Research attempting to give an overview of the urbanisation of black women in Johannesburg before 1940 is limited to official and newspaper reports, and indirect sources gathered by social scientists. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Deborah Gaitskell wrote scholarly reports such as ‘Laundry, Liquor and “Playing Ladish”. African Women in Johannesburg 1903–1939’, a dissertation entitled ‘Female Mission Initiative: Black and White Women in Three Witwatersrand Churches, 1903–1939’, and an article entitled ‘Housewives, Maids or Mothers Some Contradictions for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–1939’. Charles van Onselen (1982), Tim Couzens (1985) and Luli Callinicos (1987) did important work regarding the history of black people in Johannesburg, and all research results point to the fact that, although the aim of the Natives Laws Amendment Act No 46 of 1937 was to restrict women migrating to cities, it was not implemented on the Witwatersrand until after World War II.
The Church and Manyanos
In her article ‘Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa’ (1990), Gaitskell examines the role played by Christian women’s organisations in the mobility and solidarity of women in urban areas of the Witwatersrand, and focuses specifically on manyanos (manyano is an isiXhosa word meaning ‘unity’).44 Manyanos are well established all over South Africa and are usually Methodist, though other church groups and unions also have manyanos. By 1911, about a million (26.2%) of all black South Africans were Christian, and in 1946 the figure had risen to four million (52.6%), with the majority being Methodist or Anglican. Most were women, and they preferred to come together in separate church groups known as manyanos. The sense of community and support of a manyano prayer group is highly valued by members, many of whom endure long and lonely working hours.45 Motherhood was an important unifying aspect, and the women’s urge to autonomy is proven by the fact that, by 1937, the Transvaal manyanos had chosen a woman as president. The organisational and fundraising skills of the women were especially noteworthy, and they were immensely proud of their annual gatherings which often lasted a week, with members going to great lengths to attend. The custom of Johannesburg manyanos meeting on Thursday afternoons developed from the washerwomen’s schedule: bundles of dirty washing were fetched from white households on Mondays, washed on Tuesdays, ironed on Wednesdays, and returned on Thursday mornings, leaving the women free in the afternoon. Manyano women wear their uniforms with pride: a black skirt with either a red or white jacket, and a white hat.
The manyano movement was, for some time, perceived to be politically passive.46 The groups were, as a consequence, often sidelined in feminist discourse, but research has shown that women in manyano uniforms played a large part in mobilising women during anti-pass demonstrations in Bloemfontein in 1913 and again in Potchefstroom in 1929. Suggesting that more credit should be given to such activism, Gaitskell goes on to make the following point:
Certainly defence of family can be narrow, exclusive, inward-looking – and confining for women: but future investigation of gender relations in South Africa will have to pay sensitive attention to the changing ways in which dominant models of family life have been both valued and resisted by individuals when threatened by the state.47
Manyano women demonstrated their Christian beliefs and the value they attached to family, but they also showed that they wished to free themselves from male domination by choosing their own church structures. Beverly Haddad confirms that the manyano movement is a site of struggle, survival and resistance which needs to be recognised as an influential space. For more than a hundred years, manyano women have carried a strong message of female solidarity and forceful African Christianity. Domestic workers, especially, are attracted to the support and succour offered by a manyano group. One of these was Winnie, the woman who worked for my neighbour in Melville: every Thursday afternoon I would watch as, dressed in black, red and white, she walked down Tolip Street with a cheerful smile.
Considering that so many women went to mission schools in especially the Eastern Cape, it is regrettable that no first-person accounts of the urban experiences of black women are available. As yet, there is no known record of any such experience in Johannesburg before World War II, apart from speeches made by activist Charlotte Maxeke (1874–1939). Maxeke was also South Africa’s first black female graduate, having obtained a BSc degree at Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1901.48
The life histories of a later generation are, however, a valuable source of information. Ellen Kuzwayo (1914–2006) who grew up in the rural Free State, was sent to school in KwaZulu-Natal and moved to Johannesburg in 1946, provides valuable glimpses in her Call Me Woman (1985). However, as will be seen in chapter 5, it is Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) that contains particularly illuminating references not only to his grandmother, but also to his mother, who were both domestic workers in Pretoria.
4
Legislation and Black Urban Women
The Native man is himself the arbiter of his women’s conduct and […] any incursion damaging to the domestic state of the Native people becomes an extremely hazardous proceeding.
Editorial — Umteteli wa Bantu, 31 January 1925
While South African cities may have different origins and histories, their demographics have all been determined by laws and regulations relating to race relations. After gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the mining settlement had a continuous stream of newcomers, and Johannesburg soon became the fastest-growing and largest city in South Africa. Katherine Eales identifies four distinct periods when black women migrated to Johannesburg: 1903–1912, 1913–1923, 1924–1931 and 1932–1939.1 Apart from the many other restrictions they faced, the looming threat of the pass laws, which were eventually implemented in 1956, was a heavy burden to domestic workers. To this day, a defining characteristic of many such women is their status as migrant workers.2
1903–1912
‘She may take it into her head to walk away the next day’
The fact that 1903 is such an important date regarding the settlement of black people on the Witwatersrand is owing to the South African War (1899–1902).3 Quite apart from the imperialistic ambitions of Cecil John Rhodes, the war was provoked by the British to give them a greater say in the running of the gold mines in the Boer Republics. The lengthy war had left the region’s economy in tatters, and there was an urgent need for the mines to start producing again. There was a huge shortage of unskilled labour in the area around Johannesburg, and around 129 000 workers were urgently needed to go down the mines. In his influential study, Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa (1984), Duncan Innes makes the following observation: ‘Given the centrality of the mines to the Transvaal’s economic recovery, the mines’ labour problems became the state’s Native Question in this period.’ Initially, the term ‘natives’ referred only to men, and so women were not considered part of the ‘Native Question’. The result was that, for many years, women occupied an ambivalent space in the urban environment.
Though at first state labour bureaus tried to lure black men to the cities, eventually force was exerted. So-called hut and head or poll taxes, introduced by the British elsewhere in Africa on a per hut or per household basis, were put in place, forcing rural men to join the cash economy, and thereby strengthening the workforce. An added incentive was to give rural wives a taste for western clothing, which would have accorded with mission school teaching. Violet Markham, a fiery supporter of Alfred Milner’s administration in the Transvaal, aptly remarked in 1904: ‘The Kaffir Bride […] may prove the most valuable ally the