Читать книгу Ekurhuleni - Phil Bonner - Страница 11

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 climes, a departure which was followed by a 500-year blank in Gauteng and the southern part of North West Province.⁶ The reason for this occupation record may again lie in climate flux. The Little Ice Age, which opened around 1300 and continued to 1700 AD and brought especially cold and windy conditions to the Highveld, thereafter served as a major brake on and disincentive to occupation of the entire area, Ekurhuleni included. It was nevertheless broken from time to time by warmer interludes, and it was during one of these that a distinct and separate group of later Iron Age (as opposed to early Iron Age) people (the Bafokeng) entered the Highveld via the Free State between AD 1 400 and 1 600.⁷

Much of this area was relatively treeless (in contrast to today) which led these Sotho Tswana people to start building in stone. Known as Moloko to archaeologists (after its pottery) their settlements were laid out according to a distinct and characteristic plan. A significant concentration of such settlements can be found on the Vredefort Dome, and in the Klipriviersberg, Suikerbosrand Rand and Johannesburg areas. The settlement pattern consisted of homesteads situated a few hundred metres apart, each containing 30 to 50 people. Chiefs’ settlements were larger consisting of 300 residents or more.⁸ This period of occupation ended when the climate again deteriorated. The deepest drought in centuries gripped the whole of the interior of South Africa just after 1 700 AD.⁹ How far this extended into the Ekurhuleni area is unclear, as no serious Iron Age archaeology has been undertaken there. At around 1750, however, a new phase of climatic change commenced promoting a fresh wave of colonisation in the Gauteng area – this time comprising other Sotho Tswana groups. Their settlement pattern differs significantly from those that preceded them. Multiple arcs in the outer wall mark the back courtyards of individual households which themselves surround the cattle enclosure/kraal at the core. Among these, population densities were higher suggesting greater political centralisation. A number of these concentrated in defensive positions on hill tops or koppies such as at Meyersdal just outside the Alberton edge of Ekurhuleni.¹⁰

As much of the Ekurhuleni area was blessed with permanent springs, this would have added to its attractions for potential settlers. The site of the early 20th century town of Germiston was a farm known as Elandsfontein, named after one such spring which provided water for large herds of eland.¹¹ Aerial photographs taken in 1933 show now unpopulated African villages dotted across the Benoni suburbs of Farramere and Northmead as well as further afield which would certainly have been occupied in the wetter, warmer period of 1750–1800.¹² This remained nevertheless a marginal area which was likely to have been abandoned once colder and drier weather took hold, as happened at the beginning of the 1800s. It thus did not require any depredation from the armies of Mzilikazi’s Ndebele who intruded into the interior from KwaZulu-Natal in the early 1820s to depopulate this area (although they probably contributed to this outcome).¹³

The Ekurhuleni, Gauteng and particularly the Magaliesberg areas were thus home, with occasional intermissions, to a black population (Bantu-speaking and San) for several tens of thousands of years before white settlers arrived in this area. Even though we know they were present, however, their voices remain mute. Certainly next to no oral traditions survive. We possess simply (and importantly) an archaeological record, which tells us that they were there, but comparatively little information about their social relations and how they behaved.

VOORTREKKER OCCUPATION

Boer voortrekkers first moved into parts of this still marginal and fairly depopulated area in the course of the 1840s but remain almost equally anonymous. Such historical record as we have is equally sketchy, comprising the bald record of land grants made to individuals by the South African Republic and then housed as a record in their archives. Admittedly, names appear for the first time, but very little else. Those carrying them remain faceless and shadowy leaving the area historically as threadbare as in earlier centuries and decades. One such farm, Elandsfontein, upon which Germiston later grew up, was purchased by Johan Meyer from its previous occupant for the price of an ox-wagon in 1849.¹⁴ In 1860 J.P. Botha bought the farm Weltevreden (delimited two years before) where Brakpan subsequently arose.¹⁵ In 1869 Carl Ziervogel purchased 3 000 morgen of rocky veld, called Leeupoort, for £75, which subsequently gave birth to Boksburg.¹⁶

In 1862 four Boer farming families likewise became the first trekker outriders to settle in the Benoni area. The first farm to be officially registered by the then government of the Transvaal was granted to D.J.J. Strydom. He named it Rietfontein, half of which is now within Benoni’s municipal boundaries. Other farms in the area were also named after springs – Kleinfontein (little spring), Vlakfontein (shallow spring), Modderfontein (muddy spring) and so on. A large farmhouse built near Kleinfontein by Johan Hendrik Botha in the late 1870s was still standing on the outskirts of the suburb of Farramere a century later. Remains of several others also survive.¹⁷

The historical record becomes slightly denser when a newly installed government of the South African Republic made a concerted attempt in the early 1880s to put its administration on a firmer and more professional footing. The origins of the name of Benoni (and its history as a town) go back to this point. In 1881 the Kruger government, which was desperately short of funds, began the resurvey of the irregularly shaped triangles of unclaimed land which lay between the boundaries of farms (uitvalgrond or ‘falling out ground’), named them and then put them up for rental or sale. Johan Rissik, the Surveyor General, who was charged with this task, named Benoni after the Book of Genesis, chapter 35, where Jacob’s wife Rachel died after giving birth to a son whom she named Benoni, meaning ‘Son of My Sorrow’. Rissik allegedly found the name appealing because of the difficult conditions he was encountering doing this part of the survey.¹⁸ As we now know, the name stuck. Boksburg was named in a similar fashion, following the discovery of gold. At that time the wider area consisted of three farms: Leeupoort, Driefontein and Klipfontein. As in the case of Benoni, it was resurveyed, resulting in the release of a block of land which could accommodate 1 000 stands. Here a new township was established and named after the South African Republic’s State Secretary of the time, Dr W.E. Bok.¹⁹

Springs was born in much the same way. Rough surveys had loosely delineated the farms Geduld, De Rietfontein and Brakpan in the 1860s. An early owner of geduld, Albert Brodrick, sold it to Paul kruger in 1886. William Steyn acquired ownership of De rietfontein in the 1860s, selling it on to two mineral prospectors, Johan Ludwig gauf and W.B.M. vogts in 1888, allegedly in return for a horse’s saddle and bridle. By this time most of the farms in the Ekurhuleni area had been resurveyed, with Pretoria resident James Brookes having redrawn the boundaries of the farms geduld, De rietfontein and Brakpan in 1883. What Brookes’ survey revealed was an unbroken block of uitvalgrond 685 hectares in extent, an even larger area than had been the case with Benoni. Brookes named this chunk of uitvalgrond Die Spring’s because of the large number of natural springs in the area. Following the resurvey of the land, a farmer, W.J. Snyman, rented the farms Cloverfield and Die Springs from the then republican government, the leases of which ended when coal was found on Die rietfontein in 1888.²⁰

W.E. Bok, after whom Boksburg was named

Brakpan’s early development followed a similar trajectory.²¹ Brakpan sprang up on the farm Weltevreden whose boundaries were delimited in 1864. It was sold twice after its initial owner, J.P. Botha, purchased it in 1886, ending up 20 years later in the hands of State President Paul kruger’s son-in-law, F.C. Eloff. Both kruger and Eloff anticipated gold being found in the area, kruger himself having bought the neighbouring farm geduld.²² The practice of using insider connections clearly extends back far from present times. It was not gold, however, but coal that brought the modern towns of Brakpan and Springs into existence.

DISCOVERING GOLD

only with the discovery of almost unimaginably rich seams of conglomerate gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 did the history of Ekurhuleni acquire a more human face. It is possible that far distant Nigel led the way, with gold being discovered there on Petrus Maree’s farm in 1886 or 1887.²³ however the discovery of gold at Benoni marks a more substantial beginning when in August of that year, Landdrost Maré visited a recently opened shaft on Benoni farm and informed the government of the discovery of gold there, prospecting having already been in progress since early that year. As he reported to his superiors in Pretoria ‘Het rif ligt open in die Schacht en is acht voet breed.’ (The reef has exposed in the shaft and is eight foot wide.) It still remains on the south end of Princes Avenue. The prospector who exposed it was Cotten Acutt. Also present was J.k. hirst who represented Ethelbert Welford Noyce who had leased the farm from the government in 1885. The Benoni, kleinfontein and vlakfontein farms were proclaimed as gold prospecting areas between May and August 1888.²⁴ Finally to conclude this first phase of mining development, W.P. Taylor was sent by the rand Mines group some time later to seek to purchase the farm Modderfontein, near Benoni, which he successfully did, and which would ultimately give birth to five fabulously rich mines.²⁵

At this point the history of Ekurhuleni is getting perceptibly denser, and before long it would be recorded first in newspaper articles and later in a series of celebratory, often centennial, municipal publications. This history is, however, almost exclusively a white history and generally a white immigrant history at that. It is also cast in a very particular mould, which has been explored with considerable insight and subtlety, in the Eastern Lowveld of South Africa.²⁶ The mould is of brave, rough-and-ready, independent, solitary, resourceful pioneers rising above the odds and overcoming all adversity in their way. While pictured in a generally romantic fashion, these pioneers come with an equally familiar set of flaws – forgivable flaws but flaws nonetheless. They are carefree – on occasion close to wastrels. They are generous, often to a fault. They are great believers in (and beneficiaries of) chance, but are not above bending chance in somewhat underhand ways, or duping their colleagues. They are heavy drinkers. They can be violent when protecting what they believe to be their rights.

Much of this pioneering history has two other attributes as well. It is remorselessly anecdotal, made up of cautionary tales, amusing as well as sometimes uplifting episodes, but never delving into the contexts and personalities involved. Equally problematically African voices and faces never appear, allowing us only to access them much later. These are our sadly limited raw materials for writing this early phase of the history of Ekurhuleni.

Three of these early pioneer narratives, two coming from Nigel, give some feel for this genre of works. According to one, the owner of Vlakfontein entered into an ‘agzt’ (agreement) in 1882 in a project to look for gold. Five years later a troop of gold-seekers on their way from Natal to the Rand camped on Vlakfontein and became aware that the prospector had located gold. They thereupon went to the owner of the farm and offered £1 000 to buy it. The absentee owner, Petrus Johannes Marais (Oom Lang Piet), happened to be reading the novel by Sir Walter Scott entitled The Fortunes of Nigel, a story about a young man who was the victim of a dishonest intrigue. Suspicious, he checked out his farm, only to find that a gold reef had been discovered on it. With this, the name Nigel was born and Marais sold his property in July 1888 to the Nigel Gold Mining Company.

In an alternative account, P.J. Marais purchased the Vlakfontein property between 1881 and 1884. Two years later a pioneer Scottish prospector, Nigel MacLeish, found a gold-bearing outcrop on the farm which he named Nigel’s Reef. On 15 April 1887, Marais sold half of the farm to businessmen from Pretoria who styled themselves as the ‘The Nigel Syndicate’.²⁷ The Nigel Gold Mining Company was thereupon registered on 31 March 1888 and purchased the second half from Marais on 4 June 1888. Some connection to the novel Glenvelich Street is clear, inasmuch as all churches are named after churches in Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel.

Germiston’s origins were equally bound up with the discovery of gold. In 1886 two Harrismith merchants, John Jack and Augustus Simmer, bought a half share in the farm Elandsfontein following the initial discovery of gold in Langlaagte a few months before. Theirs was intended as a commercial/trading enterprise. The bleak spot which they chose was situated on a natural crossroads and was therefore the ideal site on which to erect a store. Within weeks, however, Paul Kruger declared the entire Witwatersrand a public diggings. Jack and Simmer immediately floated the first gold mine in the area (registered in August 1887), and then named the neighbouring township Jermiston, in honour of a farm seven miles outside of Glasgow in Scotland which had been John Jack’s boyhood home.²⁸

Elsewhere in Ekurhuleni prospectors were engaged in a different quest – the search for coal – which had emerged as an increasingly vital prerequisite for successful mining. Towards the end of 1887 a German prospector, Johan Gauf, located a seam of coal near Boksburg which initially supplied some of the needs of the area’s proliferating gold mines. In 1888 Gauf extended his search eastwards and found better quality coal about 30 metres below the surface of Eloff’s farm Weltevreden in today’s Brakpan area. The Transvaal Coal Trust Company was formed to buy the farm. They put down a shaft at what is now the Brakpan Country Club, out of which grew the Brakpan Colliery which gave its name to Brakpan town. The connection to water in the naming of Brakpan and Springs is self-evident. A year later more coal was found in the vicinity of Springs. By the end of the century four mines were operating in Brakpan and five in Springs.²⁹

Finally Kempton Park emerged out of another ancillary activity of gold mining. This town owes its origins to the dynamite factory built at Modderfontein in 1894 to supply explosives to the mines. The factory was half owned by a German company and its local director, Carl Friedrich Wolff, who soon bought up large tracts of land in the area upon which he later applied to establish a town. The township was approved in 1903 and named Kempton Park after the town of Kempten in Germany, which was Wolff’s birthplace.³⁰

The story of the discovery of Benoni’s Modderfontein gold comes with a similar message and model. In 1890 W.P. Taylor, whose activities slot in first after the first wave of pioneers, was instructed by the Rand Mines Group to purchase the farm Modderfontein near Benoni from its then owner Wilhem Prinsloo. The episode that follows comes directly from Taylor’s autobiography, African Treasure. According to Taylor, and to local legend, Prinsloo was adamantly opposed to parting with his farm for anything less than £100 000. Taylor hung around for weeks and eventually a clever trick or subterfuge secured him his prize. As he puts it in African Treasure:

One bitterly cold evening the Hottentot servant brought in, in the bottom of a zinc bucket, the scanty milk he had drawn from half a dozen shivering cows [which gave Taylor an opening].

‘My poor friend,’ said Taylor, ‘I have a cow in Johannesburg that will fill that bucket twice a day; that is what I call milk.’

‘Yes,’ Taylor went on, ‘the cow will fill that bucket twice a day, and when I have bought this farm I will give it to my friend, your wife. If the cow does not fill the bucket twice a day, as I promise, there shall be no deal.’

There was a long silence and I knew the farm was as good as mine.

Next morning he appeared a tired man. ‘Englishman,’ he said, ‘you give me no peace. This woman has destroyed my rest with your dammed cow and its two buckets of milk. Let us bring the deal to a head. What is your offer?’

£30 000 in cash, forty thousand in shares and a cow that will fill your bucket with milk twice a day.’

He went back to his wife, and she, coveting the cow, counselled acceptance.³¹

MINING GOLD

The Ekurhuleni region (previously East Rand) is conventionally divided into an east central zone comprising Germiston, Boksburg, Alberton and the far eastern region comprising Brakpan, Springs and Nigel, with Benoni sometimes falling into the one and sometimes the other. Gold mining first developed at each end of the Far East Rand. This was due to the geological vagaries of the Main Reef series of ores. Benoni lies on the north-western edge of a huge gold-bearing reef known as the Far East Rand Basin. The reef more generally stretches in a straight line from Johannesburg until it reaches Boksburg. From there it curves south, and puzzled gold prospectors initially lost it as they interpreted it as a complete break in the gold-bearing formation. This they dubbed the Boksburg gap. The Far East Rand Basin which began at Benoni emerged as isolated outcrops at that point (i.e. the end of the gap). It then dipped down to about 2 300 metres in the vicinity of Springs, before turning upwards to surface once again in Nigel, 24 kilometres from Benoni – hence the initial gold discoveries at both ends (at Nigel and Benoni).³²

Four mines began operating in the Benoni area from 1887: the Benoni Gold Mining Company and the Chimes Company located on Benoni farm, and the Van Ryn and New Kleinfontein Company on Vlakfontein and Kleinfontein farms, respectively. By the end of 1890, all four companies had failed and had later to be financially reconstructed. This was partly because of the exhaustion of surface workings, which was compounded by the absence of a rail link; the diseases that afflicted animal-borne transport; and irregular supplies of labour. Further contributing factors however were, plain and simple, incompetence and self-indulgence. In 1890, for example, the Mining Journal attributed the failure of the Van Ryn Mine to ‘incompetent management, defective organisation and extravagant expenditure’, faults which apparently accompanied many pioneering South African ventures. The first Benoni gold mine, which opened in September 1887, went bankrupt in 1888. Many other small mines in Ekurhuleni suffered the same fate, and for some of the same reasons.³³ Additional problems facing all mines in the area as well as the communities they spawned were the absence of fuel on the treeless Highveld and a shortage of water.³⁴ The shortage of fuel was partly resolved by the discovery of coal, first on the farm Vogelsfontein near Boksburg, then in the vicinity of Brakpan and Springs.³⁵ The issue of water was a good deal more intractable. Drought struck the Witwatersrand gold fields ferociously and from the very beginning. At the end of the first winter in the life of the gold fields in 1886 it was reported that water was very scarce. In October 1887 Johannesburg’s Landdrost Von Brandis telegrammed State Secretary Bok in Pretoria in desperation: ‘What about a waterworks for Johannesburg? The wells are dry’. In 1889, 1890 and 1895 exceptionally severe droughts again struck the Witwatersrand, placing both mines and local communities in Ekurhuleni in a position of acute stress.³⁶

The drought of 1890 coincided with the exhaustion of the surface workings of gold-bearing outcrops. This forced the gold mining companies to search for gold-bearing reef ever deeper underground. A massive problem they encountered when pushing more than 40 metres below the surface was that the characteristics of the gold ore they were mining changed. The iron pyrites they then found in the ore made the gold much more difficult to extract, so that only a quarter of the available gold could be recovered. As a result a major economic depression settled on the Rand. Many mines closed. The Stock Exchange collapsed. Almost a third of the Rand’s white population packed their bags and left.³⁷ The industry was only rescued from its plight in 1892, when it began to employ the potassium cyanide-based extraction process discovered by MacArthur and Forrest in distant Scotland three years before. One immediate requirement of the MacArthur-Forrest process was water – 2 009 litres to mill one ton of ore.³⁸ In Benoni, and other parts of Ekurhuleni, huge dams were built to supply this need – these formed the lakes which now dot the area and are such a conspicuous feature of its landscape. At the end of 1895, for example, the Kleinfontein Estates and Township Company bought Kleinfontein farm, mainly because of the stream that ran through it, upon which it constructed two huge new dams – the first called Homestead Dam and the second New Kleinfontein Dam (beside which the city of Benoni is now situated).³⁹

Deep-level mining, however, also required access to massive resources of technology, expertise, labour and capital. To mobilise these, the mining houses embarked on a process of take-over, amalgamation and concentration out of which the group system was born.⁴⁰ It was these groups that gave birth to the new generation of mines that sprang up in the mid-1890s. In Benoni New Kleinfontein, New Modderfontein and Van Ryn Estates were launched, the former owned by Sir George Farrar. In Germiston and Boksburg, Angelo, New Comet, Driefontein, Cinderella, New B, East Rand Proprietary Mines (ERPM) and Driefontein, also sprang into life, many controlled by George Farrar’s group.⁴¹ The industry had taken off. By 1898 the Witwatersrand’s mines produced 27% of the world’s gold. By 1913 this had leapt to 40%.⁴²

Between Benoni and Nigel, however, there remained a large tract of empty land – the inscrutable ‘Boksburg Gap’. Not a single gold mine was established in these parts. It would require further technological breakthroughs before these could be exploited, or indeed even located. As late as 1919 the East Rand Express could proclaim, ‘Even on the East Rand the feeling is still prevalent that civilisation ceases after Boksburg is left.’⁴³ However, what the East Rand Express did not realise was that a turning point had already been reached. Only in 1909/1910 had the idea first been seriously considered of the gold reef extending into the centre of Ekurhuleni. The reef was finally located in 1911. Technological advances facilitated the rapid development of gold mining in the region in the next decade-and-a-half. Critical here was the introduction of the Francois Cementation Process, which allowed shafts to be sealed off from water-bearing fissures in 1916. This left the way open for the East Rand Basin to be fully explored and exploited. A clutch of what would prove to be highly profitable gold mines then came into existence: Springs, New State Areas, Modder East and Van Dyk. Collectively they pushed Ekurhuleni to the forefront and to a pre-eminent position in the industry, which was uncontested by the mid-1920s when many Central Rand/Johannesburg mines closed down operations. In 1922 Ekurhuleni took over the role of the leading gold-producing region on the Witwatersrand, and hence in the world, a position which it would retain until the early 1950s.⁴⁴

Early gold mining in Boksburg

LIVING IN EKURHULENI

Following close on the heels of mining development came the founding of Ekurhuleni’s earliest towns. The first two were Boksburg and Germiston. Boksburg claims the position of the second township after Johannesburg to be proclaimed on the Rand – in this case in 1887, at which point it became the government’s administrative centre for the Ekurhuleni gold fields.⁴⁵ The diary of an early visitor who had a brief sojourn in Boksburg in September 1887 leaves us the following account:

The place is still in its infancy yet, tents and mud houses being the predominant features. The walls of the government offices are beam high but they are by no means strong. The walls of half of the gaol have also been run up some eight or nine feet [three metres] being built of stone, with small air holes some distance from the floor. We pity the poor unfortunates who may have to be locked up in that dismal hole. A considerable amount of mining work is being carried on near Boksburg.⁴⁶

When Montagu White, the first Mining Commissioner, arrived in Boksburg in 1888 he registered what he called ‘the two defects in South African scenery … the absence of water and the scarcity of trees’. He accordingly resolved to build a big dam, as would later be done in Germiston and Benoni. Black, long-term prisoners were imported from Johannesburg to carry out the work, while 40 000 trees were planted above the railway line. In 1891, after two years of drought, the dam finally filled up.⁴⁷ The first steps in the transformation of the physical landscape of the town had been taken.

Germiston followed a similar track. Two hundred stands were laid out on the farm Elandsfontein in May 1887, which presumably marked the proclamation of the township. At this point, according to a letter from John Jack to a correspondent in Johannesburg, a stream of water ran down one side of the township beside which a mill (to crush mealies), and a hotel, a store, a blacksmith’s shop, a wagon maker, an agent, a private boarding house and one or two dwelling houses had been built.⁴⁸ Later tin shacks, tents and waggons lined the streets. A major fillip was given to the town when the railway line from Vereeniging (and hence Cape Town) reached Germiston in 1892. Shortly after, a line linking Germiston ww to Pretoria was built.⁴⁹ It was then that Germiston assumed its position as the railway and transport hub of the Rand, which in turn sparked off a wave of development in the town.

Benoni’s development was somewhat more belated. A prospector’s account dating back to 1887 speaks of the fellow prospector whom he was coming to assist and who lived in a grass hut near Benoni Hotel which was ‘the only building in the district, with the exception of the far-away homesteads of the Boers’. The hotel itself was anything but salubrious offering ‘room for two beds with a table in between’. The first store was opened in 1888, a wood and iron building without ceiling or floor. The best known venue in town was Chimes Hotel (later the Transvaal Hotel) whose proprietor was locally renowned for his St Helenan coloured wife, ‘Mother Eata’. Throughout this period Benoni remained isolated from other Witwatersrand towns. Roads to other centres were simply tracks in the veld, where highway robbers often lurked. Even when the first railway was built between Johannesburg and Springs in 1891, the nearest station was Brakpan, eight kilometres away. At this point and for some while after, the many single white men working on the mines were housed in rows of rooms known as single quarters, provided with communal facilities. They took their meals at private boarding houses – boarding houses in the true sense. Married miners lived in blocks of wood-and-iron houses each with two bedrooms, one sitting room and a small kitchen. Given the absence of sanitary facilities, bad health and disease were constant companions. As newspaper editor William Hill later wrote in his diary:

Over all that time … hung an ever present threat. In winter it was pneumonia caused by the dust; in summer typhoid caused by the filthy conditions under which the inhabitants had to live.

No schools existed before the conclusion of the South African War (1899–1902), previously referred to as the Anglo-Boer War.⁵⁰

Benoni was only properly laid out after that conflict had ended, in an era which has aptly been called reconstruction, because of the need to repair damage caused by the war. In the interim the vast bulk of the black and white population had fled Ekurhuleni and the Rand, and the mines had come to a halt. Much plant and machinery was destroyed along with wood-and-iron buildings and accommodation. In the case of Benoni, plans which had been approved for the building of a new township by the Kleinfontein Estates Company, a leading shareholder of which was George Farrar, stalled until after the war. This extended pause was to change the course of Benoni’s history decisively. After the war, Sir George Farrar returned to set his mining ventures into motion once again. Heavy rains had fallen in the last summer of the war, creating an artificial lake at Kleinfontein Dam and transforming a barren valley and naked earthwork into a grassy natural beauty spot. Farrar set about persuading the Kleinfontein Estates and Township Company to relocate the township to the north-facing slopes of the valley. They agreed and appointed him to design the new town, the centre of which was modelled on Farrar’s native Bedford in England. Many of the streets were given names associating them with Bedford. Later in 1903 the new township was pegged out, 200 stands being bought in the first auction in March 1904.⁵¹ Part of the new influx of residents was drawn from British soldiers who took their discharges in Benoni and other Ekurhuleni towns at the end of the South African War (1902). These imparted to the white community the ‘Britishness’ it would retain until well into the century.⁵² In common with Germiston and Boksburg, Benoni was also granted municipal status, and municipal self-government (for whites) in 1903, which unequivocally opened a new era in the history of Ekurhuleni.⁵³

Springs grew up on the back of coal rather than gold which had been discovered in 1887. In 1888 the Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg-Maatschapij (NZASM) was authorised by the South African government to mine coal at Springs, and a railway line was built to connect Springs to Johannesburg in 1898. After the war Springs/ Brakpan was the most productive coal mining region in the country, although it was shortly to lose out comprehensively to Middelburg/Witbank when the Apex-Witbank railway line was opened in 1910, and the Ekurhuleni coal mines immediately found that they could not compete. As late as 1901 no Springs town existed. Corrugated iron cottages clustered round the collieries, with a few general stores and small hotels dotted around them, and Springs only attained full municipal status in 1912. Brakpan languished in a more or less identical position. The population of Springs comprised coal-mining immigrants from Scotland and Wales in the eastern part of the area, and from Holland and Germany in the west. Almost no Afrikaners were to be found among them. Managed by a Health Committee from 1902, a Town Council was only constituted and a township proclaimed in 1904, boasting no residential area in the decade 1900–1909.⁵⁴ Brakpan’s first residential township was only established in 1911. Brakpan would only separate from Benoni and acquire independent status in 1919, at more or less the same time as Alberton. Nigel’s early start, following the discovery of gold at Sub Nigel – allegedly the richest gold mine in existence – was not sustained. In 1902 a Health Committee was established, but prior to 1923 the town consisted of little more than a mining camp under the supervision of the Commissioner of Mines. Only in 1930 was it granted a town council.⁵⁵

In the 1904 census the white population of Boksburg totalled 1 217 (750 males, 467 females), that of Benoni and Brakpan (then grouped in one single municipality) 1 000, and that of Germiston and Springs.⁵⁶ All retained an air of impermanence, reflected in the cheap and movable wood-and-iron houses that were built, which only began to be replaced by brick built structures during World War I. All were conscious of depending on dwindling assets, either gold or coal, especially the colliery towns of Brakpan and Springs, most of whose coal mines had ceased producing by 1910, and which in the view of at least one writer, were built as potential ‘ghost towns’ from the start.⁵⁷

Social life in these settlements initially revolved around their economic mainstay – the mines. The early sports clubs which provided facilities for cricket, football, swimming, athletics and tennis were all centred on the mines. A recreation hall was built in Benoni in 1905 offering a town-based social facility, but it was not until economic recovery unambiguously set in in 1909, after a series of economic slumps, that the first sports club was established in Benoni town for townspeople proper. Social life generally centred on New Kleinfontein mine as late as 1912. The chief sources of recreation among the white townspeople of Ekurhuleni at this time were the silent cinema, starting in Benoni in 1903 and becoming a regular feature by 1911, picnicking, and, for men, massive bouts of drinking, and billiard-and-card playing in the town’s many saloons, the latter leaving Ekurhuleni’s streets and workplaces empty and sombre places on Monday mornings. Various forms of vaudeville and travelling shows accompanied or complemented silent films. In February 1909, for example, the Hoodenni Variety Company carried acts from ‘James Hoodenni the handcuff king, Pharos the Ancient magician, and Miss Lily Bateman, Chic Comedienne’, besides Professor Harvey ‘Europe’s Great Hypnotic Entertainer and Magnetic Healer’.⁵⁸

Shimwell Brothers, Germiston CBD, 1899

Basic services in the towns were rudimentary, verging on primitive. By 1913–1914 most were securing steady and cheap supplies of water from the recently formed Rand Water Board, but none boasted water-borne sewage and they were reliant instead on the ‘bucket’ system, in which pails full of faeces were removed three times a week and replaced with clean, empty buckets. Only in 1935 was Benoni provided with a water-borne sewage system and flush toilets, while a similar service came on stream in Germiston two years later in 1937, and in Boksburg and Springs at more or less the same time.⁵⁹ Reasonably cheap bulk electricity likewise came on line from Victoria Falls Power Station in World War I, but it was not until the early 1930s, when Benoni and other towns inaugurated new electricity schemes, that it became a realistic option to purchase a variety of electrical appliances. At that point electrical refrigerators and stoves began to appear for the first time in Ekurhuleni stores. As Benoni City Times editorialised in April 1933, ‘Everybody is talking electricity’.⁶⁰

Springs, 1909

Motor cars also made their first significant appearance on Ekurhuleni streets after the end of the recession of 1908. The first two motor licences were issued by Benoni municipality in March 1910. By 1911 the scale of motoring had grown to such an extent that the town imposed a speed limit of 12 miles (19 km) an hour which was raised to 15 miles (24 km) per hour in 1915. Macadamised roads were first laid down only in 1924. Ekurhuleni’s white population responded with vigour to the new facilities they enjoyed. Cars allowed people to live further from work and the first of a new series of middle-class suburbs were built. By 1934, in addition, Benoni boasted the highest recorded motor car accident rate in the world. In 1924, 527 cars were registered in Benoni (climbing to 3 495 in 1934). In 1925 Ford Motor Company proclaimed in bold letters in newspaper advertisements to an agog public, ‘And now colours!’ New purchases were no longer restricted to the single colour – black.⁶¹

Ekurhuleni was settling down. As the new suburbs were laid out, the new houses were built more solidly and permanently of stone and brick. The year 1917 was the first time, for example, that Benoni’s Town Council received no planning applications to build structures of wood and iron.⁶² Ekurhuleni’s towns and their populations were also becoming increasingly anchored by new industrial development and were not entirely dependent for their life blood on the wasting assets of the mines. In 1917 Germiston became the first municipality in South Africa to lay out its own industrial townships. In 1921 the Rand Gold Refinery set up home there and was soon producing three-quarters of the refined gold in the world. Before long, clothing and other factories mushroomed in the town’s industrial quarter.⁶³ In Benoni, iron and steel and other industries also took root in World War I, after the Benoni Council had adopted the policy of actively courting industrial development in 1917.⁶⁴ This, however, would never really take off there and in the other Far East Rand towns until the outbreak of World War II.

Lifestyle changes of all sorts also occurred in the 1910s and 1920s. In the course of World War I a fresh surge of Afrikaner immigration swept into Ekurhuleni (see next section). Many of these were poor whites. This was accompanied by a major shift in the patterns of whites’ worship and church-going. Up until that point churches had been upper and middle class in character. Now Pentecostal churches made their first appearances and then made major inroads into the old churches’ congregations, appealing especially to poor whites. By 1929, 25 such churches existed in Benoni alone.

In the mid-1920s gramophones became popular while vaudeville disappeared as the ‘talkies’ replaced silent films. In a partly unobserved and certainly unobtrusive manner, entertainment became more private, moving out of the public domain and into the home. For reasons which remain unclear dress patterns also became more liberal and liberated. Skirts became shorter, and men’s shorts became fashionable for the first time in the late 1920s, copied, it was said, from the Rhodesians. Lastly Benoni acquired (why Benoni one must ask?) the first of two screen goddesses to grace the Hollywood stage, in this case Molly Lamont, who hit the big time in the early 1930s (after winning a competition run by Outspan oranges).⁶⁵ The better-known and more recent celebrity of this kind that hailed from Benoni, is of course, Charlize Theron, subsequently upstaged by another interloper from Benoni, Charlene Wittstock, who married Prince Albert of Monaco in 2011.