they came into power, the new government immediately set out to regulate the tide of uncontrolled black urbanisation.’17 The government imposed stricter pass laws which would curtail African labourers’ easy move to the towns and cities; cleared black freehold townships and other areas of black settlement in the inner city and peri-urban areas; and established tighter control over the municipal locations which it had intended to be the sole place of residence of urban Africans. Two years after the government had assumed power, it promulgated the Group Areas Act ‘designed to allocate separate residential areas to Africans, coloureds, Indians and whites’.
In Kroonstad this resulted in the establishment of the ‘model’ townships of Seeisoville,18 built in 1958, and Phomolong (also known as Vuka ’Zenzele, ‘Wake up and do it yourself’, in isiZulu) in 1960. Brentpark, named after Superintendent Brent, was constructed in 1957 for coloureds. ‘[Model townships] were designed to maximise control over the African population ... their grid layout controlled access points and master-lights aimed to ensure effective state surveillance.’19 It was this maximum control and constant police harassment that caused the African residents of Kroonstad to take to the streets in 1959, protesting against the municipal police’s incessant raids on the houses known to be brewing beer.
Black people’s survival mechanisms and restlessness
Life in Kroonstad’s black locations was a mixed bag. For those who were employed it was less taxing than for those who were not. Professionals such as teachers, for example, who descended on Kroonstad to teach at Bantu United School (in the 1940s renamed Bantu High School) were relatively well off. For example, Ntantala described how AC Jordan had bought a house in ‘B’ Location and tore it down to rebuild it into a five-roomed modern house. Similarly, Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, whose parents were teachers, recalled that his house was big: ‘We had a house that had a dining room, a living room, kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom for the boys, a bedroom for the girls, and a bedroom for my parents.’ Some of the non-professional residents (but employed on the railway plant) could also afford big and attractive houses. In an interview, Jonah Setiloane recalled that his parents had built a five-roomed house and two additional rooms outside. Those who were less fortunate lived in houses mostly built with mud bricks or corrugated iron sheets.
For the majority of residents life was not easy. Those who were not employed in the professions as teachers or church ministers found employment at the South African Railways plant, at the Milling Company, at shops in town, on the roads and in the neighbouring farms. But most of the women were either housewives or were employed as domestic workers. For example, Lucy Mosele Taje, who was born in 1919 in April’s Kraal Farm in Kwakwatsi (Koppies), arrived in Kroonstad during ntwa ya Hitler (Adolf Hitler’s war, or the Second World War) and worked in the ‘kitchens’ (domestic work) for the greater part of her life.20 Jonah Setiloane, who lived in Kroonstad during this period observed that domestic workers ‘earned a mere pittance’.
In dire circumstances, some of the young people of school-going age felt obliged to take up part-time work in town to supplement their parents’ income. Many, like Jonah Setiloane, became caddies at the golf course.
I started to be caddy when I was about thirteen years old. I had to because the situation was bad really. I had to do that in order to help out at home by buying food. Initially my mother would hint at me saying, ‘Basimani ke bale ba dira [Other young boys are working]’
This nearly cost him his studies.
That’s how I started bunking school. My parents would think I was at school; meanwhile I was at the golf course. I used to caddy even during the week because the caddy master, Siebert, used to send me to town to buy him fish and other goodies. We sometimes earned about ten cents or twenty cents. Then I’ll take that money and give it to mother at home. She would then use it to buy meat.
Some of the families survived through farming – although on a very small scale. From oral evidence it appears that a significant number of families before the 1950s could keep their livestock (on which many depended to supplement their incomes) in the locations. Marubene Lydia Mokwena remembered that her parents had three horses, sheep, chickens and turkeys. From the chickens they were able to get a lot of eggs, she recalled. And Jonah Setiloane recalled that his father had a cow from which they could get milk so that his father, the sole breadwinner in the family, could use his earnings for other things such as their education. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, who in the 1950s was still a teenager, remembered that his grandfather, who owned cattle, sold milk to survive. In the late 1950s, the municipality introduced regulations drastically reducing the number of cattle the location residents were permitted to keep, and some whom I interviewed claimed that they were allowed to keep only four cows. Others said two. For Lebone Holomo, who was born in Kroonstad in 1949, the cattle restriction impoverished people ‘because we were dependent on all that for milk’. Isaac ‘Sakkie’ Oliphant eloquently described the devastating effect:
Where the [Boitumelo] hospital is situated was a cattle camp. It was where we herded cattle. As a little boy we had ten cows at home and they have just cut the number, telling us that we could not have more than that. The old man used to have a cattle-drawn vehicle. He used to transport heavy things. The stone buildings that you see in town, he used to go fetch stones ... And they [he and his son] would shape those stones and thereafter used them to build those buildings. I don’t know how many other people were doing the same thing but he was one of the key players there. When they realised that people are benefitting well with these cattle, because cows were feeding us, we got meat and they were working for us, they started cutting down on the number of stock. At home we were left only with cows that we used for milk. The ones that were used for the cattle-drawn vehicle were no longer available. I was looking after ten cows and later on they went down to two. I remember my father died. I was six. Many fathers died at that time. I don’t know if it was because of heart attack but they died.
This incident left an indelible mark on the memories of many young people. Years later, in the interviews for my doctoral thesis, they were to invoke it as one of the factors that influenced them to become involved in the struggle for liberation. Holomo recalled that when growing up he would overhear older people complaining about the cattle limitation and connecting it to land dispossession.
Stock limitation was not peculiar to Kroonstad. It was actually being implemented in many other areas across the country. The political scientist Tom Lodge has argued that this was the NP government’s way of forcing black people to work on the farms.21 The industrialisation of the 1940s, stimulated by the war, had created an imbalance in the supply of labour to the agricultural sector because farmers were unable to offer wages to compete with the manufacturing sector. The abundance of stock that had, over the years, cushioned the majority of residents in the locations from pinching economic hardship was finally destroyed.
Kroonstad, unlike the Vaal Triangle and East London, had a limited industrial sector to absorb the increasing number of work-seekers. It was only from 1951 that talk began of seriously looking into expanding the town’s industry, when a local businessman told the Northern Times that the town council would have to provide new industrial sites very soon if prospective industries were to be attracted.22 The situation looked bleak, particularly for the unemployed. To survive, many engaged in trading despite the fact that this was deemed illegal. The Kroonstad Town Council refused to grant blacks trading rights, using the authority of the Urban Areas Amendment Act No. 25 of 1930, which stipulated:
Any urban local authority which has under its administration and control a location or native village – (a) may, and, if so directed by the Minister after consultation with the Administrator and after due enquiry at which the urban local authority shall be entitled to be heard, shall, on such condition as he may prescribe in the absence of approved regulations framed under paragraph (g) of sub-section (3) of section twenty-three, let sites within the location of native village for trading
