A SOUTH AFRICAN WHITE WORKING CLASS
Until the late 1910s and well beyond in most cases, the white population of Ekurhuleni’s towns were overwhelmingly foreign and predominantly English-speaking. This was mainly because the initial skilled labour complement of the gold mines on the Rand was drawn from English-speaking miners from Cornwall, Wales, Northern England, Australia and the United States of America.1 Internationally these miners formed a mobile floating global population and have been appropriately described by Jan Hyslop as ‘the imperial working class’.2 Thus by 1907 a full 83% of the men working on the mines were foreign born.3 For Afrikaners, towns were foreign places, the abode of the uitlander whose moral contamination was to be avoided at all costs.4 English speakers dominated all aspects of life in the Ekurhuleni towns. They ran the businesses (until complemented by a large Jewish infusion); they staffed the professions and municipal service; and they owned the small workshops that helped serve the mines.5 Not only was the occupational structure of Ekurhuleni dominated by the British, but so was its cultural and social life. Up to World War II, Benoni’s social world, for example, revolved around its Caledonian Society, Cornish Association, Irish Association and Royal Society of St George, together with the mainly mine-based sporting clubs.6 Afrikaners gradually infiltrated the semi-skilled ranks of the mines after the turn of the 20th century, but their entry, as Elaine Katz has put it was ‘silent’ and ‘unobtrusive’.7 Afrikaner learner miners were at pains to conceal their origins, not to flaunt them, not even daring, for example, to address a mining official in Afrikaans, for fear of losing their job.8
While English-speaking mine managers openly disparaged the capacities of what they termed ‘backvelder’ or ‘bywoner’ Afrikaner miners, they entered the industry in steadily increasing numbers in the late 1900s and 1910s.9 Two events are usually associated with the process: the 1907 general strike on the Rand, and the outbreak of World War I. By the early 20th century most of Germiston’s highly productive mines, as well as others in Ekurhuleni, were controlled by George Farrar. In 1907, when the first general strike on the gold mines broke out, triggered by the decision by Knight’s Deep mine management to compel their white miners to supervise three rather than two black drillers, Tommy Heldzinger, George Farrar’s undercover agent, describes in his diary how he was sent to Pretoria by his management to recruit impoverished whites to act as mine guards or strikebreakers. For him this was the start of the poor Afrikaners’ move to the mines.10 A second surge is associated with World War I. Then, across the Rand, an exodus of 20% of skilled British artisan miners, who joined up to serve the British army on the Western Front, were replaced by Afrikaner ‘farmer-miners’ who were fleeing catastrophic agricultural distress in the Orange Free State and the Cape.11 In Benoni alone, 2 300 men out of a total mine white labour force of 3 500 joined up. By 1917, 70–80% of underground miners were Afrikaners.12
These two pivotal events, however, concealed deeper processes at work. One was the ravages of the miners’ lung disease known as silicosis or phthisis. This incapacitated and then quickly killed thousands of white miners on the mines after a few years underground. One chilling statistic reveals the misery this entailed: in 1910 the average age of death of white miners was 33 years and the most common age was 29.13 Hence, when the famous Scots trade union leader James Bain visited the Witwatersrand in 1913, he found that out of 18 men serving on the 1907 miners’ strike committee, ten were dead of silicosis,14 three were suffering from it and only one remained in good health. Such mortality opened up the ranks of the white working class to Afrikaners in a way no strike could ever have done.
A second force promoting the movement of Afrikaner workers onto the mines was simple destitution. Afrikaners, as noted earlier, regarded the towns as an alien imposition: they clung on to their niches in the countryside for as long as they could. The scorched earth policy pursued by the British army in the guerrilla stages of the South African War of 1899–1902 obliterated many rural livelihoods and proved to be the first step in the rural Afrikaners’ undoing, driving scores of impoverished farmers to the towns.15 The gradual extinction of the white bywoner farmer (tenant farmer, share cropper) was the second. This proceeded apace as land values rose, as land was sub-divided among heirs, and as fencing in of large tracts of the eastern and northern Cape and the western Orange Free State began around 1910 and accelerated in the early mid-1920s, forcing many footloose trekboer herders to the brink of collapse.16 Droughts which struck South Africa and especially the Orange Free State/Cape interior in the late 1910s and 1920s often provided the final blow. As the Drought Commission reported in 1922:
1907 Miners’ Strike at New Kleinfontein
Since the white man has been in South Africa enormous tracts of country have been entirely or partially denuded of their original vegetation, with the result that rivers, vleis and water holes … have dried up.
That drying up ‘was still continuing’. The report then continued in doom-laden terms:
The simple unadorned truth is sufficiently terrifying without the assistance of rhetoric. The logical outcome of it all is ‘The Great South African Desert’, uninhabitable by man.17
POOR WHITES (ARME BLANKES)
These forces led to the emergence of a new category in South African society – poor whites. The Carnegie Commission into Poor Whites published in 1929 painted a stark picture of how desperate their conditions were. One such graphic case history was that of Mrs Van Wyk:
Born in the Little Karoo her family hired pasture but were too poor to hire labour to work it. She and her three sisters therefore worked alongside five brothers to help earn the family living. After marriage, Mrs Van Wyk led the migratory life of a poor bywoner. Over several years they prospered and their stock grew to number a respectable 500.18 Then the 1916 drought struck. Only 20 animals survived. She and her family took refuge in Knysna where they cleared forests. Her husband then died and the family thereafter survived on Poor Relief.19
First-generation, social engineer, white supremacists recognised that other short-term, stop-gap solutions also had to be employed in the meantime, such as poor white road relief work, agricultural settlement, forestry projects, railway employment, but as Berger observes, policy makers saw education as the long-term solution which would bridge the gap between rural poverty and the labour aristocracy.20
Many such individuals flooded into Ekurhuleni. There the first Afrikaner immigrants/migrants to arrive hailed from the Transvaal (Gauteng). Their movement occurred mainly between 1903 and 1914. Thereafter a second and much larger wave engulfed Ekurhuleni – made up of bywoners arriving from the interior regions of the southern Orange Free State and the northern Cape. Comprising families who had been poor for many years, they flooded in from the late 1910s through the 1920s. A Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister’s survey in Benoni conducted in the 1920s recorded 56% of Afrikaners coming from the Cape, 17% from the Orange Free State and 27% from the Transvaal (Gauteng) and Natal (KwaZulu-Natal). Many paid their last coins for a rail ticket to Ekurhuleni, arriving destitute and without any safety net of friends. Since Germiston was the railway hub of the Witwatersrand it was there that they first alighted. Frequently the local Dutch Reformed Church minister and church was their sole refuge – and only available port of call. Such families were accustomed to an extremely simple way of life – a single-roomed dwelling, no furniture save a riempie bed, earth-dung smoothed floor on which the children slept, one meal a day.21 This they reproduced where they could do it, on the East Rand. Often a long-term life goal was to occupy and invest in small holdings (or part thereof) which surrounded the main towns of Ekurhuleni, once legislated in existence in 1919. One such example was the Putfontein Small Holdings, eight kilometres east of Benoni. This was dotted
