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CHAPTER ONE

Protests before 1976

The time from the early 1950s up to 1963 was one of protest politics in Kroonstad. First, women protested against the extension of passes to include African women. Towards the end of the 1950s, the black residents – seemingly influenced by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) – protested against the municipality’s oppressive laws.

Before this time (apart from the period when the residents rallied, first behind the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union [ICU] and later, in the mid-1930s, the Registered and Ratepayers Association), black people in the locations avoided engaging in protests and confrontational politics. The reason for this, and for the intermittent existence of black radical and confrontational politics in Kroonstad, was the restrained approach adopted by the branch of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, in 1923 renamed the African National Congress) in Kroonstad. The role played by moderate bodies such as the Native Advisory Board (NAB) and the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives (JCEN) helped to contain radical politics in the locations. Most of the residents in the old locations sincerely believed that their continued support for these bodies would yield positive results for them. But it was not to be.

The situation was made worse by the Orange Free State African Teachers Association (OFSATA) and the Society of Young Africa (SOYA). Although these bodies did not shy away from challenging the government and expressing their radical views, they nevertheless were overly cautious about not involving themselves in protest action. It did not help that their memberships, especially OFSATA’s, were composed of teachers, the educated elite, who would rather discuss and negotiate matters of concern with the relevant authorities than protest. To compound the situation, after the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953 it became illegal for any teacher to publicly oppose the government. SOYA, more so than OFSATA, did not subscribe to confrontational politics but believed in generating ideas to oppose the government. In her autobiography, Phyllis Ntantala noted that SOYA’s slogan was ‘We fight ideas with ideas’.¹

Establishment of Kroonstad and the formation of black locations

In March 1855, The Friend, a regional newspaper in the Orange Free State (OFS), reported a sale of erven (land) in the village of Klip Plaat Drift, Valsch River, in the district of Windburg. Joseph Orpen, the landdros (magistrate) of Windburg and the government land surveyor, later named this place Kroonstad. In her book commissioned to document the 130th anniversary of Kroonstad, Dot Serfontein claims that although the first inhabitants were whites, by the 1880s natives had also begun to settle in the area. Drawing from oral tradition, Tsiu Vincent Matsepe noted that the Thlapane family, from his maternal side, were among the first African families to settle in Kroonstad. Others included the Maraba, M’Baco, Nothibi, Bukes, Buffel and Mareka families. Initially, these families lived in what is today the town centre, between the river and the old jail,where they had established a settlement called ‘A’ Location. However, after numerous complaints by whites living in the same area about interracial relationships between white men and black women, and the spread of influenza, the Kroonstad Town Council had, by 1925, decided to resettle all the black people to the north of the town, in their own locations.²

There is no evidence to suggest that the removals incited protest among the black residents – but this was not peculiar to Kroonstad. As far back as 1905, when black people were being removed from what the white authorities perceived as inner-city slums in Johannesburg to their own areas on the outskirts of the city, black people did not protest.³ Although the residents of Kroonstad’s old ‘A’ Location ‘objected to the small premises, transfer costs and visitors’ permits to be issued in the new location’,⁴ they finally moved, and undoubtedly the absence of a radical political body to rally them against the removals made it easier for the council to implement its plan.

On arrival in their new premises they built their houses and called their settlement ‘A’ Location. It was still within walking distance to town, so the residents did not incur the extra costs of travelling there. Jonah Moeng Setiloane, who was born in 1920 in Kroonstad, recalls that ‘A’ Location was made up of a mixture of Basotho and coloured people. Over the years the population grew and another location was built; it was called ‘B’ Location (also known by collective memory as Marabastad after Jan Maraba, one of the first to settle in Kroonstad). As did ‘A’ Location, this location accommodated Basotho and coloureds, but also isiXhosa-speaking and Setswana-speaking groups. Hilda Mantho Motadinyane, who was born in 1927 in that location, recalls that her father came from Ga-Motlatla, Ventersdorp, and her mother from Serowe in Botswana. The majority of black people who had landed up in Kroonstad were in search of employment (William Setiloane, Jonah’s father, who had moved from Allanridge, about eighty kilometres from Kroonstad, was employed by the railway). Most people, both black and white, were pushed off the farms to the towns by ‘low incomes and low profit margins; high land prices and high rates of crop and stock failure; falling prices and slow turnovers ...’⁵

In the early 1930s another settlement, ‘D’ Location, was built to accommodate black people who were drifting in from the surrounding farms. In his book The History of Black Education in Maokeng, Kroonstad, Jonah Setiloane described this area as a settlement of people who were not originally inhabitants of Kroonstad. ‘Most of them,’ he writes, ‘were squatters who settled here in search of employment. They originated from the neighbouring farming districts.’⁶ According to the historians Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien, the majority of black people left the farms because of the drought which had begun after 1927 and reached its peak in 1932–34.⁷ Because of it many farmers abandoned their farms, and those who remained laid off black labour tenants in their thousands. Many of the tenants left the land and headed for the towns. Kroonstad received its fair share of the new arrivals.

In most cases the new arrivals, particularly those who lacked money – or cattle to sell for money – could not build their own houses. Some of these people did not intend to settle in Kroonstad permanently and found accommodation as tenants in the yards of stand-owners in the locations. Phyllis Ntantala, who arrived in Kroonstad in 1937 to take up a teaching post at the Bantu United School, first boarded with Mrs Monyake in ‘B’ Location, and later moved in with Mr and Mrs Binda in ‘D’ Location. Leboseng Violet Selele, who was born in 1933 in ‘A’ Location, remembered in an interview that her father, John Mphikeleli Maseko, who had businesses in the location, also rented out accommodation to tenants: ‘Our house was number 185 ‘A’ Location ... We had a very big yard, so we had many people renting rooms in our yard.’ When ‘model’ townships were established in the 1950s, tenants and older children of the stand-owners were among the first to move into the new houses.

Perhaps the most distinguished arrivals in Kroonstad’s black locations were teachers. As in many places across the country where black people had settled, schooling was initially offered by the churches, but by 1929 the various non-Catholic schools in Kroonstad had merged to form the Bantu United School. By 1940 Reginald Ndumiso Cingo, who had taken over the principalship of the school in 1932 from Joe Kokozela, had turned the school into one of the major centres of education for African students in the then Orange Free State. It was one of the two African day schools to offer matric as early as 1940 (the other was Sehunelo in Bloemfontein), the only African school to offer a lower primary teachers’ course for girls in the mid-1950s,⁸ and the only African school whose matriculants wrote the Joint Matriculation Board examination in the mid-1960s instead of the Bantu Education senior certificate examination.

From the onset, Cingo, the longest-serving principal of the school, identified and employed some of the best-qualified teachers in the country, a number of whom came from the Cape Province and were isiXhosa-speaking. Among the most notable was Cingo himself, who was born in eFundisweni, Pondoland. Others were Dorrington Matsepe, who was born in Douglas, Cape Province, in 1906 and joined the staff of Bantu United in 1931. Timothy Alphy Makae from the district of Mount Fletcher, Cape Province, was employed at around the same period as Matsepe. And Archibald Campbell (AC) Jordan, who was born in the Tsolo district of the Transkei, began teaching at Bantu United in 1935, whereas Phyllis Ntantala (later to be Jordan’s wife), who was born at the Duff Mission in the district of Idutywa, Cape Province, joined the staff two years later.

This section of the community was further augmented by the arrival of ministers of churches and their families. Various churches were established, representing a number of denominations: Methodist, Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Ethiopian, Apostle Methodist Episcopal, Roman Catholic and a few traditional churches. The most illustrious among the church ministers to settle in Kroonstad before the 1960s was the Reverend Zaccheus Richard (ZR) Mahabane,⁹ born in 1881 in Thaba ’Nchu. There is no certainty as to when he arrived in Kroonstad but he was already there in 1938. The population of Kroonstad’s black locations increased, and Serfontein estimates that in 1946 there were 10 333 blacks: 9 733 natives and 600 coloureds.¹⁰

Because of the numerous churches in Kroonstad’s black locations, church activities became a significant part of the residents’ lives. According to Setiloane, ‘blacks attended weddings, parties, christenings and funerals, and enjoyed concerts at the various church buildings ...’¹¹ In an interview, Jonah Setiloane related that he grew up in a very religious family where children were expected to attend church regularly:

You know, every day in the evening we had to pray. ‘Our Heavenly Father’ in Setswana. After praying we’d then go to sleep. During the week we attended church. We used to say we’re going to ‘class’. Our church was Methodist. On Sunday we went to church. And after the service we were supposed to come home and inform our mother about the service and who was preaching.

Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, who was born in 1948, recalls that in his teen years church became the centre of his life:

Church [was] engraved in us. You go to Sunday school on Sunday. And you would go to what was called Band of Hope, which is a younger children’s organisation where we [were] taught about the evils of alcohol. And on Tuesday we must go to another church event in the Methodist church, which is called ‘class’. On Wednesday, if you go to a Methodist church you would go to an event called ‘prayer’. It was church, church, church. That is the kind of environment that [we were] brought up under.

The last residential area to be built before the 1950s, when the National Party (NP) government established ‘model’ townships, was ‘C’ Location (or Cairo). This settlement was designated for the Kroonstad coloured community, which, in the 1930s, was on a steady rise. Miscegenation seemed to be the main cause. Matsepe recalls that his grandfather Jonah Thlapane married a white woman, Miss Pretorius, and they had coloured children. One of their children was Malithuli Violet Thlapane, who was later to marry an African man, Singaphe Dorrington Matsepe – Tsiu Vincent Matsepe’s father. Similarly, Hilda Mantho Motadinyane related that her grandmother was married to a white man and they lived in ‘A’ Location.

The creation of the coloured-only settlements was as a result of the compromise reached between the central government’s Native Affairs Commission and the OFS municipalities which had initially rejected the Native Urban Areas Bill of 1918 because they suspected that it would revoke the provincial and municipal legal restrictions on urban segregation, thereby giving coloureds equal legal status with white people.¹² The establishment of Cairo seems also to have been intended to create divisions within the coloured community itself: between the real kleurling (coloured) and ‘other coloureds’. In an interview, Anthony Bouwer explained: ‘[In] the area we knew as Cairo there was this thing that those who lived [in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ locations] were not coloured and those who lived in Cairo were the real kleurling.’ Because of the closely knit relations that have developed over the years between Africans and coloureds in Kroonstad, the divisions between these groups were never really entrenched. This trend continued through to the 1970s. ‘As the process of building Brentpark and removals from the location moved at a slow pace, the constant to and fro between the areas (old locations and Brentpark) continued into the 1970s, resulting in the maintenance of community connections.’¹³

Even after the coloured school had been established, following the approval of its application in 1933,¹⁴ the town council was not as rigid in enforcing the segregation policy as it would be in the latter half of the 1950s, and African children were allowed to attend there. Mpopetsi Dhlamini, who was born in 1945 and started at the coloured school probably between the ages of six and seven, remembers that his parents sent him there, together with his brother, because they believed that with a solid foundation in Afrikaans their children’s chances of finding employment, particularly in the OFS, would be better. The main reason the council adopted a flexible position was that the establishment of the coloured school was requested by the Coloured Advisory Board in 1932.¹⁵ It was after the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953 that the council enforced the segregation law in schools. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe explains:

My father teaches with my mother at Maokeng Bantu Primary School. Then a law comes that says coloureds must be separated from Africans. When that law came into operation my mother had to stop to teach at that school because she was classified coloured. My father is an African.

Before the latter half of the mid-1950s, the law intended to divide different racial groups was not rigid. At this stage coloureds were not obliged to relocate to their new location, Cairo, and those who moved did so voluntarily. Violet Matsepe worked in Cairo but continued to live in ‘A’ Location with her family. Other coloureds, like Ariel Bouwer, did not even move to Cairo.

Just like the coloureds who lived cordially with Africans in the locations, so did the different black groups. Basotho culture, however, dominated, and people from the other groups were forced to learn Sesotho. The trend continues even today. Parkies Setiloane, who was born in 1927 in ‘B’ Location, recalled that his parents were Batswana but he learned Sesotho at school. Similarly, Ntantala, who was originally isiXhosa-speaking, remembered that while teaching in Kroonstad she was forced to learn to speak Sesotho and that her daughter Nandi, whose minder spoke Sesotho and could not speak English, instilled the Sesotho culture in her as well. She writes: ‘Nandi would proudly tell people: Ke MoSotho nna! Ake mo-Qhosa (I am Sotho; I am not Xhosa).’¹⁶ The influence of Sesotho can be attributed to the large number of Basotho from Basotholand (now Lesotho) who settled in Kroonstad. In the 1990s the prevalence of Sesotho in Kroonstad would play a vital role in mitigating against ethnic conflict which, in the Witwatersrand (the Rand), was used to foment political violence.

In 1948 the NP came to power on the policy of apartheid (or ‘separate development’). The Nationalists’ main support came from Afrikaner farmers who feared that the uncontrolled rapid movement of Africans to the cities and towns was affecting their business. They could no longer manage to retain African labourers, who preferred to seek employment in the mines or in the manufacturing sector, which was growing rapidly owing to the Second World War. These two sectors paid better than did the farmers. ‘Once they came into power, the new government immediately set out to regulate the tide of uncontrolled black urbanisation.’¹⁷ The government imposed stricter pass laws which would curtail African labourers’ easy move to the towns and cities; cleared black freehold townships and other areas of black settlement in the inner city and peri-urban areas; and established tighter control over the municipal locations which it had intended to be the sole place of residence of urban Africans. Two years after the government had assumed power, it promulgated the Group Areas Act ‘designed to allocate separate residential areas to Africans, coloureds, Indians and whites’.

In Kroonstad this resulted in the establishment of the ‘model’ townships of Seeisoville,¹⁸ built in 1958, and Phomolong (also known as Vuka ’Zenzele, ‘Wake up and do it yourself’, in isiZulu) in 1960. Brentpark, named after Superintendent Brent, was constructed in 1957 for coloureds. ‘[Model townships] were designed to maximise control over the African population ... their grid layout controlled access points and master-lights aimed to ensure effective state surveillance.’¹⁹ It was this maximum control and constant police harassment that caused the African residents of Kroonstad to take to the streets in 1959, protesting against the municipal police’s incessant raids on the houses known to be brewing beer.

Black people’s survival mechanisms and restlessness

Life in Kroonstad’s black locations was a mixed bag. For those who were employed it was less taxing than for those who were not. Professionals such as teachers, for example, who descended on Kroonstad to teach at Bantu United School (in the 1940s renamed Bantu High School) were relatively well off. For example, Ntantala described how AC Jordan had bought a house in ‘B’ Location and tore it down to rebuild it into a five-roomed modern house. Similarly, Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, whose parents were teachers, recalled that his house was big: ‘We had a house that had a dining room, a living room, kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom for the boys, a bedroom for the girls, and a bedroom for my parents.’ Some of the non-professional residents (but employed on the railway plant) could also afford big and attractive houses. In an interview, Jonah Setiloane recalled that his parents had built a five-roomed house and two additional rooms outside. Those who were less fortunate lived in houses mostly built with mud bricks or corrugated iron sheets.

For the majority of residents life was not easy. Those who were not employed in the professions as teachers or church ministers found employment at the South African Railways plant, at the Milling Company, at shops in town, on the roads and in the neighbouring farms. But most of the women were either housewives or were employed as domestic workers. For example, Lucy Mosele Taje, who was born in 1919 in April’s Kraal Farm in Kwakwatsi (Koppies), arrived in Kroonstad during ntwa ya Hitler (Adolf Hitler’s war, or the Second World War) and worked in the ‘kitchens’ (domestic work) for the greater part of her life.²⁰ Jonah Setiloane, who lived in Kroonstad during this period observed that domestic workers ‘earned a mere pittance’.

In dire circumstances, some of the young people of school-going age felt obliged to take up part-time work in town to supplement their parents’ income. Many, like Jonah Setiloane, became caddies at the golf course.

I started to be caddy when I was about thirteen years old. I had to because the situation was bad really. I had to do that in order to help out at home by buying food. Initially my mother would hint at me saying, ‘Basimani ke bale ba dira [Other young boys are working]’. I also joined them. It was common among youngsters to do that.

This nearly cost him his studies.

That’s how I started bunking school. My parents would think I was at school; meanwhile I was at the golf course. I used to caddy even during the week because the caddy master, Siebert, used to send me to town to buy him fish and other goodies. We sometimes earned about ten cents or twenty cents. Then I’ll take that money and give it to mother at home. She would then use it to buy meat.

Some of the families survived through farming – although on a very small scale. From oral evidence it appears that a significant number of families before the 1950s could keep their livestock (on which many depended to supplement their incomes) in the locations. Marubene Lydia Mokwena remembered that her parents had three horses, sheep, chickens and turkeys. From the chickens they were able to get a lot of eggs, she recalled. And Jonah Setiloane recalled that his father had a cow from which they could get milk so that his father, the sole breadwinner in the family, could use his earnings for other things such as their education. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, who in the 1950s was still a teenager, remembered that his grandfather, who owned cattle, sold milk to survive. In the late 1950s, the municipality introduced regulations drastically reducing the number of cattle the location residents were permitted to keep, and some whom I interviewed claimed that they were allowed to keep only four cows. Others said two. For Lebone Holomo, who was born in Kroonstad in 1949, the cattle restriction impoverished people ‘because we were dependent on all that for milk’. Isaac ‘Sakkie’ Oliphant eloquently described the devastating effect:

Where the [Boitumelo] hospital is situated was a cattle camp. It was where we herded cattle. As a little boy we had ten cows at home and they have just cut the number, telling us that we could not have more than that. The old man used to have a cattle-drawn vehicle. He used to transport heavy things. The stone buildings that you see in town, he used to go fetch stones ... And they [he and his son] would shape those stones and thereafter used them to build those buildings. I don’t know how many other people were doing the same thing but he was one of the key players there. When they realised that people are benefitting well with these cattle, because cows were feeding us, we got meat and they were working for us, they started cutting down on the number of stock. At home we were left only with cows that we used for milk. The ones that were used for the cattle-drawn vehicle were no longer available. I was looking after ten cows and later on they went down to two. I remember my father died. I was six. Many fathers died at that time. I don’t know if it was because of heart attack but they died.

This incident left an indelible mark on the memories of many young people. Years later, in the interviews for my doctoral thesis, they were to invoke it as one of the factors that influenced them to become involved in the struggle for liberation. Holomo recalled that when growing up he would overhear older people complaining about the cattle limitation and connecting it to land dispossession.

Stock limitation was not peculiar to Kroonstad. It was actually being implemented in many other areas across the country. The political scientist Tom Lodge has argued that this was the NP government’s way of forcing black people to work on the farms.²¹ The industrialisation of the 1940s, stimulated by the war, had created an imbalance in the supply of labour to the agricultural sector because farmers were unable to offer wages to compete with the manufacturing sector. The abundance of stock that had, over the years, cushioned the majority of residents in the locations from pinching economic hardship was finally destroyed.

Kroonstad, unlike the Vaal Triangle and East London, had a limited industrial sector to absorb the increasing number of work-seekers. It was only from 1951 that talk began of seriously looking into expanding the town’s industry, when a local businessman told the Northern Times that the town council would have to provide new industrial sites very soon if prospective industries were to be attracted.²² The situation looked bleak, particularly for the unemployed. To survive, many engaged in trading despite the fact that this was deemed illegal. The Kroonstad Town Council refused to grant blacks trading rights, using the authority of the Urban Areas Amendment Act No. 25 of 1930, which stipulated:

Any urban local authority which has under its administration and control a location or native village – (a) may, and, if so directed by the Minister after consultation with the Administrator and after due enquiry at which the urban local authority shall be entitled to be heard, shall, on such condition as he may prescribe in the absence of approved regulations framed under paragraph (g) of sub-section (3) of section twenty-three, let sites within the location of native village for trading or business purposes.²³

The council’s position was that it would make a definitive decision only after the sitting of the Native Trading Rights Inquiry on 5 September 1932. By January 1933 the government had still not made a decision about native trading rights, as was evident from a letter addressed to JD Rheinallt-Jones, one of the founders of the joint council system, by BW Shepherd from Lovedale in the Cape, asking about the outcome of the inquiry. The government does not seem to have been convinced by the Kroonstad Joint Council of Europeans and Natives’ representations on the subject, and as a result the town council refused to grant trading rights to blacks, who continued to trade illegally. A number were arrested and fined, providing funds for the council’s native revenue account. In June 1931, for example, seventeen-year-old John Moseka was arrested in ‘B’ Location and charged with hawking and peddling unlawfully. He was found guilty and fined £5 or one month’s hard labour. In the same year, Sam Kaulane, a ‘native sergeant’ in the South African Police, testified in court that he had arrested a man trading illegally in the location. He told the court:

On the 20 June 1931 I found accused in ‘D’ Location, in Kroonstad, pushing a handcart, shouting ‘goods for sale’. I saw him stop in front of hut No. 193 and selling some two packets of mealie meal, which he took from his cart. Accused had no licence of any kind.²⁴

The failure by the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives to represent adequately the black people’s interests in trading rights (and the unabating arrest of black traders in Kroonstad) caused Father Martin Knight of the St Francis Priory and a member of the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives to address a letter to Mr Saffery, the secretary of the council, in March 1935. It lamented that the council’s inquiry into Free State trading rights ‘met here when it was too late’ and he recommended that in future the council should establish central committees in each area to deal with matters of local rather than national importance.²⁵

Not all black traders were unfortunate. Some managed to engage in business without detection by the police. Lydia Malehlohonolo Mphosi is one of them. She was born in 1918 at Heuningspruit, a farming area in the Kroonstad district, and came to Kroonstad in 1942. She did not attend school, but instead conducted a vegetable business. Mokete Pherudi, in Who’s Who in Maokeng, points out: ‘At the time, no family in Maokeng slept without food because Mrs Mphosi was not only selling cheap but was also providing credit for weekend and month-end collection.’

The refusal to grant blacks trading rights continued until after the Second World War. In 1947–48 ‘the [Native Affairs] Committee in Kroonstad recommended that Abel Mathike, Sam Kuolane [possibly Kaulane], David Chakane, Nicodemus Ntanga and Gilbert Mayeza [possibly Mateza] be permitted to trade as butchers in the location ...’²⁶

Simon Mateza, who was born in Marabastad in 1931, remembers that his father, Gilbert Mateza, opened his vegetable business during this period. ‘I went up to Standard 5. Thereafter, I went to help my father because as he was working, he also used to own a shop. We had some donkeys and a cart, which we used to collect some vegetables from the market, and sold them around the location.’ With the relaxation of the trading laws, Mateza senior went on to establish his first formal business. But trading was still heavily restricted.

... it used to be difficult during those times for a black person to start a business. We used to have something that resembled a shop at our house. So, the law was that we were only allowed to open very early in the morning before people went to work, so that they could buy some sugar and some coffee. After that you had to close for the rest of the day and only open at five when people returned from work.

Simon Mateza continued trading after his father died (in 1951).

But during that time I already had an idea [about running a business]. I later opened something like a barbershop, where I was cutting people’s hair. I ran that shop even though I was not making enough money ... I did some piece jobs, and also transported people around the location. I did that until I had a car of my own. I would transport them to the farms. I went to rent a shop in Marabastad. We started by selling food in the bar, me and my partner by the name of Mkhoane. When Mkhoane and I separated, I decided to open my own [business] in Phomolong, where I was renting a place. In 1963 I found my own stand and built a shop, which I named Langa Cash Store. That was my breakthrough. Business was doing well. Shops like Pick n Pay and Shoprite were not there yet. Shops which were there used to close at five in the afternoon. And in town no shops operated on weekends and during holidays, as well. That was a good chance for us to sell and make good money.

Women who were not employed, like Moses Masizane’s grandmother, the owner of ‘Khambule’s Place’, survived by selling home-made beer. ‘Beer brewing was a pervasive feature of location life ... women monopolised the brewing of beer and it was often their major source of income.’²⁷ Most black women who settled in the urban areas in the 1930s survived through the brewing trade although the white authorities deemed it illegal. To curb it, the government, through the Native (Urban Areas) Act No. 13 of 1928, prohibited the supply or delivery of any liquor to Africans²⁸ and ruled that Africans seeking to purchase liquor should do so from beer halls created by the municipalities. As the Witwatersrand municipalities had done, the white authorities in Kroonstad also enforced a total ban on the purchase and consumption of liquor by its African population. The police constantly raided householders suspected of trading in home-brewed beer, and the women brewing and selling it devised measures to avoid police raids. Historians Bonner and Nieftagodien note that some used ‘watchmen’ (usually their children), who stood on corners to spot the police. ‘When the police came by on their bicycles, the watchmen would signal by saying, “It is red” or by walking away quickly from their spots.’²⁹ Others hid their stock so that the police could not find it, while some bribed the police by allowing them to drink beer without paying.

In a miscalculated move to resolve the illegal trading of home-brewed beer, in 1935 the Kroonstad Native Advisory Board passed a resolution that licensed ‘kaffir’ beer should be placed under municipal control. The resolution prompted agitation in the locations. Keable ’Mote, a leading figure in the ICU in the town, demanded the resignation of the board, which had been set up in the 1920s ‘to serve as [a mechanism] of liaison between location residents and the authorities’.³⁰ The women continued to trade, and the police increased their raids.

In spite of all the hardships that the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations had to endure, they refrained from protesting, except on a few occasions.

Black political formations and protests

In 1912 the SANNC was formed in Bloemfontein to unite, mobilise and represent African interests following the passing of the 1910 whites-only South Africa Act of Union, which withheld the franchise from all Africans outside the Cape. Three years later, its branch in Kroonstad hosted the organisation’s fourth meeting.³¹ The SANNC branch in Kroonstad was neither militant nor radical, but Kroonstad offered a convenient meeting place, midway between Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Natal and the Cape on the main line.³²

The docility of the SANNC’s Kroonstad branch is unsurprising. During the initial stages of its existence, the SANNC’s national leadership was also restrained in its approach. It hoped that by pleading and petitioning the British Crown, the latter would intervene on behalf of the African people in South Africa. ‘African leaders,’ Lodge writes, ‘were keen to demonstrate their loyalty for the duration of the First World War.’³³ On the other hand, the SANNC leadership’s preoccupation with the Land Act of 1913 shifted its focus on directing and shaping agitation at the local level. In Kroonstad, one of the leading figures in the SANNC, Reverend Pitso, was an energetic member of the committee, headed by RW Msimang, which was tasked with ratifying the constitution of the SANNC.³⁴ The reason for the inactivity of the SANNC’s branch in Kroonstad is its failure to become involved in the day-to-day hardships experienced by the residents of the locations – but other branches of the SANNC in the OFS did not operate with the same restraint. In 1920, in Springfontein, for instance, the branch of the SANNC supported the women’s anti-pass campaign.³⁵ Similarly, in Thaba ’Nchu the SANNC branch discussed the Land Act, passes for women, education, hostels for domestic workers and the state’s replacement of black rail workers and interpreters by ‘poor whites’. Because of this the support for this branch grew.³⁶ But the SANNC branch in Kroonstad, taking its cue from the national leadership’s modus operandi¸ failed to mobilise the black residents to resist the removals from their initial settlement in town and by 1920 this branch had ceased to function. Various attempts were made to revive it, but without success. For example, in 1936 Simon Ndlovu, Keable ’Mote and Sol Ngaonabase were reported to be attempting to revive the ANC in Kroonstad,³⁷ and again in 1938 the president-general of the ANC, the Reverend ZR Mahabane, pressurised ’Mote, ‘who was now provincial secretary of the All African Convention (AAC) in the OFS, to establish the branch of the ANC in Kroonstad’.³⁸ Perhaps the promulgation of the Riotous Assemblies (Amendment) Act in 1930 (following acts of radicalism and protests spearheaded by African women in the 1920s) contributed to the failure to revive the ANC in Kroonstad.

The inertia of the Kroonstad branch can also be attributed to the internal problems which had besieged the ANC in the 1920s, ranging from some members’ heightened disillusionment with the politics of diplomatic persuasion and the changing of leadership from the militant Josiah Gumede to the ageing Pixley ka Isaka Seme in 1930, and to the not-so-radical Reverend Mahabane. In Kroonstad, the ANC’s politics were to remain moribund until the mid-1950s, when the Women’s League revived them. It was against this background that the ICU briefly filled the political vacuum left by the ANC.

The ICU and radical protests in Kroonstad

The ICU initially organised workers, particularly farm workers, fighting on their behalf for better wages and working conditions, but gradually shifted its activities towards politics and became ‘a workers’ organisation but function[ing] as a mass-based political party because its charismatic leaders voiced a broad range of popular grievances’.³⁹ In a country where blacks were treated unjustly because of the government’s segregation laws, it was inevitable that ‘the pronouncement and actions of the ICU and its leaders took on an increasingly political colour’.⁴⁰

Available evidence suggests that there were few ICU branches in the OFS towns (particularly in the northern OFS) which could match the ICU branch in Kroonstad. Besides taking up labour issues (such as when Joe Kokozela, the principal at Bantu United School, together with William Ballinger, met with the district union farmers and recommended that a farm worker should be afforded ‘three pounds a month, a house, and good food for a male adult with a small family, with five pounds if there were more than two children’),⁴¹ the ICU branch in Kroonstad also involved itself in the affairs of the locations. In 1928 the mayor of Kroonstad accused the ICU of being instrumental in advising stand-holders not to pay their taxes (rent charges).

The Afrikaans media and some of the members of the Native Advisory Board in Kroonstad blamed Keable ’Mote, the secretary of the ICU in the OFS, as the prime instigator. The Northern Times, a local newspaper, reported that in 1927 ’Mote and his supporters (presumably within the ICU) discredited the Native Advisory Board and encouraged the residents to refuse to pay tax and rent to the council – which responded by threatening to evict residents in arrears. This raised the ire of the residents. In her seminal work on the ICU, Helen Bradford argues that in fact it was not ’Mote who incited the rent boycott but the ICU Women’s Section, which was defending its members’ middle-class status: ‘[T]he Kroonstad ICU Women’s Section leaders were distinguished from those forced into the labour-market by possession of a house, and hence ability to draw rent from lodgers.’⁴²

It has been noted above that from the 1920s a significant number of black people were moving to Kroonstad in search of employment and somewhere to stay. The new arrivals included a sizeable number of women. In 1923 General Jan Smuts’s government – despite resistance by some municipalities in the OFS – passed the Natives Urban Areas Act which stopped black women from carrying passes and effectively removed all restrictions on women entering urban areas. However, the 1930s was not a good time to enter the urban areas, especially Kroonstad, as the NP government which came to power in 1929 did everything possible to provide job opportunities for ‘poor whites’ at the expense of blacks. Because of this, and the already limited job opportunities in Kroonstad, black workers found themselves either out of work or forced to settle for meagre pay and it was impossible for tenants to pay their accommodation fee regularly. Others, particularly those who were forced out of work to be replaced by poor whites, probably could not even pay their rent. This affected the stand-owners’ livelihoods. When the town council hiked rent charges, the women, some of whom depended solely on the tenants’ rental (and sometimes on the sale of home-brewed beer), rallied and refused to pay, and by the time ’Mote was arrested for supporting the boycott, the residents owed the council £4 000. This protest prompted the town council to begin to take note of the ICU’s presence in the area.

In 1928, serious tensions had developed between the ICU founder, Nyasaland-born Clements Kadalie, and ’Mote. There is no available evidence to explain the exact reason for this tension, but it is possible that after his trip overseas Kadalie, as the leader of the union, felt that ’Mote was becoming too radical. Kadalie favoured a moderate approach.⁴³ This was evident when, during the ICU’s fight against the Kroonstad Town Council for threatening to evict the rent defaulters, Kadalie (and other local leading figures in the ICU) failed to come to ’Mote’s defence,⁴⁴ instead distancing himself and the national council of the ICU from ’Mote and insisting that he was away in Europe at the time and therefore could not be associated with ’Mote’s actions. Kadalie’s changed position had a great deal to do with his fear of being deported to Nyasaland.

When ’Mote advocated the replacement of the Native Advisory Board with a new association, after concluding that the body was not advancing the residents’ interests, his proposal was hotly challenged. In a letter to the Kroonstad Times, MM Tladi, a schoolteacher at Bantu United, accused ’Mote of deception. He argued that ’Mote had informed the newspaper that an association was to be formed which would get rid of the Native Advisory Board, and said he had interviewed the teachers and ministers of the church whom ’Mote claimed to have mobilised and who said they knew nothing about the imminent association. In addition, Tladi accused ’Mote of being deceptive because he had encouraged the residents to continue with the protest and promised he would settle the deficit owed to the council. He concluded his letter by asking ’Mote: ‘Where is the £4 000 promised to wipe out the deficit?’ The story did not end there. Soon rumours that ’Mote was embezzling ICU funds began making the rounds. To contain him, in 1928 the union decided to transfer him to the Transvaal. In response, ’Mote threatened to secede from the ICU. But after negotiations he reconsidered. He later hit back by associating himself and the ICU in the OFS with the campaign organised by the Communist Party of South Africa to burn passes on Dingaan’s Day, 16 December 1929.

Kadalie, who by then had made a deal with the government that he would not be deported, openly opposed the campaign. This put the final nail in the coffin of the relationship between the ICU and its OFS branch. By this point there were serious tensions and differences within the ICU’s national leadership. In April 1931, ’Mote convened a conference in Kroonstad of ICU branches in the OFS and the Western Transvaal. At the meeting fifty-seven delegates formed the Federated Free State ICU of Africa and elected Selby Msimang president and ’Mote secretary. However, this new organisation was stillborn, and in 1934 the ICU branch in Kroonstad ceased to function on the farms and in the location which had once led Kadalie to boast that ‘the ICU have never failed in Kroonstad’.⁴⁵

The conflicts within and finally the demise of the ICU in Kroonstad not only paved the way for native advisory boards (and other moderate bodies) to function without any hindrance, but also arrested vibrant political engagement in the locations for the next two decades.

‘Moderate’ bodies in Kroonstad

In response to the growing schism between urban blacks and whites, particularly the officials in various towns, which were reflected in widespread protests, the government, through the Native Affairs Department, recommended the creation of advisory boards instituted through the Urban Areas Act of 1923 to encourage harmonious cooperation between urban Africans and local officials. However, the boards had no real power. Nieftagodien contends: ‘... they were explicitly denied any real power and their overall functions were limited to an advisory capacity and local authorities were neither obliged to consult the advisory boards nor to take into account any recommendations by them’.⁴⁶

More worrying was the fact that the boards ‘tended to be drawn from the members of the petty-bourgeoisie, the teachers and semi-literate’. Board members had to be upstanding members of the community, ‘free of rental arrears’ – in short, exemplary people in the community who ‘did not agitate for radical change’.⁴⁷ In Kroonstad, for example, the board was composed essentially of teachers – which is hardly surprising, because from the late 1920s Kroonstad had become one of the important centres of black education in the country. Some of the members of the Native Advisory Board in Kroonstad were Manes, Pitso, Makhetha, Damane, Dingalo, Molete, Modise, Tladi (the complainant against ’Mote, above) and Lekhetha, but despite their educational background and standing in the community they not only failed to influence the town council but also condoned some of its unpopular decisions, thus further denting the board’s credibility in the eyes of black residents.

Although teachers were not prohibited from becoming members of political organisations or participating in the activities of organisations associated with opposition politics, the government took exception to their political involvement. Participation in opposition politics could lead to outright dismissal. Elias Maliza, for instance, was dismissed because of his active membership in the ICU.⁴⁸ But it was the case of Abiel Thabo Seele that probably caused teachers in the OFS, especially Kroonstad, to be particularly cautious. Seele, a teacher at Heilbron United Native School, was humiliated by the Department of Native Education, which demanded he write a letter giving reasons why the department should not dismiss him after he addressed a meeting of the ICU on 1 November 1936. In his reply, Seele, who was not a member of the ICU, wrote, in part:

In the first place may I sincerely apologise for having participated at all – this error was done in ignorance. To relate ... circumstances attending this participation may I mention that on this day while proceeding from church I was requested by the officials of the said movement to assist them in interpretation – to this request I readily acceded because there be no one efficient for the purpose. At the end of the meeting I was asked to say a few words ... I had not the least desire or motive of creating a spirit of ill-feeling and hostility between white and black, nor did I harbour any malicious intention of publicly criticising government administration.⁴⁹

Seele’s dismissal was finally shelved after Reverend C Jummen intervened on his behalf, stating that Seele had learned his lesson and pleading with the department to forgive him.⁵⁰ Such intimidation and threats probably explain why teachers in Kroonstad (which is about eighty kilometres from Heilbron) felt more comfortable working within ‘moderate’ bodies such as the Native Advisory Board.

The Native Advisory Board’s credibility was ‘damaged by the role of the white chairman, which often precluded the possibility of direct criticism of the local authority’ ... [B]oard members were encouraged to use their “good office” in such matters as resolving domestic disputes, discouraging illegal brewing and sale of liquor, informing the authorities of necessary repairs and improvement of services and, in general preserving “peace and good order”.’⁵¹ In some places, such as Cradock in the Eastern Cape, location advisory board members ‘resolved small disputes, studied pauperism, launched ward clean-up contests and asked the town council to maintain the location’s cemetery’,⁵² and in Alexandra township, it was stated that the Native Advisory Board ‘... would not only assist the police in carrying out the law, but it would also make representation on any other matter affecting the welfare of the township’.⁵³ Finally, board members were made to believe that they were superior to the rest of the community and that it was their duty to lead by example. This message was stressed to delegates attending the Location Advisory Boards Congress in 1935 by JR Brent, Kroonstad’s superintendent:

You leaders must never lose sight of the fact that you are at least a century or two ahead of the Bantu masses you lead. You are educated men. You understand and have absorbed the modern civilised outlook. Never fall into the error of imagining that any appreciable number of your followers have the same outlook. Labour patiently to teach and to leaven them so that one day they will be able truly to enjoy the benefits of modern civilisation. Don’t always aim at popularity or political advantage, but stem their rush towards the precipice, when the necessity arises, and head them gently in the right direction.⁵⁴

During this period, when the Native Advisory Board was in existence in Kroonstad’s black locations, besides the economic hardships the majority of the residents had to endure, conditions in the locations were appalling. Roads were untarred, dusty, replete with potholes, and littered with ash, empty tins and discarded pieces of paper. There was no sewerage system – an outmoded bucket system was in use. ‘Equally outmoded was the water-supply system. The residents used communal taps placed strategically at corners of the locations’ streets and venue. Besides having to queue for the water on a daily basis, at times these taps ran dry. As a result women and young girls were forced to walk long distances to other taps in the locations to get water.’⁵⁵

The first signal of the ineffectiveness of the Native Advisory Board became visible in 1932 when the white authorities divided the Kroonstad riverbanks into two separate areas for ‘Europeans’ and ‘Natives’ (those considered coloured were allowed access to the European section). This shocked Africans, who saw no difference between themselves and coloureds. The board demanded that the riverbank regulation should also apply to coloured persons but this was refused by the local secretary of native affairs. During this period the Kroonstad Town Council, under the tenure of Mayor FA van Reensen, stepped up the police raids for home-brewed beer, even on Sundays. The Kroonstad Native Advisory Board made an attempt to dissuade the Kroonstad Town Council but failed, and its relationship with the residents of the locations deteriorated.

These incidents, and the inability of the board to influence the town council to develop the locations, caused the residents to be disillusioned with it. Some public bodies in the locations bypassed the board and negotiated directly with the town council. The Registered and Ratepayers Association, under the leadership of Mr Mothibedi, opposed the decision by the board, which complained bitterly and requested the council to ensure that all public bodies in the locations approach the council through it. The residents’ intolerance of the Kroonstad Native Advisory Board had reached boiling point. More than 500 people assembled in the location for a meeting and, after a vigorous speech by ’Mote, unanimously asked the Native Advisory Board to resign en bloc.

In its final attempts to demonstrate its concern for the residents, the board requested the council to stop the night raids during the months of December and January. The request was turned down. Again, in 1945, the council rejected the board’s request to have the names of wives removed from lodgers’ permits and for the lodger’s fee to be reduced from three pennies to two. In the same year the board was reprimanded for misleadingly informing the council that the number of taxis in the location had decreased. Finally, in 1946 the board’s request that the location’s inhabitants be allowed to slaughter cattle for marriage feasts was turned down. To the residents of the locations these were clear signs that the board was failing to advance their best interests.

After 1944 some native advisory boards were radicalised, possibly as a result of the formation of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), which introduced radical ideas into black politics. It was at this stage that politicians, including members of the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa, became members of the advisory boards. The people of Kroonstad’s black locations were, however, neither mobilised nor organised for some time. Concurrent with the functioning of the Native Advisory Board in the town, the Kroonstad Joint Council of Europeans and Natives, consisting of eighteen whites and eighteen Africans, was established in September 1928. Among its main objectives were to promote cooperation ‘between Europeans and Natives’; to investigate and report upon any matter relating ‘to the welfare of the Native peoples of South Africa to which the Council’s attention may be called’; and to make representation ‘to the Union Government, Provincial Administration, public bodies or individuals’.⁵⁶

The list of council members included a number of church ministers, the rest being a mix of individuals involved in various trades. Among them were Robert Sello, ’Mote, Henderson Binda (trade unionist: ICU), J Crutse (teacher) and Jan Maraba (policeman). The non-militant approach of all except the trade unionists shaped the role of the council. By 1931, however, ’Mote was no longer a member, as is evident from correspondence between Charles F Martin Knight of the St Francis Priory and Rheinallt-Jones, in which Knight informs Rheinallt-Jones about ’Mote’s speech at a council meeting: ‘Rather a disturbed meeting of the Joint Council last night. ’Mote was introduced as a visitor and let off his usual hot-air. I doubt if he will be given another opportunity.’⁵⁷

The absence of militancy in the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives was also possibly influenced by the presence of white members. Although the council’s constitution stipulated that whites should be in the majority in Kroonstad, this was not the case, although they did, as stipulated in the constitution, hold leadership positions. Like the Native Advisory Board, the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives had no real power to influence or change decisions of the town council. Its role could be likened to that of a pressure and lobby group, raising issues to put pressure on the local authority. For example, it took up the issue of trading rights for blacks in the locations, making representations to the Kroonstad Town Council and, later, to the OFS municipalities conference.⁵⁸ It also made representations to the inquiry into native trading facilities in Kroonstad, which started on 5 September 1932, and sought to send a deputation to the minister of native affairs – who refused to meet it. While it discussed the issue of home-brewing in advance of the Illicit Liquor Commission’s report, it failed to mobilise the community (particularly African women brewing and selling beer) when the Kroonstad municipality decided to establish a municipal canteen system similar to those operating in Natal.

Differences in approach caused some of the blacks in the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives to feel that their white counterparts were controlling and dictatorial. In 1936 cracks in the Kroonstad Joint Council of Europeans and Natives began to show. In August 1937, Knight wrote to Rheinallt-Jones:

... in Kroonstad the type of European here is rather put off by the title Joint Council because he thinks it is a suggestion of what his ancestors called ‘ungodly equality’ ... It is true that the actual dissolution of the Kroonstad Joint Council was due to the defection of the Africans which made it impossible to carry on without doing them more harm than good. But there had always been a problem connected with European members.

In 1941 Father Amor, secretary of the Kroonstad Joint Council of Europeans and Natives, made the same point in a letter to Rheinallt-Jones:

I know how the Joint Council has faded away in the OFS. From the African side there was much desire to exploit the JCs for the purpose of getting things for themselves which were difficult or impossible in other ways ... And often Europeans also used their position in an endeavour to tell the Native what his place was and where he got off.

The political situation changed in 1944, partly as a result of the formation of the ANCYL, which radicalised the mother body. But before this, in 1942 the residents of the locations had heard enough. They supported Hyman Basner, a lawyer, to be elected to represent the interests of Africans in the senate and national assembly. After the passage of the Hertzog legislation in 1936, which removed Africans (in the Cape) from the common voters’ roll, Africans were from then on represented in parliament and in the senate by white elected native representatives. The residents of the locations could not restrain their excitement during the meeting addressed by Basner, and afterwards all those eligible to vote voted for Basner and not for Senator Rheinallt-Jones. Basner’s candidacy awakened the black teachers in the OFS, and through the OFSATA they began to look critically at the way the Department of Education treated them, for it did not treat them as professionals.⁵⁹ OFSATA’s reputation grew, particularly after the election of AC Jordan to the presidency in 1943. ‘By 1945 it [was] the most militant [organisation] in the whole country’⁶⁰ – but, even so, it was aloof from the masses. Unlike teachers’ organisations in the 1980s (such as the National Education Union of South Africa [NEUSA]), OFSATA did not coalesce its struggles with those of the community – but this should not be construed to mean that no teachers were political. Peter Molotsi, who studied at Bantu High (formerly Bantu United) in Kroonstad, and later became a founding member of the PAC, recalled that in the 1940s teachers at the school openly discussed politics with their students. In an interview, he said:

The members of the staff were people with a clear purpose, prepared to teach us and liberate us. They delivered two messages, the syllabus and its need and [our] purpose in life. Our teachers were so devoted that they actually taught beyond the syllabus: they taught our minds to satisfy the needs of the syllabus, but they then also prepared us as future citizens of a South Africa that would be free. They delivered the message of liberation.

It is possible that it was some of these politicised teachers who invited a member of the ANCYL to address teachers in 1949 and who cajoled teachers into taking a more militant approach. The political influence some of the teachers had over their students encouraged the students to form their own organisation, the branch of OFSASA (Orange Free State African Students Association) in Kroonstad. Molotsi recalled this association as a centre of conscientisation, which was giving students ‘knowledge not available in the school syllabus’. This helps to explain Molotsi’s early introduction to politics, leading to his active involvement in the struggle for liberation as a member of the PAC later in life.

Having won the election in 1948, the National Party passed a host of oppressive laws in the early 1950s, including the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which formally brought to an abrupt end the open involvement by teachers in opposition politics. According to Ntantala, OFSATA was at the time under the control of collaborators who welcomed Bantu Education. Certainly there is little evidence of black teachers in Kroonstad mobilising the community to protest its introduction, as was the case in other areas such as Benoni on the East Rand, and Alexandra north of Johannesburg. In an interview, Jonah Setiloane, who became one of the leading figures in OFSATA, conceded that OFSATA was not militant, but he refuted Ntantala’s assertion. He contended that under the circumstances the leadership had to adopt a challenging but restrained approach against the Department of Education. As did the SANNC before 1944, OFSATA believed in consultation. Jonah Setiloane confessed that this was why, after the introduction of Bantu Education, OFSATA ‘consulted with Pretoria to air our grievances, but many people didn’t understand that role’.

In spite of OFSATA’s stance, black teachers in Kroonstad did display some militancy, although in a different form. A few teachers, drawn to the politics of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), formed the Society of Young Africa (SOYA). AC Jordan, who by 1946 had moved to Cape Town and joined NEUM there, was instrumental in the formation of SOYA in Kroonstad. Parkies Setiloane, a former member of SOYA and teacher at Bantu High School recalls:

We didn’t pay a subscription fee to join SOYA; you just became a member. At the time the ANC was using boycotts, resistance, and all that to fight oppression. But SOYA was saying educate the masses first so that the masses must know their importance in society ... educate the people first politically; it’s then that you can take action. AC Jordan came up and lectured ... And then you had to buy stationery like The Awakening of a People by [Isaac] Tabata – he was from the Eastern Cape. We held meetings in Reverend Mahabane’s study room at the Methodist manse and discussed about oppression at the time. Sometimes we would attend conferences.

Evidently SOYA operated at an intellectual level. Although it managed to attract like-minded people, especially teachers, it also had a few members who were not teachers but were equally educated. SOYA’s lifespan, however, was short. During the action-oriented period of the 1950s (1952 was the start of the defiance campaign) the masses no longer tolerated the political debates and discussions in which SOYA had immersed itself. They wanted action. Some of SOYA’s members felt the same way. Parkies Setiloane explains:

What did not impress me about SOYA was that it was highly critical of the ANC. We never took action in SOYA like the ANC. We never took part in the defiance campaign ... SOYA would argue that they [the ANC] are wisening up the white man to come up with more stringent laws. We said let’s hit them where it hurts the most, which was educating the masses. And then take action once! We would target labourers, teachers, ministers – everybody. And once we embarked on a strike action there’ll be a standstill.

SOYA’s intention to ‘educate the masses’ remained only an idea. It was never implemented. Finally, some of its members, among them Parkies Setiloane, left the location – in his case for a teaching post on the farms – and SOYA ceased to function in Kroonstad. But SOYA’s demise should also be read in the context of the state’s attempt to curtail black incitement and protest. For instance, in 1953 the government passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which increased the penalties for civil disobedience, incitement and protest.

The revival of radical politics

Although the rolling out of the defiance campaign in 1952, led mainly by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress, did not produce the same extraordinary response in Kroonstad as it did in some areas of the Eastern Cape like Port Elizabeth and East London, it nevertheless helped to revive the ANC in the locations. Residents, ostensibly members of the ANC, embarked on mass political mobilisation and demonstrations – albeit briefly. From oral evidence it is apparent that before or during the campaign ANC leaders visited Kroonstad, a visit possibly prompted by a lack of action in the town’s locations during the ANC’s call for a national stay-at-home on 26 June 1950.⁶¹ Recalling the visit, Mekodi Arcilia Morailane (now Mokoena), who was born in 1946 in Bloemfontein and had moved to Kroonstad by 1952, remembered seeing Walter Sisulu (during this period the ANC’s only full-time paid official). It was not long after this visit that Amon Mahomane, Esther Montshiwa and Joseph Ditaole Lenong led a demonstration to the municipal offices to complain about the excessive number of whites working in municipal offices, increased rent, and the proposed ejection of all unmarried young men from their homes in the locations to be housed in municipal hostels.

The news of a reputable law firm owned by Africans seems to have boosted the confidence of the black residents of Kroonstad to fight for their rights. The residents of the locations became aware of the Mandela and Tambo law firm, which was established in 1951, when Oliver Tambo travelled to Kroonstad to represent Mphikeleli Maseko, a prominent businessman in the area. Maseko had shot and killed a thief. Leboseng Violet Selele, Maseko’s daughter, described the event: ‘My father was involved in an incident. There were certain boys fighting with knives, trying to abduct my sister by force. My father intervened and shot and killed one of those boys. My father was arrested. And that was a problem. So my husband and I gathered some money to help where we could. Then we heard about Mandela and Oliver Tambo.’ Maseko was acquitted. This served as encouragement to the residents of the locations – even if they were arrested there were African lawyers who would represent them (Selele recalls that during this period the only lawyers in Kroonstad were Afrikaners).

Some teachers, even those at the day-care level, were becoming politically conscious, illustrating an awareness that bordered on radicalism, as is evident from what they taught. Morailane remembers that at her day-care, Dorcas House, learners were taught poems grounded in the history of dispossession. She recalls that during the visit by the ANC leaders, including Walter Sisulu, the children recited one of these poems as a form of entertainment. According to her, the poem went as follows:

Mo-Afrika, ke kgotsofetse ka se keleng sona. Le hoja naha ya rona e ne e se tshehla. Naha ya rona e fetohile lehaha la mashodu, teng ho phela batho ba mefuta yohle. Batho ba ikemiseditseng ho ripitla Mo-Afrika. [I am satisfied to be an African. Our country was never barren. It has been turned into a haven of thieves, where many people live. But some of these people are constantly preparing to destroy Africans (at which point she stamped her foot).]

Some of the members of the teaching staff at Dorcas House were members of the National Council of African Women (NCAW). Hilda Mantho Motadinyane was one. Until the late 1940s, the NCAW worked for the upliftment and upward mobility of African women. In the 1950s the organisation’s role had shifted and it became involved in political issues. Motadinyane joined the council after hearing one of its members, the late Winkie Direko, speaking about the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act, which was introduced in 1952, making it compulsory for women to carry reference books.

It does not look as if the ANC had a branch in Kroonstad at the time, although there were people who supported it: Curnick Ndamse, a teacher at Bantu High, was one of its staunch followers, as was Reverend Mahabane – having been the president-general of the ANC twice (1924–27 and 1937–40), he must have influenced some of the residents in the locations in favour of the ANC.

Political momentum was growing in Kroonstad’s black locations. The government’s decision to promulgate the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act intensified the situation. Recounting the indignation women felt about this law, Maggie Resha, a resident of Sophiatown and a member of the ANC Women’s League, wrote: ‘To extend the pass laws was to pull down the wall which protected the women from the humiliation of carrying these documents.’⁶² Throughout South Africa, women incensed by the Act protested. In a bid to coordinate the protests, 150 women from different parts of the country converged in Johannesburg in 1954 to adopt a ‘Women’s Charter’ and launch a new organisation, the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw). The following year, 2 000 women from the Transvaal marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria with a petition to the then prime minister, JG Strijdom. The fact that Strijdom snubbed the women did not deter them and they were to march again in 1956. Before that, however, in March 1956, African women marched ‘in virtually all the major cities ... from locations into city centres to hand in petitions and protests to town clerks, native commissioners, magistrates and other local affiliates’.⁶³ In Kroonstad the campaign was led by some of the older women (possibly members of the ANC Women’s League). The most prominent was Matseki Majoro, who had been active in politics prior to the anti-pass campaign. Violet Selele remembered that Majoro also led the fight against high rent.

This group comprised older women of the same age as my mother. They would go to the town hall in town to protest against rent. They also protested against [the] lodger’s permit.⁶⁴ They would demand that they should be arrested. Indeed, they were arrested. But they were later released.

Michael ‘Baba’ Jordan, a long-time resident of Kroonstad, also recalled Majoro as an activist, while Godfrey Oliphant, another resident, remembered her as a powerful orator:

As sy gepraat het [when she spoke], people would listen. [Addressing people she would say,] ‘It’s been long that we’ve been under the yoke of a white man’. Those were the words. ‘We’ve got to stand up as the people today and fight for our rights.’

Majoro is best remembered for her role in the anti-pass campaign. Selele recalled:

I can still remember I was sitting next to one of these women whose husband was a shopkeeper when I said, ‘Me Masielatsa, do you realise that there are some people here who will leave this meeting and go and tell the boers [police] that we don’t want passes. I think we should stop the meeting so that we can assess the situation’ ... here in Kroonstad we didn’t trust each other.

Selele’s fears were realised. Not long after the meeting, Matseke Majoro was detained. In an interview, John Modise recalled: ‘Matseki worked in town but she also liked to help other people within the community. She worked closely with Reverend Mahabane and Mrs Mahabane. When Matseki was arrested, Reverend Mahabane was also arrested – on the same day.’

When Mahabane arrived in Kroonstad he was politically moderate, but this changed after a visit to Ghana in 1957, when, according to some interviewees, he became actively involved in community issues, particularly conscientising the younger generation. In that year Ghana had won its independence under Kwame Nkrumah. ‘Baba’ Jordan recalled that he was told that Mahabane came back radicalised from Ghana, saying in a sermon that ‘the message from Nkrumah for blacks in South Africa was that they must get the boot of the white man off from their necks’. Lindiwe Gladys Mwelase, a relative of Majoro, returned to Kroonstad in 1956 after spending some time working in Johannesburg to find that Majoro had been arrested. ‘They accused [her] of being too influential about the pass resistance. I asked the people and they told me that they burned passes and she stayed behind when others fled.’ It is unlikely that Majoro was arrested for mobilising women to burn their passes as at this point passes had not been issued to women (this only happened the following year) and the burning of passes took place after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.

Despite the demonstrations the government swiftly implemented the extension of passes to women, starting with women in Winburg in the OFS. In 1957, passes were issued to African women in Kroonstad. Motadinyane, who was working at the day-care at Dorcas House at the time, recalls that ‘[t]he municipality police came to our workplace and took us to the hall. When we arrived there they took our photographs. We were the first group of women to be given passes.’ Like the men, women experienced the unpleasantness associated with passes. ‘Life became hard,’ said Motadinyane. ‘Police would knock at our doors in the middle of the night, demanding to see our passes. In my case, when they arrived at my place and demanded to see my pass, I would tell them to show me theirs first.’ The suppression of the anti-pass demonstrations marked the end of the ANC’s above-ground activities in Kroonstad’s black locations. But it did not end the protests. In 1959, the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations had reached their breaking point, after an increase in the number of raids by the municipal police.

The 1950s saw the NP government reversing all the limited reforms of the early 1940s and promulgating racial and segregationist laws which adversely affected African labour. In order to curb urbanisation, the government tightened and strictly monitored influx control. Through the pass system it divided Africans between those who had rights to be in an urban area and those who did not. Put the other way round, Africans without the ‘section 10’ rights⁶⁵ were prohibited from being in an urban area permanently unless they were employed there, and if not employed they had to return to their reserve. The ‘urban right’ determined who had right to employment in an urban area. In a small town like Kroonstad, which had a limited manufacturing sector, it became extremely difficult for the majority of Africans with no right to be in an urban area to find employment. Consequently, gangs emerged, and the majority of the unemployed could not keep up with the rental payment demanded by the council.

In its attempt to recoup its rental money, the council unleashed its police force to raid – sometimes twice in a day – all households in arrears, claiming that these households owed it £300. On 22 February 1959 the residents held a meeting where they tabled their grievances to Mr De Vries, the manager of the Non-European Affairs Department. The grievances included their resentment of having to queue for long hours for permits to seek work only to receive them past noon when there was no more time to look for work. Mr De Villiers undertook to look into their grievances and promised to meet them again in March, but when the date of the meeting arrived he could not attend because he had honoured another meeting in Durban. He failed to attend another meeting on 1 April. The following day the residents met again and to this meeting came seven Europeans – officials and police (it is reported that some of them were displaying their revolvers). At this meeting the residents voiced their lack of confidence in the Native Affairs Department. Then the residents dispersed and not long afterwards shots were heard. Three Africans were shot and thirty-nine arrested, among them thirty-four youngsters. The residents of Kroonstad’s locations responded by smashing windows at the post office and the Bantu Social Centre; they also cut the post office’s telephone wires and stoned some cars.⁶⁶

Godfrey Oliphant, who was present at this meeting, places Tsolo Nyakane at the centre of this brawl. He believes the incident was the result of the influence of members of the PAC. ‘There were guys who came in from Vereeniging. One of them was Mr Nyakane [Tsolo], who [made] people realise that they were being harassed by whites.’ He recalled how teacher Ndamse of the ANC stirred up the atmosphere:

[Ndamse] spoke passionately about the attitude of the whites. He [went] to the whites and said, ‘You are treating us like children.’ The whites had the backing of the police. When they started shooting I remained behind because one of my neighbours got shot not dead ... [Amon] Mahomane and my brother Botiki got involved and they were arrested.

What is apparent from Oliphant’s recollection is that at this point the PAC was making inroads into Kroonstad’s black locations. Nyakane was the PAC’s branch secretary in Sharpeville. In the early 1950s a section of the membership of the ANC which referred to itself as the ‘Africanists’ developed some uneasiness with what they perceived as the influence of the communists over the ANC. The tension reached a climax when the ANC invited the South African Indian Congress, the Congress of Democrats, the Liberal Party and the South African Coloured People’s Organisation to form a Congress Alliance. Criticism of this move by the Africanists led to some of the leading figures being expelled from the ANC, notably Potlako Kitchener Lebalo.

In 1955 the Congress Alliance adopted the Freedom Charter in Kliptown, outside Soweto. The Freedom Charter was touted as the principles document for a non-racial and inclusive South Africa. The Africanists denounced it as communist inspired. Most importantly, they rejected it because of the controversial preamble: ‘South Africa shall belong to all who live in it’. Simon Ramogale, who joined the PAC in 1960 in Tembisa on the East Rand, and was incarcerated on Robben Island between 1963 and 1966 for his role in the organisation, said: ‘We used to say the land cannot belong to all who live in it; the land must belong to somebody. We had some leaders within the PAC who said, ‘ “South Africa is not a prostitute that belongs to everybody who lives in it ...” ’

In 1958 the Africanists broke away from the ANC and in April 1959 they launched the PAC. In line with the ANCYL’s programme of action, the PAC called for the anti-pass campaign. Leading figures in the PAC travelled across the country mobilising African people for this campaign which was launched on 21 March 1960. It is possible that Nyakane had gone to Kroonstad during this period to canvass support for the PAC there. After all, Kroonstad was a Basotho-dominated area and he, Nyakane, was a Mosotho too.

The shooting and arrests of 1959 did not deter the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations. They demonstrated again in March 1960. The call by the PAC to African men to leave their passes at home and present themselves at the nearby police station for arrest hit the right chord with many African people. Although a clear imbalance was evident in the numbers who participated in this campaign, in Sharpeville and Langa townships masses of people took part; Lodge estimates that in Sharpeville, for example, about 4 000 Africans, men and women, heeded the call.⁶⁷

After 21 March the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations protested, possibly in solidarity with the victims of the shooting in Sharpeville. The majority of the people interviewed for this study recalled that the residents, at least those who were pass-carrying citizens, had planned to burn their passes. The ANC leaders had announced that Monday 28 March would be a day of pass burning. It is possible that Gladys Mwelase, whom we met earlier, was referring to this protest when she was recalling how Majoro was arrested. In an interview, Violet Motlhacwi remembered the time when Majoro was arrested at a place called thoteng (refuse dumping site), where she had led the residents to burn their passes. But Motlhacwi went on to note that after Majoro and the others had been arrested, Stara Naledi, a prominent businessman in Kroonstad’s locations, sent a certain Gumede to Johannesburg to seek the legal assistance of Oliver Tambo. According to her, Tambo came to Kroonstad and successfully represented Majoro and the others. When they left the court they started singing Raohang masole ntoa ya loana. Hlomelang bohle dira ke tsena (Rise up soldiers. The war is on. Arm yourselves, our enemy is here). It is possible that Majoro and the others were arrested for attempting to burn their passes, but what is not possible is that the arrested residents were represented by Tambo, for when the ANC embarked on the call to burn passes Tambo had already fled South Africa into exile (accompanied by Ronald Segal, he left the country on 27 March – a day before the burning of passes).⁶⁸ The exaggeration is a good example of the limitations of oral history.

This notwithstanding, days after the Sharpeville massacre the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations took to the streets. This resulted in some arrests. ‘Baba’ Jordan, who was one of those detained in this period, remembers that he was labelled a klipgoeier (stone thrower) by the police, and he was also charged with burning passes.

In 1960 I was seventeen going on for eighteen. I was on my way to school but I had to run back home because youngsters were spreading information that if you are seen wearing a pair of jeans ... without any question they will load you on a police truck as a troublemaker who is busy burning reference books. So my running back home didn’t help me because the whole township, the Old Location was surrounded by police and soldiers. I was taken out of the backyard of my grandmother. Although I never had any bundle of dompasses [reference books] in my hand to burn I was just loaded.

Jordan spent three days at the Klipkraal prison in town and was released after his uncle paid his fine.

The police’s harsh response did not immediately affect the residents’ resolve to continue fighting what they perceived as an unjust system. At this point, some people in the locations were actively working with or had joined the PAC. One of them was John Motsiri Coangae, who claims he was persuaded to join the PAC by Peter Molotsi. Four months after its foundation, the PAC’s national leadership published that in the OFS it had 301 branches.⁶⁹ It is not clear whether one of these was in Kroonstad, but what is certain is that the PAC cell which operated in Kroonstad was established by Coangae.

After the Sharpeville massacre, the government declared a state of emergency and there were mass detentions of ANC and PAC leaders and supporters. On 8 April 1960 it banned the ANC and PAC. The two organisations decided to turn to the armed struggle and operated from exile. The PAC formed a military wing and called it Poqo (pure, in isiXhosa). Later, Poqo was changed to the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA). The ANC established Umkhonto we Sizwe (spear of the nation, in isiZulu). Initially the PAC operated from Basotholand (now Lesotho), where one of its founders, Leballo, summoned branch members and instructed them ‘to step up recruitment, with each branch having to enlist a target of 1 000 members’.⁷⁰ Responding to this directive, Coangae and the members of his cell embarked on a membership recruitment campaign. The cell, or at least Coangae, developed networks with some members of the PAC in Lesotho: his father was a church minster and at some point was stationed in Basotholand, where he lived with his son. John Motsiri Coangae was to reignite his childhood friendships in the 1960s, and some of his old friends were now members of the PAC.

At the beginning of the 1960s not only were the police vigilant – they had also created an army of informers to help them. Before long they uncovered the cell’s activity after intercepting a letter Coangae had written to his contact in Maseru informing him about their progress. He remembers: ‘The police intercepted the letter and replied to me and stamped it as if it was from that guy. And they put it in the postbox and told the owner of the firm [where he was working] to send me to fetch the letter. They had been following me all the time, without me knowing.’ The intercepted letter ordered Coangae to meet his contact from Lesotho at a train station. But when Coangae arrived there he was arrested. He was finally sentenced to three years on Robben Island. The arrest and incarceration of Coangae was the final blow to the Kroonstad PAC and also marked the – temporary – end of black political activism in the town. The government’s response had intimidated many people, and after his release from Robben Island Coangae stayed clear of politics because nobody wanted to be associated with him. People were scared to be associated with ‘terrorists’, as the government had termed everybody who opposed it. Instead, he focused on football. In the early 1980s he was to return to politics, but this time he focused his energy on the government-created councils.

Although politics dominated the Kroonstad locations, there were other activities taking place, even during the tense moments. Children played games in the dusty streets. Violet Selele remembers the old locations as quiet and a fun place where girls played double Dutch (a jumping-rope game). Other children played ho tjheha dinonyana (to trap birds), morabarabara (drought) and mantlwane (playing house). Music, choral or band, also entertained the residents of the locations. Godfrey Oliphant described the mood of the times: ‘The people used to be excited with jive. There used to be a local group that used to play musical instruments. One of their members, Miki Matsepe, used to play piano.’

Sport was another form of entertainment, football the most popular. Everyone I interviewed in Kroonstad singled out Shamrock United, Blackburn Rovers and Union Jacks as the best football teams in the locations. John Motsiri Congae, who was born in 1940 in Kroonstad and started playing football at the age of eight, recalls watching big teams like Shamrock United and Callies, from Cairo, playing at Masakeng, so called because the football field was enclosed with hessian sacks. For him, Godfrey Toonkie ‘ABC’ Borman, Gaborone Alfred ‘Sugar’ Motale and Jacob ‘Hayi Tsotsi’ Leboso ranked among the best players for this team. He remembers that after Seeisoville had been established, a group split from the Kroonstad Bantu Football Association and formed the Kroonstad African Football Association which was led by Zack Morabe, Dr Cingo and Dorrington Matsepe. It was at this stage that local teams began competing with teams from outside Kroonstad. Congae recounts: ‘Shamrock United played in the open grounds. That was the time when we started seeing big football clubs like Orlando Pirates, Moroka Swallows, Blackpool and Matlama from Lesotho coming over to play here.’ Echoing Coangae, Isaac ‘Sakkie’ Oliphant said: ‘These teams played against some of the popular teams in Johannesburg like Moroka Swallows and would defeat them. Everyone was in agreement that Billy Maraba was the best player to come out of Kroonstad.’

But Kroonstad was not always fun and games. There were fights and gangs in the locations. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe remembers, as a teenager growing up in Kroonstad, witnessing fights between Ama-Baca (a Nguni group) and the Russians (the Basotho gang). However, the most feared gang during this period was the Green-White (or ma-Green White, as it was called locally). This gang was led by Skapie Mofokeng. It began as a group of about ten or twelve young people in ‘B’ Location. Joseph Ditheko ‘Makula’ Molai, one of the gang’s surviving members, remembers that they were part of the baseball team called the Green-White, because of the team’s uniform: white shirts and shorts with green stripes. The members included David Gooie, John Sisana, Boy-Boy Ponyane, Choke Tlokotsi and Sydney Mashoe. The initial activity of this group was to protect the Basotho nationals who lived in ‘B’ Location from harassment by the municipal police who raided their houses searching for people in the location without a visitor’s permit. (Those who failed to produce it were arrested. The police also arrested them for defaulting on rent payment or the ‘lodger’s’ [permit]. Finally, the police harassed the Basotho women who traded in African beer.) The Green-White group liked workers from Lesotho who would share rations every month-end after receiving their pay. It was during the group’s fight with the municipal police that a gang called the Spoilers emerged and aligned itself with the police. This, according to Molai, forced them to form themselves into a gang. Fearing attack from the police and the Spoilers, the Green-White gang began acquiring guns by disarming the police. Molai claims: ‘We overpowered them. One of them who was well known was “Optel”, Mr Van der Westhuyssen; we even took his pistol.’ In 1955 all the members of the gang had stopped attending school at Bantu High and now channelled their energy into gang activities. The gang affected the community in more than one way. Youngsters in the locations were forced to join gangs to defend themselves – and the junior Green-White and the junior Spoilers were formed and fought each other.

Because of the government’s objective of supplying the agricultural sector with labour, more and more black men who were unemployed and could not find work were arrested and sent to prison farms, especially in Bethal, in the then Eastern Transvaal, to labour on the potato farms.⁷¹ To avoid being harassed by police for passes, members of the Green-White harassed whites in town, demanding stamps proving that they were employed. Molai recalls:

That Cross Street in town, we used to go from shop to shop and do as we pleased, and the shopkeeper must just shut up. If he attempted to run to the phone, he would find one of us sitting on the desk where the phone was. The police also used to collect loafers, those people who weren’t working, and throw them in the van. Our gang members used to collect all these rubber stamps from shops and we would stamp our IDs [reference book] to pretend as if we were employed. And when they wanted to see our reference and asked us waar werk jy? [where do you work?], they would find a lot of stamps in our IDs, those from Dixies Trading Store, Ellerines, Ackermans, what what. And after seeing the stamps in our IDs they would leave.

Echoing Molai, Tebello ‘Blackie’ Tumisi remembers that the Green-White members refused to look for work as stipulated in the law:

There were these guys called the Green-White. There were gangs, the Spoilers ... eh ... the Caspers ... but the Green-White was the strongest one. It was the most feared gang around here. People used to go to the pass office. But because they were a gang they decided that they won’t go there.

As with other gangs in different places, the Green-White’s era was brought to an abrupt end by the police. Members of the gang were arrested and others were shot and killed. By the 1960s Kroonstad’s black locations were free of gangs.

Fear and distrust characterised the post-Sharpeville period. Matsepe recalls that they adhered to an unwritten code, ‘do not talk’, because it could lead to trouble. Although in the 1960s the government had passed a barrage of severely repressive laws and there was an economic boom which in many ways caused the majority of black people to refrain from participating in politics, the government could not totally contain the black people’s anger. The people were now aware. In the next chapter I look at the role played by the Black Consciousness Movement in conscientising the generation of the 1970s. But first I explore the attempts by some individuals in Kroonstad to operate underground, with the intention of introducing the younger generation to politics.

Endnotes

1 Ntantala, P (1992) A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala, University of the Western Cape Mayibuye History Series No. 6. Cape Town: David Philip, p. 149.

2 Serfontein, D (1990) Keurskrif vir Kroonstad: ’n kroniek van die ontstaan, groei en vooruitsigte van ’n Vrystaatse plattelandse dorp. Johannesburg: Perskor-Boekdrukkery, p. 449.

3 Bonner, P and Segal, L (1998) Soweto: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, p. 13.

4 Serfontein op. cit., p. 448.

5 Bradford, H (1987) A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930. Johannesburg: Ravan, p. 26.

6 Setiloane, JSM (1997) The History of Black Education in Maokeng, Kroonstad. Cape Town: HSRC Press, p. 4.

7 Bonner, P and Nieftagodien, N (2008) Alexandra: A History. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p. 5.

8 Setiloane op. cit., p. 110.

9 Reverend Mahabane is renowned for serving two terms as the president-general of the ANC, in 1924–1927 and 1937–1940. See City Press, 8 January 2012.

10 Serfontein op. cit., p. 519.

11 Setiloane op. cit., p. 6.

12 For an in-depth account on the creation of coloureds-only settlements in South Africa, see Parnell, SM (1993) ‘Johannesburg Slums and Racial Segregation in South African Cities, 1910–1937’. PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand.

13 Kentridge, I (2013) ‘“And So They Moved One by One” ’: Forced Removals in a Free State Town, 1956–1977’, in Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 1, p. 144.

14 Free State Provincial Archives (hereafter FSPA), G76, PAE 52 ‘Subject: Kroonstad Coloured School’.

15 Kentridge op. cit., p. 139.

16 Ntantala op. cit., p. 87.

17 Bonner and Nieftagodien, Alexandra, p. 28.

18 Seeisoville was named after Chief Seeiso Lerothodi of Basotholand. See Pherudi, ML (2008) The History of an African Son from the Dusty Marantha-Maokeng, 1965–2007: Life History with Pictures. Gaborone: Botswana Printing and Publishing Company, p. 104.

19 Nieftagodien, N (2014) The Soweto Uprising. Auckland Park: Jacana Media, p. 14.

20 Pherudi, M (2009) Who’s Who in Maokeng, Volume 1. Gaborone: Botswana Printing and Publishing Company.

21 Lodge, T (1983) Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945. Johannesburg: Ravan, p. 262.

22 Serfontein op. cit., p. 567.

23 University of the Witwatersrand Library Historical and Literary Papers (hereafter UWLHLP) AD1433 (Box CK5.3) Kroonstad Joint Council, ‘Draft of Memorandum on Granting of Trading Rights in Locations’.

24 UWLHLP Minutes: Joint Council of European and Natives, Kroonstad, 21 August 1934.

25 UWLHLP Joint Council of European and Natives, Minutes, Kroonstad, 20 March 1935.

26 Kroonstad Municipality Council Minutes, 21 February 1949 to 29 August 1949.

27 Bonner, P and Nieftagodien, N (2001) Kathorus: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, p. 11.

28 Kros, C (1978) ‘Urban African Women’s Organisations and Protests on the Rand from the Years 1939 to 1956’. Honours dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, p. 46.

29 Bonner and Nieftagodien, Kathorus, p. 12.

30 Umteteli wa Bantu, 6 July 1935.

31 Meli, F (1988) A History of the ANC: South Africa Belongs to Us. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, p. 53.

32 Moloi, T (2013) ‘The Emergence and Radicalisation of Black Political Formations in Kroonstad, 1915–1957’, in New Contree (Special Edition), A Journal of Historical and Human Sciences for Southern Africa, 67 (November), p. 172.

33 Lodge, Black Politics, p. 3.

34 Walshe, P (1987) The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa. Craighall: AD Donker, p. 205.

35 Wells, JC (1982) ‘The History of Black Women’s Struggle Against Pass Laws in South Africa, 1900–1960’. DPhil thesis, Columbia University, pp. 208–9.

36 Limb, P (2010) The ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class, and Place in South Africa Before 1940. Pretoria: Unisa Press, p. 219.

37 Umteteli wa Bantu, 6 May 1936.

38 Rich, P (1989) ‘Managing Black Leadership: The Joint Councils, Urban Trading and Political Conflict in the OFS, 1925–1942’, in Phil Bonner, Isabel Hofmeyr, Deborah James and Tom Lodge (eds) Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in 19th Century and 20th Century South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan, p. 190.

39 Lodge, Black Politics, p. 6.

40 Johns SW (1970) ‘Trade Union, Political Pressure Group, or Mass Movement? The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa’, in Robert I Rotberg and Ali Mazrui (eds) Protest and Power in Black Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 716.

41 Bradford op. cit., p. 178.

42 Bradford op. cit., p. 69.

43 It is possible that Kadalie was becoming jealous of ’Mote’s rapidly increasing popularity in the OFS. In 1927, for example, at an ICU meeting held in Parys, ’Mote was introduced by Simon Elias, who addressed about 600 people, as ‘my Jesus’, and when ’Mote ascended the platform to speak the crowd broke spontaneously into the song ‘God Save Africa’. FSPA SOO 1/1/47, No. 8/10 1946; see The Parys Post, 10 May 1927.

44 ’Mote was arrested for climbing the train in the section designated for whites, with the aim of informing the whites about the black people’s plight because of the council’s decision. See Serfontein op. cit., pp. 449–50.

45 Serfontein op. cit., p. 451.

46 Nieftagodien, N (2001) ‘The Implementation of Urban Apartheid on the East Rand, 1948–1973: The Role of Local Government and Local Resistance’. PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand.

47 Tetelman, M (1997) ‘We Can: Black Politics in Cradock, South Africa, 1984–85’. PhD thesis, Northwestern University, p. 26.

48 FSPA SOO 1/1/47, No. 8/10 1946 ‘Letter from Secretary of Education to the Secretary for Native Affairs, Pretoria’, 24 September 1927.

49 FSPA SOO 1/1/47, No. 8/10 1946 ‘Letter from Abiel Thabo Seele to the Secretary for Native Education, Bloemfontein’, 2 December 1936.

50 FSPA SOO 1/1/47, No. 8/10 1946 ‘Letter from Reverend C Jummen to the Secretary for Native Education, Bloemfontein’, 2 January 1937.

51 Cobley, AG (1990) Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950. New York: Greenwood Press, p. 69.

52 Tetelman op. cit., p. 26.

53 Bonner P and Nieftagodien N op. cit., p. 37.

54 Cobley op. cit., p. 208.

55 Setiloane op. cit., p. 5.

56 UWLHLP AD1947/65.2 (Box 39) Miscellaneous/Memoranda in South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR).

57 UWLHLP AD1433 (Box CK5.3) Kroonstad Joint Council: Letter: ‘letter from Father Martin to Rheinallt-Jones’, 27 October 1931.

58 See UWLHLP AD1433 (Box CK5.3) Kroonstad Joint Council: Letter: ‘letter from Father Martin Knight to Rheinallt-Jones’, 3 February 1932; ‘Letter from Rheinallt-Jones to Martin Knight’, 24 August 1932.

59 Ntantala op. cit., p. 119.

60 Ntantala op. cit., p. 120.

61 The reason for the ANC’s call for a national work stay-at-home was in protest against the shooting and killing of protesters by police on May Day in 1950.

62 Resha, M (1991) ‘Mangoana O Tsoara Thipa Ka Bohaleng’: My Life in the Struggle. Johannesburg: Cosaw, p. 112; see also Walker, C (1982) Women and Resistance in South Africa. London: Onyx Press.

63 Resha op. cit., p. 143.

64 The lodger’s permit contained the name of the wife and children, and a certain amount had to be paid every month. In 1939 the Native Advisory Board deputation requested, without success, that the name of the wife be removed from the lodger’s permit and the permit be reduced from 3 to 2 shillings per month; see Pherudi who’s who, p. 4.

65 Section 10 was introduced after the passing of the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952. It determined which Africans had the right to be in the urban areas permanently. Those who were born in an urban area after the passing of the Act fell under section 10(1) (a); those who had worked continuously for one employer for ten years fell under section 10(1) (b); and, finally, section 10(1) (c) rights were allocated to women living in rural areas whose husbands possessed either section 10(1) (a) or (b). See, for example, Posel, D (1991) The Making of Apartheid 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

66 New Age, 30 April 1959.

67 Lodge, T. (2011) Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 100.

68 Callinicos, L (2005) Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains. Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 254–6.

69 Lodge Sharpeville, p. 58.

70 Lodge Sharpeville, p. 200.

71 For a detailed account of the potato farm prisons in Bethal, see First, R (1947) ‘The Farm Labour Scandal’, New Age, Pamphlet 1947; Drum, March 1952.