Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

in 1922:

      1907 Miners’ Strike at New Kleinfontein

      Since the white man has been in South Africa enormous tracts of country have been entirely or partially denuded of their original vegetation, with the result that rivers, vleis and water holes … have dried up.

      That drying up ‘was still continuing’. The report then continued in doom-laden terms:

      The simple unadorned truth is sufficiently terrifying without the assistance of rhetoric. The logical outcome of it all is ‘The Great South African Desert’, uninhabitable by man.¹⁷

       POOR WHITES (ARME BLANKES)

      These forces led to the emergence of a new category in South African society – poor whites. The Carnegie Commission into Poor Whites published in 1929 painted a stark picture of how desperate their conditions were. One such graphic case history was that of Mrs Van Wyk:

      Born in the Little Karoo her family hired pasture but were too poor to hire labour to work it. She and her three sisters therefore worked alongside five brothers to help earn the family living. After marriage, Mrs Van Wyk led the migratory life of a poor bywoner. Over several years they prospered and their stock grew to number a respectable 500.¹⁸ Then the 1916 drought struck. Only 20 animals survived. She and her family took refuge in Knysna where they cleared forests. Her husband then died and the family thereafter survived on Poor Relief.¹⁹

      First-generation, social engineer, white supremacists recognised that other short-term, stop-gap solutions also had to be employed in the meantime, such as poor white road relief work, agricultural settlement, forestry projects, railway employment, but as Berger observes, policy makers saw education as the long-term solution which would bridge the gap between rural poverty and the labour aristocracy.²⁰

      Many such individuals flooded into Ekurhuleni. There the first Afrikaner immigrants/migrants to arrive hailed from the Transvaal (Gauteng). Their movement occurred mainly between 1903 and 1914. Thereafter a second and much larger wave engulfed Ekurhuleni – made up of bywoners arriving from the interior regions of the southern Orange Free State and the northern Cape. Comprising families who had been poor for many years, they flooded in from the late 1910s through the 1920s. A Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister’s survey in Benoni conducted in the 1920s recorded 56% of Afrikaners coming from the Cape, 17% from the Orange Free State and 27% from the Transvaal (Gauteng) and Natal (KwaZulu-Natal). Many paid their last coins for a rail ticket to Ekurhuleni, arriving destitute and without any safety net of friends. Since Germiston was the railway hub of the Witwatersrand it was there that they first alighted. Frequently the local Dutch Reformed Church minister and church was their sole refuge – and only available port of call. Such families were accustomed to an extremely simple way of life – a single-roomed dwelling, no furniture save a riempie bed, earth-dung smoothed floor on which the children slept, one meal a day.²¹ This they reproduced where they could do it, on the East Rand. Often a long-term life goal was to occupy and invest in small holdings (or part thereof) which surrounded the main towns of Ekurhuleni, once legislated in existence in 1919. One such example was the Putfontein Small Holdings, eight kilometres east of Benoni. This was dotted with ‘hundreds of huts’, a full third of them deemed by social workers ‘unsuitable for civilised life’. One family here was described as being made up of a mother, father, eight children all living in a single-roomed shack, with an earth floor and consuming one mealie pap meal a day.²² Others were Norton and other small holdings outside Germiston where large numbers of Afrikaner women garment workers lived.²³ Otherwise such arme blankes concentrated in slum areas in each of the towns of Ekurhuleni – in Georgetown in inner-city Germiston and in the east side of Benoni, where again social workers reported ‘34 people living in a pair of semi-detached houses void of furniture or comfort of any sort’. Some years later up to four Afrikaner women garment workers were recorded as sharing a single room and a single bed there, and as enjoying a daily diet of ‘dry bread and coffee’. ²⁴ These families comprised the bulk of the substantial number of poor white unemployed in Ekurhuleni. Those who had jobs were overwhelmingly miners until the Civilised Labour Policy of the Pact government in the 1920s, which opened up railway and other government jobs, began to develop and secondary industry employed large numbers of Afrikaner women. ²⁵

       THE WHITE MINERS STRIKES OF 1913 AND 1914

      Mines dominated the economic, social and political life of Ekurhuleni until well into the 1930s. The white population was divided along rigid class lines largely dictated by the mines. The upper stratum consisted of educated men, the administrators, the mines’ professional men – doctors, engineers, surveyors, accountants. Between them and the miners and commercial people there existed a rigid social division. Each enjoyed entirely different and segregated social facilities, geographical spaces and schools. Mine officials maintained a demeanour of cold superiority when dealing with workmen, often more pronounced in the case of Afrikaners and Jews. If any working miner on a mine asserted himself too much socially he was liable to suffer for his precocity by being dismissed. Captain Hoffman, Manager of Chimes Mine was merely at one end of this behavioural spectrum when he insisted that his entire staff salute him when they first met in the morning.²⁶

      1913 Miners’ Strike

      In this authoritarian milieu jobs and futures were extremely insecure. As the Small Holdings Commission reported to Parliament in 1913 about 13.3% of the entire white mine force had changed jobs each month two years earlier in 1911. Most of this ‘shifting’ occurred among underground men. Mine managers attributed this to the bywoner/backvelder mental universe of Afrikaner miners. However, all the evidence points to the managers themselves being heavily implicated in this situation. As the Small Holdings Commission again reported:

      A change of Manager on the mines of the Witwatersrand is, more often than not, accompanied by an entire change of staff; a change of even Engineers, Mine Captains and others at lower positions, means a change in the staff of those immediately under their control.

      The Commission also reproduced an illuminating extract from a Report of the Inspector of White Labour Johannesburg for the year ending 1911 in which he quoted the words of a mine employee:

      ‘I have been lucky’, he told the Inspector, ‘I have been here about ten years and am about the oldest hand on the property. The changes during my time here have been constant. I have never felt at ease although I know I can do my work. When you see so many men as good or better than yourself get shifted on the change of a boss how can you feel secure.’²⁷

      Such wholesale changes of personnel had moreover become increasingly common in the years after Union. Of the 50 mine managers working in August 1913, O. Quigley tells us, one had been appointed in 1901, one in 1903, one in 1907, five in 1909, fifteen in 1910, seven in 1911, eighteen in 1912 and ten in 1913 (O’Quigley, Section 5, p.18).²⁸ As a result, numerous witnesses informed the Commission, ‘It is a well-known and accepted fact that the industrial community is a roving one.’²⁹ As trade union and 1913 strike leader James Bain later informed the Commission, the average white miner was likely to work for only eight months a year, while many worked on the mines simply with a view to maintaining a toehold on the land.³⁰

      It was precisely this kind of situation which triggered the second miners’/general strike to grip the Rand in May 1913, which shook the post-Union South African state to its foundation. The trigger for the strike at face value was ‘trifling’ (quoted from the South African Typographical Journal, June 1913 p. 9),³¹ but in fact went to the core of miners’ grievances and conditions on the mines. It began on New Doornfontein Mine in Benoni after a new mine manager, Edward Bulman, was appointed. Upon his arrival 60 underground employees of the mine left of their own accord and Bulman discharged 15 others. Bulman immediately set about re-organising