Place of Thorns. Tshepo Moloi
church activities became a significant part of the residents’ lives. According to Setiloane, ‘blacks attended weddings, parties, christenings and funerals, and enjoyed concerts at the various church buildings ...’11 In an interview, Jonah Setiloane related that he grew up in a very religious family where children were expected to attend church regularly:
You know, every day in the evening we had to pray. ‘Our Heavenly Father’ in Setswana. After praying we’d then go to sleep. During the week we attended church. We used to say we’re going to ‘class’. Our church was Methodist. On Sunday we went to church. And after the service we were supposed to come home and inform our mother about the service and who was preaching.
Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, who was born in 1948, recalls that in his teen years church became the centre of his life:
Church [was] engraved in us. You go to Sunday school on Sunday. And you would go to what was called Band of Hope, which is a younger children’s organisation where we [were] taught about the evils of alcohol. And on Tuesday we must go to another church event in the Methodist church, which is called ‘class’. On Wednesday, if you go to a Methodist church you would go to an event called ‘prayer’. It was church, church, church. That is the kind of environment that [we were] brought up under.
The last residential area to be built before the 1950s, when the National Party (NP) government established ‘model’ townships, was ‘C’ Location (or Cairo). This settlement was designated for the Kroonstad coloured community, which, in the 1930s, was on a steady rise. Miscegenation seemed to be the main cause. Matsepe recalls that his grandfather Jonah Thlapane married a white woman, Miss Pretorius, and they had coloured children. One of their children was Malithuli Violet Thlapane, who was later to marry an African man, Singaphe Dorrington Matsepe – Tsiu Vincent Matsepe’s father. Similarly, Hilda Mantho Motadinyane related that her grandmother was married to a white man and they lived in ‘A’ Location.
The creation of the coloured-only settlements was as a result of the compromise reached between the central government’s Native Affairs Commission and the OFS municipalities which had initially rejected the Native Urban Areas Bill of 1918 because they suspected that it would revoke the provincial and municipal legal restrictions on urban segregation, thereby giving coloureds equal legal status with white people.12 The establishment of Cairo seems also to have been intended to create divisions within the coloured community itself: between the real kleurling (coloured) and ‘other coloureds’. In an interview, Anthony Bouwer explained: ‘[In] the area we knew as Cairo there was this thing that those who lived [in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ locations] were not coloured and those who lived in Cairo were the real kleurling.’ Because of the closely knit relations that have developed over the years between Africans and coloureds in Kroonstad, the divisions between these groups were never really entrenched. This trend continued through to the 1970s. ‘As the process of building Brentpark and removals from the location moved at a slow pace, the constant to and fro between the areas (old locations and Brentpark) continued into the 1970s, resulting in the maintenance of community connections.’13
Even after the coloured school had been established, following the approval of its application in 1933,14 the town council was not as rigid in enforcing the segregation policy as it would be in the latter half of the 1950s, and African children were allowed to attend there. Mpopetsi Dhlamini, who was born in 1945 and started at the coloured school probably between the ages of six and seven, remembers that his parents sent him there, together with his brother, because they believed that with a solid foundation in Afrikaans their children’s chances of finding employment, particularly in the OFS, would be better. The main reason the council adopted a flexible position was that the establishment of the coloured school was requested by the Coloured Advisory Board in 1932.15 It was after the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953 that the council enforced the segregation law in schools. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe explains:
My father teaches with my mother at Maokeng Bantu Primary School. Then a law comes that says coloureds must be separated from Africans. When that law came into operation my mother had to stop to teach at that school because she was classified coloured. My father is an African.
Before the latter half of the mid-1950s, the law intended to divide different racial groups was not rigid. At this stage coloureds were not obliged to relocate to their new location, Cairo, and those who moved did so voluntarily. Violet Matsepe worked in Cairo but continued to live in ‘A’ Location with her family. Other coloureds, like Ariel Bouwer, did not even move to Cairo.
Just like the coloureds who lived cordially with Africans in the locations, so did the different black groups. Basotho culture, however, dominated, and people from the other groups were forced to learn Sesotho. The trend continues even today. Parkies Setiloane, who was born in 1927 in ‘B’ Location, recalled that his parents were Batswana but he learned Sesotho at school. Similarly, Ntantala, who was originally isiXhosa-speaking, remembered that while teaching in Kroonstad she was forced to learn to speak Sesotho and that her daughter Nandi, whose minder spoke Sesotho and could not speak English, instilled the Sesotho culture in her as well. She writes: ‘Nandi would proudly tell people: Ke MoSotho nna! Ake mo-Qhosa (I am Sotho; I am not Xhosa).’16 The influence of Sesotho can be attributed to the large number of Basotho from Basotholand (now Lesotho) who settled in Kroonstad. In the 1990s the prevalence of Sesotho in Kroonstad would play a vital role in mitigating against ethnic conflict which, in the Witwatersrand (the Rand), was used to foment political violence.
In 1948 the NP came to power on the policy of apartheid (or ‘separate development’). The Nationalists’ main support came from Afrikaner farmers who feared that the uncontrolled rapid movement of Africans to the cities and towns was affecting their business. They could no longer manage to retain African labourers, who preferred to seek employment in the mines or in the manufacturing sector, which was growing rapidly owing to the Second World War. These two sectors paid better than did the farmers. ‘Once 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.
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