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Introduction

What is it about an undistinguished, if picturesque, northern Free State town called Kroonstad – or, more accurately, its black residential areas – that makes it a fertile field of study for a social historian?

For one thing, its history. Seventy-five years after it was established in 1855, Kroonstad was recognised as the second-largest town in the then Orange Free State (OFS). The town has two black townships: Maokeng¹ (‘place of thorns’ in Sesotho), whose black residents initially came from all over South Africa and from neighbouring countries; and Brentpark, established in the latter half of the 1950s to accommodate the town’s coloured community in line with the requirements of the Group Areas Act.

This book demonstrates that in the 1980s Kroonstad’s black residential areas lagged behind other black residential areas across the country when it came to protest politics. This was mainly because in Maokeng and Brentpark, at least until 1989, there were no pressing socioeconomic grievances – these areas were led by, respectively, the town council and management committee which made every effort to meet the residents’ basic service needs without increasing rent (or, at least, by keeping it at an affordable level).

The study that led to this book concentrates on a politically significant area which has received scant scholarly attention. In fact, in their chapter on activists’ networks and political protest in the Free State, historians Chitja Twala and Jeremy Seekings make an important observation: ‘... overall, political struggles in the Free State did not compare with those in many other parts of the country’.² Perhaps this has discouraged researchers and scholars from undertaking studies in this region. The observation does not, however, imply that there is an absolute absence of work on the Free State, or parts of it. In 1985 the city council commissioned a book to celebrate Kroonstad’s 130 years of existence. The book, a massive 645-page volume, provides useful information about the establishment of Kroonstad, the development of the town and its white residents, and the role of the white city council.³ Until recently it was the only authoritative history of Kroonstad. Apart from alluding to a few incidents such as the role played by the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) and the boycotts against increased rent in the late 1920s, the book is silent on political activism in the black townships.

Place of Thorns makes a significant contribution to trying to understand black people’s experiences and responses to apartheid from a local perspective. For the historian Noor Nieftagodien, local history is crucial because it elevates black people from being seen only as peripheral actors and it also gives attention to ‘... local leaders of popular movements, teachers, home-owners, former gangsters, and young people, who ... invariably would appear as no more than footnotes in conventional narratives’.⁴

Patricia Kay’s Notre Dame and Phyllis Ntantala’s A Life’s Mosaic have each dedicated a chapter to the history of Kroonstad. Kay describes the important role played by the Roman Catholic Church in introducing education in the black locations in 1907, and Ntantala sheds light on the daily living conditions of the residents in the old locations in the 1930s and early 1940s, and alludes to the presence of the ICU and African National Congress (ANC).⁵

Books by Antjie Krog, poet, author and long-time resident of Kroonstad, on the other hand, deal – in some considerable detail – with political events which took place in Maokeng and Brentpark, mainly towards the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. In A Change of Tongue, she recounts the ‘first and only truly inclusive’ march organised from Brentpark to the centre of town to say ‘this is our town too and we demand equal rights here’. For her, even though this march was ruthlessly suppressed by the police it bridged the gap between the residents of Maokeng and Brentpark.⁶ And in Begging to be Black, Krog narrates a story about the murder of the leader of the Three Million Gang in 1992. The book also provides glimpses of politics in Maokeng in the mid-1980s – for example, Krog alludes to the competing political factions in the township, the Maokeng Democratic Crisis Committee and the Activists’ Forum, and describes how these divided the ‘community’.⁷

In spite of the valuable contribution these authors and scholars have made through their work, none has attempted to explore protest politics (or lack thereof) in Kroonstad’s black areas in the 1980s. This partially explains the obvious omission in the literature of the crucial role played by the Town Council of Maokeng, especially its chairman Michael Koekoe, in restraining protest politics in Kroonstad.

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Literature on political mobilisation and protest in South Africa is relatively abundant. Some scholars specifically focus on youth, students, labour or the underground. With the notable exception of Jeremy Seekings, scholars have avoided researching the reasons some townships lagged behind in terms of political mobilisation and protest. In his study of Kagiso township on the West Rand, Seekings demonstrated that this township experienced political mobilisation and protest belatedly because ‘political organisation was very weak in Kagiso in 1984–85, and there were no pressing local issues around which mobilisation occurred’.⁸ In this volume I make the same point, but go further and emphasise the centrality of the role played by the town council and its chairperson (and, to a lesser extent, the management committee in Brentpark).

Post-apartheid South Africa ushered in a resurgence of the study of black politics and protest. Currently scholars’ and authors’ interests have seemingly shifted to autobiographies and biographies – mainly of the leaders of the liberation movements; the role of the ANC’s and Pan Africanist Congress’s (PAC) military wings, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA) respectively, in the struggle for liberation; and, recently, the service delivery protests. In contrast, little attention has been given to the contentious and uneasy relationship between the leadership of the ANC and community-based structures caused by the transition from apartheid to the democratic dispensation.

This book contributes to an understanding of the relationship between the ANC, at both provincial and national levels, and civic associations (or civics) at the local level. It demonstrates that lack of consultation by ANC leaders, who sometimes had little or no understanding of Kroonstad’s local politics, backfired and cost the ANC vital votes during the first democratic local government elections.

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Several considerations motivated the choice of Kroonstad as a case study. Firstly, Kroonstad’s black townships, particularly Maokeng, have a distinctive feature: a relatively permanent African population, and a comparatively small one. In 1988 the population of Maokeng was estimated at about 70 000.⁹ Eight years later the transitional local council for the Greater Kroonstad Department of Community Services placed the population of this township at 99 585.¹⁰

Kroonstad town, unlike other towns, particularly to the east of Johannesburg (known as the East Rand), has never been a mass industrial area agglomerated by diverse ‘manufacturing clusters: metal industry, chemicals and food’. Although Twala and Seekings note that ‘both population and industry are concentrated in the north-west corner, which includes the goldfields around Welkom as well as Sasolburg, Parys and Kroonstad’,¹¹ Kroonstad had far fewer industries, particularly manufacturing industries, than the other towns in that locality. Its economy is largely based on service industries and these, unlike the mining and manufacturing industries, did not attract large numbers of labourers. This partially explains why Kroonstad’s black residential areas did not experience the problem of squatter settlements. Nor did it have hostels accommodating migrant labourers (the hostels which were established in the black old locations to house employees of companies based in Kroonstad were closed after many of those companies left Kroonstad following economic recession in the 1970s). Because of this, and because Maokeng, unlike other townships, was not divided along ethnic lines, it did not experience the ethnically driven political violence that erupted at the beginning of the 1990s.

And finally, because education played a key role in the development of Kroonstad’s black townships, especially the area which later came to be known formally as Maokeng, community matters were always led (or influenced) by the ‘respectables’ or the educated elites – at least until the late 1970s. This helps to explain the constraint on mass political mobilisation, especially violent protests, which became the norm in the township only from the mid-1980s. The ‘respectables’ believed in resolving issues through dialogue.

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Research process

The information for this book was obtained using the life history interview technique through which social historians focus on the interviewee’s life holistically. The interview covers early childhood, family history (the backgrounds of grandparents, parents and siblings), education, employment, social life, religion and political activities. The idea is to have a deeper understanding of the individual’s life. Through the life histories of my interviewees I was able to gain an understanding of the circumstances – from an individual’s perspective – that caused them to be involved in the political processes in Kroonstad’s black residential areas. This technique also helps to explain their actions.

Life history interviews, as will be seen in the book, have their limitations. Sometimes interviewees tend to confuse events or the date when events happened – or participants in the same event recall it differently. For example, in an interview Tsepo Oliphant, who was born in 1958 and in 1976 was doing Junior Certificate (JC, today’s Grade 10), confused the date when the students at Bodibeng High School demonstrated in 1976. He claimed that the demonstration took place on 15 June, a day before the Soweto uprisings. The demonstration was actually on 24 August. Again, when I interviewed former students at Bodibeng about the morning they took to the streets in 1985 demanding that the prefect system be replaced with a student representative council (SRC), they could not remember who among the teaching staff had announced the prefects.

It is for this reason that the celebrated oral historian John Tosh cautions that life histories should be ‘heard alongside the careful marshalling of social facts in the written record’.¹² One of the ways to overcome the limitations of life history interviews is to interview more than one person. This helps when verifying information. Although oral history has its limitations, it is nonetheless a capable methodology to discover ‘hidden histories’ or undocumented histories of ordinary people. Hence, Tosh asserts that ‘problems in [oral history] should not be grounds for having nothing to do with oral history’. And the sociologist Monique Marks asserts that notwithstanding the limitations, oral history ‘is a satisfactory source’.¹³

My first contact with Kroonstad was in 2006, when I was employed as an oral historian for the South Africa History Archives and Sunday Times Oral History Project. Part of the project was to introduce oral history in schools, with the objective of training high school and secondary school students to research the history of their local communities, write a report and present it. Two schools were identified in each of the four provincial towns in which the project was to take place. Among them were Bodibeng and Brentpark Secondary in Kroonstad. After contacting the schools and presenting the project, I began my preliminary research. I interviewed a substantial number of people in each town, including former teachers, religious leaders, members of youth and student congresses, adult political activists, ‘ordinary’ members of the communities, and many more. From these interviews (and archival research) it became clear to me that Kroonstad, particularly its black townships, has an interesting history which, surprisingly, has not been adequately documented.

Towards the end of 2007 I registered for my doctoral studies in the ‘Local Histories and Present Realities’ programme, headed by Professor Philip Bonner at the University of the Witwatersrand, and I chose Kroonstad as my case study. Conducting research in a township that is not your birthplace, or a place where you have spent most of your life, has its challenges. But it also has its advantages. To my interviewees in Maokeng I was an ‘outsider’ and I was constantly reminded of this – although not maliciously. According to Marlize Rabe, ‘... the insider versus outsider debate is ... not new in social research’.¹⁴ Kikumura, cited by Rabe, sums it up as follows:

On the one hand, advocates for the outsider perspective generally argue that access to authentic knowledge is more obtainable because of the objectivity and scientific detachment with which one can approach one’s investigation as a non-member of the group. On the other hand, proponents of the insider perspective claim that group membership provides special insight into matters (otherwise obscure to others) based on one’s knowledge of the language and one’s intuitive sensitivity and empathy and understanding of the culture and its people.

With the help of Mr Mpopetsi Dhlamini, a former teacher, inspector and long-time resident of Kroonstad, I identified people for interviews. After retiring, Dhlamini founded Rebirth of Kroonstad, a non-profit organisation focused on capturing the history of Kroonstad, and particularly of Maokeng. Dhlamini was born in and had lived all his life in Kroonstad, and his vast knowledge of the area and of people from different backgrounds helped me to understand the political nuances of the town, and to gain access to the ‘relevant’ people (as he put it) and learn who to contact for other sources such as archival materials, especially in the municipality. He introduced me to people as the ‘young man from Wits [University], who is doing a very important job: writing the history of Kroonstad, something that is long overdue’. He always emphasised to the residents of Maokeng that it was imperative for them to participate in the research by granting me interviews, because one day they would be ‘gone’ (dead) and their history would be forgotten or, worse, distorted.

This seemed to work. People made time for me. They welcomed me into their homes and offices. Some, like Hennie Ludik, a former employee of the Town Council of Maokeng, even entrusted me with their personal photographs and a few pamphlets.

Inasmuch as Dhlamini’s knowledge of the area and its people was helpful, it proved, at times, also to be detrimental. He referred me only to the people he knew – the people who, according to him, would ‘give you the best and honest interviews’. He tended to dismiss other people as ‘irrelevant’. In my observation these were mainly people he did not take ‘seriously’ (that is, people outside his circle). Moreover, he seemed mostly acquainted with the older residents, people of his generation. However, he also introduced me to some of the key members of the student and youth organisations in the township, although his knowledge of this generation was limited. To gain access to them I had to rely on referrals by other former members of student and youth organisations I had interviewed.

This book is based on interviews with eighty respondents from different social, economic and political backgrounds conducted over a period of six years, between 2006 and 2012. Among them are former teachers, local councillors, civic leaders, gangsters, religious leaders, former trade unionists and former cadres of MK and APLA, and former student and youth activists – representing a diversity of backgrounds and voices that have helped to bring to life the rich and complex history of Kroonstad’s black townships.

Endnotes

1 The name Maokeng was used long before the Anglo-Boer War to refer to Kroonstad as a whole, but was not used formally until 1984, when the Town Council of Maokeng took over the administration of the African townships.

2 Twala, C and Seekings, J (2010) ‘Activist Networks and Political Protest in the Free State, 1983–1990’, in South African Democracy Education Trust (eds) The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 4, 1980–1990. Pretoria: Unisa Press, pp. 766–7.

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

4 Nieftagodien, N (2010) ‘The Past of “The Local” in History Workshop’s Local History’, in African Studies 69, 1 (April), pp. 41–2.

5 Kay, P (1984) Notre Dame: Under the Southern Cross. Johannesburg: Ravan; 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.

6 Krog, A (2003) A Change of Tongue. Johannesburg: Random House, p. 113.

7 Krog, A (2009) Begging to be Black. Cape Town: Random House Struik, p. 172; see also Krog, A (1995) Account of a Murder. Johannesburg: Heinemann.

8 Seekings, J (1992) ‘From Quiescence to “People’s Power”: Township Politics in Kagiso, 1985–1986’, in Social Dynamics 18, 1, pp. 20–41.

9 Die Noordelike Stem – The Northern Times, 21 October 1988.

10 Samuel Tanya et al. (eds) (1996) ‘ “Bringing Houses to Maokeng”: A Community-Based Approach’, Research Report for Community Agency for Social Enquiry and Maokeng Community Development Trust, July, p. 3.

11 Twala C. and Seekings J (2010) ‘Activist networks and political protest in the Free State, 1983–1990’, in South African Democracy Education Trust (eds) The road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 4, 1980–1990, Pretoria: Unisa Press, p.767.

12 Tosh, J (1991) The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History. Harrow: Longman, p. 210.

13 Marks, M (2001) Young Warriors: Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p.15.

14 Rabe, M (2003) ‘Research Reports: Revisiting “Insiders and Outsiders” as Social Researchers’, in African Sociological Review 7, 2, pp. 149–61.