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PREFACE

Ekurhuleni, one of the country’s primary metropolitan areas, is merely a decade old. Whereas the promulgation of its more prominent urban neighbours – Johannesburg and Tshwane – as metropolitan areas involved the incorporation of smaller peripheral areas into major pre-existing cities, Ekurhuleni was created from the amalgamation of several relatively equal towns in what was historically known as the East Rand. Each of its constituent towns, including the suburbs, industrial areas, and especially the black residential areas attached to them, have rich histories going back to at least the start of the 20th century. This book is the first to attempt to weave together the separate threads of the pasts of each of these areas into a common historical narrative of the entire region.

Previously published books were usually commissioned by local municipalities to celebrate one or other milestone in the history of the white town. Written during the apartheid years, they focused almost exclusively on the achievements of the white population and were in fact premised on the basic notion that towns were places of white history and development. Their pages were filled with accounts of the experiences of white (usually male) pioneers in mining, industry and local politics. Black residents of these towns were excluded from these official histories, and when they did make fleeting appearances it was generally either as labourers and troublemakers or to demonstrate the goodwill and paternalism of the white authorities towards ‘its blacks’. Women and youth were similarly marginalised: white women were represented as wives or social entertainers, and white youth either as jovial or boisterously anti-social. Social strife, industrial action and political contestations were also downplayed (Benoni, Son of my Sorrow, is the one exception) in order to construct narratives of peaceful progress and enlightened development.

Several of these hagiographic accounts were produced prior to the 1970s. Those written after 1976 ignored or were oblivious to a large body of scholarly research undertaken from the 1970s, which produced fundamentally different histories and interpretations from the officially sanctioned books. Inspired by the turn to social history, academics and students based at universities wrote new histories that emphasised the role of ordinary people – women, men, workers, squatters, tenants and youth – in the making of their own history. Above all else, they consciously aimed to fill the major gap in the existing literature, namely, to recover the histories of ordinary people, especially the black oppressed. The collection of oral testimonies has played a critical role in this process of rewriting histories ‘from below’. Ekurhuleni has been a major site of this research, especially by scholars associated with the activities of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand. In addition to our own work, the research undertaken by, among others, Sapire, Sitas, Cohen, Webster, Callinicos, Lambert, Gilfoyle, Mooney, Moloi, Seekings, Brink, Menachemson, Ruiters, and Ndima, has generated a rich and diverse set of historical analyses. These writers chiefly drew attention to the complex processes of urbanisation (and particularly the role played by African and Afrikaner women), the making of working class cultures, popular insurgent movements, ethnic-based violence, and the re-emergence of independent trade unions and civic movements from the 1970s, and posited innovative analyses of the contestations in the making of apartheid and the political violence of the early 1990s. Despite the existence of this treasure trove of social history, very little is more widely known about Ekurhuleni’s significant contributions to the country’s history. This is partly due to the fact that a significant proportion of this body of work consists of unpublished theses and conference papers. One of the main objectives of this book is to bring into the public domain relevant aspects of this literature.

It remains the case, however, that most of the aforementioned literature took individual towns or locations/townships as their principal point of reference. Consequently, we know a considerable amount about squatters in Benoni, stayaways in Brakpan Location, forced removals in Payneville and Benoni Old Location, trade unions in Germiston and hostel violence in Kathorus. This book builds on and highlights the peculiarities of these local histories but it also draws attention to the numerous common processes that spread across the region. Competition between towns, especially in the economic field, tended to exacerbate differences between them. In reality though, they were all competing in the same frame, often to be the same thing, while the socio-economic borders between them were quite porous and distinctive town-specific identities rarely crystallised among any section of the population.

Ekurhuleni is unique because it is the single largest urban region in South Africa, comprising nine of the country’s leading urban towns, two of its largest African township conglomerations and has for extended periods been the country’s leading industrial region. These salient features emanate from the region’s pivotal role in the development of the country’s modern economy. Perhaps more than any other city or region, Ekurhuleni has reflected the rhythms of development of the mining and industrial sectors of the national economy. During the first half of the 20th century it was among the leading gold mining regions in the world and in the decades following the Second World War became the undisputed ‘workshop’ of the rapidly industrialising local economy.

An important and far-reaching consequence of this combination of characteristics was that from the early 20th century the various towns of the region attracted work-seekers from across the region and globe. Much like Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni very quickly developed a cosmopolitan character. The roll call of early mine owners and political leaders reveals a strong British presence, and later, as immigration from eastern and southern Europe increased, Jewish, Greek and Portuguese families also made their mark in various facets of life in the region. By far the most significant group of immigrants into the region was black workers from various parts of southern Africa, first to work on the coal and gold mines, and then in even larger numbers in the rapidly expanding secondary industry. From the outset a large proportion of the region’s population, black and white, was working class. In the first half of the 20th century this was mainly mine-based and thereafter the region was dominated by an industrial working class, making the locations of Ekurhuleni important sites in the creation of working class cultures and politics. This was reflected to some extent in the history of workers’ organisations and episodes of workers’ militancy such as the 1922 White Miners’ Strike, the wave of strikes in the early 1940s, the emergence of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) in the 1950s, the rise of independent unions in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the influential role played by black workers 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.