Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

public patience broke. The TNC called for a collective refusal to carry passes. This was the first major anti-pass campaign to have been summoned in South Africa and counts as an epochal event. On 1 April thousands attended meetings in Johannesburg and hundreds handed in their passes. Pickets in white suburbs collected 2 000 more. At a meeting held late that day it was decided that delegates from Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Boksburg and Benoni were to secure the surrender of passes the following day and a cessation of work in those areas. On 2 April in the storm centre of Benoni, large crowds gathered at the police charge office; as a result 69 women and 49 men were arrested, to which the crowd responded by stoning the police. The next day 100 Africans returned carrying a sack of surrendered passes, upon which 67 arrests were made. On 4 April all available white constables were summoned to round up 20 male Africans who were travelling the district ‘spreading disaffection among the mine natives’. Similar episodes were reported first in Springs and then finally in Boksburg.⁴² Here a more ambiguous political climate prevailed. As early as February 1919 an agitation against passes had developed in this area, but had been largely stifled by the moderation of its TNC branch chairman Wessels Morake (who would stand at the head of a long line of Boksburg black elite conservatism). In April an ERPM clerk, J.G. Matshiqi, took the lead in the movement, however, and Morake’s restraint was swept aside after Matshiqi had summoned reinforcement from Johannesburg, Germiston and Benoni.

      Police repression, a split in the leadership of the TNC and a range of minor concessions, again led black political leaders on the Rand to step back from the brink. However, neither they nor anyone else could gainsay or disguise one unrelenting reality and pressure – the ever-spiralling increase in prices with which wages dismally failed to keep up. The tide of resistance was about to break its banks. During December 1919 and January 1920 workers from Rose Deep and Knights Central in Germiston, from New Modder, Van Ryn East, Geduld, Welgedacht and Modder Deep in Benoni and from Simmer and Jack in Boksburg all at one point or another refused to work and registered protest over wages.⁴³ Then on 16 February 1920 two Zulu miners, named Mobu and Vilakazi, were arrested after attending a TNC meeting in Vrededorp (in Johannesburg). They had been moving from room to room on the Cason section of ERPM, and urging fellow workers to strike for higher pay. The following day the vast majority of workers in Cason Compound went on strike – 2 500 out of 2 900 men demanding their release and an increase in wages. With that the 1920 black mine workers’ strike formally began. From there the virus quickly spread to other parts of Ekurhuleni, thence to Johannesburg and finally to the West Rand. This was to be the most significant black worker and certainly black mine worker action for the next 60 years. When the strike finally ended on 28 February 1920, 71 000 African workers had been on strike with over 30 000 out on six consecutive days. Ekurhuleni was its detonator and fuse.⁴⁴

      African men were regularly subjected to pass raids

      Rapid deflation set in in 1921 and caused the agitation to subside. Widespread apathy now reigned among Africans on the Rand, reinforced by several other brutal acts of State repression elsewhere in South Africa. Particular acts of aggression include the assault on the Israelites in the Eastern Cape in 1921 and the bombing of the Bondelswarts rebels in South West Africa, and of the rebels of the Rand Strike in 1922. Political agitation staged a minor revival with the arrival of Clement Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICWU) late in 1925, but after one tour of Ekurhuleni, at which Kadalie spoke to many audiences in Germiston, Benoni, Boksburg and Springs, he and his lieutenants concentrated all ICU resources and meetings in Johannesburg. Ekurhuleni branches consequently stagnated, and despite giving a platform and political exposure to a number of rising political personalities such as Walter Ngqoyi in Benoni, Dinah Maile in Springs, Abel Phoofolo in Germiston and others in Boksburg, it slid into total obscurity in the area after 1927.⁴⁵

      From then onwards Ekurhuleni’s politics wound down completely to the level of the local and the parochial. The consequent lack of national profile that these achieved has meant a number of major grass roots movements and initiatives which mobilised themselves in this period have been missed or ignored, leaving the late 1920s to the late 1930s being written off as ‘years of anguished impotence’.⁴⁶

      The reality, as will be shown, was precisely the opposite and a series of fundamental challenges to municipal control were then spearheaded by Ekurhuleni black urban women. This is one of the subjects of the next chapter.

      Black Ekurhuleni began to set down roots in the ‘mine locations’ which emerged on the Reef before and after the South African War of 1899–1902. Once Ekurhuleni’s towns acquired municipal status they took steps to control these mushrooming settlements and ultimately to establish formal locations. Two distinct features of these locations which defied the authorities’ original intention were their mixed African, Indian and coloured population, and the large numbers of African women they soon came to house. These helped fashion a new urban culture which went by the name of ‘marabi’. Between 1913 and 1920 intense popular and worker struggles swept through both mining and urban locations, among the most notable of which were the 1919 anti-pass campaign and the 1920 Black Workers’ Strike. Thereafter a number of factors led to the demobilisation of these movements, and politics in the various locations declined to the level of the purely parochial.

CHAPTER 4

       EKURHULENI’S INSUBORDINATE WOMEN 1918-1945

      Women’s resistance in Germiston

      In the inter-war years, sections of both black and white women found themselves in a similar predicament in South Africa generally and in Ekurhuleni in particular, even though each group’s life chances and circumstances diverged radically in certain respects, and white women shared uncomplainingly in the structure of exploitation that white society as a whole imposed on its black subjects. The interwar period was the time when women – both black and white – emerged as an increasingly conspicuous component of South African society and, in a hitherto unprecedented way, made their voices and their presences felt. Nowhere was this truer than in Ekurhuleni, which emerged as one of the prime sites, if not the prime site of women’s struggle for equal rights and better lives in South Africa. Here the collectively subordinate position of both white and black women to men was challenged earlier and more vigorously than in any other part of the land.

      Many white women entered work during the war

       WHITE WOMEN’S POLITICS

      White women entered the political limelight first as noted in Chapter 2. By the common decision of white men (with only the Prime Minister of Natal dissenting) in the negotiations leading up to the Act of Union in 1910, white women were denied the vote in national, provincial and local elections. The common view among white men at this time was that a woman’s place was in the home and that they should not leave this private space to enter the public arena.¹ The first place and the first sphere of activity in which they accomplished this shift was in the field of philanthropy and social work, with Afrikaner women becoming particularly active in the face of the social ravages and the part collapse of the Afrikaner family which followed the South African War of 1899–1902.² Social dislocation (often manifesting itself in the excessive consumption of alcohol which was a characteristic feature of the Rand at this time) prompted white women (in this case mainly English speaking and middle class) to join a recently established organisation, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. This was soon to have a massive effect on the Rand, as they waged extremely effective temperance campaigns at the beginning of World War I and again in the 1920s.

      The gradual breach of the public sphere by white women was in a large part the product of social and economic change. As industrialisation