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Preface

THIS BOOK IS THE FIRST attempt to write a comprehensive history of an African criminal society known as the Marashea, or “Russians,” from its inception in the 1940s to the present.¹ It covers the formation of the association in the townships and mining compounds of the Witwatersrand, the massive street battles of the 1950s, and the government’s forced removal schemes that dispersed the Russians from some of their urban strongholds during this same period.² These original groups of Marashea drew their strength from Basotho migrants who worked and lived on the Johannesburg area mines, as well as those who resided in the townships and were employed in the city.³ The gold-mining industry’s expansion into the far West Rand and Free State during the 1950s and 1960s, coupled with the Aliens Control Act of 1963 (which made it illegal for the vast majority of Basotho migrants to work in South Africa outside the agricultural and mining sectors), resulted in a Marashea migration that shifted Russian power from the Rand to the townships and informal settlements surrounding the emerging gold mines. The Marashea remains a powerful force in many of South Africa’s gold mining areas.

Newspapers and archival documents proved to be valuable source materials but are limited in the range of issues they address. Police, mining, and township officials tended to focus on the disruption to order that Russian activities caused, and the Marashea came to public notice almost exclusively as a result of their involvement in violence. Newspapers intended for white readership rarely mentioned Marashea because, except for the most spectacular instances of violence, their activities did not impinge on the white world. African newspapers reported on collective violence, robberies, and court appearances and typically condemned the gangs as primitive tribal thugs. This was the public face of the Marashea.

Archival sources were useful in providing government and mining officials’ views of the Marashea, as well as supplying dates, casualty figures, and arrest records for specific events. In the archival records, the Marashea appear as a nuisance in the townships and mines—because of their involvement in street battles, faction fights, murders, and robberies—but not as a political threat to the state. Instead, they are depicted as tribal Africans untainted by communist or other revolutionary ideology, with no grievances against whites and no political agenda. Mining officials expressed occasional concern over Russian violence that threatened to disrupt mining operations, but the gangs did not challenge white authority on the mines. White commentators sometimes characterized the Marashea as murderous thugs but not as political subversives. These sources of evidence provide little information on the inner workings of the Marashea but are particularly valuable in situating the Russian gangs in a political context. Documentary evidence clearly indicates that the apartheid regime not only discounted the Marashea as a threat to white rule but that the police made common cause with gangster and vigilante groups as early as the 1950s in their campaigns to undermine the ANC and its affiliates. In this way the state was directly responsible for sponsoring episodes of conflict in the townships long before the politicized violence of the 1980s and 1990s.

Gathering oral testimony from current and former Marashea was the only way to probe into issues of culture and gender relations, to better understand how the gangs fit into their environment and how they perceived of and represented themselves. The major limitation to this approach is that one does not get an outsider’s view of the society. I interviewed a handful of mineworkers, police, and mining officials, but, for the most part, outsiders’ perceptions are examined only through the claims of Marashea themselves.

Between April 1998 and June 1999, seventy-nine Marashea (sixty-three men, sixteen women) were interviewed in Lesotho, in the townships and informal settlements of Gauteng province, and in Marashea settlements surrounding the mining towns of Klerksdorp, Virginia, Carletonville, and Welkom.⁴ These seventy-nine individuals span six decades of experience as Marashea. Some respondents spent the majority of their adult lives as Marashea while others were members for only a year or two. The ages of those informants who knew their birth dates ranged from twenty-eight to eighty-four. With the exception of two respondents who spoke very good English, all interviews were conducted in Sesotho.

The foremost difficulties involved gaining access to active members and women. Meetings with current Marashea visiting Lesotho led to trips to Russian settlements in South Africa, where additional interviews were conducted, including one with BM, the leader of the Matsieng faction in the Free State. In the end my research assistants and I spent time in four different Marashea settlements, and a total of nine active Marashea participated in interviews. Moreover, informal conversations yielded information about protection arrangements, rental agreements with white farmers, the demographics of the camps, business ventures, living conditions, social practices, and relations with mineworkers.

BM refused our request to interview women, saying that women did not know history and would say silly things. The same experience was repeated in the other Marashea settlements. As a result, only one active woman, a relation of an intermediary, was interviewed. Marashea women in general were difficult to identify, especially in Lesotho. Former Marashea women who have returned to Lesotho tend not to advertise their status and, despite exhaustive efforts, female informants made up just under 20 percent of the total interview pool.

Interviewing people who had experience with Marashea was often problematic. It would have been valuable to consult with more police officers, but I decided against this because of the extensive connections Marashea groups have with police. If it was discovered that I was asking the police about the Marashea it is possible that avenues would have been closed off. Consequently, I did not pursue any police contacts in South Africa until near the end of my fieldwork, although I discussed the Marashea with a few police officers in Lesotho. Several mineworkers were also interviewed during the initial stages of fieldwork in Lesotho. Although a number of South African mining officials refused to discuss the Marashea, staff at Harmony Mine in the Free State were very helpful. An NUM representative enthusiastically participated in an interview, as did a former liaison division employee of the Employment Bureau of Africa. In the 1950s Johannesburg gangs attracted a great deal of public attention, primarily because of the massive street battles in which they engaged. Unfortunately, many of the lawyers and township officials who came into contact with the Johannesburg Russians are deceased. With the exception of one advocate who represented Russians in the 1960s and 1970s, I was unable to track down any members of the legal profession or government service who had done business with the Marashea.

Not surprisingly, some Marashea informants were evasive or refused to discuss certain topics. Questions concerning relationships with the police, criminal activities, conflicts with ANC supporters, and links with political parties in Lesotho were the most likely to elicit such responses. The political turmoil stemming from the May 1998 national elections in Lesotho, which eventually led to military intervention and occupation by a South African–led force in September 1998, made discussions of political affairs extremely sensitive.

Problems of accuracy and reliability are two central issues that oral historians continually confront. This study was no different and gathering testimony from respondents who were involved in a range of criminal activities rendered these concerns even more salient. The formulation of collective memory in oral testimony has been commented on by many practitioners. Discussing the testimony of Holocaust survivors, Deborah Lipstadt observes that “lots of survivors who arrived at Auschwitz will tell you they were examined by [Dr. Josef] Mengele. Then you ask them the date of their arrival and you say, ‘Well, Mengele wasn’t in Auschwitz yet at that point.’ There were lots of doctors . . . somehow they all became Mengele.”⁵ In this instance it seems that larger societal perceptions influenced how people remembered and related their stories. Mengele became a symbol of evil, representing the horror of the concentration camps, so some survivors appropriated his presence to make sense of their own horror and to perhaps better express it to others, including the interviewer. This raises the issue of the construction of memory, or as Alistair Thomson suggests, the composure of memory. “In one sense we ‘compose’ or construct memories using the public language and meanings of our culture. In another sense we ‘compose’ memories which help us feel relatively comfortable with our lives, which gives us a feeling of composure. We remake or repress memories of experiences which are still painful and ‘unsafe’ because their inherent traumas or tensions have not been resolved. . . . Our memories are risky and painful if they do not conform to the public norms or versions of the past.”⁶

Marashea informants recited careful constructions of particular events and personalities. One of the defining events for Marashea active on the Rand in the 1950s and 1960s was a series of battles between combined Marashea forces and Zulu hostel dwellers that took place in 1957. The fighting raged for days between hundreds, if not thousands, of combatants, and the Dube Hostel Riots, as the conflicts came to be known in official parlance, were the subject of a government inquiry and extensive media attention. Virtually all the men interviewed who were members during this era claim to have taken part in these battles and recite details that have obviously become embedded in popular lore. It is extremely doubtful that all these informants actually participated in the fighting. For example, some men date their arrival on the Rand after 1957. Given the confusion with dates this is not absolute proof they were not present, but the likelihood that they all were is extremely remote. The Marashea’s image as defenders of the Basotho resonates very strongly among these men, and the Dube Hostel conflicts provide the foremost example of the Marashea rallying to the defense of fellow Basotho during this era. It was also a great victory for the Russians, and informants wished to be associated with an event that reinforced their identity as champions of the Basotho and successful warriors. Philip Bonner notes a similar development in discussions of a 1940s clash between Basotho and Zulu in Benoni: “A host of other informants claim to have witnessed this latter episode. I am almost certain that for a number it was hearsay.”⁷

The collective memory phenomenon also emerges in the strikingly similar accounts of the Dube Hostel conflicts. Informants’ recitations of the beginning of the conflict in which a Russian named Malefane was castrated by Zulu men in the hostel’s shebeen has the feel of a story that has been many times in the telling. The same sort of mythologizing surfaced in testimony surrounding the famous leader Tseule Tsilo. Again, it is unlikely that all the men who claimed to have witnessed Tsilo’s feats and interacted with him could have done so. Rather than invalidating such testimony, these responses speak to the power of the myth of Tsilo. Once such developments are recognized, they can be used as windows to interpret the ideals and worldviews of informants instead of simply dismissing suspect statements and stories as falsehoods. As Allesandro Portelli argues, “Oral sources tell us not just what people did but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did.”⁸

Kathleen Blee’s experience gathering testimonies from former members of the Ku Klux Klan led her to consider how people from groups that have been publicly maligned consciously attempt to rehabilitate the group’s (and their individual) reputation during the interview process: “Meanings are created in social and political contexts; memory is not a solitary act. Thus it is not simply that narratives constructed by former Klan members to explain their role in one of history’s most vicious campaigns of intolerance and hatred are biased by their own political agendas and their desire to appear acceptable to an oral historian but also that informants’ memories have been shaped by subsequent public censure of this and later Klans.”⁹

Marashea informants are well aware of their public reputation as thugs and assassins, and some men went to great lengths to portray the Marashea, or at least their particular group, as a benign force that fought crime and dispensed justice in the townships and informal settlements. This was especially evident among active informants, who dismissed Marashea of the past as violent criminals. These men depicted the current Marashea as a business and mutual-aid association for migrant Basotho, denying that they or their fellow members engaged in criminal or other antisocial activities. To cite one example, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Russian leader BM denied that his group participated in the violent conflicts between Marashea and union supporters that took place in and around Harmony Gold Mine in 1990. When questioned, BM insisted that his followers had no stake in the conflict and that any Marashea who joined the fighting did so in their capacity as miners, not as Marashea.¹⁰ The testimony of active informants, who were unlikely to incriminate themselves and who had a more direct interest in the well-being and reputation of the current Marashea, has to be considered in this light. Sensitive information about the modern Marashea was more readily supplied by recently retired veterans who were active in the 1980s and 1990s. These men and women tended to be more candid and discussed aspects of their experiences that active Marashea were reluctant to divulge.

Retired informants’ reflections on their lives as Marashea differed. While a few women emphasized the excitement of being associated with the Russians, most spoke of the hardships and violence they endured. Some men expressed regret for the crimes they committed while others were boastful and unrepentant. The diversity of responses on many issues leads me to believe that the informants comprise a fairly representative cross-section of the Marashea, despite the underrepresentation of women and young, active male members.

Gathering oral testimonies from gang members who were regularly involved in criminal activities presented particular difficulties, the foremost being identifying informants and persuading them to participate in an interview. Second, because of the nature of their activities and the climate of repression that characterized their lives in South Africa, some informants were evasive or refused to discuss certain topics. I labor under no illusion that I have uncovered the definitive history of the Marashea. Many aspects of people’s lives as Marashea remain obscured for a host of reasons. The archival record is extremely limited in the scope and range of issues commented on and the collected testimony cannot possibly relate the entire story of the many thousands of people who have comprised the Marashea over the years. Perhaps most important, respondents revealed mere fractions of their experiences. Bearing these qualifications in mind, I believe this work provides an insight into the lives led by the women and men of the Marashea; the coping strategies they employed; the impact the association had in the townships, informal settlements, and mining hostels; and the autonomy that groups like the Marashea exercised within the structural constraints established by the apartheid state.