a century later. Remains of several others also survive.17
The historical record becomes slightly denser when a newly installed government of the South African Republic made a concerted attempt in the early 1880s to put its administration on a firmer and more professional footing. The origins of the name of Benoni (and its history as a town) go back to this point. In 1881 the Kruger government, which was desperately short of funds, began the resurvey of the irregularly shaped triangles of unclaimed land which lay between the boundaries of farms (uitvalgrond or ‘falling out ground’), named them and then put them up for rental or sale. Johan Rissik, the Surveyor General, who was charged with this task, named Benoni after the Book of Genesis, chapter 35, where Jacob’s wife Rachel died after giving birth to a son whom she named Benoni, meaning ‘Son of My Sorrow’. Rissik allegedly found the name appealing because of the difficult conditions he was encountering doing this part of the survey.18 As we now know, the name stuck. Boksburg was named in a similar fashion, following the discovery of gold. At that time the wider area consisted of three farms: Leeupoort, Driefontein and Klipfontein. As in the case of Benoni, it was resurveyed, resulting in the release of a block of land which could accommodate 1 000 stands. Here a new township was established and named after the South African Republic’s State Secretary of the time, Dr W.E. Bok.19
Springs was born in much the same way. Rough surveys had loosely delineated the farms Geduld, De Rietfontein and Brakpan in the 1860s. An early owner of geduld, Albert Brodrick, sold it to Paul kruger in 1886. William Steyn acquired ownership of De rietfontein in the 1860s, selling it on to two mineral prospectors, Johan Ludwig gauf and W.B.M. vogts in 1888, allegedly in return for a horse’s saddle and bridle. By this time most of the farms in the Ekurhuleni area had been resurveyed, with Pretoria resident James Brookes having redrawn the boundaries of the farms geduld, De rietfontein and Brakpan in 1883. What Brookes’ survey revealed was an unbroken block of uitvalgrond 685 hectares in extent, an even larger area than had been the case with Benoni. Brookes named this chunk of uitvalgrond Die Spring’s because of the large number of natural springs in the area. Following the resurvey of the land, a farmer, W.J. Snyman, rented the farms Cloverfield and Die Springs from the then republican government, the leases of which ended when coal was found on Die rietfontein in 1888.20
W.E. Bok, after whom Boksburg was named
Brakpan’s early development followed a similar trajectory.21 Brakpan sprang up on the farm Weltevreden whose boundaries were delimited in 1864. It was sold twice after its initial owner, J.P. Botha, purchased it in 1886, ending up 20 years later in the hands of State President Paul kruger’s son-in-law, F.C. Eloff. Both kruger and Eloff anticipated gold being found in the area, kruger himself having bought the neighbouring farm geduld.22 The practice of using insider connections clearly extends back far from present times. It was not gold, however, but coal that brought the modern towns of Brakpan and Springs into existence.
DISCOVERING GOLD
only with the discovery of almost unimaginably rich seams of conglomerate gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 did the history of Ekurhuleni acquire a more human face. It is possible that far distant Nigel led the way, with gold being discovered there on Petrus Maree’s farm in 1886 or 1887.23 however the discovery of gold at Benoni marks a more substantial beginning when in August of that year, Landdrost Maré visited a recently opened shaft on Benoni farm and informed the government of the discovery of gold there, prospecting having already been in progress since early that year. As he reported to his superiors in Pretoria ‘Het rif ligt open in die Schacht en is acht voet breed.’ (The reef has exposed in the shaft and is eight foot wide.) It still remains on the south end of Princes Avenue. The prospector who exposed it was Cotten Acutt. Also present was J.k. hirst who represented Ethelbert Welford Noyce who had leased the farm from the government in 1885. The Benoni, kleinfontein and vlakfontein farms were proclaimed as gold prospecting areas between May and August 1888.24 Finally to conclude this first phase of mining development, W.P. Taylor was sent by the rand Mines group some time later to seek to purchase the farm Modderfontein, near Benoni, which he successfully did, and which would ultimately give birth to five fabulously rich mines.25
At this point the history of Ekurhuleni is getting perceptibly denser, and before long it would be recorded first in newspaper articles and later in a series of celebratory, often centennial, municipal publications. This history is, however, almost exclusively a white history and generally a white immigrant history at that. It is also cast in a very particular mould, which has been explored with considerable insight and subtlety, in the Eastern Lowveld of South Africa.26 The mould is of brave, rough-and-ready, independent, solitary, resourceful pioneers rising above the odds and overcoming all adversity in their way. While pictured in a generally romantic fashion, these pioneers come with an equally familiar set of flaws – forgivable flaws but flaws nonetheless. They are carefree – on occasion close to wastrels. They are generous, often to a fault. They are great believers in (and beneficiaries of) chance, but are not above bending chance in somewhat underhand ways, or duping their colleagues. They are heavy drinkers. They can be violent when protecting what they believe to be their rights.
Much of this pioneering history has two other attributes as well. It is remorselessly anecdotal, made up of cautionary tales, amusing as well as sometimes uplifting episodes, but never delving into the contexts and personalities involved. Equally problematically African voices and faces never appear, allowing us only to access them much later. These are our sadly limited raw materials for writing this early phase of the history of Ekurhuleni.
Three of these early pioneer narratives, two coming from Nigel, give some feel for this genre of works. According to one, the owner of Vlakfontein entered into an ‘agzt’ (agreement) in 1882 in a project to look for gold. Five years later a troop of gold-seekers on their way from Natal to the Rand camped on Vlakfontein and became aware that the prospector had located gold. They thereupon went to the owner of the farm and offered £1 000 to buy it. The absentee owner, Petrus Johannes Marais (Oom Lang Piet), happened to be reading the novel by Sir Walter Scott entitled The Fortunes of Nigel, a story about a young man who was the victim of a dishonest intrigue. Suspicious, he checked out his farm, only to find that a gold reef had been discovered on it. With this, the name Nigel was born and Marais sold his property in July 1888 to the Nigel Gold Mining Company.
In an alternative account, P.J. Marais purchased the Vlakfontein property between 1881 and 1884. Two years later a pioneer Scottish prospector, Nigel MacLeish, found a gold-bearing outcrop on the farm which he named Nigel’s Reef. On 15 April 1887, Marais sold half of the farm to businessmen from Pretoria who styled themselves as the ‘The Nigel Syndicate’.27 The Nigel Gold Mining Company was thereupon registered on 31 March 1888 and purchased the second half from Marais on 4 June 1888. Some connection to the novel Glenvelich Street is clear, inasmuch as all churches are named after churches in Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel.
Germiston’s origins were equally bound up with the discovery of gold. In 1886 two Harrismith merchants, John Jack and Augustus Simmer, bought a half share in the farm Elandsfontein following the initial discovery of gold in Langlaagte a few months before. Theirs was intended as a commercial/trading enterprise. The bleak spot which they chose was situated on a natural crossroads and was therefore the ideal site on which to erect a store. Within weeks, however, Paul Kruger declared the entire Witwatersrand a public diggings. Jack and Simmer immediately floated the first gold mine in the area (registered in August 1887), and then named the neighbouring township Jermiston, in honour of a farm seven miles outside of Glasgow in Scotland which had been John Jack’s boyhood home.28
Elsewhere in Ekurhuleni prospectors were engaged in a different quest – the search for coal – which had emerged as an increasingly vital prerequisite for successful mining. Towards the end
