Forest Town, as the name implies, is a leafy

suburb A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan areas jobs are located with some being predominantly residential. They can either be denser or less densely populated ...

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu language, Zulu and Xhosa language, Xhosa: eGoli ) (colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, Jo'burg or "The City of Gold") is the most populous city in South Africa. With 5,538,596 people in the City of Johannesburg alon ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

. It lies between the busy thoroughfares of Jan Smuts Avenue and Oxford Road, and is bordered to one side by the Johannesburg Zoo.

History

The suburb was first surveyed on land called Sachsenwald, now known as Saxonwold, in 1908. The name of the suburb is derived from the Sachsenwald plantation. Forest Town is well known as the scene of a high-profile police raid, the Forest Town raid, on a

gay ''Gay'' is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'. While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late ...

party in 1966, which triggered a moral panic and led to the

Apartheid Apartheid ( , especially South African English: , ; , ) was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was characterised by an ...

government passing the Immorality Amendment Bill of 1967. The Bill criminalised all sexual activity between men, as well as extending the legislation to include lesbians. Following South Africa's first non-racial elections in 1994, all discriminatory legislation was repealed. In 2005, the Forest Town home of

Jacob Zuma Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma (; born 12 April 1942) is a South African politician who served as the fourth president of South Africa from 2009 to 2018. He is also referred to by his initials JZ and clan names Nxamalala and Msholozi. Zuma was a for ...

, at that time deputy president of South Africa, was raided by the

Scorpions Scorpions are predatory arachnids of the Order (biology), order Scorpiones. They have eight legs and are easily recognized by a pair of Chela (organ), grasping pincers and a narrow, segmented tail, often carried in a characteristic forward cur ...

in order to obtain documents for his corruption trial. Jacob Zuma, now a former

president of South Africa The president of South Africa is the head of state and head of government of the Republic of South Africa. The president directs the executive branch of the government and is the commander-in-chief of the South African National Defence F ...

, is currently under investigation for fraud, money laundering, racketeering, and a host of other criminal charges. In 2019, the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre opened in Forest Town, the centre explores the history of genocide in the 20th century, focusing on case studies from the Holocaust and the 1994

Rwandan genocide The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred from 7 April to 19 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. Over a span of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Gre ...

.About
Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre. Retrieved on 29 October 2023 The site was previously occupied by the Bernberg Fashion Museum, started by two Jewish sisters, Anna and Theresa Bernberg, to house their fashion collections. The sisters bequeathed the property to the

City of Johannesburg The City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality () is a metropolitan municipality that manages the local governance of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa. It is divided into several branches and departments in order to expedite se ...

on the condition that it be used as a museum or art gallery.S. African museum to juxtapose Holocaust with Rwandan genocide
''Jewish Telegraphic Agency''. 5 October 2010 In 2020, the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, a

contemporary Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from about 1945 to the present. In the social sciences, contemporary history is also continuous with, and related t ...

art gallery An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long ...

, opened in the suburb.A new foundation that aims to change the way we engage with art
''Daily Maverick''. 10 November 2020

References

External links

*https://web.archive.org/web/20060614103125/http://www.wits.ac.za/gala/archives_i.htm Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa Johannesburg Region B {{Johannesburg-stub