Place of Thorns. Tshepo Moloi
as butchers in the location ...’26
Simon Mateza, who was born in Marabastad in 1931, remembers that his father, Gilbert Mateza, opened his vegetable business during this period. ‘I went up to Standard 5. Thereafter, I went to help my father because as he was working, he also used to own a shop. We had some donkeys and a cart, which we used to collect some vegetables from the market, and sold them around the location.’ With the relaxation of the trading laws, Mateza senior went on to establish his first formal business. But trading was still heavily restricted.
... it used to be difficult during those times for a black person to start a business. We used to have something that resembled a shop at our house. So, the law was that we were only allowed to open very early in the morning before people went to work, so that they could buy some sugar and some coffee. After that you had to close for the rest of the day and only open at five when people returned from work.
Simon Mateza continued trading after his father died (in 1951).
But during that time I already had an idea [about running a business]. I later opened something like a barbershop, where I was cutting people’s hair. I ran that shop even though I was not making enough money ... I did some piece jobs, and also transported people around the location. I did that until I had a car of my own. I would transport them to the farms. I went to rent a shop in Marabastad. We started by selling food in the bar, me and my partner by the name of Mkhoane. When Mkhoane and I separated, I decided to open my own [business] in Phomolong, where I was renting a place. In 1963 I found my own stand and built a shop, which I named Langa Cash Store. That was my breakthrough. Business was doing well. Shops like Pick n Pay and Shoprite were not there yet. Shops which were there used to close at five in the afternoon. And in town no shops operated on weekends and during holidays, as well. That was a good chance for us to sell and make good money.
Women who were not employed, like Moses Masizane’s grandmother, the owner of ‘Khambule’s Place’, survived by selling home-made beer. ‘Beer brewing was a pervasive feature of location life ... women monopolised the brewing of beer and it was often their major source of income.’27 Most black women who settled in the urban areas in the 1930s survived through the brewing trade although the white authorities deemed it illegal. To curb it, the government, through the Native (Urban Areas) Act No. 13 of 1928, prohibited the supply or delivery of any liquor to Africans28 and ruled that Africans seeking to purchase liquor should do so from beer halls created by the municipalities. As the Witwatersrand municipalities had done, the white authorities in Kroonstad also enforced a total ban on the purchase and consumption of liquor by its African population. The police constantly raided householders suspected of trading in home-brewed beer, and the women brewing and selling it devised measures to avoid police raids. Historians Bonner and Nieftagodien note that some used ‘watchmen’ (usually their children), who stood on corners to spot the police. ‘When the police came by on their bicycles, the watchmen would signal by saying, “It is red” or by walking away quickly from their spots.’29 Others hid their stock so that the police could not find it, while some bribed the police by allowing them to drink beer without paying.
In a miscalculated move to resolve the illegal trading of home-brewed beer, in 1935 the Kroonstad Native Advisory Board passed a resolution that licensed ‘kaffir’ beer should be placed under municipal control. The resolution prompted agitation in the locations. Keable ’Mote, a leading figure in the ICU in the town, demanded the resignation of the board, which had been set up in the 1920s ‘to serve as [a mechanism] of liaison between location residents and the authorities’.30 The women continued to trade, and the police increased their raids.
In spite of all the hardships that the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations had to endure, they refrained from protesting, except on a few occasions.
Black political formations and protests
In 1912 the SANNC was formed in Bloemfontein to unite, mobilise and represent African interests following the passing of the 1910 whites-only South Africa Act of Union, which withheld the franchise from all Africans outside the Cape. Three years later, its branch in Kroonstad hosted the organisation’s fourth meeting.31 The SANNC branch in Kroonstad was neither militant nor radical, but Kroonstad offered a convenient meeting place, midway between Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Natal and the Cape on the main line.32
The docility of the SANNC’s Kroonstad branch is unsurprising. During the initial stages of its existence, the SANNC’s national leadership was also restrained in its approach. It hoped that by pleading and petitioning the British Crown, the latter would intervene on behalf of the African people in South Africa. ‘African leaders,’ Lodge writes, ‘were keen to demonstrate their loyalty for the duration of the First World War.’33 On the other hand, the SANNC leadership’s preoccupation with the Land Act of 1913 shifted its focus on directing and shaping agitation at the local level. In Kroonstad, one of the leading figures in the SANNC, Reverend Pitso, was an energetic member of the committee, headed by RW Msimang, which was tasked with ratifying the constitution of the SANNC.34 The reason for the inactivity of the SANNC’s branch in Kroonstad is its failure to become involved in the day-to-day hardships experienced by the residents of the locations – but other branches of the SANNC in the OFS did not operate with the same restraint. In 1920, in Springfontein, for instance, the branch of the SANNC supported the women’s anti-pass campaign.35 Similarly, in Thaba ’Nchu the SANNC branch discussed the Land Act, passes for women, education, hostels for domestic workers and the state’s replacement of black rail workers and interpreters by ‘poor whites’. Because of this the support for this branch grew.36 But the SANNC branch in Kroonstad, taking its cue from the national leadership’s modus operandi¸ failed to mobilise the black residents to resist the removals from their initial settlement in town and by 1920 this branch had ceased to function. Various attempts were made to revive it, but without success. For example, in 1936 Simon Ndlovu, Keable ’Mote and Sol Ngaonabase were reported to be attempting to revive the ANC in Kroonstad,37 and again in 1938 the president-general of the ANC, the Reverend ZR Mahabane, pressurised ’Mote, ‘who was now provincial secretary of the All African Convention (AAC) in the OFS, to establish the branch of the ANC in Kroonstad’.38 Perhaps the promulgation of the Riotous Assemblies (Amendment) Act in 1930 (following acts of radicalism and protests spearheaded by African women in the 1920s) contributed to the failure to revive the ANC in Kroonstad.
The inertia of the Kroonstad branch can also be attributed to the internal problems which had besieged the ANC in the 1920s, ranging from some members’ heightened disillusionment with the politics of diplomatic persuasion and the changing of leadership from the militant Josiah Gumede to the ageing Pixley ka Isaka Seme in 1930, and to the not-so-radical Reverend Mahabane. In Kroonstad, the ANC’s politics were to remain moribund until the mid-1950s, when the Women’s League revived them. It was against this background that the ICU briefly filled the political vacuum left by the ANC.
The ICU and radical protests in Kroonstad
The ICU initially organised workers, particularly farm workers, fighting on their behalf for better wages and working conditions, but gradually shifted its activities towards politics and became ‘a workers’ organisation but function[ing] as a mass-based political party because its charismatic leaders voiced a broad range of popular grievances’.39 In a country where blacks were treated unjustly because of the government’s segregation laws, it was inevitable that ‘the pronouncement and actions of the ICU and its leaders took on an increasingly political colour’.40
Available evidence suggests that there were few ICU branches in the OFS towns (particularly in the northern OFS) which could match the ICU branch in Kroonstad. Besides taking up labour issues (such as when Joe Kokozela, the principal at Bantu United School, together with William Ballinger, met with the district union farmers and recommended that a farm worker should be afforded ‘three pounds a month, a house, and good food for a male adult with a small family, with five pounds if there were more than two children’),41 the ICU branch in Kroonstad also involved itself in the affairs of the locations. In 1928 the mayor of Kroonstad accused the ICU of being instrumental in advising stand-holders not to pay their taxes (rent charges).