially from the remainder of the population. This was by no means complete by the end of the colonial era as legal intentions often gave way before practical problems. The White and other immigrant groups were more integrated, although pressures towards segregation increased with the arrival of Asians late in the nineteenth century. Municipal plans and proposals for a greater degree of segregation were only fitfully applied prior to Union, resulting in a mixture of relative integration on the one hand and the areas of total single group segregation on the other.