Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

‘And now colours!’ New purchases were no longer restricted to the single colour – black.⁶¹

      Ekurhuleni was settling down. As the new suburbs were laid out, the new houses were built more solidly and permanently of stone and brick. The year 1917 was the first time, for example, that Benoni’s Town Council received no planning applications to build structures of wood and iron.⁶² Ekurhuleni’s towns and their populations were also becoming increasingly anchored by new industrial development and were not entirely dependent for their life blood on the wasting assets of the mines. In 1917 Germiston became the first municipality in South Africa to lay out its own industrial townships. In 1921 the Rand Gold Refinery set up home there and was soon producing three-quarters of the refined gold in the world. Before long, clothing and other factories mushroomed in the town’s industrial quarter.⁶³ In Benoni, iron and steel and other industries also took root in World War I, after the Benoni Council had adopted the policy of actively courting industrial development in 1917.⁶⁴ This, however, would never really take off there and in the other Far East Rand towns until the outbreak of World War II.

      Lifestyle changes of all sorts also occurred in the 1910s and 1920s. In the course of World War I a fresh surge of Afrikaner immigration swept into Ekurhuleni (see next section). Many of these were poor whites. This was accompanied by a major shift in the patterns of whites’ worship and church-going. Up until that point churches had been upper and middle class in character. Now Pentecostal churches made their first appearances and then made major inroads into the old churches’ congregations, appealing especially to poor whites. By 1929, 25 such churches existed in Benoni alone.

      In the mid-1920s gramophones became popular while vaudeville disappeared as the ‘talkies’ replaced silent films. In a partly unobserved and certainly unobtrusive manner, entertainment became more private, moving out of the public domain and into the home. For reasons which remain unclear dress patterns also became more liberal and liberated. Skirts became shorter, and men’s shorts became fashionable for the first time in the late 1920s, copied, it was said, from the Rhodesians. Lastly Benoni acquired (why Benoni one must ask?) the first of two screen goddesses to grace the Hollywood stage, in this case Molly Lamont, who hit the big time in the early 1930s (after winning a competition run by Outspan oranges).⁶⁵ The better-known and more recent celebrity of this kind that hailed from Benoni, is of course, Charlize Theron, subsequently upstaged by another interloper from Benoni, Charlene Wittstock, who married Prince Albert of Monaco in 2011.

CHAPTER 2

       WHITE WORKERS AND THEIR STRUGGLES 1907-1924

      Cornish miners

      In the 1910s and 1920s Ekurhuleni, and more specifically the Far East Rand, was the fulcrum of white working-class politics in South Africa. It was home to more white mine workers than any other part of the Rand; it was the first site of a remarkable synthesis of white immigrant and white Afrikaner working-class cultures which blossomed briefly in the 1922 white workers’ rebellion on the Rand; it provided the impetus for the first two major white workers’ strikes in 1907 and 1913; it was the major centre of the 1922 Rand rebellion; it was the principal and most durable stronghold of the South African Labour Party and to the now largely forgotten but then immensely important political tradition that it represented; and within that it was the principal focus of the two major competing, ideological and political orientations among white workers in South Africa. In short, it condensed the politics of white labour.

       THE EMERGENCE OF A SOUTH AFRICAN WHITE WORKING CLASS

      Until the late 1910s and well beyond in most cases, the white population of Ekurhuleni’s towns were overwhelmingly foreign and predominantly English-speaking. This was mainly because the initial skilled labour complement of the gold mines on the Rand was drawn from English-speaking miners from Cornwall, Wales, Northern England, Australia and the United States of America.¹ Internationally these miners formed a mobile floating global population and have been appropriately described by Jan Hyslop as ‘the imperial working class’.² Thus by 1907 a full 83% of the men working on the mines were foreign born.³ For Afrikaners, towns were foreign places, the abode of the uitlander whose moral contamination was to be avoided at all costs.⁴ English speakers dominated all aspects of life in the Ekurhuleni towns. They ran the businesses (until complemented by a large Jewish infusion); they staffed the professions and municipal service; and they owned the small workshops that helped serve the mines.⁵ Not only was the occupational structure of Ekurhuleni dominated by the British, but so was its cultural and social life. Up to World War II, Benoni’s social world, for example, revolved around its Caledonian Society, Cornish Association, Irish Association and Royal Society of St George, together with the mainly mine-based sporting clubs.⁶ Afrikaners gradually infiltrated the semi-skilled ranks of the mines after the turn of the 20th century, but their entry, as Elaine Katz has put it was ‘silent’ and ‘unobtrusive’.⁷ Afrikaner learner miners were at pains to conceal their origins, not to flaunt them, not even daring, for example, to address a mining official in Afrikaans, for fear of losing their job.⁸

      While English-speaking mine managers openly disparaged the capacities of what they termed ‘backvelder’ or ‘bywoner’ Afrikaner miners, they entered the industry in steadily increasing numbers in the late 1900s and 1910s.⁹ Two events are usually associated with the process: the 1907 general strike on the Rand, and the outbreak of World War I. By the early 20th century most of Germiston’s highly productive mines, as well as others in Ekurhuleni, were controlled by George Farrar. In 1907, when the first general strike on the gold mines broke out, triggered by the decision by Knight’s Deep mine management to compel their white miners to supervise three rather than two black drillers, Tommy Heldzinger, George Farrar’s undercover agent, describes in his diary how he was sent to Pretoria by his management to recruit impoverished whites to act as mine guards or strikebreakers. For him this was the start of the poor Afrikaners’ move to the mines.¹⁰ A second surge is associated with World War I. Then, across the Rand, an exodus of 20% of skilled British artisan miners, who joined up to serve the British army on the Western Front, were replaced by Afrikaner ‘farmer-miners’ who were fleeing catastrophic agricultural distress in the Orange Free State and the Cape.¹¹ In Benoni alone, 2 300 men out of a total mine white labour force of 3 500 joined up. By 1917, 70–80% of underground miners were Afrikaners.¹²

      These two pivotal events, however, concealed deeper processes at work. One was the ravages of the miners’ lung disease known as silicosis or phthisis. This incapacitated and then quickly killed thousands of white miners on the mines after a few years underground. One chilling statistic reveals the misery this entailed: in 1910 the average age of death of white miners was 33 years and the most common age was 29.¹³ Hence, when the famous Scots trade union leader James Bain visited the Witwatersrand in 1913, he found that out of 18 men serving on the 1907 miners’ strike committee, ten were dead of silicosis,¹⁴ three were suffering from it and only one remained in good health. Such mortality opened up the ranks of the white working class to Afrikaners in a way no strike could ever have done.

      A second force promoting the movement of Afrikaner workers onto the mines was simple destitution. Afrikaners, as noted earlier, regarded the towns as an alien imposition: they clung on to their niches in the countryside for as long as they could. The scorched earth policy pursued by the British army in the guerrilla stages of the South African War of 1899–1902 obliterated many rural livelihoods and proved to be the first step in the rural Afrikaners’ undoing, driving scores of impoverished farmers to the towns.¹⁵ The gradual extinction of the white bywoner farmer (tenant farmer, share cropper) was the second. This proceeded apace as land values rose, as land was sub-divided among heirs, and as fencing in of large tracts of the eastern and northern Cape and the western Orange Free State began around 1910 and accelerated in the early mid-1920s, forcing many footloose trekboer herders to the brink of collapse.¹⁶ Droughts which struck South Africa and especially the Orange Free State/Cape interior in the late 1910s and