Ottilie Abrahams grew up in the Old Location, where she lived until she moved to Cape Town to do standard 7 in 1951 at age 14. Her family was later moved to Khomasdal during forced removals of the 1960s.  Old Location was on the western outskirts of the city, within walking distance to town. It had been growing since it was first established in 1912. In the 1950s, the municipality had put aside 1.2 million pounds for a plan to improve living conditions. At the same time the South African administration was working on the implementation of its Apartheid policies to segregate people into racialized group areas. Mixed neighbourhoods in towns were broken up and inhabitants resettled elsewhere. Local residents in Old Location protested and the police opened fire on crowds on 10 December 1959, killing 11 and wounding 44 others. This event is known as the Old Location uprising. The transfer of residents to the new suburb of Katatura, meaning “a place where we don’t want to stay,” took several years. In 1962, approximately 7,000 people had been moved. Eventually, most ‘coloured’ Namibians in Windhoek where settled in ‘Khomasdal’, five kilometres outside of Windhoek, divided by Katatura by a `buffer zone’ which was typical of apartheid racist social and geographical segregation. Until her death, Ottilie Abrahams stressed that the explosive urban housing issue was central to the land question.