FROM THE LAT E 1950S, THE GOVERNMENT SHIFTED ITS IDEOLOGICAL orientation to pursue a doctrinaire form of apartheid. The period from 1960 to the early 1970s is regarded as the era of ‘high apartheid’ characterised by the National Party's attempts to halt and reverse African immigration to urban areas, its promotion of the homelands system, and the entrenchment of the migrant labour system by, among other interventions, a stricter enforcement of pass laws and the construction of migrant hostels in urban townships. Key features of urban township life now came under attack by the state. Home ownership was the primary target. The removal of the old locations effectively eliminated freehold title for the vast majority of Africans. In the new townships, the state introduced the thirty-year leasehold scheme, which gave households a degree of ‘ownership’ for a given period, and a measure of security in the urban areas. But, as HF Verwoerd intimated in 1956, the state was determined not to convey to Africans any sense that they could expect to enjoy basic rights in the urban areas. Anticipating the important policy changes that would come into effect from the late 1950s, the ‘architect of apartheid’ explained in his speech to the fifth annual conference of the Institute of Administrators of Non-European Affairs, in September 1956, that,

In the 1960s, even the limited concessions made to Africans in the early 1950s, such as home ownership in the new townships, came under attack and in 1968 the government summarily terminated leasehold rights in Soweto where approximately 10 000 homes were held under the thirty-year lease scheme.