Germiston and Boksburg acquired self-governing, municipal status in 1903, Benoni in 1907 and Springs in 1912.16 Each took steps to assume control of these haphazard mushroom settlements, most of which were already too small to house the populations they contained, by first taking over these locations in the short term and in the long term by finding new land. Germiston Council found itself immediately frustrated when the mining houses expressed themselves unwilling to sell the ground on which the location stood in Georgetown South and had to content themselves with simply leasing the land on an annual basis. Under this arrangement only four stands for trading were allowed by the mine owners.17 Boksburg Council was more fortunate. After a fruitless search for new land on which to site a black location which persisted through 1904, it learnt that Hercules Gold Mining Company was willing to permit the establishment of such a settlement 1 kilometre south of the existing black village on Klippoortjie 149. Eventually surface rights over 100 acres were obtained by the Council in this area and the move was accomplished in 1910; 668 men, 549 women and 558 children were moved.18 This community was subsequently renamed Stirtonville after its first Superintendent, Stirton, who held that position between 1910 and the early 1930s.19
Chinese labourers
One development which concentrated the minds of several municipalities on the task of securing appropriate land was the passing of the Gold Law in 1908. This prohibited the presence of informal locations on mine land (as well as trading without a licence, which soon caused other problems to be discussed shortly). In Benoni’s case, the Council had searched for an alternative site for the location from the time it assumed office in 1907. Here the New Kleinfontein Gold Mining Company was willing to hand over the land on which the location stood, but the Council rejected the site as being already too small. In 1909, however, the Council’s hand was forced when the Mining Commissioner gave the location’s residents notice to move by the end of the year, in terms of the Gold Law promulgated the year before. After securing a stay of execution the Council then searched somewhat more diligently for an appropriate plot of land. It found it south-west of Benoni on the farm Rietfontein on which it purchased 66 morgen of land – enough for 4 000 people. After legal complications it removed the inhabitants of Chimes location to this site in February 1912.20
In Springs the local authority was faced with fewer problems. The existing location lay on government land, and its population was small. Accordingly, in 1908 it took over formal control of the settlement and tried to shift all blacks living elsewhere in Springs into this area. The latter proved difficult since far more people lived in Springs than in the location itself. From 1916 they embarked on a search for other land but made little progress in the face of non-co-operation from Geduld Proprietary and other nearby mines. Eventually, in 1919 the Springs Mining Commissioner found a satisfactory area of land on Geduld – 77 morgen which could accommodate 1 871 plots. Unlike any of the other Ekurhuleni municipalities, Springs secured a government loan of £25 000 with which it built houses for those removed, a settlement which would eventually be known as Payneville. Unlike anywhere but Alberton location, its plots were a spacious 17 × 17 yards instead of the standard 17 × 8.5.21 Finally Alberton location was laid out after the town gained municipal status in 1907. Here again, plots were fairly large. Cass Khayile remembers fig and pear trees growing in his father’s garden. Rosalind Sibeko’s father kept cattle and sheep, while Mrs Nkosi recalls large gardens and big rooms, so much so that when the family was removed ‘our furniture couldn’t fit it’.22 It would remain relatively small for many years.
Germiston’s hand was eventually forced by the Indian traders of Georgetown. In October 1910 a merchant named Kala Singh who had been charged by the Council for doing business illegally in a residential area, won his case on the grounds that the location area had never been formally proclaimed a location (as it was leased to and not owned by the Council). The Council then concluded that it needed to consider clearing the area and obtaining separate residential or trading areas for Africans and Indians. Its trouble deepened when first, the Gold Mining Company, on whose land Georgetown stood, gave six months’ notice for the Council to complete the removal of its residents (to be accomplished by mid-1913) and second, when negotiations then broke down (over price) over the purchase of new land. They were only offered a way out when the Transvaal Provincial Administration agreed to obtain surface rights from Knights Central Gold Mining Company for land on which an African residential area could be laid out. The Council, however, still had the problem of what to do with its Indian traders. The Department of Native Affairs, the Department of the Interior and other government offices all objected to Indians and Africans occupying the same ground, and the Council proved unable to find alternative separate land. Eventually, in the absence of any alternative and with a crisis looming rapidly, a compromise was reached whereby Indians could live on the same site provided that a 67-metre buffer separated the two residential areas. By 1922 this, perhaps predictably, had disappeared. The new site was 30 morgen in extent and 4 kilometres from the centre of town. In June 1913 the African population of this new residential area stood at 2 193, and the Indian population at 675.23
Benoni’s negotiations over its new location faced the same complication of where to house its Indian population. Not only did Indian traders refuse to move, but the Gold Law prohibited trading on mining ground. The Council negotiated this issue in two ways. It removed the African customers of these Indian traders to the new location, and then offered the traders residence and trading rights, this in open defiance of the law (which, however, was amended in 1913). The new location was then laid out in three parts, one for Africans, one for coloureds and one for Indians.24 The same solution was arrived at, after the 1913 change in the law, in Springs, in whose new location plots 1–384 were reserved for coloureds, plots 385–1 569 for Africans, and the rest for Indians. No compensation was paid to any section of the community, despite extensive protests on their part.25
Types of housing and living arrangements in the new locations would define both the capacity of location superintendents and their administrations to control them, and the general contours of black political assertion, resistance and struggle over the following three decades. Local councils like those which ran Germiston or Benoni were penny-pinching in the extreme, and built negligible numbers of municipal houses for blacks (Springs being one marked exception). The typical pattern of municipal policy across the Ekurhuleni towns was to trim costs by providing serviced plots or stands, upon which stand holders could erect wood-and-iron structures, sometimes aided by loans or low-cost building materials furnished by municipal authorities. As a result, by the early 1930s the ratio of owner to municipally built houses in Ekurhuleni stood at anything from 2 and 12 to 1 (621:326 Springs location; 963:226 Germiston location; 1 026:273 Benoni location).26 This mostly self-built built environment opened up a number of spaces and opportunities which allowed its residents to escape some of the structures of urban control and which served to soften the harsh regimen of black urban life. Firstly, stand holders who had built their houses and paid their stand rent were more difficult for either the council or the government to coerce and control, and this had significant consequences with respect to the independence of black urban women. Widows, for example, along with other women who had been abandoned or divorced, were allowed to hold on to (and perhaps even acquire) stands, which flew in the face of official policy on this matter. By 1930, for example, women occupied 250 out of 818 stands in Benoni location, and a similar situation was developing on a slightly lesser scale elsewhere on the Reef.27 In 1932 Brakpan location was allegedly ‘teeming with people – principally from Basutoland, who … have thrown up shacks all over the place and defied the authorities’.28 Finally by 1935, in Springs, the ‘black female population was alleged to have substantially overtaken that of males’.29 Other major consequences of this pattern of semi-autonomous female urbanisation was that it created a situation where massive sub-letting and equally massive illicit brewing of liquor could (and did) occur. Both were to prove nightmares for the white municipal administrations of Ekurhuleni.
Thus despite all official intentions to the opposite, the Ekurhuleni locations became ethnically mixed