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As a result of the demand for laborers during the Second World War the migration of Africans to the industrial centers of the country accelerated. Settlements and squatters camps sprang up around large cities. Many settlements housed new arrivals from the countryside as well as Africans who had been forcibly removed from centers of cities such as Johannesburg to implement segregation. Stuart ventured into locations and squatters' settlements to document the conditions and how the inhabitants were creating new lives for themselves. She recorded life in the South-Western Townships (near Johannesburg, now known by the acronym Soweto), depicting the inhabitants' plight and resilience, hope and despair under adverse circumstances. Her photographs of Africans from the South-Western Townships of Orlando and Pimville, members of an African church in Alexandra near Johannesburg and laborers in the diamond mines of Kimberley and the gold mines near Johannesburg are among her most powerful. Stuart counted among her friends many liberals who sought to improve the conditions under which Africans lived. Their hopes were crushed, however, when the Nationalist Party under the leadership of Daniel Francois Malan (1874-1959) came to power in 1948. Once again, Stuart was there to chronicle history, covering the arrival of Malan in Pretoria after he and his party had won the election. It was under his government that apartheid ("apartness"), the system that superseded segregation, was implemented. |