(Rise up soldiers. The war is on. Arm yourselves, our enemy is here). It is possible that Majoro and the others were arrested for attempting to burn their passes, but what is not possible is that the arrested residents were represented by Tambo, for when the ANC embarked on the call to burn passes Tambo had already fled South Africa into exile (accompanied by Ronald Segal, he left the country on 27 March – a day before the burning of passes).68 The exaggeration is a good example of the limitations of oral history.
This notwithstanding, days after the Sharpeville massacre the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations took to the streets. This resulted in some arrests. ‘Baba’ Jordan, who was one of those detained in this period, remembers that he was labelled a klipgoeier (stone thrower) by the police, and he was also charged with burning passes.
In 1960 I was seventeen going on for eighteen. I was on my way to school but I had to run back home because youngsters were spreading information that if you are seen wearing a pair of jeans ... without any question they will load you on a police truck as a troublemaker who is busy burning reference books. So my running back home didn’t help me because the whole township, the Old Location was surrounded by police and soldiers. I was taken out of the backyard of my grandmother. Although I never had any bundle of dompasses [reference books] in my hand to burn I was just loaded.
Jordan spent three days at the Klipkraal prison in town and was released after his uncle paid his fine.
The police’s harsh response did not immediately affect the residents’ resolve to continue fighting what they perceived as an unjust system. At this point, some people in the locations were actively working with or had joined the PAC. One of them was John Motsiri Coangae, who claims he was persuaded to join the PAC by Peter Molotsi. Four months after its foundation, the PAC’s national leadership published that in the OFS it had 301 branches.69 It is not clear whether one of these was in Kroonstad, but what is certain is that the PAC cell which operated in Kroonstad was established by Coangae.
After the Sharpeville massacre, the government declared a state of emergency and there were mass detentions of ANC and PAC leaders and supporters. On 8 April 1960 it banned the ANC and PAC. The two organisations decided to turn to the armed struggle and operated from exile. The PAC formed a military wing and called it Poqo (pure, in isiXhosa). Later, Poqo was changed to the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA). The ANC established Umkhonto we Sizwe (spear of the nation, in isiZulu). Initially the PAC operated from Basotholand (now Lesotho), where one of its founders, Leballo, summoned branch members and instructed them ‘to step up recruitment, with each branch having to enlist a target of 1 000 members’.70 Responding to this directive, Coangae and the members of his cell embarked on a membership recruitment campaign. The cell, or at least Coangae, developed networks with some members of the PAC in Lesotho: his father was a church minster and at some point was stationed in Basotholand, where he lived with his son. John Motsiri Coangae was to reignite his childhood friendships in the 1960s, and some of his old friends were now members of the PAC.
At the beginning of the 1960s not only were the police vigilant – they had also created an army of informers to help them. Before long they uncovered the cell’s activity after intercepting a letter Coangae had written to his contact in Maseru informing him about their progress. He remembers: ‘The police intercepted the letter and replied to me and stamped it as if it was from that guy. And they put it in the postbox and told the owner of the firm [where he was working] to send me to fetch the letter. They had been following me all the time, without me knowing.’ The intercepted letter ordered Coangae to meet his contact from Lesotho at a train station. But when Coangae arrived there he was arrested. He was finally sentenced to three years on Robben Island. The arrest and incarceration of Coangae was the final blow to the Kroonstad PAC and also marked the – temporary – end of black political activism in the town. The government’s response had intimidated many people, and after his release from Robben Island Coangae stayed clear of politics because nobody wanted to be associated with him. People were scared to be associated with ‘terrorists’, as the government had termed everybody who opposed it. Instead, he focused on football. In the early 1980s he was to return to politics, but this time he focused his energy on the government-created councils.
Although politics dominated the Kroonstad locations, there were other activities taking place, even during the tense moments. Children played games in the dusty streets. Violet Selele remembers the old locations as quiet and a fun place where girls played double Dutch (a jumping-rope game). Other children played ho tjheha dinonyana (to trap birds), morabarabara (drought) and mantlwane (playing house). Music, choral or band, also entertained the residents of the locations. Godfrey Oliphant described the mood of the times: ‘The people used to be excited with jive. There used to be a local group that used to play musical instruments. One of their members, Miki Matsepe, used to play piano.’
Sport was another form of entertainment, football the most popular. Everyone I interviewed in Kroonstad singled out Shamrock United, Blackburn Rovers and Union Jacks as the best football teams in the locations. John Motsiri Congae, who was born in 1940 in Kroonstad and started playing football at the age of eight, recalls watching big teams like Shamrock United and Callies, from Cairo, playing at Masakeng, so called because the football field was enclosed with hessian sacks
But Kroonstad was not always fun and games. There were fights and gangs in the locations. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe remembers, as a teenager growing up in Kroonstad, witnessing fights between Ama-Baca (a Nguni group) and the Russians (the Basotho gang). However, the most feared gang during this period was the Green-White (or ma-Green White, as it was called locally). This gang was led by Skapie Mofokeng. It began as a group of about ten or twelve young people in ‘B’ Location. Joseph Ditheko ‘Makula’ Molai, one of the gang’s surviving members, remembers that they were part of the baseball team called the Green-White, because of the team’s uniform: white shirts and shorts with green stripes. The members included David Gooie, John Sisana, Boy-Boy Ponyane, Choke Tlokotsi and Sydney Mashoe. The initial activity of this group was to protect the Basotho nationals who lived in ‘B’ Location from harassment by the municipal police who raided their houses searching for people in the location without a visitor’s permit. (Those who failed to produce it were arrested. The police also arrested them for defaulting on rent payment or the ‘lodger’s’ [permit]. Finally, the police harassed the Basotho women who traded in African beer.) The Green-White group liked workers from Lesotho who would share rations every month-end after receiving their pay. It was during the group’s fight with the municipal police that a gang called the Spoilers emerged and aligned itself with the police. This, according to Molai, forced them to form themselves into a gang. Fearing attack from the police and the Spoilers, the Green-White gang began acquiring guns by disarming the police. Molai claims: ‘We overpowered them. One of them who was well known was “Optel”, Mr Van der Westhuyssen; we even took his pistol.’ In 1955 all the members of the gang had stopped attending school at Bantu High and now channelled their energy into gang activities. The gang affected the community in more than one way. Youngsters in the locations were forced to join gangs to defend themselves – and the junior Green-White and the junior Spoilers were formed and fought each other.
Because of the government’s objective of
