Place of Thorns

Black Political Protest In Kroonstad Since 1976

Tshepo Moloi

• Editorial: Wits University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781868149070
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: African History

Place of Thorns: Black Political protest in Kroonstad since 1976, is a landmark study that examines the tumultuous and often fractious politics in Kroonstad's black townships.
In spite of the town's relative obscurity, the author demonstrates a rich tradition of civic and political life in its townships and provides a persuasive explanation for the violence unleashed in the 1990s after decades of relative political 'quiescence'.
Based on scores of life-history interviews, the book illustrates a shift in the political mood from 1976 onwards. Inspired by the philosophies of black consciousness and the Congress movement, students developed a radical attitude and they spearheaded and shaped political protests in the townships up to the 1990s. However, tensions between the local civic associations and the regional and national ANC leadership ultimately cost the ANC the first democratic local government elections in Kroonstad. As a work of revisionist history, this book showcases South Africa's nuanced liberation history that unfolded in smaller, less known places.
The book is essential reading for scholars and students, and everyone interested in the South African liberation history, 'local' histories, political mobilisation and protests.

CHAPTER ONE

Protests before 1976

The time from the early 1950s up to 1963 was one of protest politics in Kroonstad. First, women protested against the extension of passes to include African women. Towards the end of the 1950s, the black residents – seemingly influenced by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) – protested against the municipality’s oppressive laws.

Before this time (apart from the period when the residents rallied, first behind the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union [ICU] and later, in the mid-1930s, the Registered and Ratepayers Association), black people in the locations avoided engaging in protests and confrontational politics. The reason for this, and for the intermittent existence of black radical and confrontational politics in Kroonstad, was the restrained approach adopted by the branch of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, in 1923 renamed the African National Congress) in Kroonstad. The role played by moderate bodies such as the Native Advisory Board (NAB) and the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives (JCEN) helped to contain radical politics in the locations. Most of the residents in the old locations sincerely believed that their continued support for these bodies would yield positive results for them. But it was not to be.

The situation was made worse by the Orange Free State African Teachers Association (OFSATA) and the Society of Young Africa (SOYA). Although these bodies did not shy away from challenging the government and expressing their radical views, they nevertheless were overly cautious about not involving themselves in protest action. It did not help that their memberships, especially OFSATA’s, were composed of teachers, the educated elite, who would rather discuss and negotiate matters of concern with the relevant authorities than protest. To compound the situation, after the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953 it became illegal for any teacher to publicly oppose the government. SOYA, more so than OFSATA, did not subscribe to confrontational politics but believed in generating ideas to oppose the government. In her autobiography, Phyllis Ntantala noted that SOYA’s slogan was ‘We fight ideas with ideas’.¹

Establishment of Kroonstad and the formation of black locations

In March 1855, The Friend, a regional newspaper in the Orange Free State (OFS), reported a sale of erven (land) in the village of Klip Plaat Drift, Valsch River, in the district of Windburg. Joseph Orpen, the landdros (magistrate) of Windburg and the government land surveyor, later named this place Kroonstad. In her book commissioned to document the 130th anniversary of Kroonstad, Dot Serfontein claims that although the first inhabitants were whites, by the 1880s natives had also begun to settle in the area. Drawing from oral tradition, Tsiu Vincent Matsepe noted that the Thlapane family, from his maternal side, were among the first African families to settle in Kroonstad. Others included the Maraba, M’Baco, Nothibi, Bukes, Buffel and Mareka families. Initially, these families lived in what is today the town centre, between the river and the old jail,where they had established a settlement called ‘A’ Location. However, after numerous complaints by whites living in the same area about interracial relationships between white men and black women, and the spread of influenza, the Kroonstad Town Council had, by 1925, decided to resettle all the black people to the north of the town, in their own locations.²

There is no evidence to suggest that the removals incited protest among the black residents – but this was not peculiar to Kroonstad. As far back as 1905, when black people were being removed from what the white authorities perceived as inner-city slums in Johannesburg to their own areas on the outskirts of the city, black people did not protest.³ Although the residents of Kroonstad’s old ‘A’ Location ‘objected to the small premises, transfer costs and visitors’ permits to be issued in the new location’,⁴ they finally moved, and undoubtedly the absence of a radical political body to rally them against the removals made it easier for the council to implement its plan.

On arrival in their new premises they built their houses and called their settlement ‘A’ Location. It was still within walking distance to town, so the residents did not incur the extra costs of travelling there. Jonah Moeng Setiloane, who was born in 1920 in Kroonstad, recalls that ‘A’ Location was made up of a mixture of Basotho and coloured people. Over the years the population grew and another location was built; it was called ‘B’ Location (also known by collective memory as Marabastad after Jan Maraba, one of the first to settle in Kroonstad). As did ‘A’ Location, this location accommodated Basotho and coloureds, but also isiXhosa-speaking and Setswana-speaking groups. Hilda Mantho Motadinyane, who was born in 1927 in that location, recalls that her father came from Ga-Motlatla, Ventersdorp, and her mother from Serowe in Botswana. The majority of black people who had landed up in Kroonstad were in search of employment (William Setiloane, Jonah’s father, who had moved from Allanridge, about eighty kilometres from Kroonstad, was employed by the railway). Most people, both black and white, were pushed off the farms to the towns by ‘low incomes and low profit margins; high land prices and high rates of crop and stock failure; falling prices and slow turnovers ...’⁵

In the early 1930s another settlement, ‘D’ Location, was built to accommodate black people who were drifting in from the surrounding farms. In his book The History of Black Education in Maokeng, Kroonstad, Jonah Setiloane described this area as a settlement of people who were not originally inhabitants of Kroonstad. ‘Most of them,’ he writes, ‘were squatters who settled here in search of employment. They originated from the neighbouring farming districts.’⁶ According to the historians Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien, the majority of black people left the farms because of the drought which had begun after 1927 and reached its peak in 1932–34.⁷ Because of it many farmers abandoned their farms, and those who remained laid off black labour tenants in their thousands. Many of the tenants left the land and headed for the towns. Kroonstad received its fair share of the new arrivals.

In most cases the new arrivals, particularly those who lacked money – or cattle to sell for money – could not build their own houses. Some of these people did not intend to settle in Kroonstad permanently and found accommodation as tenants in the yards of stand-owners in the locations. Phyllis Ntantala, who arrived in Kroonstad in 1937 to take up a teaching post at the Bantu United School, first boarded with Mrs Monyake in ‘B’ Location, and later moved in with Mr and Mrs Binda in ‘D’ Location. Leboseng Violet Selele, who was born in 1933 in ‘A’ Location, remembered in an interview that her father, John Mphikeleli Maseko, who had businesses in the location, also rented out accommodation to tenants: ‘Our house was number 185 ‘A’ Location ... We had a very big yard, so we had many people renting rooms in our yard.’ When ‘model’ townships were established in the 1950s, tenants and older children of the stand-owners were among the first to move into the new houses.

Perhaps the most distinguished arrivals in Kroonstad’s black locations were teachers. As in many places across the country where black people had settled, schooling was initially offered by the churches, but by 1929 the various non-Catholic schools in Kroonstad had merged to form the Bantu United School. By 1940 Reginald Ndumiso Cingo, who had taken over the principalship of the school in 1932 from Joe Kokozela, had turned the school into one of the major centres of education for African students in the then Orange Free State. It was one of the two African day schools to offer matric as early as 1940 (the other was Sehunelo in Bloemfontein), the only African school to offer a lower primary teachers’ course for girls in the mid-1950s,⁸ and the only African school whose matriculants wrote the Joint Matriculation Board examination in the mid-1960s instead of the Bantu Education senior certificate examination.

From the onset, Cingo, the longest-serving principal of the school, identified and employed some of the best-qualified teachers in the country, a number of whom came from the Cape Province and were isiXhosa-speaking. Among the most notable was Cingo himself, who was born in eFundisweni, Pondoland. Others were Dorrington Matsepe, who was born in Douglas, Cape Province, in 1906 and joined the staff of Bantu United in 1931. Timothy Alphy Makae from the district of Mount Fletcher, Cape Province, was employed at around the same period as Matsepe. And Archibald Campbell (AC) Jordan, who was born in the Tsolo district of the Transkei, began teaching at Bantu United in 1935, whereas Phyllis Ntantala (later to be Jordan’s wife), who was born at the Duff Mission in the district of Idutywa, Cape Province, joined the staff two years later.

This section of the community was further augmented by the arrival of ministers of churches and their families. Various churches were established, representing a number of denominations: Methodist, Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Ethiopian, Apostle Methodist Episcopal, Roman Catholic and a few traditional churches. The most illustrious among the church ministers to settle in Kroonstad before the 1960s was the Reverend Zaccheus Richard (ZR) Mahabane,⁹ born in 1881 in Thaba ’Nchu. There is no certainty as to when he arrived in Kroonstad but he was already there in 1938. The population of Kroonstad’s black locations increased, and Serfontein estimates that in 1946 there were 10 333 blacks: 9 733 natives and 600 coloureds.¹⁰

Because of the numerous churches in Kroonstad’s black locations, 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 enfor...