Mdantsane is a South African urban township situated 15 km away from East London and 37 km away from Qonce in the Eastern Cape. It is the second largest township in the Eastern Cape after Ibhayi near Port Elizabeth and seventeenth largest in South Africa after Vosloorus near Boksburg, Gauteng. The name Mdantsane was derived from a stream that ran from the Nahoon River down to the Buffalo River. Some believe the stream was called Dontsane. Soon after the stream was named, a “white farm” which was at the entrance of Mdantsane [now known as Zone 1] was also named after the stream Dontsane or Umdanzani. The township is part of the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality in the Eastern Cape. The Mdantsane township is the largest township in the Eastern Cape, by population. History Establishment In the 1940s, living quarters for Africans East London workers were hard to find. The implementation of the Group Areas Act of 1950 further entrenched racial segregation in East London. Unhygienic conditions, overcrowding and riots became matters of concern in Duncan Village, a township which had been created for the African population in the 1940s. The apartheid government recommended that Amalinda, a white suburb not very far from Mdantsane, should be zoned as a black area in 1957. However, the white residents of Amalinda, who wanted the area to be retained as a white zone, strongly opposed this recommendation. In the same year, the East London municipality received an instruction from the apartheid South African government to submit an application for a new township for its African residents. On February 20, the Minister of the Department of Bantu Administration and Development announced that the entire African population of East London was to be moved to a new site called Mdantsane, which was within the boundaries of the Xhosa native reserve under the administration of the Ciskei Territorial Authority which had been set up in 1961. The first houses were built in late 1963 with removals planned for 1964. However, removals and resettlement began in 1963. Mdantsane was formally established in 1963 on a farm called “ Umdanzani” and the first 300 residents occupied the new houses. The original inhabitants were people who were forcibly removed from what was known as East Bank in East London. In 1964, approximately 112 000 people from Duncan Village were forcibly moved to the outskirts of Mdantsane township. Mdantsane was