Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

In the subsequent Martial Law Court sittings 72 strikers were convicted (35 English, 37 Afrikaners). Eighteen were sentenced to death; four were hanged. In the aftermath of the strike 3 000 white mine workers were left unemployed. The spectre of poor whiteism again became acute, and gangs of unemployed white miners were conscripted into relief gangs to help build the Hartbeespoort Dam and the greater part of the railway system around Benoni.⁷²

      Following the suppression of the strike the militant white labour tradition became diluted and co-opted by the 1924 Pact Government’s policies of civilised labour and of industrial conciliation, only surviving among Afrikaner women worker trade unions (discussed in Chapter 4). The politics of white labour and white Ekurhuleni would be forever transformed. Henceforth a much more sedate and conservative political tradition held sway, until the rise of a militant Afrikaner nationalism during and after World War II, which is the subject of Chapter 8.

      Ekurhuleni was a principal, if not the principal home of white labourism and white worker militancy in South Africa. It stood at the centre of the 1913, 1914 and 1922 strikes, the first and last of which represented massive threats to capitalist political hegemony. It was also a prime focal point of white labourers’ policies of job reservation and segregationism both powerfully articulated by the South African Labour Party, who commanded massive support in this area. Finally, it was perhaps the principal site of fusion and interaction between the Afrikaner- and English-speaking sections of the white working class, a place where a broader working class unity seemed a real possibility until 1922, after which it was lost.

CHAPTER 3

       CONSTRUCTING BLACK EKURHULENI, 1890-1927

      Benoni Pass Office

      The rise of the gold mining sector greatly increased the number of Africans residing in Ekurhuleni. Most worked on the mines themselves. Initially their numbers were fairly modest. Only 15 000 Africans were employed on the entire Witwatersrand gold fields in 1890 of which perhaps 5 000 worked in Ekurhuleni. As the deep level mines came into operation, however, these numbers climbed to 69 127 in 1897, and 189 000 in 1912.¹ Most were oscillating migrants who had to be accommodated partly in shanty settlements on mine land, but mainly in compounds. To take one example, in 1895 New Kleinfontein mine expanded its compound so as to accommodate a labour force of 1 200 miners.² Black miners in this period enjoyed considerably more freedom of movement when compared to post-1910 conditions. Rates of desertion stood typically at 7.2%, while New Kleinfontein Company reports in 1897 noted that at any one time 20% of its unskilled labour force was incapacitated by drink.³

      After the South African War (1899–1902) the gold mines of the Rand suffered persistent and paralysing shortages of unskilled African labour, largely because of their efforts to reduce the wages they paid to such workers. Wage cuts had been attempted, and failed in 1890, 1896, 1897 and 1900. Finally in 1902 a 50% wage cut was enforced (30 shillings for 30 shifts). This prompted a collective though unorganised withdrawal of African labour from the mines. A low point was reached in July 1906 when only 90 500 African workers were employed on the mines.⁴ Mine owners had insisted as early as 1903 that 197 650 able-bodied African miners were required (a considerable exaggeration) but, however inflated their supposed needs, it was clear that a critical labour shortage was gripping the mines. The mine owners responded in three ways. They increased minimum wages to 50 shillings for 30 shifts; they tried to make living arrangements for their labour marginally more attractive; and they gained permission to import tens of thousands of cheap, indentured Chinese labourers. At their peak the number of Chinese workers rose to 54 000; they were paid at far lower rates and were on longer contracts than African migrant workers (Table 1).⁵

Table 1: Average monthly wage for African and Chinese workers ⁶

Year	Chinese	African
September 1904	-	57s. 0d.
1905–6	39s. 9d.	51s. 11d.
1906–7	41s. 6d.	52s. 3d.
1907–8	44s. 3d.	49s. 1d.

      Evidence of their stay can still be seen in the occasional compound dating from that period that still survives today – most noticeably in the form of five-foot bunks, which were far too small to accommodate the average African miner’s frame. These indentured Chinese labourers were repatriated en masse in 1908, and the part that they played in the history of the Witwatersrand and Ekurhuleni has been almost entirely effaced. Yet they fundamentally affected the trajectory of economic development on the Rand, helping the gold mining industry to force down the level of African wages to the level which they had previously sought – and at which they stayed, quite astonishingly, until 1969.⁷

      Besides undercutting African wages through importing indentured Chinese, individual mine managers also tried to attract African labour by closing an eye to the sale and consumption of alcoholic liquor (as continued at New Primrose in Germiston at least until 1913),⁸ and by permitting African miners to co-habit with women in clusters of shacks on mine property, which lay largely outside managerial (or any other kind of) control. As J.M. Pritchard of the Native Affairs Department explained:

      The principal reason advanced in favour of mine locations is that certain natives, who have worked for long periods on the mines and whose services are particularly valuable, have become married or ‘attached’ to women and if they were not permitted to live with these females in some such place as these locations they would leave the mine. Many such natives, having worked for years on the mines have practically made their homes here and have become skilled labourers.

      Such ‘mine locations’ sprang up all along Ekurhuleni, both before and after the South African War of 1899–1902.⁹ The largest were sited immediately adjacent to the main Ekurhuleni towns, and soon came to accommodate large numbers of Africans and coloureds who worked in various capacities in the urban area which they served, and Indian traders who gravitated towards these clumps of population to sell goods. Two key features of these early locations were thus that they formed the nuclei of the permanently settled black urban population of Ekurhuleni, and that they were racially mixed and heterogeneous.¹⁰ The mine locations at both Germiston and Boksburg came into existence before the South African War. In Germiston, Consolidated Goldfields secured permission from the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR) Mining Commissioner to establish a residential area for Asians and Africans on part of the farm Driefontein on the south side of Georgetown which fell inside the municipal area.¹¹ In Boksburg the ZAR government set aside six claims on the farm Vogelfontein belonging to the Hercules Gold Mining Company for the residence of Indians although they made no formal provision for Africans. Nevertheless, blacks and some whites quickly took up residence on this ground upon which 132 self-built structures arose housing 606 people in 1906.¹² In Benoni both Africans and Indians were granted rights to live on a patch of ground owned by the New Kleinfontein Gold Mining Company, known as Kleinfontein or Chimes location, where they erected corrugated iron or unburnt brick-and-thatch houses.¹³ In Springs African and Indians squatted on ground belonging to the government which leased to New State Areas mines.¹⁴ In Brakpan, which only acquired municipal status in 1920, languishing until then under the control of Benoni, African residential arrangements were even more haphazard and ad hoc. Informal mine locations sprang up at Rietfontein Colliery on private stands sub-leased to Jewish traders and on Brakpan Mines. In addition family