Qualla: Marabastad https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:25 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/k/e/k/j/marabastad-pretoria-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Marabastad https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria Marabastad: Introduction https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria/ Photo credit Leo za1, CC BY-SA 3.0. The smell of cardamom and frying samosas still drifts down Boom Street, where Indian-owned shops crowd against each other much as they did a century ago. But walk a block in any direction and you sense the absence. Marabastad was once home to thousands of families - African, Indian, and Coloured South Africans living side by side in one of the country's rare mixed neighborhoods. Then apartheid came for it. The buildings mostly survived. The community did not.

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Image: Leo za1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/k/e/k/j/marabastad-pretoria-wp/kekj-marabastad-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Marabastad: Maraba's Town https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria/ Photo credit Leo za1, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name carries a history older than the city beside it. In the 1880s, a Ndebele headman named Maraba lived and worked near a stream called Steenhoven Spruit, serving as an interpreter on the colonial frontier. Africans who had come to the area for work, or who simply had nowher...

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Image: Leo za1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/k/e/k/j/marabastad-pretoria-wp/kekj-marabastad-marabas-town.mp3 0:06 2 full Marabastad: A Rare Mingling https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria/ Photo credit Leo za1, CC BY-SA 3.0. What made Marabastad remarkable was who lived there together. By 1901, after the upheaval of the Second Boer War filled the area with refugees, there was, as one record bluntly notes, "no real segregation between Africans, Indians and Coloured people." Shopkeepers, laborers, chur...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/k/e/k/j/marabastad-pretoria-wp/kekj-marabastad-a-rare-mingling.mp3 0:06 3 full Marabastad: The Removals https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria/ Photo credit Leo za1, CC BY-SA 3.0. The unraveling came in stages, each one tearing apart families and friendships. The black residents of Marabastad were uprooted to the distant township of Atteridgeville beginning in 1945; under the Group Areas Act, the Coloured community was sent to Eersterus in 1963, and the In...

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Image: Leo za1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/k/e/k/j/marabastad-pretoria-wp/kekj-marabastad-the-removals.mp3 0:06 4 full Marabastad: What the Bulldozers Missed https://qualla.com/marabastad-pretoria/ Photo credit Leo za1, CC BY-SA 3.0. Here Marabastad's story diverges from its more famous counterparts. Sophiatown was flattened and rebuilt as a white suburb cruelly renamed Triomf - "Triumph." District Six in Cape Town was reduced to rubble and left as a scar for decades. Marabastad was spared the wrecking ball. ...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/k/e/k/j/marabastad-pretoria-wp/kekj-marabastad-what-the-bulldozers-missed.mp3 0:06 5 full