Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

in the region in the establishment of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985.

      A relatively unknown subtheme of this phenomenon is that the Communist Party of South Africa was, until its banning in 1950, among the most influential organisations in the region among black workers as well as a stratum of white and black intellectuals. The African National Congress (ANC) also cemented its position in many of the old locations and in the 1950s these areas were in the forefront of the mass defiance campaign, contributing to the emergence of a collective political identity among the region’s black population.

      Within the white population party political allegiances reflected both the composition of the white electorate and the shifts in national politics. Until the advent of apartheid the mostly English-speaking population tended to vote for the United Party (UP), which held sway in most municipalities and dominated parliamentary elections. From the 1950s, however, voting patterns turned decisively in favour of the ruling National Party (NP), so that by the mid-1960s Ekurhuleni had become an apartheid stronghold. Rivalry between towns features prominently in newspaper reports and in the proceedings of the different local councils, but it was largely confined to competition to attract industrial investment, rather than reflecting substantive differences between the towns. The pre-apartheid dominance of the UP and subsequent predominance of the NP created a degree of political quiescence and homogeneity among the white population and municipalities.

      In the 1940s the state perceived the region as an important source of contestation to white privilege and power, as black locations became sites of popular insurgent struggles, including by women and squatters. As a result, from the early 1950s the apartheid government made a concerted effort to bring the entire black population spread across several areas under control through the implementation of a single, centrally co-ordinated plan. This region experienced with great intensity apartheid’s urban racial restructuring, with its high concentration of so-called black spots and squatter settlements. It is here where the state experimented with its core policies of establishing regional and ‘properly planned’ townships and group areas. As a region, Ekurhuleni was subjected to more forced removals than any other urban area, as hundreds of thousands of Africans, coloureds and Indians were moved around like pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to create a neat, racially segregated region that would still satisfy the labour needs of each town. It was also here where the apartheid government first implemented its scheme of creating ethnic enclaves in African townships, triggering tension and violence as early as the 1950s in Daveyton. Ironically, the creation of massive African township conglomerations (Kathorus and Kwatsaduza) and regional group areas for coloureds (Reiger Park) and Indians (Actonville) encouraged the emergence of regional identities.

      It may be argued therefore that local identities (of belonging to particular towns or townships) co-existed with emergent regional identities. From the 1960s the expansion of white suburbia effectively blurred the formal municipal boundaries between towns. Often towns were separated by single roads. The emergence of regional shopping centres established new nodes of regional economic activity and in the process began to replace the more localised Central Business Districts as the main commercial centres in the region.

      In the black townships and group areas the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s and 1980s created new regional formations and political identities. Independent unions organised across industries and industrial zones, connecting workers in Wadeville with their counterparts in Springs. Student (Congress of South African Students [COSAS]) and youth organisations consciously established regional leadership structures. A similar project was undertaken by the East Rand People’s Organisations, one of the first radical civics to be created in the region. The formation of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) further augmented broad political identities. However, as the violence of the early 1990s revealed, and in which townships in Ekurhuleni were deeply embroiled, parochial and conservative identities persisted.

      This book does not aim to provide a comprehensive history of all the towns and townships that make up Ekurhuleni, but offers an overview of some of the salient local and regional processes that have contributed to the development of this significant urban region. It draws mainly on existing social histories. Hence one underdeveloped theme, ironically, given the emphasis in pre-1970s texts, is ordinary white culture and social life in the post-apartheid years. Beyond being a synthesis of existing work, however, this study makes a number of original contributions. For example, our researchers were able for the first time to conduct detailed life history interviews with activists who were involved in underground military activities in the mid- and late 1980s in and around Duduza, Tsakane and KwaThema. The time period covered in this book is from the pre-20th century, although it concentrates primarily on the 20th century, to the beginning of the new millennium when the new Metropolitan area was created.

CHAPTER 1

       TRACING THE CONTOURS OF EKURHULENI

      Germiston, 1900

      Ekurhuleni was shaped in the first instance by its geology and its environment, and only much later by the populations that came to live there. Indeed so historically mute are its early scatterings of inhabitants, the only sign of whom is the occasional archaeological site, that we are forced back to the landscape and climate to provide any sense of the place – which is what we shall do here.

      Ekurhuleni lies in the Highveld interior of South Africa nearly 2 000 metres above sea level. Like the Johannesburg region (Central Rand) and the West Rand, Ekurhuleni (East Rand) is home to the Main Reef series of the gold conglomerate ore, which was the central reason for its existence and the source of its prosperity throughout the first half of the 20th century and in some cases beyond. Unlike the Central and the West Rand, however, it is shaped and enfolded by strikingly different landscapes. Whereas major ridges run north of the mining belt on the West and Central Rand, the East is open and relatively flat, much of it poorly drained, and in places filled with pans. This landscape marks it out as a distinct region from the West and Central Rand, and has been one of the most important factors favouring its development as a massive, diversified industrial area, the workshop of South Africa and the Rand in particular.¹

       EARLY SETTLEMENT

      The elevation of the entire Witwatersrand zone has created a marginal environment and left its inhabitants, from time immemorial, peculiarly vulnerable to climatic variations. In wetter and warmer periods human populations expanded into and occupied its lands. Fifty thousand years ago, for example, Stone Age hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the San, ranged through this area leaving stone tools and hand axes behind as evidence of their stay. Amateur archaeologists in the mid-20th century found examples of both in the Cranbourne Station and Rynfield areas of Benoni.² Sites from a similar period have also been uncovered in Primrose, Germiston; at Witpoort and Withoek in Brakpan; as well as at an unnamed site in Springs.³ The later Stone Age period, starting around 30 000 years ago, is marked by a major break in the middle of its archaeological record in Ekurhuleni, in the Gauteng region more generally, as well as further afield. Between 18 000 BP (Before the Present) and 1200 BP no sign of human occupation can be detected. Archaeologists believe this break or hiatus to be due to a major climate change which brought with it lower rainfall and colder temperatures.⁴ Even after the hiatus only a scatter of Stone Age occupation can be discerned in the entire Gauteng area, no example of which has yet been found in Ekurhuleni. Scant pickings indeed.

      In the 4th and 5th centuries AD, early Iron Age communities settled in the bushveld areas of the interior of South Africa, extending as far as the Magaliesberg valley, where the Broederstroom site was detected and excavated in 1971. These early settlers cultivated cereal crops (sorghum and millet), forged iron implements and weapons, and herded cattle and smaller stock.⁵ The requirements of a mixed agricultural way of life limited the range of their spread. Grown together, their cereals required 500 mm of rainfall a year, concentrated into 50 days for millet and 75 days for sorghum. Night-time temperatures, in addition, had to remain over 15°C. After only 100 years in the Magaliesberg valley these early farmers withdrew to warmer