on the East Rand the feeling is still prevalent that civilisation ceases after Boksburg is left.’43 However, what the East Rand Express did not realise was that a turning point had already been reached. Only in 1909/1910 had the idea first been seriously considered of the gold reef extending into the centre of Ekurhuleni. The reef was finally located in 1911. Technological advances facilitated the rapid development of gold mining in the region in the next decade-and-a-half. Critical here was the introduction of the Francois Cementation Process, which allowed shafts to be sealed off from water-bearing fissures in 1916. This left the way open for the East Rand Basin to be fully explored and exploited. A clutch of what would prove to be highly profitable gold mines then came into existence: Springs, New State Areas, Modder East and Van Dyk. Collectively they pushed Ekurhuleni to the forefront and to a pre-eminent position in the industry, which was uncontested by the mid-1920s when many Central Rand/Johannesburg mines closed down operations. In 1922 Ekurhuleni took over the role of the leading gold-producing region on the Witwatersrand, and hence in the world, a position which it would retain until the early 1950s.44
Early gold mining in Boksburg
LIVING IN EKURHULENI
Following close on the heels of mining development came the founding of Ekurhuleni’s earliest towns. The first two were Boksburg and Germiston. Boksburg claims the position of the second township after Johannesburg to be proclaimed on the Rand – in this case in 1887, at which point it became the government’s administrative centre for the Ekurhuleni gold fields.45 The diary of an early visitor who had a brief sojourn in Boksburg in September 1887 leaves us the following account:
The place is still in its infancy yet, tents and mud houses being the predominant features. The walls of the government offices are beam high but they are by no means strong. The walls of half of the gaol have also been run up some eight or nine feet [three metres] being built of stone, with small air holes some distance from the floor. We pity the poor unfortunates who may have to be locked up in that dismal hole. A considerable amount of mining work is being carried on near Boksburg.46
When Montagu White, the first Mining Commissioner, arrived in Boksburg in 1888 he registered what he called ‘the two defects in South African scenery … the absence of water and the scarcity of trees’. He accordingly resolved to build a big dam, as would later be done in Germiston and Benoni. Black, long-term prisoners were imported from Johannesburg to carry out the work, while 40 000 trees were planted above the railway line. In 1891, after two years of drought, the dam finally filled up.47 The first steps in the transformation of the physical landscape of the town had been taken.
Germiston followed a similar track. Two hundred stands were laid out on the farm Elandsfontein in May 1887, which presumably marked the proclamation of the township. At this point, according to a letter from John Jack to a correspondent in Johannesburg, a stream of water ran down one side of the township beside which a mill (to crush mealies), and a hotel, a store, a blacksmith’s shop, a wagon maker, an agent, a private boarding house and one or two dwelling houses had been built.48 Later tin shacks, tents and waggons lined the streets. A major fillip was given to the town when the railway line from Vereeniging (and hence Cape Town) reached Germiston in 1892. Shortly after, a line linking Germiston ww to Pretoria was built.49 It was then that Germiston assumed its position as the railway and transport hub of the Rand, which in turn sparked off a wave of development in the town.
Benoni’s development was somewhat more belated. A prospector’s account dating back to 1887 speaks of the fellow prospector whom he was coming to assist and who lived in a grass hut near Benoni Hotel which was ‘the only building in the district, with the exception of the far-away homesteads of the Boers’. The hotel itself was anything but salubrious offering ‘room for two beds with a table in between’. The first store was opened in 1888, a wood and iron building without ceiling or floor. The best known venue in town was Chimes Hotel (later the Transvaal Hotel) whose proprietor was locally renowned for his St Helenan coloured wife, ‘Mother Eata’. Throughout this period Benoni remained isolated from other Witwatersrand towns. Roads to other centres were simply tracks in the veld, where highway robbers often lurked. Even when the first railway was built between Johannesburg and Springs in 1891, the nearest station was Brakpan, eight kilometres away. At this point and for some while after, the many single white men working on the mines were housed in rows of rooms known as single quarters, provided with communal facilities. They took their meals at private boarding houses – boarding houses in the true sense. Married miners lived in blocks of wood-and-iron houses each with two bedrooms, one sitting room and a small kitchen. Given the absence of sanitary facilities, bad health and disease were constant companions. As newspaper editor William Hill later wrote in his diary:
Over all that time … hung an ever present threat. In winter it was pneumonia caused by the dust; in summer typhoid caused by the filthy conditions under which the inhabitants had to live.
No schools existed before the conclusion of the South African War (1899–1902), previously referred to as the Anglo-Boer War.50
Benoni was only properly laid out after that conflict had ended, in an era which has aptly been called reconstruction, because of the need to repair damage caused by the war. In the interim the vast bulk of the black and white population had fled Ekurhuleni and the Rand, and the mines had come to a halt. Much plant and machinery was destroyed along with wood-and-iron buildings and accommodation. In the case of Benoni, plans which had been approved for the building of a new township by the Kleinfontein Estates Company, a leading shareholder of which was George Farrar, stalled until after the war. This extended pause was to change the course of Benoni’s history decisively. After the war, Sir George Farrar returned to set his mining ventures into motion once again. Heavy rains had fallen in the last summer of the war, creating an artificial lake at Kleinfontein Dam and transforming a barren valley and naked earthwork into a grassy natural beauty spot. Farrar set about persuading the Kleinfontein Estates and Township Company to relocate the township to the north-facing slopes of the valley. They agreed and appointed him to design the new town, the centre of which was modelled on Farrar’s native Bedford in England. Many of the streets were given names associating them with Bedford. Later in 1903 the new township was pegged out, 200 stands being bought in the first auction in March 1904.51 Part of the new influx of residents was drawn from British soldiers who took their discharges in Benoni and other Ekurhuleni towns at the end of the South African War (1902). These imparted to the white community the ‘Britishness’ it would retain until well into the century.52 In common with Germiston and Boksburg, Benoni was also granted municipal status, and municipal self-government (for whites) in 1903, which unequivocally opened a new era in the history of Ekurhuleni.53
Springs grew up on the back of coal rather than gold which had been discovered in 1887. In 1888 the Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg-Maatschapij (NZASM) was authorised by the South African government to mine coal at Springs, and a railway line was built to connect Springs to Johannesburg in 1898. After the war Springs/ Brakpan was the most productive coal mining region in the country, although it was shortly to lose out comprehensively to Middelburg/Witbank when the Apex-Witbank railway line was opened in 1910, and the Ekurhuleni coal mines immediately found that they could not compete. As late as 1901 no Springs town existed. Corrugated iron cottages clustered round the collieries, with a few general stores and small hotels dotted around them, and Springs only attained full municipal status in 1912. Brakpan languished in a more or less identical position. The population of Springs comprised coal-mining immigrants from Scotland and Wales in the eastern part of the area, and from Holland and Germany in the west. Almost no Afrikaners were to be found among them. Managed by a Health Committee from 1902, a Town Council was only constituted and a township proclaimed in 1904, boasting no residential area in the decade 1900–1909.54 Brakpan’s first residential township was only established in 1911.
