1
 INTRODUCTION 
 
Overview, Literature Review and Chapter Outline 
 
Overview 
 
Perched on the western edge of the Witwatersrand, Krugersdorp was both a 
typical and an atypical mining town. It was typical in the sense that it sprang 
up virtually overnight like boomtowns elsewhere and it shared with these 
urban spaces a measure of precariousness and violence. It was unusual, 
however, because it was occupied by a large Dutch-speaking population of 
farmers who interacted with the English-speaking miners to a degree that was 
not found elsewhere. It was both a Boer dorp and a rough-neck mining town, 
serving as an agricultural centre as well as an administrative centre for the 
western goldfields. This intertwined history of ?Boer and Briton? makes 
Krugersdorp a fascinating place to examine. 
 
Krugersdorp evolved in a complex way from a ramshackle, transient mining 
camp called the ?Devil?s Dorp? where life was cheap, to a settled, stable and 
attractive small town possessed of paved roads, piped water and street lights, 
by the turn of the century. At the same time its Boer and largely British mining 
population shaped and moulded the town in ways that reflected their 
corresponding values so that its different parts were marked by contrasting 
?Transvaal Republic? and ?Imperial Edwardian? architecture.  
 
Churches sprang up at important crossroads in a way that suggests that their 
sponsors were trying to influence the transient white miners to settle, while 
white, English-speaking middle class professionals and shopkeepers built 
substantial shops and homes to demonstrate that they had struck down roots 
into the town. It was, however, a distinctly ?British? town that that they were 
planning to build based on ?British? stands and with all the shops and features 
of a British town reproduced on the veld. 
 
 
 2
 In the years immediately following the South African War of 1899-1902, 
Krugersdorp acquired two new and distinctive characteristics. It became an 
overtly British chauvinist ?Jingo? town and large numbers of children were born 
in its environs. These were separate developments but were also intertwined 
in important ways.  
 
In the aftermath of peace, Krugersdorp celebrated the crowning of the new 
British monarch by laying out the ?Coronation Park? on the Southeast side of 
the town, not far from the Paardekraal Monument further north. This latter 
monument had been built only a few years earlier to commemorate Boer 
victory over the British in the First Boer War of Independence, 1880-1. Across 
the town new British buildings like the Town Hall confronted older Transvaal 
Republican structures like the Police Station, Railway Station and Magistrate?s 
courts. The ideological struggle between Boer and Briton was inscribed into 
the built environment 
 
Krugersdorp?s streets were regularly bedecked with Union Jacks and bunting 
over the next few years to celebrate a range of Imperial occasions as well as 
visits by eminent British figures. On one occasion, a giant gilded crown was 
strung across Market Street while a band played British marching tunes in the 
Market Square. Virtually all the new buildings erected during this period were 
constructed in the ?Edwardian? style and given patriotic names like ?Victoria? 
and ?Jubilee?.  Krugersdorp was transformed into a British town but still 
retained many of its older aspects as a Transvaal Republican Boer dorp. 
 
During the same period, many hitherto transient white miners began to settle 
down in Krugersdorp and to raise families. Most of these miners were English-
 speaking and had British roots; some were from Cornwall, others had come 
from Britain via Canada, California, Australia and various South African mining 
towns like Kimberley and Pilgrim?s Rest. British victory in the South African 
War had given these nomadic miners the confidence to set down roots in 
Krugersdorp and to raise families or to bring existing families from overseas to 
live with them in the town. Within a very short period, Krugersdorp had 
transformed from a rough mining town of young males into a settled town with 
 
 3
 a more balanced demographic mix of men and women. As families were 
established, Krugersdorp quite suddenly acquired hundreds of small children.  
 
The impact of this demographic change was striking. Music halls, saloons and 
gambling dens faded away and were replaced by restaurants, concert halls, a 
park and a municipal library. Women pushed their babies in perambulators on 
the sidewalks and in the park. The local newspaper advertised a range of 
baby formulas, clothes and toys that local shops were stocking. Municipal 
building plans had to be altered to take into account this new reality. A 
swimming pool in the park proved too deep and had to be provided with a 
shallow end, playgrounds had to be built and a municipal fruit orchard had to 
be scrapped because of fears of juvenile theft. Above all else, the town had to 
build schools and had to ensure that it was safe for school children to walk to 
and from school by, for example, building a bridge over one of its streams.  
 
These twin developments of ?Jingo? town and a ?child-centred? town became 
intertwined in an ?imperial project? of raising white English-speaking children 
as patriotic Britons. The schools were built in sturdy Edwardian-style manner 
and the curriculum emphasized British Imperial glory in history, geography 
and literature classes. School children were dragooned into parades on 
Empire Day and cajoled by organizations like the Guild of Loyal Women to 
write essays on the British Empire. Boys were recruited into cadet squads 
while girls began to learn sewing to prepare them for a life as ?imperial 
mothers?.   
 
This did not last, however, and by 1905 Krugersdorp had evolved into a more 
ideologically harmonious ?hybrid? town where a nascent ideology of South 
Africanism brought Boer and Briton closer together. There were many 
pressures that steered developments in this direction including the relatively 
small size of the town and its population. English-speaking townsmen, for 
example, interacted with Dutch-speaking farmers at the morning market, 
farmers bought goods from shopkeepers who hailed from Britain and both 
groups mingled regularly through a range of social activities including those 
organised by the Krugersdorp Club and the local rugby association. The built 
 
 4
 environment began to reflect these changes, notably in the form of the 
Wanderers Sports Stadium that was established between the Paardekraal 
Monument and the Coronation Park.  
 
These changes were reflected in Krugersdorp?s youth who did not take well to 
the imperial project. Working class children were frequently absent from class 
according to School logs while Dutch-speaking children were deliberately 
withdrawn in protest against the process of ?Anglicisation? that was introduced 
into the schools. English-speaking parents were unhappy about the quality of 
both school buildings and the curriculum, leading to changes that reflected the 
nascent South Africanism described above.  
 
Letters to the local newspaper extolled the virtues of the ?Colonial Boy? and 
?Colonial Girl? in preference to the imperial project. The Boy Scouts 
movement, which represented a compromise between the colonial and 
imperial, attracted a few middle-class children when it was introduced a few 
years after the War. Even this opportunity failed to appeal to Krugersdorp?s 
young working-class children who ran barefoot in the veld and swam in the 
dams nearby. One of the main reasons why Krugersdorp began to assume a 
different character was that the youth, particularly as they grew older, simply 
wanted to have fun and this meant dances where both sexes were invited. 
Their parents, inspired by the Edwardian ?Gospel of Fun? indulged them and a 
more relaxed philosophy of ?let and let live? South Africanism was the result. 
 
Like mining towns elsewhere in the world, Krugersdorp matured into a settled 
town occupied by families but unlike such towns in Australia and California, it 
contained a substantial population of Africans, Indians and coloureds who 
were segregated into their own residential and business areas. While this was 
typical of most South African towns, Krugersdorp?s racial spaces evolved in 
ways that were distinctive and unusual.  
 
Indians penetrated Krugersdorp?s commercial spaces to a degree that was 
unprecedented and yet faced harassment from the white-dominated Town 
Council that was so ruthless and unrelenting that Krugersdorp became the 
 
 5
 benchmark of anti-Indian legislation and orchestrated social harassments like 
the boycotts of Indian-owned shops. Indians faced a barrage of municipal 
regulations and Provincial Ordinances aimed at denying them trading licenses 
and at confining them to a distant ?Indian Bazaar?. The white professional and 
commercial elite in the town used every opportunity to deny their Indian 
competitors a foothold in the town.  
 
Inspired and led, at various times, by a young barrister called Mohandas 
Gandhi, Krugersdorp?s Indians marched, protested and finally ignored the law, 
to set up shops in the centre of Krugersdorp around the Market Square. While 
these struggles were by no means unique in South Africa, they were unusual 
for their ferocity and the ingenuity that was employed on both sides. Lawyers 
and magistrates still cite Dadoo v Krugersdorp Municipality, 1920 as case law 
to demonstrate how Indian shareholders in a company were able to evade 
restrictions on Indian land ownership. The evasion of law through the 
exploitation of legal loopholes was raised to a high art by Krugersdorp?s Indian 
community.  
 
Similarly, Indians still recall, whether they lived in Krugersdorp or not, the anti-
 Indian MP for Krugersdorp, Sir Abe Bailey who became their nemesis. 
Krugersdorp white shopkeepers and professionals led the rest of the Rand in 
innovative exercises such as the launch of the anti-Indian Krugersdorp White 
League and White Hawkers? Association. Indian location residents, for their 
part, defied the municipality and refused to move to a distant Indian bazaar in 
what was probably the earliest example of Gandhi?s passive resistance on 
record. The struggle between white, mainly ?British? shopkeepers and their 
Indian, mainly Muslim, counterparts, was played out on two arenas, the courts 
and in the media. 
 
The struggle in the courts, which has already been alluded to, was remarkable 
in the sense that Indian (and also Chinese, Assyrian and other ?non-white?) 
shopkeepers won a dramatic series of legal battles. The real struggle, 
however, took place in the media and at the level of the semiotic where 
Indians were portrayed by their rivals in the lurid images of disease while 
 
 6
 white shopkeepers were portrayed as price gougers seeking to make a profit 
out of the struggling consumer.  
 
Although the battle was unequal in the sense that the local newspaper 
favoured the white shopkeepers, the Indian community of Krugersdorp fought 
a surprisingly successful counter-campaign that denied their reputation as 
disease-ridden while, at the same time, portraying Indian shopkeepers as the 
white consumer?s best friend. White housewives, the poor Dutch-speaking 
residents of the white suburb of Burghershoop and white Dutch-speaking 
farmers clearly favoured Indian shopkeepers and constantly undermined 
attempts to isolate the Indian commercial community. 
 
A comparison between the Indian community in Krugersdorp, on the one 
hand, and the African and Coloured community on the other hand presents 
both similarities and differences.  Like the Indians, Africans and Coloureds 
were isolated into their own combined ?location? very early in Krugersdorp?s 
history, starting in 1890. Krugersdorp?s white-dominated Town Council 
adopted a relentless segregationism that kept black residents isolated from 
the white population in a range of ways, including a notorious sidewalks 
clause that compelled Africans (but not Coloureds) to walk in the streets and 
gutters rather than on the sidewalks which were reserved for white residents.  
 
After the South African War, however, for a range of complex reasons but 
principally as a result of the adoption of the ideology of ?liberal segregationism? 
by influential elements of the white-dominated Town Council, the municipality 
began to offer concessions to the middle-class Africans and to the Coloured 
community as a whole. Broadly speaking, an attempt by the white middle 
class to strike an alliance with middle class African and Coloured elements in 
the face of increasing violence that emanated from the African working-class 
and lumpenproletarian elements who together constituted the ?dangerous? 
classes of Krugersdorp. Such concessions were never extended to the Indian 
community and it is remarkable to compare for example, the building of a 
?Model Location? for Africans and Coloureds with the neglect of the Indian 
location in Krugersdorp.  
 
 7
  
Well-built houses were erected at the ?New Location? in 1912 for Africans and 
Coloureds, dressed out with red roofs and stone-coloured walls. A tarred road 
extended to its entrance and ?innumerable trees? were planted at this site 
which was at a higher elevation than distant neighbouring white suburbs. The 
Indian location, by contrast, consisted of low, mean shelters, some of which 
housed as many animal as human occupants. The houses were jumbled and 
crowded together in a haphazard way.  
 
The houses in the New Location were, by contrast, neat, with aligned sides 
and streets organised into an orderly grid pattern. Clearly Indians were the 
enemies of the white-dominated Town Council, where commercial and 
professional interests predominated, while the African middle class was 
groomed to become their allies by having their new homes styled to British 
middle-class standards inspired, apparently, by the Garden City movement in 
the Britain.  
 
Things did not, however, turn out as planned. Very few residents of the ?Old 
Location? were prepared to move to the relatively distant and isolated ?New 
Location?. The houses there were more expensive to build and they were 
situated too far from white suburbs and the railway station for the large 
numbers of black women who made a living working as domestic service and 
by taking in laundry. Lumbered with an expensive white elephant, the white-
 dominated Town Council turned against the African middle classes and the 
Coloured community by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.  
 
A new location was established at Randfontein which was to become a 
?model? of harsh or ?repressive? segregation that can be described as a 
?ghetto?. Devoid of shops, placed far from Krugersdorp and the only location 
on the Rand to be fenced, the Randfontein Location seems to be born out of a 
desire for revenge on the part of the white Town Council. Yet, surprisingly, the 
location became popular among Africans living in the Old Location and nearby 
mine locations who flocked to it in droves. The Randfontein Location grew 
rapidly, quickly overtaking the New Location as the second largest black 
 
 8
 residential area and threatening to overtake the Old Location as the most 
sought-after location for local Africans to live. 
 
Part of the explanation lies in its proximity to the small white village of 
Randfontein which provided some domestic work, but its main attraction was 
the proximity of the mines and the Railway station. Most black women ? who 
formed the majority of the location?s population ? made a living from brewing 
and selling illicit liquor to black miners and the Randfontein Estates G.M. Co. 
Ltd. was one of the largest mines on the Rand, if not the world.  
 
Those black women who made a living from taking in washing, found the 
proximity of the Randfontein railway station appealing as it was just a short, 
and relatively affordable trip to Krugersdorp railway station and the white 
working class suburbs in southern Krugersdorp. When the white Town Council 
built the Lewisham Location in 1920 it learnt its lessons and eschewed both 
?Model Location? and ?ghetto?, preferring instead a compromise that offered 
modest concessions to the African middle class while avoiding the harshest 
features of the Randfontein Location.  
 
While black women helped to shape the racialised spaces of Krugersdorp?s 
built environment in this way, white women also proved to be influential and 
helped to ?make? Krugersdorp into the town it became during World War One. 
White, middle class female activists organised effective pressure campaigns 
around temperance, women?s suffrage and social purity that successfully 
weakened white male power and curtailed white male sexuality.  Their 
success was short-lived, however, and by the last two years of the First World 
War, their influence began to wane.  
 
The first and primary campaign of white female activism focussed on 
temperance and their main organisation was the Krugersdorp branch of the 
Women?s Christian Temperance Union or WCTU. While ostensibly 
campaigning for temperance, this body of about thirty women began a 
concerted campaign to turn Krugersdorp and its neighbours ?dry? in 1914 and 
1915. Liquor licensing courts were harassed to the point that licences were 
 
 9
 denied to a range of applicants and the whole suburb of Burghershoop 
remained free of liquor outlets.  
 
Young men who enlisted to fight for Britain during the war were progressively 
denied access to liquor while serving for King and Country until even officers 
were forced to carry permission slips to obtain liquor. Patriotism of the fiercely 
?Jingo? kind which was last seen in Krugersdorp shortly after the South African 
War, returned with a vengeance but it was appropriated for the cause of 
eradicating drink from the town. In 1916 Krugersdorp?s WCTU campaigned for 
a ?Direct Veto? to turn Johannesburg ?dry? with the intention of spreading this to 
campaign to Krugersdorp shortly thereafter. 
 
A backlash from enlisted men, civilian men and women, as well as officers, 
meant that this victory was short-lived. The Liquor Licensing courts ignored 
the WCTU protestors and issued every liquor licence that they received in the 
years 1917 and 1918. The WCTU disappeared from the public and from local 
media thereafter.  
 
A similar trajectory can be detected in the social purity and women?s suffrage 
campaigns that were also fought by the WCTU although other women?s 
groups such as the Krugersdorp Women?s Reform Club and the South African 
Women?s Federation also became involved. The campaign for social purity 
involved several different strands but its main aim was to raise the age of 
consent for girls to 16 years of age throughout the Union. In 1916 this 
ambition was achieved but the legislation was problematical and in the years 
that followed, little was heard of social purity issues.  
 
Finally the campaign for female suffrage also peaked in the early years of 
World War One when the municipal vote and the right to stand as Town 
Councillors was extended to white women. In 1915, the first municipal election 
campaign was launched by women candidates in Krugersdorp but while they 
acquitted themselves well, none were elected. In 1916 and in the years 
thereafter, until much later, no female candidates stood for Town Council.  
 
 
 10
 The common experience of all three campaigns was that they achieved 
substantial successes during the first two years of the First World War and 
then, having peaked, began to decline into obscurity. Part of the reason was 
that their missions were substantially accomplished but also the campaigns of 
female activists antagonized many white males and many white females as 
well. The main reason for the collapse of these movements was the prolonged 
nature of the war. The absence of men had provided white female activists 
some space but as the casualties mounted, white, English-speaking society 
began to rally behind what came to be called the ?War Effort?. The social 
purity, female suffrage and temperance campaigns distracted from this 
patriotic effort to support the ?men in uniform? and divided society into 
competing sexes. A backlash in favour of domesticity finally won out and this 
led to a drift of female activists literally back to the home.  
 
Krugersdorp was shaped by many different socio-cultural, political and 
economic forces over its first thirty-six years. While the white, mainly English-
 speaking middle class loomed large, their Dutch-speaking counterparts also 
played an important role. The white working class began to increasingly 
emerge as an influential force by the First World War when Labour candidates 
began to be elected and they influenced municipal policy, especially in terms 
of racialised space, as municipal voters who strongly supported segregation 
but also in terms of their plans to build a white working-class town.  
 
The Indian traders and hawkers helped to ?make? Krugersdorp?s built 
environment by defying the Town Council and by infiltrating throughout the 
town. The African and Coloured middle and working class frustrated the Town 
Council?s plans time and time again as they pursued their own strategies for 
economic survival, shaping Krugersdorp?s racialised spaces in the process. 
Finally, both white women and white children played important roles in 
shaping and moulding Krugersdorp at strategic times in its history. This is how 
Krugersdorp was made. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 11
 Literature Review 
 
An historical account of the making of Krugersdorp between 1887 and 1923 is 
necessarily an interdisciplinary, multi-paradigmatic, eclectic project. Any 
attempt critically to analyse how and why an urban environment originated in 
a specific locale, took root and then rapidly developed through various stages 
into a major town, cannot be undertaken within the confines of single 
discipline. While history ? or more precisely social history  ? is the dominant 
paradigm that provides the overall structure and much of the vital detail of this 
study, other disciplines and paradigms have also been utilized to prop up 
shaky structural sections and to fill in the blank spaces in the corners that 
social history cannot reach. 
 
There are a several secondary sources that examine Krugersdorp?s early 
years in detail in an attempt to explain how and why it was established. These 
sources also explore the multitude of problems that beset the first inhabitants 
and how these were ultimately overcome so that the town could become a 
permanently settled urban environment. However, these sources fall within 
the domain of antiquarian works and Afrikaner Nationalist history and so are 
problematical in various ways that need to be considered here. These sources 
must be approached with caution even though they appear to contain many 
important details and observations that shed light on the early Krugersdorp.  
 
An early history of Krugersdorp by Ramsay MacNab and Smith is a good 
example of an antiquarian source.1 It is undated but gauging by the content, it 
was written early in the last century. Strictly speaking, this work is really a 
trade directory and thus a primary source but it is prefaced with a lengthy 
introduction that recounts the town?s early history in considerable detail with 
many illustrative photographs. Another important source is Burger?s 
unpublished ?history? of Krugersdorp,2 which also falls within the antiquarian 
mode. Another valuable source is a collection of photos with captions that was 
                                                 
1  W.  Ramsay MacNab and J. W. Smith, Guide to Krugersdorp and the West Rand, W. &  
   A.K. Johnston Ltd, Edinburgh and London, n.d. 
2 Krugersdorp Public Library, B. Burger, ?Die Geskiedenis van Krugersdorp tot 1952?,   
  unpublished typed manuscript, 1953. 
 
 12
 published to commemorate Krugersdorp?s Centenary in 1987.3 I have found 
all three works useful in terms of basic information as both works are packed 
with minutiae of painstaking accuracy.  
 
These studies explain why Krugersdorp was given its name and relate 
revealing ?tales? concerning its early ?pioneer? days that provide important 
insights into the fragility of the town during its formative years. I have also 
used antiquarian works on other South African towns like Cape Town4 and 
Johannesburg and the East Rand5 for the purpose of comparison and context. 
The titles of these works suggest that they are concerned with ?social scenes?, 
the ?streets? and the ?way of life? that are pertinent to a study of the making of 
town. 
 
Antiquarian secondary sources have to be approached with caution, however, 
as these works ignore large swathes of the experiences of ordinary urban 
residents in favour of what was deemed ?colourful? or ?of interest?. These works 
were written as commercial propositions, to be sold to discerning middle class 
readers as so-called ?coffee table? books. Antiquarian studies have little in 
common with professional academic history apart from a superficial concern 
for the ?past? and the employment of a ?narrative? to ?tell the story? of a 
particular town?s past.  The word ?antiquarian? here refers to narrative that 
simply records events without analysis or historical interpretation. Historians 
seldom refer to such works as sources as a result. 
 
Such neglect is, on the face of it, justified as in the South African case, black 
residents are almost completely absent from most antiquarian works and 
women are marginalized and trivialised into examples of ?fashion?, a ?way of 
life? or used to illustrate arcane concerns like ?etiquette?. The writing is also 
overwhelmingly descriptive and if analysis is included, it is theoretically ill-
 informed, speculative and poorly supported by evidence. Antiquarian writing, 
                                                 
3 Krugersdorp Town Council, Krugersdorp 100 jare/years, Volks Beperk, Krugersdorp, 1987. 
4 See, for example, E. Rosenthal, Fishorns and Hansom Cabs: Life in Victorian Cape Town,  
  A.D. Donker, Cape Town, 1977. 
5 See, for example, E. Rosenthal, Gold! Gold! Gold! MacMillan, London, 1970 and D.  
  Humphriss, Benoni, Son of My Sorrow, Town Council of Benoni, Benoni, 1968. 
 
 13
 furthermore, fails to inform the reader of the sources employed by the writer: 
there are no footnotes, no bibliography and no sense that what is being 
reported constitutes contested terrain and is the subject of historical debate. 
Like school textbooks, such work makes claims to authoritativeness by 
?naturalising? the knowledge it puts forward as the ?truth? and need to be 
treated with caution. 
 
I would argue that social historians are able, nonetheless, to extract valuable 
information from these works and under the influence of postmodernist theory, 
historians have become more open-minded about the range of ?texts? that can 
be studied and used in the pursuit of an understanding of the past. For 
example, the authors of highly regarded urban histories of Cape Town6 made 
use of antiquarian sources to write an academically reputable book that was, 
the same time, designed as a viable commercial proposition.7 My own study 
here as made liberal use of such work and has taken a similar approach to 
Afrikaner nationalist historical studies. 
 
Schutte?s work8is written in Afrikaans and exemplifies a standard Afrikaner 
nationalist brand of history that flourished during the mid-1970s. Like 
antiquarian works, it focuses narrowly the cultural, social and political doings 
of the local white elite, particularly the Dutch- or Afrikaans-speaking residents, 
from what van Jaarsveld called a ?kerktoringsperspektief?9 (literally: ?church 
tower perspective?, meaning a ?top-down perspective?). Such work 
concentrates on allegedly ?great men? while largely ignoring ordinary working 
class whites, white women and almost completely effacing Indian, Coloured 
and Africans except for brief mentions of ?servants? and ?labourers?. Black 
people either simply do not exist in this paradigm or, if they appear 
occasionally on the pages, it is to underscore their servile, inferior status.  
                                                 
6 N. Worden, E. Van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith (eds.), Cape Town: The Making of a 
  City, David Philip, Cape Town, 1998 and N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-   
  Smith (eds.), Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, David Philip, Cape Town, 1999.  
7 C. Rassool, ?Interview with Elizabeth van Heyningen, Nigel Worden and Vivian Bickford- 
  Smith?, South African Historical Journal, 40, 1999, pp. 267-285. 
8 M.A. Schutte, ?Die Geskiedenis van Krugersdorp 1887-1900?, MA dissertation,  
  Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1976. 
9 F.A. van Jaarsveld, ?Geskiedenis van die Alledaagse Lewe ? ?n Nuwe Stroming in die Duitse  
  Sosiale Geskiedskrywing?, Historia, May, 1990, p. 12. 
 
 14
  
Afrikaners take centre stage in this account rather than English-speaking 
whites and are presented as a classless, homogenous national group or ?volk?, 
living in the towns. This homogeneity is imposed by an elite, middle-class 
fraction that acted as ?cultural brokers? in devising and disseminating Afrikaner 
nationalism.10  
 
Schutte?s work typifies such work where categories of class, gender and race 
are largely absent and history is ?naturalised? through a presentation that 
relates little more than the concerns of a tiny fraction of white Afrikaner men 
living in the town. Like antiquarian work, however, such historical sources are 
both a gold mine and minefield of minutiae which cumulatively provides 
valuable insights into Krugersdorp?s early years, albeit in a distorted fashion. 
The thesis is part chronicle and part hagiography for white Afrikaner men 
presented in the highly formulaic and meticulously organised framework that 
one finds in administrative policy documents.  
 
This fragmentation of knowledge into ever-smaller parcels recalls Barthes?s 
comments on the modernist project of administrative officials who imposed a 
stifling, grid-like classification ?net? over the town to convey the idea that 
?nothing can escape man, that the world even at its most distant part, is like an 
object in his hand, and that all property is but a dialectical moment in the general 
enslavement of Nature?11. This is an approach to knowledge that ?speaks? the 
belief that  ?nothing?could not be known, described and hence owned?.12 
 
Schutte?s work shares all these negative features of Afrikaner nationalist 
writing. Despite being a rare example of a female Afrikaner historian, she 
marginalises women in her account of Krugersdorp?s history. She offers no 
analysis of the town?s white and black working class or any systematic  
                                                 
10  A. Grundlingh, ?Sosiale Geskiedenis en die Dilemma in Afrikanergeskiedskrywing?, South                           
    African Historical  Journal, 19, 1987, p. 31 
11   I. Hofmeyr, ?Mining, Social Change and Literature with Particular Reference to the Mining  
     Novel, 1870-1920?, MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1980, p. 166. 
 12  H. MacDonald, Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880- 
    1918, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994,  p. 11  
 
 15
 analysis of the local economy in terms of a structural economic system of 
mining capitalism. Instead she relates a description in a Rankean positivist 
sense of simply recording a highly selective slice of ?facts? in order to 
reconstruct, allegedly, ?Wie es eigentlich gewesen?  (?how it really was?).13  
 
This has also been the approach of Du Plooy?s doctoral thesis on 
Krugersdorp?s history which has presented a meticulous and more inclusive 
description of various aspects of Krugersdorp?s past covering a much broader 
chronology than Schutte.14 Du Plooy?s inclusiveness may have been 
influenced by social history as there are a few references to such work in the 
footnotes but the study is essentially a chronicle that focuses heavily on white, 
male and elitist concerns. While not strictly in an Afrikaner nationalist mould, 
Du Plooy?s attempts to present a-theorised, non-ideological history, however, 
her dependence upon the Krugersdorp Public Library?s archives and neglect 
of other methods and sources, produces a history that is remarkably similar to 
that produced by Schutte in that it privileges white, mostly Afrikaner political 
and administrative concerns.   
 
Keegan?s criticism of Afrikaner nationalist historians aptly describes this form 
of writing: ?local history [becomes] a directory of local government, white 
religious and educational institutions and cultural organisations.?15 Clynick 
added that,16  
 
 ?whilst rich in administrative detail and empirically exact on 
 on matters of policy, [such writing] did not set out to explore? 
 experience from the perspective of the ordinary people who 
 appear to be largely absent from their accounts. The themes 
 which they have explored reflect an unwillingness to go beyond 
 a dominant Afrikaner nationalist historiographical school,  
 exhibiting a theoretical poverty which systematically turns away 
                                                 
13  E. H. Carr, What is History? second edition, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 8-9. 
14  J. Du Plooy, ?Die Sosio-kulturele Ontwikkeling van Krugersdorp Onder Munisipale Bestuur  
     tot 1993?, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1998 
15  T.F. Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrialising South Africa, Ravan, Johannesburg,  
     1988, pp. xvi-xviii. 
16  Kotze, J.S. ?Geskiedenis van die Wes-Transvaalse Diamantdelwerye?, MA dissertation,  
    Potchefstroom University for Christian National Education, Potchefstroom, 1972 and A.E.  
    Krause, ?Die Lichtenburgse Aluviale Diamantdelwerye, 1928-1945, n? Socio-Ekonomiese  
    Geskiedenis?, MA dissertation, University of Pretoria, 1985. 
 
 16
  from questions about social structure, class interests and 
 political consciousness.17   
 
Both Schutte and Du Plooy produce a precise, clear and accurate account of 
the establishment of the town. Their detailed chronology of key events 
provides a skeleton which the flesh of social history can, with caution, be 
arranged to produce a more rounded and insightful study of the early years of 
the town. Thus, provided one is aware of the shortcomings of such work, they 
can be ?mined? with some profit. As Tosh points out, the ?historicism? of Ranke 
and his followers, the ?countless antiquarians?, ?is by no means without 
important practical implications?.18  
 
To understand how Krugersdorp came to be located in a specific place at a 
certain time and why it was so fragile during its early years and how it evolved 
over the period 1887 to 1923 is linked inextricably to its fundamental nature as 
a mining town, functioning in the interests of the gold mining industry on the 
western periphery of the Witwatersrand goldfields. While undoubtedly 
problematic, Marxist structuralist writings and a broadly materialist paradigm, 
are powerful tools for understanding how a mining boomtown emerged, took 
root and evolved on the western periphery of the Witwatersrand.  
 
The leading Marxist structuralists  ?  who were also referred to as ?radicals? 
and ?revisionists? ? formed a ?school? in the early 1970s in reaction to ?liberal? 
writings that claimed that capitalism was ?colour blind? and that racial policies 
actually held back economic development. Racist policies were blamed on the 
cultural prejudices of mainly Afrikaner political figures whose racism was 
fomented by their experiences and those of their forefathers on the ?frontier? 
as ?trekboers? and ?Voortrekkers? who fought constantly with neighbouring 
black polities. This school comprised of what Smith19  calls the ?Elder 
                                                 
17  T.P. Clynick, ?Political Consciousness and Mobilisation amongst Afrikaner Diggers on the     
     Lichtenburg Diamond Fields, 1926-1929?, MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand,  
     Johannesburg, 1988, p. 18. 
18  P. Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern  
     History, second edition, Longman, London, 1991, p. 15.  
19  K. Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing,  (The Changing  
     Past), Southern Book Publishers, Johannesburg, 1988, p. 164. 
  
 
 17
 Statesmen?, namely, Martin Legassick, Harold Wolpe and Frederick 
Johnstone together with the ?Sussex School of Poulantzian disciples? 
especially the ?Gang of Four? of Kaplan, Davies, O?Meara and Morris.20 These 
writers were influenced chiefly by the writings of the Marxists Louis Althusser 
and Nico Poulantzas but also were influenced by the works of the French 
anthropologists Meillassoux, Levi-Strauss and Bloch and the writings of Andr? 
Gunder Frank, particularly his dependency theory based on studies of Latin 
America.  
 
Frederick Johnstone was the first of the ?Elder Statesmen? of this new school 
to pen a critique of the liberal paradigm.21 He was influenced by the May 1968 
student revolt in Paris and by his exposure to British left wing circles at 
Oxford. He was also influenced by the class analysis of Barrington Moore?s 
1967 study22 and E.P. Thompson?s seminal work which appeared in 
paperback in1969, although Johnstone preferred structuralist radicalism to 
social history.23 
 
Martin Legassick was next out of the blocks and famously attacked the frontier 
thesis in a paper at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.24 His work was 
influenced by Eugene Genovese and his seminal work on slavery.25 Harold 
Wolpe was the first of these writers to develop what became the hallmark of 
Marxist structuralist writing as a theoretically-driven, macro-level analysis of 
South African?s mining industry and its relationship to the state and 
international capital, with a special focus on segregation and apartheid. Wolpe 
famously advanced a ?cheap labour thesis? arguing that capitalism flourished 
                                                 
20  ibid. 
21  B. Bozzoli and P. Delius, ?Radical History and South African Society? in B. Bozzoli and P.       
    Delius (eds.), Radical History Review: History from South Africa, Radical History Review,  
    New York, 1990, (Radical History Review), p. 37, footnote 24. 
22  B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making  
     of the Modern World, Allan Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 1967. 
23  E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth,  
    1968. 
24  M. Legassick, ?The Frontier Tradition in South African historiography? in S. Marks and S.  
    Trapido (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial Society, Longman, London, 1980.   
     See also Smith, The Changing Past, p. 173.  
25  E. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made, Pantheon, New York, 1974. 
 
 18
 under apartheid and that racism was ?rational? for capitalist economic 
development in South Africa.26  
 
Wolpe explained that the ?reserves? subsidised labour costs for the mining 
industry that paid a wage that only covered the reproductive costs of the black 
miners living in the compounds on the grounds that the miners? families would 
be supported by means of subsistence farming in the reserves. It was this 
?ultra-exploitation? of black migrant mine workers that enabled the mining 
industry to be profitable. While not a new idea (the Italian Marxist, Giovanni 
Arrighi who had put forward a similar thesis for colonial Rhodesia in 1970)27 
Wolpe framed this explanation in sophisticated Marxist terms that analysed 
the ?articulation? of ?pre-capitalist? and ?capitalist? ?modes of production?.  
 
Wolpe was not a trained historian, however, and Bozzoli and Delius feel that 
his work ?stands somewhat at a distance from that of the other revisionists of 
this time?, and that it drew heavily from a ?structuralist heritage? and so ?was 
not easily compatible with the more historical revisionism?.28 This is an 
important distinction that is often ignored in historiography produced by liberal 
historians. It was Legassick that best represents a historically informed 
revisionism and who was the most influential of the ?structuralist Marxists?.29  
 
Bozzoli and Delius claim that Legassick ?effectively remapped the outlines of 
South African history since the sixteenth century from a materialist 
perspective?30 while Saunders describes him as the ?single most important 
figure in the radical challenge of the early 1970s?.31 His work was 
sophisticated, and, under the influence of Genovese, avoided a vulgar 
reductionism of much ?structuralist? writing. These writers were actually quite 
                                                 
26  H. Wolpe, ?Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power: From Segregation to Apartheid,?        
     Economy and Society, 1, 4, 1974. 
27  G. Arrighi, ?Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective: a Study of the Proletarianization of  
     the African Peasantry in Rhodesia?, Journal of Development Studies, 1, 1970, pp. 197-234. 
28  Bozzoli and Delius Radical History Review, p. 21. 
29  See, for example, M. Legassick, ?Gold, Agriculture and Secondary Industry in South Africa,         
    1885-1975, from Periphery to Sub-metropole as a Forced Labour System? in R. Palmer and  
     N. Parsons (eds.), The Roots of Rural Poverty in  Central and Southern Africa, Heinemann  
     Educational Books, London, 1977. 
30  Bozzoli and Delius, Radical History Review, p. 20. 
31  Saunders, The Making of the South African Past, p. 172. 
 
 19
 different from one another, criticised one another?s work and their influence 
was short-lived. By the time Johnstone published his famous manuscript in 
1976,32 the structuralist Marxist era was nearly over. 
  
What made these writers distinctive according to Bozzoli and Delius was their 
willingness to subject empirical evidence to an engagement with ?theoretical 
and conceptual categories, often in a dialectical manner?.33 Their work, 
particularly the writings of Wolpe and Legassick on the reserves, tended to be 
?functionalist?, however, assuming that since capitalism benefited from migrant 
labour from the reserves, the reserves must have been created for that 
purpose.34 My thesis makes cautious use of these works to understand how 
the mining economy functioned and why a town like Krugersdorp could 
emerge and exist in the form that it did. I have also made use of a large 
number of studies on the Witwatersrand and Kimberley mining industries that 
were influenced by these works to establish a comparative context for 
Krugersdorp35 as well as general historical works on the mining industry that 
lie outside this tradition and fall within a liberal or humanist Marxist tradition.36 
 
The work of these early structuralist Marxists was complemented by the 
writings of the ?Poulantzians?, a distinct sub-category of the structuralist 
Marxists who drew upon the work of Althusser and Poulantzas,37  and who 
                                                 
32  F. R. Johnstone, Class, Race and Gold : A Study of Class Relations and Race  
     Discrimination in South Africa, Centre for African Studies, Dalhousie, London, 1976. 
33  Bozzoli and Delius, Radical History Review, p. 21. 
34  Saunders, Making of the South African Past, p. 189. 
35  For example, W. Worger, South Africa's City of Diamonds, Yale University Press, New  
     Haven, 1987 and R. Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871- 
     1890, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. 
36 See, for example, G. Wheatcroft, The Randlords ? the Men Who Made South Africa,  
    George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London,  1985,  A. Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South  
    Africa?s Mining Economy ?  the Struggle for the Gold Mine?s Labour Supply, 1890-1920,  
    Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1985; P. Bonner and K. Shapiro,    
    ?Company Town, Company Estate: Pilgrim's Rest, 1910-1932?, Journal of Southern African 
    Studies, 19, 2, 1993, pp. 171-200, G. Nattrass, ?The Tin mines of the Waterberg  
    (Transvaal) 1905-1914? , Contree, 26, 1989, pp. 5-12; A. Mabin, ?Capital, Coal and Conflict:  
    the Genesis and Planning of a Company Town at Indwe?, Contree, 34, 1993, pp. 21-30 and  
    T. Clynick, ?Community Politics on the Lichtenburg Alluvial Diamond Fields, 1926-1929?, in  
    B. Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives, Ravan,  
    Johannesburg, 1987. 
37 The seminal works for each writer were, respecitively, L. Althusser, For Marx, Verso,       
    London, 1969 and N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, Verso, London,  
    1978. 
 
 20
 focussed more directly on the central state. Robert Davies, Dave Kaplan, Mike 
Morris and Dan O?Meara all worked as graduate students at Sussex 
University in the early to mid-1970s and began to produce work which 
analysed the South African state at various historical conjunctures in terms of 
?class alliances? and ?fractions of capital? in a highly theoretical analysis.38 
They claimed that over time the ?power bloc? that wielded hegemonic 
domination over the South African state would undergo transformation as 
class alliances were reconfigured.  
 
While the Poulantzians were innovative and sophisticated, they quickly 
attracted criticism for their reductionism. O?Meara, for example, disaggregated 
Afrikaner nationalism skilfully into a range of class fractions and class 
alliances, but in the process he made ?class? the ?sole category of analysis, all-
 important and determinant?.39 Criticism came from within the ranks of the 
Marxist structuralists and Johnstone was among the first to note that ?class 
analysis remained essential, but it was not sufficient?.40  
 
The ?socialist-humanists? like E.P. Thompson and British-based Marxists like 
Simon Clarke, attacked the Poulantzians for their ?mechanistic rigidities?, the 
?reification of rigid theoretical categories?, and for their ?inherent functionalism 
and economism?.41 Most glaring was their failure to take into account, 
sufficiently, the ?subordinated classes? and their tendency to focus from ?top 
down? in their explanatory models. These works are also very broad and an 
understanding of how a specific town emerged and set down roots cannot 
easily derived from their approach.  
 
                                                 
38 See, for example, R. Davies et al, ?Class Struggle and the Periodisation of the State in  
   South Africa?, Review of African Political Economy, 7, 1976, pp. 4-34, M. Morris, ?The  
   Development of Capitalism in the South African Countryside?, Economy and Society, 3, 3,  
   1976, pp. 292-343 and O?Meara, D., Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital, and Ideology in the  
   Development of Afrikaner nationalism, 1934-1948, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,  
   1983. For a contemporary critique, see S. Clarke, ?Capital, Fractions of Capital and the  
    State: Neo-Marxist Analyses of South Africa?, Capital and Class, 5, 1978, pp. 32-77.  
39 Saunders, The Making of the South African Past, p. 188. 
40 ibid. 
41 Bozzoli and Delius (eds.), Radical History Review, p. 24. 
 
 21
 I have made critical use of a ?neo-Poulantzian? approach that, for example, 
identifies the role of an elite, white, middle-class, professional and commercial 
?stratum? or ?fraction? as the hegemonic local interest group in Krugersdorp. I 
have also found it useful to explore how this class fraction developed shifting 
class and political alliances with other interest groups in the town to achieve 
its ends and how it was opposed by a fluctuating set of class alliances 
depending upon the issue at hand. This approach is taken throughout the 
thesis but is employed particularly in Chapter Five and Nine when analysing 
the struggle between English-speaking, white middle-class fraction of 
shopkeepers and professionals, on the one hand, and Indian,  middle-class 
traders, on the other hand. 
 
It was the humanist Marxists who constructed a specifically South African 
brand of social history that offered the most trenchant criticism of the 
structuralist Marxist and who insisted on the re-insertion of human agency into 
historical studies. I have drawn heavily upon this work in trying to understand 
how Krugersdorp set down roots and evolved into a permanent town.  
 
Before discussing this dominant paradigm, there are two important additional 
paradigms and disciplines upon which my thesis has drawn to deal with the 
issues of transience and permanence, namely urban geography and 
anthropology, where certain influential works preceded the rise of social 
history in South Africa.  
 
South African anthropology has shed light on black South Africans who began 
to settle in large numbers in urban areas for the first-time as ?first generation? 
urban migrants. Although initially transient, these residents eventually struck 
down roots and settled permanently in the towns on the Rand and this work is 
instructive for understanding Krugersdorp?s own transition from transience to 
permanence. Urban geography is particularly useful for shedding light on the 
spatial patterns that developed in the early Krugersdorp following similar 
racially defined segregated spaces of the ?Apartheid City?. Both these 
approaches influenced the early social history in South Africa.   
 
 
 22
 In tracing the roots of what he called ?South African Urban Historiography?, 
Maylam acknowledged the contribution made by anthropologists like the 
Mayers42 and Pauw43, which he argued, produced the ?most of the more 
probing urban studies? in the early 1960s.44 Such work influenced the later 
urban, social history by inspiring a readiness to engage with concepts and 
constructs such as class, gender, culture and race, in a critical fashion and to 
apply these understandings to empirical studies of the past. From the titles of 
these studies, it is clear that these anthropologists focussed on the processes 
of urbanisation and the transition from transience to permanence for first and 
second generation urban residents. 
 
Probably the most widely cited anthropological writings in South African social 
history those of Longmore45 and Hellmann46. Hellmann in particularly is 
acknowledged for her work which describes the lives of hundreds of first 
generation migrants tried to scrape a living in a densely packed ?slumyard? 
conditions of ?Rooiyard? in Johannesburg in the 1930s.  Another seminal 
contribution by anthropologists was the work of the Mayers ? already 
mentioned above ?  who traced rural Africans crossing the threshold from 
?Red?, or rural cultural status, into ?School? or permanent urban resident 
status.47 Their book remains a seminal study that still influences works on 
urban social history that focussed on urbanisation, culture, consciousness and 
identity.48  
  
                                                 
42 See, for example, P. Mayer, with I. Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen? Conservatism and  
    the Process of Urbanisation in a South African City, (Townsmen or Tribesmen?), Oxford  
    University Press, New York, 1962. 
43 B.A. Pauw, The Second Generation, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1963. 
44 P. Maylam, ?Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban Historiography?   
    (?Explaining the Apartheid City?), Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1, 1995, p. 19. 
45 L Longmore, The Dispossed. A Study in the Sex-Life of Bantu Women in Urban Areas in  
   and Around Johannesburg, Jonathan Cape, London, 1959.  
46 E. Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard, Manchester  
   University Press, 1948. Hellmann?s original MA dissertation was completed at the University  
   of the Witwatersrand in 1935 and was considered  so important and unique that the eminent  
   anthropologist Max Gluckman facilitated its publication so that it could reach a wider  
   audience (see ?Introductory Note?).  
47 Mayer with Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen? See also P. Mayer, Black Villagers in an  
    Industrial Society, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1980.  
48 Bozzoli and Delius (eds.), Radical History. pp. 31 and 42, footnote 71. 
 
 23
 Urban geographers began to apply theoretical insights to their studies of the 
built environment of South African cities and towns, during the 1950s and 
1960s. Kuper, Watts and Davies applied the ?ecology? model of the Chicago 
School to Durban?s segregated spaces in the late 1950s, in what they called a 
?racial ecology model?.49 Later Davies extended this approach in his study of 
Durban in the early 1960s50 while Hart developed a similar analytical model 
for Johannesburg in the early 1970s 51and then later refined it by focussing 
more narrowly on white residential areas in Johannesburg in the late 1970s.52 
This model was adopted and applied to Krugersdorp by Henning in the 
1960s.53   
 
As a geographer, Henning analysed how urban land was used in the town 
and explained these patterns in terms of the ?ecological? and ?sectoral? 
approaches employed by the followers of the Chicago School.54 Henning was 
sensitive to Krugersdorp?s broader context and noted, for example, how the 
?growth of Johannesburg has greatly influenced the growth of Krugersdorp?55. 
Henning observed how Krugersdorp, together with Randfontein, formed part 
of an ?outer zone?, economically dependent upon the central core of 
Johannesburg for many ?specialised functions and services?, drawing upon the 
principles of Central Place Theory56 in the process.  
 
Utilising Hoyt?s sector theory, Henning identified how wealthier residents in the 
town moved from Luipaardsvlei suburb to the more elevated and distant 
suburb of Eastern Extension, following the patterns predicted under this 
                                                 
49 L. Kuper, H.  Watts, and R.J. Davies, Durban: A Study in Racial Ecology, Jonathan Cape,  
   London, 1958. 
50 R.J. Davies,  ?The Growth of the Durban Metropolitan Area?, South African Geographical  
   Journal, 45, 1963, pp.15-43. 
51 T. Hart, ?An Examination of Sectoral and Concentric Patterns in the Socio-economic  
    Structure of Johannesburg?, South African Geographical Journal, 55, 1973, pp. 32-39. 
52 T. Hart, ?The Evolving Pattern of White Residential Areas in Johannesburg?, South African  
    Geographical Journal, 58, 1977, pp. 68-75. 
53 J. Henning, ?The Evolution, Land Use and Land Use Patterns of Krugersdorp?, (?The  
    Evolution?), BA Honours dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1963. 
54 See K.S.O. Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City, University of  
    South Africa Press, Pretoria, 2004. 
55 Henning, ?The Evolution?, p. 3. 
56 K. S.O. Beavon, Central Place Theory: a Re-interpretation, Longman, London, 1977. See  
   also P. Daniel and M. Hopkinson, The Geography of Settlement: Conceptual Frameworks  
   in Geography, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1979. 
 
 24
 theory.57 Henning, thus, attempted to identify a class-based residential pattern 
in the town and to explain both social and spatial mobility, noting, for example, 
that the poorer white residents of the town, the Dutch-speaking ?poor 
burghers?, lived in Burghershoop which was situated on low-value, low-lying 
land, west of the town proper and that most could never afford to leave this 
low status area. 
 
Henning also commented on how residential and industrial areas developed in 
a linear pattern following the railway line.58 The importance of the proximity of 
transport to and from work was emphasised in Henning?s work in a thoughtful 
way that has influenced this study, as has his observations on the importance 
of the Central Business District and Burgess?s ?Concretic Zone Theory?. 
 
While Henning?s work provided valuable insights, his study nonetheless 
contains a number of problems. Henning uncritically accepted a ?metropolitan? 
theory and applied it uncritically to the ?periphery? as a case study. A theory 
designed for a specific kind of city in an advanced industrialised world in the 
1920s, is not likely to ?travel? well and it hardly needs to be said that Chicago 
in this period was substantially different to Krugersdorp in the 1960s. Indeed 
Henning could only make these theories ?fit? by ignoring the presence of black 
residents in the town in the ?locations?, and by leaving out the massive mining 
industry on Krugersdorp?s doorstep with its tens of thousands of black migrant 
workers housed in single-sex mine compounds. Still, Henning?s analysis of the 
town?s white working class, middle class and ?high class? residential areas was 
thoughtful and can be applied to my own work on Krugersdorp.  
 
Another geographer who wrote about Krugersdorp was Proctor who penned a 
short article about ?Munsieville?, a black residential space. Proctor?s 1986 
analysis of local and central state control imposed on Munsieville, a key black 
residential area, marked an advance on Henning?s work which largely ignored 
                                                 
57 Henning, ?The Evolution?, p. 33. 
58 ibid., p. 36. 
 
 25
 black spaces and suggests that he was influenced by the social history of the 
late 1970s and early 1980s.59  
 
While focussed narrowly on a single location (a trait it shares in common with 
at least a dozen studies in South African urban and social history as will be 
demonstrated later), it does perceptively examine the tensions that existed 
between the local and central levels of government, particularly over 
strategies designed to shape the construction of black living space in ways 
that facilitated efficient control over black residents. Proctor?s work, however, 
deals with a much later period than my own work and is of limited value for 
this reason but its concern with intra-state conflict and co-operation certainly 
has relevance to my work especially insofar as its focus transects with my 
own.  
 
Humanist Marxism ? the Emergence of the New Social History 
 
The most sustained and damaging critique of Marxist structuralism came from 
a small group of radical historians who identified themselves in terms of a 
?humanist? Marxist tradition and who began to develop a new approach to the 
South African past drawing upon a British tradition of ?social history?. While 
?humanists? retained the ?class perspective? of the structuralists, they were 
influenced by Marxists like Gramsci who stressed the importance of ideology 
and culture as powerful forces in history. It was the development of this rich, 
insightful and complex social urban history for which these writers have 
become justly most well-known and it was for this reason that their works 
dominated serious historical writing during the early 1970s.  
 
Historiographers usually cite February 1977 as the point of origin for this 
influential movement linking it to the launch of the History Workshop at the 
University of the Witwatersrand. Saunders described this Workshop, and its 
successors that were held every three years, as ?a leading forum for the 
                                                 
59 M. Proctor, ?Local and Central State Control of Black Settlements in Munsieville,    
    Krugersdorp?, GeoJournal, 12, 1986, pp. 167-172. 
 
 26
 presentation of work in the new social history?.60  One of its founders, Belinda 
Bozzoli, claimed that it ?facilitated many intellectual developments on the left?61 
while Maylam observed that it marked the start of an ?outpouring of work on 
South African urban history?62  
 
In an introduction to an edited compilation of select papers from the workshop 
that was published a year later, Bozzoli explained that it was devised in the 
?tradition of the Ruskin History Workshops? history from a grassroots 
perspective?.63 The same piece further outlined the key features of a new 
social history. Firstly she noted that the History Workshop organisers 
privileged ?works in progress? that were concerned with ?local history?. Bozzoli 
made it clear that the organisers wanted to go ?beyond what is usually 
constituted by local history?, interpreting history not as the ?compilation of 
highly empirical detail and anecdote?, but rather as the ?interpretation of these 
things in a theoretically-informed context and across all disciplinary 
boundaries? 64  
 
Bozzoli insisted, nonetheless, that local history enabled historians to focus on 
the ?particular and unique system of class relations? on the Rand, where ?class 
whose significance is less national than local have been ignored?, where 
?patterns of conflict and repression occurring outside of the mining industry 
have barely been touched upon, while local forms of culture and 
consciousness are little examined.?65 Bozzoli also asserted that the History 
Workshop wanted to move away from a conception of history that was 
concerned with ??so-called ?great men? of the mining industry, the state, 
manufacturing industry or even organised labour. Contributors were invited, 
instead?, to submit papers that took the view of the ?common man? or the 
                                                 
60 Saunders, ?Making of the South African Past?, p. 185. 
61 Bozzoli and Delius, Radical History Review, p. 28. 
62 Maylam, ?Explaining the Apartheid City? p. 20. 
63 B. Bozzoli (compiler), ?Introduction?, Labour, Townships and Protest: Studies in the Social  
   History of the Witwatersrand, (Labour, Townships and Protest), Ravan Press,     
   Johannesburg, 1979 , p. 3.  
64 ibid., p.1. 
65 ibid., p. 3. 
 
 27
 ?people?, the ?subordinate groups of society, be they factory or mine workers, 
domestic servants, traders, diggers, the unemployed or the ?marginal??.66  
 
Murray notes that the History workshop arose at a time when ?social and 
labour studies in South Africa shifted away from broad-based structuralist 
accounts set within South African political economy to historically-specific 
topics and subject matter?.67 He argued that the workshop ?spearheaded? a 
?drive? towards ?popular history?, ?daily lived-experience of township residents? 
and ?human agency?, leading to the ?enormous proliferation of social and 
labour studies?.68 Smith observed that intentions of the first workshop were to  
 
popularise history, to help stimulate a historical  
consciousness among people, to break down the  
barrier between the professional writer of history  
and the workers who were the subject of his studies.69 
 
The History Workshop model was taken up at the University of Cape Town 
and other liberal English-speaking campuses. A range of work broadly 
influenced by social history began to appear in edited collections of articles 
written by left wing academics from a variety of disciplines which were 
published in the late 1970s70, 198171 and 1982.72  
 
                                                 
66 ibid. 
67 M. Murray, ?The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour     
    History? (?Triumph?), Journal of Asian and African Studies, 23, 1-2, 1988, p. 94. 
68 ibid., p. 95. 
69 Smith, The Changing Past, p. 165. 
70 P. Bonner (ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies: Papers presented at the  
   A.S.I.Studies Seminar, (Working Papers one), vol. 1, African Studies Institute, University  
   of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1977. 
71 P. Bonner (ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies, (Working Papers two),   
   vol. 2, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1981. 
72 S. Marks, S. and R. Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa;  
   African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870- 1930, (Industrialisation and  
   Social Change), Longman, London, 1982. There were several collections published  during  
   this time were written from a broadly leftist point of view and across disciplines, in a similar  
   approach, but which focussed on pre-colonial and rural history in a way that nonetheless  
   complemented social history that  focussed on urban case studies, notably S. Marks and A. 
   Atmore (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, (Economy and  
   Society), Longman, London, 1980 and R. Palmer and N. Parsons (eds.), The Roots of Rural  
   Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, (The Roots of Rural Poverty)  Heinemann  
   Educational, London, 1977. 
 
 28
 The new social history spurred a range of postgraduate studies in the late 
1970s and early 1980s like Kagan?s MA dissertation on black spaces in early  
Johannesburg written in 1983.73 These were pioneering works and, 
understandably, were subject to limitations. Kagan said little about the people 
who actually lived in these African settlements, their culture, their aspirations 
and the hard, daily grind of their lives. There was also little attempt to apply 
theory, for example, the ideas of Castells74 that were available in the late 
1970s. In addition, the very nature of her study, of African settlements, 
extracts these spaces artificially from their surroundings and although she 
notes that white neighbours protested against the presence of Africans in 
Sophiatown, little sense is provided of the context of white working-class 
residences and white middle-class suburbs. Many of the works that followed 
addressed some of these lacunae but just as frequently created new gaps of 
their own and reproduced many of Kagan?s limitations. 
 
In a remarkable postgraduate thesis, Koch wrote about the African working 
class ?slumyard? of Doornfontein in the 1930s. He built on the work of Kagan 
and a postgraduate study by Proctor on Sophiatown and its adjoining areas75 
which was later published.76 Koch also drew upon the theoretical writings of 
Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams as well as the literature of African 
writers who had lived in urban townships and wrote insightfully about their 
experiences77 including articles to Drum magazine.78  
 
Koch also consulted the work of the anthropologist David Coplan on the culture  
                                                 
73 N. Kagan, ?African Settlements in the Johannesburg Area, 1903-23?, MA dissertation,  
   University of the Witwatersrand, 1983 
74 M. Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, (Urban Question), Edward Arnold,  
   London, 1977 and M. Castells, City, Class and Power, MacMillan, London, 1978. 
75 A. Proctor, ?Black Workers, Local Government and the State: A History of Three  
   Johannesburg Suburbs ? Sophiatown, Martindale and Newclare?, BA Honours dissertation,  
   University of the Witwatersrand, 1978. 
76 A. Proctor, ?Class Struggle, Segregation and the City: A History of Sophiatown, 1905-1940?  
   in Bozzoli (comp.), Labour, Townships and Protest,  pp. 49-89. 
77 For example, E. Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, Faber and Faber, Johannesburg, 1959,  
   M.Dikobe, The Marabi Dance, Heinemann, London, 1973 and C. Themba, ?The Bottom of  
   the Bottle? in M. Dikobe, The Will to Die, David Philip, Cape Town, 1982. 
78 For example, T. Matshikiza, ?Twenty Years of Jazz?, Drum, December, 1951. 
 
 29
 of the black working class that was written in the late 1970s79 and in the early 
1980s80 and other perceptive writers like Sole and Couzens.81 These writings 
reflected a strong desire to embrace human agency with a strong cultural 
dimension among other ?non-economic aspects of class formation and class 
struggle?.82 Furthermore Koch and similar writings were determined to adopt an 
interdisciplinary approach that sought to ?avoid the separation of literary and 
cultural studies into an academic ghetto of their own?.83 
 
Coplan?s work seems to have embraced the criticism of Levi-Strauss? 
structuralist anthropology and wanted to break down the dichotomies that 
characterised this work. Coplan argued for a blurring of the sharp lines between 
African residents in urban and rural environments, traditional and Christian as 
well as the educated and the illiterate. He argued instead, for ?continuities? 
between ?amaqaba? (?red?, pagan) and ?amakholwa? (?believer, ?mission-school? 
African), the ?town boy?, the ?blanket kaffir? and the ?civilised native? in a way that 
marks an advance on the approaches of the early anthropologists such as 
Hellmann and the Mayers. Differences between these categories, he argued, 
                                                 
79 D. Coplan, ?Marabi Culture: Continuity and Transformation in Black South African Urban  
   Music?, paper presented to the Society for Ethnomusicology, Annual Meeting, Montreal,  
   1979. See also D. Coplan, ?African Working Class Culture in Town and Country 1870-1930?,  
   Conference on Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness?, University of London, 1980.   
79 D. Coplan, ?The Marabi Era: Social Implications of African Working Class Music         
   Between the  World Wars?, unpublished, undated mimeograph, c. 1980, cited in E. Koch,    
   ?Without visible means of Subsistence?: Slumyard Culture in Johannesburg, 1918-1940?,  
   History Workshop Paper, University of the Witwatersrand, February, 1981. Coplan?s works  
   were eventually published in the mid-1980s, see Coplan, D., In Township Tonight! South  
   Africa's Black City Music and Theatre, Longman, London, 1985. See also D. Coplan, ?The  
   Emergence of an African Working-class Culture? in Marks and Rathbone (eds.),  
   Industrialisation and Social Change.  
80 K. Sole, ?Class Continuity and Change in Black South African Literature, 1948-1960?,  
    History Workshop Paper, University of the Witwatersrand, February, 1978, later published  
    in Bozzoli (comp.), Labour, Townships and Protest, pp. 143-182. See also T. Couzens,  
    ?Moralizing Leisure Time?: the  Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg, 1918- 
   1936?, in Marks and Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change, pp. 314-337. 
81 B. Bozzoli, ?Introduction: Popular History and the Witwatersrand? (?Introduction?) in Bozzoli  
    (comp.), Labour, Townships and Protest, p. 10 
82 ibid., p. 9.  
83 ibid. 
  
 
 
 
 
 30
 were ?more apparent than real?84 as all were responding to the profound 
changes brought about by colonisation.  
 
Like his predecessors, Coplan traced the fascinating way that Africans adapted 
their existing and ?flexible patterns of meaning, value and organisation? to the 
new environments of ?mine, factory, town location, squatter camp?and open 
road?85 in response to colonial capitalist expansion and the ?trauma of 
proletarianisation.?86 Clearly such approaches are pertinent to my own work, 
particularly the early chapters on the transition from transience to permanence. 
 
Koch applied these fertile ideas to the making of the African working class of the 
Doornfontein slumyard in Johannesburg, in the inter-war period. While Koch 
was willing to acknowledge the importance of structuralist writings87 and stated 
that many different ?objective factors? shaped the industrial working class 
including the ?structural constraints? that characterised the economy as it shifted 
from mining to manufacturing capital during World War One, he clearly wished 
to diverge from this approach. Similarly, while he referred to the ?contradictions 
between different ?fractions? of capital, between local and central levels of the 
state and even within the local state, in a Poulantzian fashion, he nonetheless 
broke with these traditions in important ways. 
 
Firstly, he argued that the ?objective factors? referred to above, were in turn 
shaped and ?humanised? by the African working class and he emphasised the 
?self-determined? attempts by working class to make their urban living conditions 
more habitable through ?mental? or ?subjective? responses that combined ?in an 
integrated culture?.88 These rather loosely and poorly conceived references to 
agency marked his first attempt to come to terms with the writings of E.P. 
Thompson and his critics, notably Perry Anderson, something that he admitted 
                                                 
84 ibid. 
85 ibid., p. 359. 
86 ibid. 
87 E. Koch, ?Without Visible Means of Subsistence? Slumyard Culture in Johannesburg, 1918- 
   1940?, History Workshop 1981, University of the Witwatersrand, 1981, p. 1. 
88 ibid. 
 
 31
 he found ?difficult? given the ?tone and complexity of the debate?89 and which he 
consequently failed adequately to address in this paper. 
 
When his paper was published two years later in a collection of articles90, Koch?s 
understanding of this debate had advanced considerably and he drew also more 
heavily on Raymond Williams and, in particular, on Antonio Gramsci?s prison 
writings, producing an insightful analysis in the process. From Thompson?s  
writings, Koch noted that culture arises out of the way that social groups ?handle? 
their ?experience? of living in a set of objective conditions, creating a 
?corresponding? set of attitudes, symbols, values and mores?. From Williams, 
Koch adopted the view that patterns of meaning are ?created in all forms of 
practical activity?91 and he cited Williams?s comment that these patterns of 
meaning become the means whereby a ?social order is communicated, 
reproduced, experienced and explored?.92  
 
Koch, however, also noted Perry Anderson?s critique of Thompson?s analysis 
and argued that ?there is no automatic way in which a class culture is generated 
out of the experience of common material conditions?. Instead, he argued, there 
was a ?spontaneous? process was rather shaped by ?multiple levels of popular 
leadership, organisation and intellectual work.?93 Koch then cited Johnson94 to 
argue that culture becomes a ?site of struggle in class society? where, on one 
level, this culture constitutes a coping mechanism enabled the working class to 
survive the stress of living under capitalism and where, on another level, 
workers? ?subjective attitudes? that emerge in this culture influences the degree 
of ?passivity or militancy? of those exploited by capitalism.95  
 
                                                 
89 ibid., footnote 4, p. 30. 
90 E. Koch, ?Without Visible Means of Subsistence?: Slumyard Culture in Johannesburg 1918- 
   1940? (?Without Visible Means?) in B. Bozolli (ed.), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal,  
   (Town and Countryside), Ravan, Johannesburg, 1983, pp. 150-175. 
91 ibid., p. 154. 
92 Williams, Culture, London, 1981, p. 12. 
93 Koch, ?Without Visible Means?, p. 155. 
94 R. Johnson, ?Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working Class Culture? in J.  
   Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds.), Working Class Culture, Oxford University Press,  
   London, 1979. 
95 Koch, ?Without Visible Means?, p. 155. 
 
 32
 In his unpublished Masters thesis, completed in the same year, Koch developed 
his Gramscian conception of culture further to include the notion of ?hegemony? 
which he described as a ?means of exploring the subtle distinctions and 
interplay? between ?culture? and ?ideology?.96 Culture in this paradigm referred to 
the ?activities and values that are actually lived and adhered to by people? while 
ideology referred to the ?processes whereby a dominant class? attempts to 
shape activities and outlook of the dominated classes?.97 Koch?s dissertation 
also conveys Gramsci?s view that culture could serve as a ?force? equal to other 
material forces and the ?consciousness? that arose out of this culture could 
?thrust back? and shape the very material conditions out of which it arose.98 
 
Koch?s understanding of the base-superstructure model was drawn from Engels 
who wrote that ?we make history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very 
definite assumptions and conditions?.99 Koch, thus, rejected the view that ?base 
determines superstructure? and then drew upon Williams, to argue that 
?determination? simply implies ?setting limits? rather than ?predetermination of 
outcome?. Thus, ?material conditions? can only ?determine? cultural responses by 
?limiting the range of human responses that are possible within them and [by] 
exert[ing] a pressure on people who share these conditions to respond to them 
in a particular way?.100 
 
Koch then addressed the debate between E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson 
at a level of sophistication that was absent in his 1981 paper and ignored by his 
1983 article. Thompson had famously claimed that the ?working class did not 
arise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making?101 This 
refers to Thompson?s ?co-determination? of working class consciousness where 
                                                 
96  E. Koch, ?Doornfontein and its African Working Class, 1914-1935: a Study of Popular  
    Culture in Johannesburg?, MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,  
    1983, p. 10. 
97  ibid., p. 9. 
98  ibid., p. 11. According to Koch, Gramsci claimed that the ?granite compactness? of ?popular  
     beliefs? could ?assume the same energy as material forces? so that ?consciousness? could  
     ?thrust back? onto ?material conditions? which ?originally gave rise to it? and ?remould these  
     conditions?. 
99  Koch draws this reference, in turn, from R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford  
     University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 85. 
100 Koch, ?Doornfontein and its African Working Class?, p. 13. 
101 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin Books, London, 1963,  
     p. 9. 
 
 33
 he rejected the notion that ?class? and ?consciousness? could be treated as two 
separate entities, the ?one sequential upon the other?, since both must be ?taken 
together?.102  
 
Thompson?s conception of class consciousness as ?coherent self awareness by 
a class of its collective interests and antagonism to other classes? opened his 
writings up to criticism from Anderson who, in Koch?s view, ?correctly? points out 
that classes can and do exist without acquiring this sort of consciousness, 
indeed it is a rare occurrence in history and that it was appropriate to reassert 
the ?primacy? of class as ?an objective relation to the means of production, 
independent of will or attitude?.103 Koch, however, defended Thompson by 
claiming that the ?creative? agency of the working class should not be understood 
in terms of ?coherent awareness? of a ?class-for-itself?, but rather in terms of the 
?more spontaneous cultural responses of the working class to the conditions that 
they encounter living under capital?.104  
 
Koch then latched onto Thompson?s central concept of ?experience? where ?class 
culture? is ?generated out of people?s common conditions of existence? in a way 
that ?experience? bridges ideology and material conditions and lies ?half within 
social being, half within social consciousness?.105  Thompson does not, however, 
argue that experience is, in the ?last instance?, generated in ?material life? and so 
has been ?structured in class ways?. Thus, for Thompson and apparently for 
Koch, ?social being? does determine ?social consciousness?106 in the ?final 
instance?.  
 
Koch?s approach to class and culture followed the approach of the new school of 
social history which Bozzoli remarks aimed  
 
?to confront and understand the history and nature of the  
                                                 
102 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, London,  
    1978, p. 298.  
103 P. Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, Verso, 1980, p. 40. 
104 Koch, ?Doornfontein and its African Working Class?, p. 14. 
105 ibid. p. 16, citing E.P. Thompson, ?The Politics of Theory? in R. Samuel (ed.), People?s  
     History and Socialist Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 406. 
106 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 290. 
 
 34
 spontaneous consciousness of ordinary people; to develop an  
analysis of culture which takes account of class and capitalism.107 
 
Bozzoli made it clear that the social historians were not advocating an 
understanding of culture as ?autonomous? but rather advocated an approach that 
located culture in a ?complex system of class relations which moves and 
underpins modern capitalism.?108 Nor were the social historians proposing a 
?plurality? of cultures of equal value in a single structure but saw culture itself as 
a contested terrain, a site of class struggle. This struggle needed to be located 
in specific places and periods because the ?complex interplay between these 
cultural and material issues varies with time and circumstance?.109 
 
Koch also drew upon Raymond Williams?s writings on ?residual?, ?emergent?, 
?alternative? and ?oppositional? cultures, particularly the latter two forms and 
combines these with Gareth Stedman-Jones?s observation that popular culture 
in working class London was ?defensive? and an ?alternative? rather than an 
?oppositional? culture.110 Koch applied this approach to argue that Doornfontein?s 
African working class developed a culture that helped it both to ?accommodate? 
and, at times, to ?resist? their ?situation?.  
 
For Bozzoli, however, it was not simply a matter that ?oppositional? cultures 
automatically resulted in a state of continuing resistance as the reality was more 
complex. She argued that it might be better understood in terms of Clarke?s 
writings on subcultures which both share aspects in common with a ?parent 
culture? and diverge from it in important ways.111 Culture and resistance were 
also linked in complex ways so that ?resistance? is ?embedded in culture? while 
the ?form of the culture may, in turn, be shaped by the experiences and 
perceptions of ordinary people, who may themselves have participated in acts of 
                                                 
107 Bozzoli, ?Introduction?, p. 8. 
108 ibid., p.18. 
109 ibid., p. 23. 
110 G. Stedman-Jones, ?Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics in London, 1870- 
     1900, Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class?, Journal of Social History, Summer,  
     1974, p.490.  
111 Bozzoli, ?Introduction? p. 25. See also John Clarke et al, ?Sub-cultures, Cultures and  
     Class: a theoretical overview? in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through  
     Rituals: Youth Sub-Cultures in Post-War Britain, Hutchinson, London, 1976, p. 13.  
 
 35
 resistance?.112 Apparently for Bozzoli, culture is not granted a ?determining 
function? in this approach ? even apparently in the ?last instance? - but it is 
privileged as a ?force? that shapes and is shaped by experience. I would approve 
of this interpretation and have adopted a similar approach in my own writing. 
 
The political nature of resistance, in distinction from the more vague 
challenges of oppositional culture or sub-cultures, was an important focus of 
the social historians and their project of uncovering ?hidden histories?. 
Stadler?s seminal study of Squatter Movements in Johannesburg in the period  
1944-7, had a profound impact upon urban social history. Presented at the 
first History workshop in 1978113 and then published in 1979 in the first 
collection of History workshop papers,114 Stadler?s study sparked a 
widespread interest in black urban resistance and protest movements among 
a number of academics.  
 
Stadler?s article on bus boycotts in Alexandra, which also took place during 
the Second World War, and which was published in 1981, became, along with 
Lodge?s similar work on bus boycotts in Evaton,115 as influential as his article 
on squatter movements116 and inspired many similar studies. The most 
interesting and useful finding of his work, which he partly drew from Dikobe 
Modikwe,117 was how spontaneous protest interacted with organised political 
activity and how non-political leaders, including criminal elements, interacted 
with political leadership, to produce a highly effective and successful protest 
movement. 
 
In 1983, Stadler combined these two studies together and inserted insights from 
a unpublished mimeograph on the ?Food crisis of the 1930s? in Johannesburg, to 
                                                 
112 Bozzoli, ?Introduction?, p. 28. 
113 A. Stadler, ?Birds in the Cornfield: Squatter Movements in Johannesburg, 1944-1947?, History  
     Workshop Paper, University of the Witwatersrand, 1978. 
114 A. Stadler, ?Birds in the Cornfields: Squatter Movements in Johannesburg, 1944-1947?, in  
     Bozzoli (comp.), Labour, Townships and Protest. 
115 T. Lodge, ?We are Punished Because We Are Poor: the Bus boycotts of Evaton and  
     Alexandra, 1955-7? in Bonner (ed.), Working Papers two. 
116 A. Stadler, ?A Long Way to Walk: bus boycotts in Alexandra, 1940-45? in P. Bonner (ed.),  
     Working Papers two.  
117 M. Dikobe, ?We Shall Walk? in Bozzoli (comp.) Labour, Townships and Protest, Appendix B. 
 
 36
 produce an important article on how elements of the African poor, driven into 
desperation by dire economic circumstances, launched a series of determined 
?community struggles? to demand shelter, cheap transport and other basic 
amenities necessary for survival.118 The article appeared in the third of the 
series of collections of papers presented at the African Studies Institute at the 
University of the Witwatersrand which marked this institution as the centre of the 
new, radical or Marxist humanist history.  
 
This collection, edited by D. C. Hindson, who had recently carved a reputation 
as an insightful historian writing on the pass control system, marked a decisive 
shift from the two earlier collections that tended to focus on ?historical studies 
with a rural focus? to articles that were mainly concerned with ?the Post World 
War II period and dealt with urban issues?.119 This change of focus was 
explained by the editor as ?clearly an outcome of escalating social conflict in 
Southern Africa in general during the 1970s? since the ?widespread urban 
upheaval symbolised by Soweto in 1976?.120 
 
The collection focussed on both the historical and contemporary political 
mobilisation of the African urban working class as urban communities fighting for 
basic amenities and as workers in labour movements fighting for a decent wage 
and other rights. This combination of struggles in both workplaces and working 
class suburbs seems to have been influenced by the writings of ?urban Marxists? 
like Castells.  All the articles dealt with ?class conflict? in one form or another and 
a number of articles explicitly ?address[ed] the issue of the impact of the 
struggles of dominated classes on authoritarian state policies?. These articles 
did, however, depart radically from both revisionist and liberal works, which had 
tended to ignore this question.  
 
The writings on culture and resistance described above influenced an entire 
generation of social historians and postgraduate students in the eighties and 
                                                 
118 A. Stadler, ?The Politics of Subsistence: Community Struggles in War-Time Johannesburg?, in  
     D.C. Hindson (ed.) Working Papers in Southern African Studies, vol. 3, ( Working Papers  
     three), Ravan, Johannesburg, 1983, pp. 51-64. 
119 D.C. Hindson, ?Introduction?, in Hindson (ed.) Working Papers three, p. vii. 
120 ibid. 
 
 37
 nineties. A cluster of local histories produced in the early 1980s by Cohen, 
Gilfoyle and Chaskalson on the East Rand and Vaal Triangle regions, has 
demonstrated the importance of examining political resistance in highly 
specific local conditions in a similar vein.121  
 
Probably the most influential social history of them all was Charles van 
Onselen?s magnum opus, a social and economic history of the Witwatersrand 
in two volumes, New Babylon and New Nineveh, published in 1982.122 Van 
Onselen noted that he was heavily influenced by the leading Anglo-American 
social historians, especially E.P. Thompson, Gareth Stedman-Jones and 
Eugene Genovese.123  
 
Van Onselen?s work covered a broad range of issues from examining how 
Zulu ?washermen? who trained under Indian employers in Natal subsequently 
made a living on the Witwatersrand washing clothes for white, English-
 speaking, miners. Van Onselen also traced how white Afrikaner cab-drivers 
competed with their ?coloured? counterparts and white women employers 
confronted sexual tension with black male ?houseboys? during the ?moral 
panics? of ?Black Peril? and African women emerged as domestic servants or 
the ?witches of suburbia?. While van Onselen did not theorise race, class, 
gender or ethnicity in explicit ways, this should not detract unduly from the 
power of his insights. 
 
Although social historians explicitly challenged Afrikaner Nationalist history 
and its ?objectification of blacks, and its implicit or explicit racism?, they had  
 
                                                 
121 M. Chaskalson,  ?The Road to Sharpeville?, BA Honours dissertation, University of the  
     Witwatersrand, 1985; J. Cohen, ?A Pledge for Better Times: the Local State and the  
     Ghetto, Benoni, 1930-8?, BA Honours dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1982  
     and D. Gilfoyle,  ?An Urban Crisis: The Town Council, Industry and the Black Working Class  
      in Springs, 1948-1958?, BA Honours dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1981. 
122 C. van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886- 
    1914, vol. 1, New Babylon, (New Babylon), Ravan, Johannesburg, 1982 and C. van  
     Onselen, Studies in the Social Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, vol. 2,  
     New Nineveh, (New Nineveh), Ravan, Johannesburg, 1982. 
123 Van Onselen, New Babylon, p.xvii. 
 
 38
 surprisingly little to say about race itself.124 Race and ethnicity clearly has 
salience for social historians as the use of categories like ?black? and ?white? 
are used explicitly to identify the focus of their studies, but it was rarely 
problematised and analysed in theoretical terms.  
 
This is, perhaps, understandable, as these radical historians overtly 
challenged the apartheid system and this may have made them 
uncomfortable with an approach that emphasised race and ethnicity in their 
analysis as this could be construed as legitimisation of the apartheid project. 
Nonetheless, this is a weakness that needs to be addressed for as the social 
and urban historian Paul Maylam, has noted  
 
 [I]n the last twenty years or so there has been little innovative  
theorising, few breakthroughs in the historical analysis of the  
South African racial order [although] greater attention and  
weight [was] afforded to racial thought and racial theory.125  
 
Bickford-Smith?s work did address the issues of race, racism and ethnicity 
more explicitly in his remarkable study of Cape Town126 and while he failed to 
analyse these categories in terms of theoretical models, his observations are 
richly insightful. His work in particular debunked the notion that nineteenth 
century Cape Town  was an ?exceptional? case where ?liberalism? was 
supposed to have produced a more inclusive and racially tolerant society.  
 
I would concur with Posel, Hyslop and Nieftagodien127 who have recently 
defended the record of the social historians despite its ?lingering silences? by 
                                                 
124 R. Greenstein, ?Identity, race, history: South Africa and the Pan-African Context?, Seminar       
     Paper no. 405, Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, p.  
     5, cited in D. Posel et al, ?Debating ?race? in South African scholarship?, Transformation, 47,  
     2001, p. i.   
125 P. Maylam, South Africa?s Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism,  
    Segregation and Apartheid, Ashgate, Sydney, 2001, 4. 
126 C. Saunders, ?Review Symposium: C. van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic  
    History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, volume 1, New Babylon, volume 2, New  
      Nineveh, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1982? in Social Dynamics, 8, 2, pp. 85-6. 
127 ibid. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 39
 arguing that precisely because race was ubiquitous, nearly all of the literature 
dealing with apartheid ? and presumably its segregationist predecessors ? 
intrinsically encompassed race and racism by tracing the experiences of 
ordinary people? who were almost always ?black people?. These writers also 
note that the  
 
 growth, ideologies and politics of black resistance movements 
           have attracted academic interest, and some of the ambiguities 
 and complexities of racialised modes of power have been  
 explored (even if the manner of that racialisation was not itself 
 the focus on discussion).128 
  
The new social history?s focus on ?hidden history? of ?voices from below? also 
meant that they were more sensitive to uncovering women?s history in order to 
address the neglect of previous historical schools and criticism produced by a  
emergent scholarship in feminist history. Much of the earlier work by Koch, 
Proctor, Kagan, Sapire and others considered the role of women in cultural 
and political struggles for survival in urban settings, particularly the brewing 
and selling of illicit liquor, in the course of tracing the history of working-class 
Africans in the city. Over time, more work emerged that made women the 
centrepiece of the case studies.129  
 
For example, Gaitskell?s work focused on the uniformed prayer associations or 
manyanos (also known as isililo) that became a central part of the culture of 
many African married women in urban and rural areas. Gaitskell noted that 
missionary organisations promoted a culture of ?social hygiene? within African 
                                                 
128 ibid. 
129 See, for example, H. Bradford, ?We are now the men?: Women?s Beer Protests in the Natal  
     Countryside, 1929? in Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict, pp. 292-323; J. Wells,  
     ?The Day the Town Stood Still: Women in Resistance in Potchefstroom, 1912-1930? in  
     Bozzoli (ed.) Town and Countryside ; D. Gaitskell, ?Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some  
     Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903-1939?, Journal  
     of African History, 24, 1983, pp. 241-256; D. Gaitskell, ?Wailing for Purity: Prayer Unions,   
     African Mothers and Adolescent Daughters, 1912-1940? in S. Marks and R. Rathbone  
     (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation,  
     Culture and Consciousness, 1870-1930, Harlow, 1982, pp. 167-194; C. Walker (ed.),  
      Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, David Philip, Cape Town, 1990; C. Walker  
     (ed.), Women and Resistance in South Africa, London, 1982; E. Bradlow, ?Women at the  
     Cape in the Mid-19th Century?, South African Historical Journal, 19, 1987, pp. 51-75 and   
      K.A. Eales, ?Gender Politics and the  Administration of African Women in Johannesburg,  
      1903-1939?, MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1991. 
 
 40
 society, particularly among African women and their adolescent daughters. Like 
the ?social gospel?, ?social hygiene? principles were widespread amongst 
evangelical organisations on both sides of the Atlantic.130  
 
A key component of this culture was a conception of moral purity that focussed 
specifically on the prevention of premarital sexual relations among adolescents. 
Thus, like Couzens, Gaitskell was interested in demonstrating how aspects of 
European culture came to be successfully imposed upon African indigenous 
cultural forms, largely displacing it but also incorporating elements that could be 
assimilated into it. Gaitskell?s focus was placed upon religious organisation 
however, rather than mining capitalism or the state. Gaitskell?s approach 
described here has influenced my own work especially Chapter Seven that 
examines white female political activists in Krugersdorp during the war years. 
 
The social history approach on producing empirically-rich case studies meant 
that most social historians, including those who wrote explicitly on women in 
history, did not theorise gender adequately and did not seem to engage with 
the contemporary feminist writings in a meaningful way ? although Eales?s 
work may be an important exception.131 Furthermore, much social history 
ignored women in its focus on class, community and culture. Bickford-Smith?s 
work, for example, used gender-free categories of ?workers?, ?councillors?, 
?Malays? and ?Afrikaners? that disguised the reality of exclusively male groups 
that remain unproblematised and unanalysed. My own work, particularly, 
Chapter Seven, has attempted to weave theory and empirical research in a 
way that hopefully overcomes this limitations. 
 
The ?New Geography?  
 
Mabin described the ?New History? that emerged out of the late 1970s as the 
?cutting edge? and that history had, as consequence had become the ?most 
dynamic research discipline in the country, and its products are eagerly read 
                                                 
130 D. Gaitskell, ?Christian Compounds for Girls: Church Hostels for African Women?, 
    Journal of Southern African Studies, 6, 1979, pp. 44-69 
131 K.A. Eales, ?Gender Politics And The Administration Of African Women In Johannesburg,  
    1903-1939?, MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1991. 
 
 41
 by academics and studies alike in every potentially related discipline, 
geography included?.132 Mabin also recorded the emergence of a ?new 
geography? that developed a distinctive South African and geography-specific 
version as ?people?s geography? or ?humanistic geography?. The result was an 
outpouring of work written by geographers in a broadly social history 
paradigm. I have found this work useful due to its relatively greater emphasis 
on spatiality which is a neglected aspect of Marxism humanism, presumably 
because it originated in more structuralist models including Marxist 
structuralism. 
 
Beavon and Rogerson were among the earliest geographers to research and 
write the ?new geography? in studies on the black ?casual poor? in 
Johannesburg and their strategies for ?making out? or surviving in a harsh 
economic environment as self-employed informal traders.133 Beavon focussed 
on hawkers134 while Rogerson famously wrote about those who plied the 
?coffee cart? trade.135 Although constrained by the nature of their discipline, 
their work shed light on the lives of ordinary black urban residents in ways that 
approximated some of the features of social history and which inserted a more 
rigorous conceptualisation of spatiality into studies of the urban social and 
built environment. The pioneering work of these writers transformed South 
African geography136 ushering a more materialist, Marxist-based  
 
                                                 
132 A. Mabin, ?At the Cutting Edge: the New African History and its Implications for African  
     Historical Geography?, Journal of Historical Geography, 12, 1 1986, pp. 74-80, (?At the  
     cutting edge?), p. 78. 
133 K.S.O Beavon and C.M. Rogerson, ? Hawking and the Urban Poor: How Not to Make Out  
     in the contemporary South African City?, paper presented at the South African  
     Geographical Society Conference, Cape Town, 1979. K.S.O. Beavon and C.M. Rogerson,  
     ?The Resistance of the Casual Poor in Johannesburg?, Contree, 7, 1980, pp. 15-21. C.M.  
     Rogerson and K.S.O. Beavon, ?The Awakening of ?Informal Sector? Studies in Southern  
     Africa?, Southern African Geographical Journal, 62, 1980, pp. 175-190.  
134 K.S.O. Beavon, ?From Hypermarkets to Hawkers: Changing Foci of Concern for Human  
     Geographers?, Occasional Paper no. 23, Department of Geography and Environmental  
     Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1981. 
135 C.M. Rogerson, ?Making Out in the ?City of Gold?: the Coffee Cart Traders in  
     Johannesburg?, Paper presented to the Association of American Geographers Annual  
     Conference, Louiseville, 1980. 
136 K.S.O. Beavon, ?Trekking On: Recent Trends in the Human Geography of Southern Africa?,  
     Progress in Human Geography, 5, 1981, pp. 159-189.  See also J. Crush, and C.    
     Rogerson, ?New Wave African Historiography and African Historical Geography?, Progress  
     in Human Geography, 7, 1983,  pp. 203-231.  
 
 42
 ?radical geography?.137 
 
By the early 1980s, urban geographers were increasingly influenced by the 
urban social historians to explore the hitherto ?terra incognito? of black 
townships138 and wrote short but perceptive articles about Soweto139, 
Sophiatown140 and Johannesburg?s Western Areas141 in a way that 
complemented the work of urban social historians by taking a more rigorous 
spatial perspective. 
 
Christopher raised connections between South Africa?s urban form and the 
?colonial city? identified by King142 that were reiterated by a later, fuller study 
on the Apartheid City in 1982 by the geographers McCarthy and Smit.143 My 
own work has been influenced by Christopher?s conclusion that the Apartheid 
City and its predecessors were ?but one of the variants of the more widely 
distributed colonial city?144 and his broad, comparative approach while 
retaining the insights of Marxist humanists and structuralists. 
 
Wellings and McCarthy shifted the trend in the new Geography from what they 
called ?white conscience areas? such as domestic servants, urban poor and 
black housing which rendered black subjects as ?spectators?, and focussed 
instead on political conflict where black people became active agents like 
transportation boycotts, rent struggles and resistance to forced 
resettlement.145 Parnell has added a remarkable series on articles on white 
                                                 
137 J.J. McCarthy, ?Radical Geography, Mainstream Geography and Southern Africa?, Social  
     Dynamics, 8, 1982, pp. 53-70. 
138 K.S.O. Beavon, ?Black Townships in South Africa: Terra Incognita for Urban Geographers?,  
     South African Geographical Journal, 54, 1982, pp. 3-20. 
139 See C.M. Rogerson and K.S.O. Beavon, ?Getting By in the Informal Sector of Soweto?,   
    Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geographie, 73, 1982, pp. 250-265 and A.J.  
    Christopher, ?From Flint to Soweto: Reflections on the Colonial Origins of the Apartheid  
    City? (?From Flint to Soweto?), Area, 15, 1983, pp. 145-9. 
140 D.M. Hart and G.H. Pirie, ?The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown?, Geographical Review, 74,  
     1984, pp. 38-47. 
141 Pirie, G.H. and Hart, D.M., ?The Transformation of Johannesburg?s Black Western Areas?,  
     Journal of Urban History, 11, 1985, pp. 387-410. 
142 A. King, Colonial Urban Development, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976. 
143 J. McCarthy and D.P. Smit, The South African City: Theory in Analysis and Planning, Juta,  
     Cape Town, 1984. 
144 Christopher, ?From Flint to Soweto?, p. 148. 
145 Wellings and McCarthy, ?Whither Southern African Human Geography?? p. 337. 
 
 43
 housing and the role of white officials146 that echoes Sapire?s keen insight into 
the role of the Location Superintendent in her thesis, 147 while Robinson has 
combined Foucault?s concept of power with spatiality to illuminate how the 
state racialised space, in numerous articles,148 taking historical geography in a 
new direction. 
 
These works were influential on my own studies, especially those that 
consider how formal and informal channels of political power were used by 
different interest groups to pursue their agendas in Krugersdorp as dealt with 
in Chapters Four, Six and Eight. The role of officials is especially explored in 
Chapter Six while Robinson?s insights on Foucault and spatiality can be found 
scattered throughout this study. 
 
The Challenge to Social History 
 
By the late 1980s social history in South Africa had reached its zenith and 
Murray, an academic writing from the University of New York, captured a 
sense of celebration with his declaration that ?Marxism has evolved as the 
dominant intellectual perspective in South Africa?.149 In the years that followed, 
however, social history would come under increasingly harsh attack.  
 
The Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) hearings brought history into 
the public eye in an astonishing way but at the same time it shifted interest for 
many students and academics to the contemporary rather than to the past. 
Many humanist geographers and political scientists correctly anticipated that a 
                                                 
146 See, for example, S. Parnell, ?Sanitation, Segregation and Natives (Urban Areas) Act:  
     African Exclusion from Johannesburg? Malay Location, 1897-1925?, Journal of Historical  
     Geography, 17, 27, 1991, pp. 271-288 and S. Parnell,  ?Creating Racial Privilege: The  
     Origins of South African Public Health and Town Planning Legislation?, Journal of  
     Southern African Studies, 19, 3, 1993, pp.471-488.  
147 Sapire, H., ?African Urbanisation and Struggles against Municipal Control in Brakpan,  
     1920-1958?, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1990.   
148 See, for example, Robinson, J., ?Power, Space and the City: Historical Reflections on  
     Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Urban Orders?, in D. Smith (ed.), The Apartheid City and   
     Beyond: Urbanisation and Social Change in South Africa, Oxford University Press, Oxford,   
    1992 and Robinson, J., ?The Politics of Urban Form: Differential Citizenship and Township  
     Formation in Port Elizabeth, 1925-1945?, Kronos, 20, November, 1993, pp. 44-60. 
149 Murray, ?Triumph?. 
 
 
 44
 post-Apartheid government would have to address the complex and difficult 
problem of building a non-racial urban environment on the still-living remains 
of the Apartheid city. These geographers wrote increasingly about 
?management? of the urban environment in the future rather than explore 
social history themes concerned with the distant past.  
 
A new group of historians and other academics influenced by a broadly 
?postmodern? tradition, began to seriously question the social history project. 
Roger Deacon, writing from the University of Natal, fired a broadside at social 
historians who have attempted to distance themselves from a vulgar 
?structuralist? conception of Marxism that gives primacy to economic 
determinants. Although these writers broadened the concept of ?class? ? by 
evoking the concepts of ?experience? and ?culture?, for example  ?  they 
remained, in the final analysis, ?materialists?. As a result, he argued, they 
could not escape from an ?essentialist conception of history? where the 
?economic? was the ?ultimate and primary determinant of social reality?.150  
 
Saunders, complained that the triumphalist overview of social history by 
Bozzoli and Delius in their introduction to a special edition of Radical History 
Review151 demonstrated that they wished to ?establish a tradition of radical 
scholarship culminating in the kind of history which they approve?. Saunders 
speculated that radical history in South Africa may have required a coherent 
and definable adversary in the form of an authoritarian and racist Nationalist 
government to define itself and its purpose. He noted, furthermore, that at a 
History Workshop held in February, 1990 at the University of the 
Witwatersrand, ?there was little of the old fire?.152  
 
Saunders was also concerned about the failure of this school to attract black 
scholars and produce African historians. He cited Colin Bundy, who had 
written social history on both rural and urban themes, who asked, ?where are 
                                                 
150 R. Deacon, ?Hegemony, Essentialism and Radical History in South Africa?, South African  
     Historical Journal, 24, 1991, p. 167. 
151 Bozzoli and Delius, ?Introduction? in Bozzoli and Delius (eds.), Radical History   
     Review. 
152 C. Saunders, ?Radical History ? the Wits Workshop Version ? Reviewed?, South African  
     Historical Journal, 24, 1991, p. 164. 
 
 45
 the Young Turks??153 Saunders also noted that the fourth collection of History 
Workshop Papers, published in 1989154 had attracted almost unprecedented 
criticism for the ?disparateness of its contents?, with the social historian Jeremy 
Krikler going so far as to claim that the editors were guilty of an ?evasion of  
synthesis.?155  
 
Freund, a broadly leftist historian who has written about the Indian working 
class and someone who could be expected to support radical history, noted 
(in his otherwise glowing review of Radical History) that the interdisciplinary 
approach of the social historians had caused ?considerable annoyance?. He 
explained that social historians and other social scientists treaded on one 
another?s toes due to its ?lack of boundaries?. Freund suggested that radical 
history had declined into a position of ?relative weakness? as an ?intellectual 
enterprise?.156  
 
Worger, a historian who has written a history of Kimberley in a broadly 
materialist way, also admired the ?excellent academic work? represented by 
radical scholarship, but he, too, castigated its ?smug and patronizing tone?.157 
He correctly noted that there was some confusion in the definition of ?radical? 
in the Radical Review because Delius and Bozzoli used the term 
interchangeably with ?left wing? in the sense of adherence to Marxist 
categories and yet it was used to include individuals like Solomon Plaatje and 
W.M. Macmillan.  
 
Worger particularly expressed concern that after twenty years of radical 
scholarship, Bozzoli and Delius were still claiming that they had not yet 
reached ?the stage of making statements on a larger scale?. He added that 
                                                 
153 ibid. 
154 P. Bonner, I. Hofmeyr, D. James and T. Lodge (eds.), Holding Their Ground: Class,  
     Locality and Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa, Ravan,  
     Johannesburg, 1989. 
155 J. Krikler, ?Waiting for the Historians?, Southern African Review of Books, 3, 6,  
      August/October, 1990, p. 16. 
156 B. Freund, ?Radical History Writing and the South African Context?, South African  
     Historical Journal, 24, 1991, p. 155. 
157 W.H. Worger, ?White Radical History in South Africa? (?White Radical History?), South  
     African Historical Journal, 24, 1991, p. 145. 
 
 46
 these writers also claimed that the social historians? intellectual agenda would 
consist of ?domain construction? rather than ?theory construction? until their 
work ?matures?.158 He thought that after more than a decade of social history, 
was it not time for a ?little maturity and a bit of theory?.159  Worger also noted 
the ?insularity? of much of South African social history where the footnotes 
indicate little reading of articles north of the Limpopo160 and reflected on the 
dominance of white scholars. 
 
At the same time those geographers who wrote ?geographies of protest? or the 
?new geography?, began to shift away from social history in the early 1990s 
and addres new concerns of a post-apartheid South Africa. Rogerson and 
McCarthy, for example, edited a collection of geography articles that was 
published in 1992 which they claimed marked a ?contemporary transformation 
of South African geography into a phase of undertaking new geographies of 
post-apartheid reconstruction?.161 Geographers were being drawn out of the 
ivory tower and conducted research for the Urban Foundation and the 
Development Bank of South Africa162 instead of a geographical version of 
social history.  Geographers were also disillusioned by their treatment by 
social historians and Rogerson bitterly noted that the new geographers had 
been left out of an allegedly ?exhaustive survey of radical historiography? by 
Bozzoli and Delius which cited works by ?historians, sociologists, political 
scientists, anthropologists, and even musicologists; [yet] nothing by a 
geographer appears to warrant mention?.163  
 
Geographers were not the only academics drawn away from the past and 
towards the pressing needs of reconstruction. Political scientists, sociologists 
and town planners also began to abandon the study of the urban past and 
focus on urban policy making, management and issues such as housing. It is 
striking that two works on the ?apartheid city? published in the early 1990s 
                                                 
158 Bozzoli and Delius (eds.), Radical History Review, p. 21. 
159 Worger, ?White Radical History?, p. 147. 
160 ibid., p. 152.  
161 C.M. Rogerson and J. McCarthy (ed.), Geography in a Changing South Africa: Progress  
      and Prospects, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1992, p. 5 
162 J. Crush, ?Beyond the Frontier: the New South African Historical geography? in Rogerson  
     and McCarthy (eds.), Geography, p. 11.   
163 ibid. 
 
 47
 dealt only superficially with urban history and focussed much more on 
contemporary issues and future urban policy.164 A review of these books and 
a collection of case studies of individual cities165 noted that in all three 
volumes, articles evoked the term ?space? and yet it is ?never fully theoretically 
located?.166 Clearly there had been a shift to theory construction and a sense 
developed that any academics that failed to theorise, would be left behind. 
 
Social history also came under attack from a new quarter, from academics 
who had embraced postmodernism theory and its variants. Vaughan, writing 
from the University of Oxford in 1994, noted how what she called ?Africanists? 
had failed to embrace ?colonial discourse theory? that had been so influential 
for historians writing on South Asia. Instead, historians writing about 
colonialism in Africa had embraced ideas around the ?invention of tradition? 
and the ?construction of custom?, which, she argues, had developed ?largely 
independently of the influence of postmodernist  theories? and that, as a result, 
postmodernism had been passed by?, to the former?s detriment.167  
 
Rather than embrace the works of Said, Babha and Spivak, historians had 
become interested in the works of Gramsci.168 As a result, Vaughan 
wondered, ?how much we may conceal rather than reveal through 
employment in our narratives of ?African voices??and through the populist 
appeal of an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist ?people?s history??169 Vaughan 
favourably cited an article by De Kock that claimed that the radical tradition 
was marked by a ?retreat? into ?micro-history?, and that it was peculiarly ?white? 
and ?western? and which avoided any discussion of the ?politics of history? and 
?historical representation?.170 
                                                 
164 M. Swilling et al (eds), Apartheid City in Transition, Oxford, Cape Town, 1991 and D. Smith  
     (ed.), The Apartheid City and Beyond, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg,  
     1992. 
165 A. Lemon (ed.), Homes Apart, David Philip, Cape Town, 1991. 
166 R. Haines and G. Wood, ?Space for Theory?, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 12,     
     1, 1993, pp. 92-103. 
167 M. Vaughan, ?Colonial Discourse Theory and African History, or has Postmodernism  
     passed us by?? (?Colonial?), Social Dynamics, 20, 2 , 1994, pp. 1-23. 
168 ibid., p. 13. 
169 ibid., p. 14. 
170 L. De Kock,??People, Power and Culture? and the Ethics of Historical Representation?,  
     South African Historical Journal, 27, 1992, pp. 243-253, cited in Vaughan, ?Colonial?, p. 20.  
 
 
 48
  
In a commentary on Vaughan?s article, David Bunn noted that historians had 
been anticipating the arrival of postmodernism with considerable trepidation 
lest its deep theoretical abstraction infect local historical analysis like the 
?academic equivalent of downy mildew or leaf wilt?.171 Bunn argued, however, 
that that this feared ?postmodernism? really referred to ?questions of the 
subject, of textuality, and of agency being advanced by post-structuralist 
theory?.172 Bunn defended the social historians and went on to argue that 
?colonial discourse? did not exist as a ?unified critical field? and, in any case, 
what can be identified in this tradition constitutes a ?narrow, hermeneutic 
tendency already falling out of favour?.173  
 
In any case, argued Bunn, he could see no reason why Gramscian notions of 
hegemony should be opposed to discourse analysis, as Gramsci was a key 
figure for many of the theorists mentioned in relation to discourse theory. The 
writings of Said and Spivak, and Gramscian notions of ?hegemonic 
contestation?, could combine easily with the notion of a discourse. By reacting 
so violently to discourse theory, African historians were eliminating theory 
altogether from their discipline, argued Bunn, so that ?instead of providing the 
wellspring for the elaboration of new method, theory had become a way of 
marking an exterior to a specialised academic discourse.174 
 
In the midst of these increasingly damning critiques, the fifth collection of 
History Workshop papers, based on the Workshop held in February 1990, 
was published in 1993.175 The editors, for their part, demonstrated that they 
_____________________________ 
  
171 D. Bunn, ?The Insistence of Theory: Three Questions for Megan Vaughan?, Social  
     Dynamics, 20, 2, 1994, p. 24. 
172 ibid. Bunn does, however, explain that by ?postmodernism? he means that historians fear a  
     ?theoretical ?thing? on the edge of discourse of African history?a word for what must be  
     barred, for what is outside ? nothing more?. In this sense, then, as it is ?presently imagined?,  
     postmodernism will ?always be ?passing by? African History, no matter how welcoming the  
     latter discipline might be?. (p. 29) 
173 ibid., p. 31. 
174 ibid., p. 33. 
175 P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (eds.), Apartheid?s Genesis, 1935-1962, (Apartheid?s  
    Genesis), Ravan Press and Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 1993. 
 
 49
 were aware of many of the criticisms that were directed at social history and 
noted that, 
 
 previous History Workshop volumes have underscored the  
 importance of the view from below. This volume inserts the 
 state more forcibly into the picture, in order to understand 
 apartheid as shaped simultaneously by struggles from  
 below and interventions from above.176  
 
Saunders noted that while the contributors to previous volumes had ?much to 
say about culture, consciousness and class? while saying little about ?politics 
or the economy as such?, this volume?s shift of focus to the ?making of 
apartheid? would enable the ?social and the political-economic to be 
integrated.177 Saunders remarked that the social historians had learnt from 
past mistakes and were notably more self-critical than they had been in the 
past.  Saunders argued that while the state was given more attention, 
important aspects of ?history from above? are ignored, for example ?the ideas 
of white politicians and the intricacies of electoral politics, are given no 
attention.?178 In short, Saunders claimed that what was needed was, ??a set 
of more rounded and broader studies, which rest on an exhaustive reading of 
the secondary and archival material?.179  
 
A notable absence in this volume, notwithstanding the comments made by 
Vaughan and Bunn, was a failure to engage with postmodern,  
poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches. Even the ?bible? of radical 
history, the journal Past and Present, had engaged in an exchange of views 
on ??History and Post-Modernism?,180 yet this debate had not yet made any 
apparent impact on South African social history. In 1994 social historians at 
last began to grasp the nettle at a conference entitled ?Paradigms Lost, 
                                                 
176 Bonner, Delius and Posel (eds.), Apartheid?s Genesis, p. 3. 
177 C. Saunders, ?Apartheid and its Genesis?, review article, South African Historical Journal,  
     20, 1994, p. 136. 
178 ibid., p. 141. 
179 ibid., p. 143. 
180 See L. Stone, ?History and Post-Modernism?, Past and Present, 131, May 1991, pp. 217- 
    18 and P. Joyce and C. Kelly, ?History and Post-Modernism?, Past and Present, 133, 1991,  
     pp. 204-13,  
 
 50
 Paradigms Gained? which marked the twentieth anniversary the Journal of 
Southern African Studies.181  
 
Etherington whose sensitive work on missionaries placed him within the 
materialist, radical school of social history, noted that many individual papers 
argued that ?postmodern, poststructural paradigms have displaced neo-
 Marxist , materialist ones?.182 Helen Bradford, a stalwart among social 
historians and a regular contributor to History Workshop compilations, claimed 
that ?older conceptions of the opposition between fact and fiction have been 
disrupted? by ?key postmodernist challenges to the discipline of history?.183  
 
The overall tone was defensive. Etherington, argued that paradigms were 
?slipping? rather than ?lost? and that there was ?still plenty of recognisable social 
history and even some Marxism on offer?.184Paul Rich, writing from the 
University of Warwick, and a stalwart from the early days of radical history 
who wrote about South African Liberalism, asked the question that was on 
everyone?s mind if not their lips: ?Is South African Radical Social History 
Becoming Irrelevant??185 He observed that there was a ?general crisis of nerve 
among the academic left in southern African studies and its slowness to come 
to terms with the post-Cold War world?.186 He noted that a ?sense of loss? had 
been made ?particularly tangible? by the closing down of the Centre for 
Southern African Studies in York University due to declining student numbers 
and the ?collapse? of the revered journal Work in Progress.  Rich felt that 
 
 ?any analyst of contemporary Eastern Europe should know 
 that it is impossible to insulate intellectual trends there from 
 what is happening in the rest of global politics, even if we are 
 not living in some kind of ?end of history?, in the Francis Fukuyama 
 sense. The collapse of the Eastern bloc has well and truly ended 
 the hopes some radicals had in the early 1980s for a model of 
                                                 
181 N. Etherington, ?Fissures of the Post-Apartheid Academy? (?Fissures?), South African  
     Historical Journal, 30, May, 1994, pp. 205-8. 
182 ibid., p. 206. 
183 H. Bradford, ?A Series of Abortions: Olive Schreiner and Loss of an Unborn Child?, cited in  
     Etherington, ?Fissures?, p. 207. 
184 ibid., p. 207. 
185 P. Rich, ?Is South African Radical Social History Becoming Irrelevant?? South African  
     Historical Journal, 30, May, 1994, pp. 191-7.  
186 ibid., p. 191. 
 
 51
  collective, regional self-reliance in southern Africa?the new 
 South African state emerges as a rather ordinary one,  
 experimenting with the usual bland mixture of Keynesian 
 demand management and market economics. 187 
 
Rich also noted that radical social history, after years of pre-eminence within 
South African studies ?faces the prospect of being sidelined by other 
disciplines such as economics and political science, which are going to be 
rather more useful to state bureaucrats and planners, as well as to aspirant 
members of the new black political elite.?188 In retrospect, Rich?s crystal ball 
gazing appears to have borne out as student numbers enrolled in history 
classes fell dramatically, notably at the University of the Witwatersrand that 
was the spiritual home of radical social history and where most of its original 
founders were, and are, still working.  
 
Jenny Robinson, an urban geographer ? already mentioned above  ?  who 
had written on the urban past by drawing creatively on the works of Foucault 
and Walzer to locate ?power and knowledge? in the city,189 rebuked urban 
social historians for their collective failure to engage with theories around 
spatiality.190 In her review of Apartheid?s Genesis, Robinson remarked that the 
book marked ?a high point in the trajectory of the South African social-history 
school, although in some ways it may well also signal its demise?.191 Robinson 
felt that urban social history was on the right path in bridging the ?sacred gap? 
between its focus on ?history from below? and the ?more conventional social-
 science concerns with the state and national economic power?. She, however, 
noted that it was to continue further in this direction, it would have to ?confront 
the conceptual frameworks which have so far worked only to silently support 
apparently factual historical narratives.?192  
 
                                                 
187 ibid., p. 192. 
188 ibid. 
189 Haines and Wood, ?Space for Theory?, p. 100. 
190 J. Robinson, ?(Dis)locating Historical Narrative: Writing, Space and Gender in South  
     African Social History?, South African Historical Journal, 30, May, 1994, p. 144. 
191 ibid., p. 146. 
192 ibid. 
 
 52
 She made the insightful observation that urban social historians shared with 
the post-structuralists a concern to ?explore the specific and contextual? rather 
than to elaborate ?grand narratives?. She also noted that urban geographers 
had become increasingly interested in those aspects of post-modernism that 
?resonated with traditional themes in the discipline concerning regional and 
spatial variability.?193 She proposed that the ??micro-geographies of 
administrative strategies, social control and individual and collective actions 
could help us to understand how apartheid racial domination was maintained, 
and perhaps why it collapsed.?194  
 
In 1995, the Journal of Southern African Studies published its ?special issue? 
on ?urban studies and urban change in South Africa?, where the editors, Hilary 
Sapire and Jo Beall, reiterated many of these now familiar criticisms of the 
urban social history sub-field.195 They particularly noted that there had been 
insufficient attention to the ?city as a whole?196 and much urban history had  
been ?history-in-the-city? rather than ?history-of-the-city?.197  
 
Paul Maylam made a number of incisive criticisms in his survey of South 
African urban historiography over two decades, noting that ?theoretical 
influences have been stronger in the case of some urban historical 
geographers than with urban historians?. He cited, with approval, the work 
produced by Robinson198 and Hart in this regard.199  
 
While Maylam edited a volume of urban social history articles on Durban in 
the same year,200 it is striking that in the years that followed, he became 
                                                 
193 ibid., p. 147.  
194 ibid., p. 154. 
195 H. Sapire and J. Beall, ?Introducing Urban Change and Urban Studies in Southern Africa?,  
     Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1, March 1995, pp. 3-18. 
196 ibid., p. 7.  
197 ibid, see P. Maylam, ?Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban  
     Historiography?, (?Explaining the Apartheid City?), Journal of Southern African Studies, 21,  
     1, 1995, pp. 19-38, especially p. 20. 
198 J. Robinson, ?The Power of Apartheid: Territoriality and State Power in South African Cities  
     ? Port Elizabeth 1923-1972?, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1990. 
199 D.M.Hart, ?Master Plans: The South African Government?s Razing of Sophiatown, Cato  
     Manor and District Six?, unpublished PhD thesis, Syacuse University, 1990. 
200 P. Maylam and I. Edwards (eds.), The People?s City: A History of African Life in Durban,  
     University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1995. 
 
 53
 increasingly engaged in theoretical discussions around postmodernism and its 
application to historical study. At the end of his review article, Maylam 
advocated a deepening of the approach already tentatively adopted in 
Apartheid?s Genesis of exploring the ?relationship between the central state 
and the local state in the making of urban policy? and ?broad issues of state-
 capital relationship?. He seems to disagree with Robinson?s support for 
ongoing ?microstudies? as these ?case studies have?often stopped short of 
illuminating [these] large questions?.201  
 
While he stressed the ?continuing salience of materialist-type analysis in the 
field of urban history?, Maylam felt that urban social historians could usefully 
adopt ?some of the concerns of post-modernism?. He cited, in particular, the 
?discourse of urban policy and management? as a field that could yield useful 
insights.202 Susan Parnell, an urban geographer ? already mentioned above  
?  who wrote about the urban past in a broadly social history perspective, and 
Alan Mabin, based in Town Planning and someone who was associated with 
the urban history school since its inception and who had written extensively 
about mining towns, together offered a stinging rebuke of radical history.203 
They claimed that these microstudies had effectively treated urban 
segregation in a way that implicitly accepted ?race? as a ?legitimate and 
primary category of inquiry?, indeed it ?fostered racially constructed 
research?.204  
 
Instead they argue that urban social historians had to shift their attentions to 
?history from above? and ?post-modern notions of European coding of space 
and communities as ?other.?205 Social historians had also to trace how ?urban  
managers? and ?modernist planners? constructed the segregated city in their 
attempts to ?reduce fire risks, improve health, supply clean water and 
[provide]?financially effective administration?.206  
                                                 
201 Maylam, ?Explaining the Apartheid City?, p. 37. 
202 ibid. 
203 S. Parnell and A. Mabin, ?Rethinking Urban South Africa?, Journal of Southern African  
     Studies, 21, 1, March 1995, pp. 39-61 
204 ibid., p. 42. 
205 ibid., p. 47. 
206 ibid., p. 48. 
 
 54
  
Both Parnell and Mabin had become involved in advising non-government 
organisations, local governments and community organisations around issues 
of urban management in the post-apartheid city and it is not difficult to see 
that they wanted a new kind of urban social history so that they would ?find in 
those experiences some lessons for present day participants in erecting ?a 
new state?.207 Finally, they also argued for an engagement with global debates 
around ?race and the city? and develop ?comparative research?.208 
 
Tim Nuttal and John Wright, both historians writing from the University of 
Natal, Pietermaritzburg, shed further light on the implications of these well-
 meaning warnings, but now they were concerned with the fate of historical 
study itself.209 They added their insights to the now considerable number of 
articles that had been written over the late 1990s about the ?threat? of 
postmodernism to South African history including contributions by 
Etherington,210 Bottomley,211 Allen212 and Maylam.213 There is insufficient 
space here to explore these arguments fully except to note that these articles 
seem to be either overly pessimistic in their appraisals of the ?threat? posed by 
postmodernism and insufficiently helpful in proposing ways in which social  
historians could adapt their research and writing to take into account the 
criticisms cited above. 
 
Minkley and Rasool writing in the late 1990s, offered one of the most 
trenchant criticisms yet of the social history project. They claimed that social 
                                                 
207 ibid., p. 51. 
208 ibid., p. 61. 
209 T. Nuttall and J. Wright, ?Probing the Predicaments of Academic History in Contemporary  
     South Africa?, South African Historical Journal, 42, May 2000, pp. 26-48. 
210 N. Etherington, ?Postmodernism and South African History?, New Contree, 40, 1996, pp.     
      28-41. 
211 J. Bottomley, ?Paradigmatic Confusion in the History of the ?New South Africa?, New  
     Contree, 39, August, 1996, pp. 28-44 and see also J. Bottomley, ?History as Artefact and  
     South African Historians as Jugglers of Fictions, Purveyors of Snake Oil, and Other  
     ?Suspect Narratives?, New Contree, 42, 1997, pp. 5-17 and J. Bottomley, ?Postmodernism  
     ? South Africa?s ?Third Force? ? Subverting the Dominant Power Relations?, New Contree,     
     3, September, 1998, pp. 7-26. 
212 G. R. Allen, ?Is There a Baby in This Bathwater? Disquieting Thoughts on the Value of  
     Content in History?, South African Historical Journal, 42, May 2000, pp. 290-306. 
213 P. Maylam, ?Dead Horse, the Baby and the Bathwater: ?Post-Theory? and the Historian?s  
     Practice?, South African Historical Journal, 42, May 2000, pp. 121-135. 
 
 55
 historians relied on oral testimony to uncover ?hidden history? and to 
?democratize the historical record?, yet failed to interrogate the weaknesses of 
this method and were ?particularly silent about memory as either a theoretical 
or historical category?.214  
 
They pointed to Keegan?s comments that human memory was an 
?indispensable resource? yet it was ?given to error, misconception, elision, 
distortion, elaboration and downright fabrication?.215 This recalls Luise White?s 
comments that ?first-person accounts are often metaphors rather than 
descriptions?216 and her personal observation that her second interviews with 
the same informant often produced new information that flatly contradicted the 
older information of the original interviews.  
 
While White was reluctant to argue that informants lied and noting that social 
historians use ?political academic terms for false? like ?fictive? and 
?metaphorical?, she tried to explain away such anomalies by suggesting that 
the informant had time to reflect upon the first interview and that this led to the 
changed story as new aspects were remembered. She also notes that 
informants sometimes change elements because of who was in the room and 
noted that the audience could shape the informants? testimony so that the 
telling of their lives was ?negotiated and re-presented (as opposed to 
represented)? in the process.217 These are useful criticisms but they are hardly 
new to practising historians who have made similar observations of their 
discipline and practice. 
 
Minkley and Rassool citing Hofmeyr218 argued that social historians mined? the 
information derived from oral testimony for ?facts? rather than focussing on  
                                                 
214 G. Minkley and C. Rassool, ?Orality, memory, and social history in South Africa? in S.  
     Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds.), Negotiating the Past: the making of memory in South Africa,  
     Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1998, p. 91. 
215 J. Keegan, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa, David Philip,  
     Cape Town, 1988, pp. 159-62. 
216 L. White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, (Vampires),   
     University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000, p.35.  
217 ibid., p. 40.  
218 I. Hofmeyr, ?We Spend Our Years as a Tale That is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a  
     South African Chiefdom?, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1994, p. 9. 
 
 56
 the words or the way the testimony was presented. This information was 
highly selective and far from allowing their informants to ?speak?, they imposed 
their own narrative in the form of ?nationalist and culturalist teleologies of 
resistance to generate a grand narrative of experience, read as ?history from 
below??.219  
 
They argued that individual informants are simply inserted ?or ?inscribed? into 
the ?collective memory as resister, or a variant thereof? and that history 
imposes or ?binds? collective memory to its historical model of ?modern 
domination and resistance.220 If these views ? and they are merely views 
rather than well-supported arguments ? are true, then it would seem that no 
social history is possible. Most practising historians, however, would argue 
that they are aware of their ?positionality? when conducting interviews and that 
they always corroborate oral testimony with other sources when establishing 
?factual? information about the past. Professional historians, furthermore, 
always do analyse the words, gestures and tone of the interviewees along 
with the content in order to establish its veracity.  
 
White also argued that social historians? attempts to ensure that ?authentic 
voices? appeared in academic texts meant that the ?colonial subjects have 
been enframed as they have been represented?.221 She observed that 
selection and omission by the historian, particularly exclusion of information 
that appeared chaotic or unreliable, meant that ?historian?s reorganization  
gives some meanings great and renewed power and strips others of their 
intensity?.222 Her conclusion is less harsh than the dismissive tone of Minkley 
and Rassool and she argues rather for an ?expansion of historical 
epistemologies? to take these criticisms into account and, in particular, to 
encourage social historians to consider rumour and gossip as valid sources 
that illuminate how their informants really see the world.223 Most historians can 
live with such advice and it can only add texture and depth to their studies. 
                                                 
219 Minkley and Rassool, ?Orality?, p 94. 
220 ibid, p. 99. 
221 White, Vampires, pp. 49-50. 
222 ibid., p. 24. 
223 ibid., p. 55. 
 
 57
  
The Current State of Social History 
 
Urban social history continues to be researched and written in what is still 
referred to as the South African English-speaking universities or ?liberal? and 
?historically advantaged? universities. Students still take history courses that 
are recognisably discipline-specific. Urban social history case studies 
produced by the History Workshop are still widely read by students who write 
essays using these studies. The value that an essentially materialist urban 
social history has in shedding light on otherwise enigmatic aspects of the 
urban past makes it so useful, insightful and compelling, that there seems no 
doubt that it will continue to be taught and studied for many decades to come. 
 
Popular history, a close cousin of urban social history, seems to be alive and 
well as books on Soweto224 and Kathorus225 testify, although the latter 
attracted the same kind of criticism that urban social history has been 
subjected to in the past decade. For example, a reviewer recently complained 
that Bonner and Nieftagodien treated Kathorus as an ?island separate from the 
rest of East Rand, or from the Witwatersrand as a whole?.226 The review also 
argued that by choosing to write a ?chronological rather than a thematic  
history of Kathorus? the authors ?risk[ed] creating a sense of historical 
determinism?.227  
 
While such criticism has become tediously repetitive, social historians can no 
longer ignore them and need to take them seriously and act accordingly. My 
own work on Krugersdorp has attempted to situate the town in a broader 
context of the Witwatersrand and other mining towns around the world, for 
example. My study has also attempted to look at the town as a whole, 
combining themes and chronological approaches, to integrate different 
                                                 
224 P. Bonner and L. Segal, edited by S. Fraser, Soweto: A History, Maskew Miller Longman,  
    Cape Town, 1998.  
225 P. Bonner and N. Nieftagodien, Kathorus: A History, Maskew Miller Longman, Cape Town,  
     2001. 
226 P. Gervais-Lambony, ?Urban Social History?, review, Journal of Southern African Studies,  
     28, 4, December, 2002, pp. 846-7. 
227 ibid. 
 
 58
 suburbs, ?locations? and the central business district as well as linking the town 
with its rural hinterland and nearby mines. 
 
The ?case study approach? or ?micro-study? is still needed to produce the 
intensely rich detail that urban social history requires. A shift from ?local 
history?, another defining feature of the radical urban history project, to 
regional history, comparative history or even a return to analyses of the 
political economy at the national and state level, would require imaginative 
reworking of social history. A proper synthesis of many related case studies in 
a specific city into a coherent ?city-wide? study is both necessary and 
desirable.  
 
Urban historians writing in the social history tradition can, and should, engage 
more with ?history-of-the-city? rather than ?history-in-the-city?, consult a wider 
range of related sources, including those from outside South African itself and 
from a variety of disciplines. Urban social historians can, and also should, 
move beyond ?domain construction? and start to produce at least modest, 
?middle level? theory from their work, as they widen their reading. There is 
nothing intrinsic to urban social history that precludes the perceptive 
application of theory and the creative development of new theory.  
 
In 1999 Glaser offered an optimistic approach to the onslaught of the ?New 
Humanities? or postmodernism that is still applicable today.  In a review of 
three texts by historians who explicitly critique postmodernism228 Glaser, using 
Windschuttle, noted that postmodernism produced history that was simply 
unconvincing. Foucault was notorious for his ?sloppy research? and for 
?periodisation that was up to a hundred years? out?, for a conceptualisation of 
power that was ?frustratingly vague? and for historical passages ? devoid of 
any footnotes ? that were simply wrong or, at best, crude. Similarly 
postmodernist accounts of the interactions between colonisers and colonised 
                                                 
228 C. Glaser, ?The Empir(icists) Strike Back?, The English Academic Review, 16, December,  
     1999, pp. 8-21. R. Evans, In Defence of History, Granta Books, London, 1997; K.  
     Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are  
    Murdering Our Past, The Free Press, London, New York, 1997 and E. Hobsbawm, On  
    History, Abacus, London, 1997. 
 
 59
 peoples in Mexico and Hawaii were revealed to be misleading and often 
lacking in any useful insight.229  
 
Glaser then applied this approach to postmodern books on South African 
history230 with similar results. For example, he felt that Crais?s work on the 
Eastern Cape frontier which makes use of a Foucauldian analytical 
framework, ?ultimately build[t] only very incrementally on a body of radical 
frontier historiography?.231  
 
Sumit Sarkar, writing from the perspective of Indian historiography, was 
similarly defensive about social history or its variant as ?subaltern studies? (at 
least in its early form), and argued that postmodernism ? or its variant 
?postcoloniality? ? had largely supplanted the former, had added little to our 
historical understanding of India. At the same time, it opened up space for 
hagiography, notably for works that advanced the interests of Hindu 
chauvinism.232  
 
Both Glaser and Sarkar felt that social history was still relevant and useful. 
Glaser pointed out that Evans defended social history by demonstrating that, 
while problematic, it still produced a ?history from below? notwithstanding the 
criticism of postmodernists that historians had ?usurped the voices of the 
powerless? and that the position of typical historians as largely white, middle 
class ?aliens? or ?outsiders? offered certain advantages of distance.233  
 
Provided that social historians were self-aware, foregrounded their 
positionality and wrote with empathy and sensitivity, Sarkar and Glaser saw 
no reason why the history of ordinary people could not still be uncovered. The 
                                                 
229 ibid. 
230 A. Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa,  
    Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990; C. Crais, The Making of the Colonial Order: White  
    Supremacy and Black Resistance in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865, Wits University Press,  
    Johannesburg, 1992 and A. Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse, Verso,  
     London, 1996. 
231 Glaser, ?The Empir(icists)?, p.17. 
232 S. Sarkar, Writing Social History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, first published 1997,  
     Fourth Impression, 2002, p. 3, 
233 Glaser, ?The Empir(icists)? p. 15. 
 
 60
 alternative, suggested Sarkar, was to ignore the subaltern altogether.234 
Sarkar has also defended subaltern studies in India, observing that recent 
historical writings have focussed narrowly on elitist colonial and post-colonial 
discourses while ignoring ordinary Indians.  
 
Glaser, like Sarkar, was willing to take on board the perceptive insights that 
posmodernism brought to historical understanding and he particularly noted 
that the ?New Humanities? asked ?interesting questions? about the past. The 
resurgence in the history of ideas and institutions was attributed to the 
influence of postmodernism and had yielded valuable insights. Sarkar, too, 
saw some value in postcoloniality and observed with approval that some 
formerly stalwart social historians like Gareth Stedman-Jones have produced 
some insightful understandings by combining the best aspects of both 
approaches into a study of the ?language of classes?.235   
  
In summary then, urban social history need not be abandoned but must rather 
be adapted in the ways that have been outlined here to meet the constructive 
and well-meaning criticism that has been directed at it over the past three 
decades. Its future depends upon its re-invention along these lines. I would 
like to suggest two ways that social history appears to be re-inventing itself 
which my own work has in particular explored. 
 
Making Regional and International Linkages 
 
Nieftagodien has broken with the pattern of ?history-in-the city? where a narrow 
focus on a single township had become the norm and argued for the 
?centrality of regional urban planning? on the ?development of the 
Witwatersrand?.236 Although he focussed on Springs on the East Rand and 
proposed to write a ?local history? in the social history tradition of ?ordinary 
black people?, Nieftagodien focussed on two different locations of Payneville 
                                                 
234 ibid. 
235 G. Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-class History,  
     Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. 
236 N. Nieftagodien, ?The making of Apartheid in Springs: Group Areas and Forced Removals?,  
     MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1995, p. 11. 
 
 61
 and Bakerton in a comparative approach. He also made use of comparisons 
between these spaces and others on the Rand, including Munsieville, 
Krugersdorp.237 He focussed on the East Rand Administration Board archives 
and situated his study in a broader regional analysis of the East Rand. This 
?regionalist? approach marked an important improvement on the narrow 
microstudies of earlier social history and has been the approach of my own 
study which locates Krugersdorp in the West Rand and makes frequent 
comparisons and linkages between Krugersdorp and other Rand towns and 
cities.  
 
Nieftagodien developed these themes in his doctoral thesis which focussed 
deliberately on regional history by researching the implementation of urban 
apartheid over the whole East Rand.238 While this work clearly took its cue 
from radical historiography, especially social history, it, nonetheless defined 
as one of its main concerns the ?emergence of modernist planning discourse 
in the pre- and post-1948 state?.239 This suggests an unusual and refreshing 
willingness to advance social history into ?history from above?, to ?history of the 
city? and to engage with discourse theory and the postmodernist critique of 
modernity.  
 
Nieftagodien also takes seriously the call by Mabin and Parnell for social 
historians to write on local government and offers a nuanced analysis of 
considerable sensitivity to trace how political alliances developed in white 
politics to facilitate various aspects of the implementation of apartheid.240 In 
the process, Nieftagodien challenged the approach that local government was 
merely a ?transmission belt? for the ideas of the centre by highlighting tensions 
that arose between the central and local levels of the state. 
 
Nieftagodien also moves beyond regional history and comparisons with towns 
beyond the East Rand, to consider how the National Party government drew 
                                                 
237 ibid., p. 128. 
238 N. Nieftagodien, ?The Implementation of Urban  Apartheid on the East Rand, 1948-1973:  
    The role of local government and resistance?, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand,  
     2001.  
239 ibid., p. 6 
240 ibid., p. 6. 
 
 62
 upon international planning policies in devising their urban segregationist 
projects. Rather than treating South Africa as an ?exceptionalist? case, 
Nieftagodien noted how the Nationalists made use of current international 
modernist ideas like the ?Garden City? movement and other aspects of 
?modernism? that included ?state intervention, Keynesian ideas, social 
democratic and welfarist policies?local public works programmes?.241  
 
Jonathan Hyslop has also advanced social history in new directions to focus 
on contextualised biography. Hyslop?s main contribution was to widen the 
scope of social history from its narrow scope on local case studies to a far 
broader canvas which in the case of his work, extended to the British Empire 
itself. While Hyslop does not overtly situate his work in the social history 
school, he is interested in uncovering the history of ?ordinary people? from the 
working class through biography.  
 
In a paper that set out the broader context of his biography, Hyslop argued 
that the white working classes of the British Empire were not ?discrete entities? 
linked to specific ?nationalities? but instead were a highly mobile ?imperial 
working class? that moved between different parts of the Empire. He pointed 
out that white miners traversed thousands of kilometres between the mining 
towns of Cornwall in Britain, to similar mining towns in Australia and South 
Africa.242  
 
Hyslop, who drew upon the work of Stoler and Cooper,243 argued that labour 
history operated in a nation-state framework that was ?profoundly misleading 
and anachronistic? and argued instead for Empire as the ?geo-social 
framework?.244 His approach challenged the case for South African 
?exceptionalism? that explained the ?white labour policy? of white workers in 
                                                 
241 ibid., p. 71. 
242 J. Hyslop, ?The Imperial Working Class Makes itself ?White?: White Labourism in Britain,  
     Australia and South Africa Before the First World War?, (?The Imperial Working Class?),  
     paper presented to the Institute for Advanced Social Research seminar, no. 449,  
     University of the Witwatersrand, 1999, p. 1. 
243 A.L. Stoler and F. Cooper, ?Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research  
     Agenda? in F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (eds.), Tensions in Empire: Colonial Cultures in a  
     Bourgeois World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997. 
244 ibid., p. 2. 
 
 63
 South Africa as a product of local conditions or ?ideological infection? from the 
settled, especially Afrikaner, population.  
 
Instead, Hyslop argued, racism was also a characteristic feature of white 
workers in Britain and Australia that was transmitted through the international 
circulation of labour especially around the turn of the century. In this way he 
also challenges recent work in the USA by Ignatiev and Bonnet on Britain, 
who explained ?whiteness? as conceptions that were socially constructed  
exclusively within these nation states.245  In Britain, Australia and South Africa, 
?white labourism? emerged and circulated between these three places with its 
?weird combination of racism and egalitarianism?.246 Cornish miners, coming 
directly from Cornwall or via Australia were conspicuous in the leadership of 
South African white miners? associations and trade unions and played a key 
role in the adoption of a racist white labourism. Hyslop explained that ?Cornish 
vector? operated by means of what Belich (1996) called ?Crew Culture? that 
shared  
 
 The same manners, customs, slang, prejudices, dress, leisure  
 habits, virtues and vices ? the same subculture?Crews were  
 prefabricated communities into which new members could easily  
 slot?247 
 
This ?crew culture? enabled new Cornish miners to be rapidly assimilated into 
the racist views of white labourism. Thus, Hyslop concluded, ?the imperial 
working class did not ?become white?: it made itself  ?white??.248 I find Hyslop?s 
approach, like those of Nieftagodien to be both fascinating and liberating and I 
have worked along similar lines in my thesis. This applies particularly to 
Chapters Three, Four and Seven which situate local history in a much broader 
context of contemporary ideas that circulated throughout the British Empire.  
 
                                                 
245 ibid. See also N. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, Routledge, New York, 1995 and  
A. Bonnett ?How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)formation of  
     Racialised Capitalism?, Journal of Historical Sociology, 11, 1998, pp. 316-340. 
246 Hyslop, ?The Imperial Working Class?, p. 6. 
247 J. Belich, Making Peoples: A History of New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the  
     End of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, Auckland, 1996, p. 428. 
248 J. Hyslop, ?The Imperial Working Class?, p. 16. 
 
 64
 Inserting Spatiality and the Meaning of Place into Urban Social History 
 
Agnew and Duncan have highlighted the neglect of spatiality in much writing 
on sociology, including socio-historical categories used in social history, and 
propose an exploration of ways to bring the geographical and social 
?imaginations? together. Similarly, Massey refers to the need to construct the  
?geographical constitution of cultures?.249 Social history, with its focus on local 
history, usually a clearly defined geographic ?slice? of a town in the form of a 
suburb or township, has always been sensitive towards spatiality along with its 
associated concepts of territoriality, place and landscape, but like so many 
other concepts these were never theorised, problematised and applied in a 
critical, reflective way. Space has often been treated by social historians in a 
taken-for-granted way as the background a particular socio-economic struggle 
without considering how space itself could act on material forces. 
 
Social historians have also considered the importance of ?place? and its 
meaning but this remains undertheorised or even sentimental. This seems 
particularly to be the case for places that were subjected to forced removal 
like Sophiatown and District Six by informants. Social historians are well-
 positioned to adapt their understandings of experience to develop an 
approach on the ?experiential dimensions of place?250 that can take social 
history beyond nostalgia and emotionalism. 
 
In the early 1970s, Marxist urban geographers began to examine the working 
class in terms of the two key concepts of  ?working class consciousness? and 
?spatiality?. In the process they drew heavily upon Antonio Gramsci?s writing work 
on the relatively neglected aspects of the ?superstructure? of politics, law, culture, 
ideology and religion251 to explore how the working class interacted with the 
                                                 
249 D. Massey, ?Spatial Construction? in G. Valentine and T. Skelton (eds.), Cool Places:  
     Geographies of Youth Cultures, Routledge, London, 1998, p. 123. Thanks to K. Mooney  
     for this source.  
250 M. A. Godkin, ?Identity and Place: Clinical Applications Based on Notions of Rootedness  
     and Uprootedness? in A. Buttimer and D. Seamon (eds), The Human Experience of Space  
     and Place, St Martin?s Press, New York, 1980, p.73. Thanks to K. Mooney for this source. 
251 N. Bobbio, ?Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society? in C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and  
     Marxist Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, cited in I. Katznelson, Marxism and the  
     City, (Marxism and the City), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, p. 15. 
 
 65
 urban environment.  This required Marxists to engage with spatiality, a concept 
that did not ?fit? easily into either the base or the superstructure of the traditional 
Marxist theoretical model.  
 
Levebre was one of the first Marxists to recognise the importance of spatiality as 
something that operated beyond merely the ?built-environmental?, asserting that 
it constituted a ?force of production? and an ?object of consumption?. He claimed 
that space had been alienated from workers by the capitalist system and 
advocated the ?re-appropriation? of space for human purposes252 as an important 
socialist aim. Levebre?s contribution is important but, according to Castells, he 
reified space to a point of ?spatial fetishism?.  
 
Castells, a leading urban Marxist, attempted to adapt Marxism to the realities of 
the urban lived environment, without going as far as to privilege spatiality as 
Levebre had done. Castells devised, instead, the notion of the ?means of 
collective consumption? that incorporated a spatial dimension into workers? 
struggles around urban issues.253 For Castells, the city was a ?distinctive domain 
of consumption, reproduction and collective action? within the capitalist 
system.254 Castells did not, however, explore the meaning that the city had for 
people who lived in them. Recent work by Katznelson and Walter, as well as 
older studies such as Lynch?s work, can illuminate these aspects. 
 
Katznelson claimed that capitalism was experienced in ?particular locations at 
particular times? and proposed a theoretical model of class that incorporated 
?features of the organisation of social existence? both ?at work and off work?.255 
Capitalist cities constitute concrete lived worlds both at work and at home and 
working people learnt to ?construct maps of their social terrain in both 
domains'.256 Cognitive mapping bridged social being and social consciousness 
as an ?urban-centred engagement? with capitalism which constituted the working 
                                                 
252 Katznelson, Marxism in the City, p. 98. 
253 ibid., p. 99. See M. Castells, Urban Question. 
254 cited in Katznelson, Marxism in the City, p. 113. 
255 ibid., pp. 204-5. 
256 ibid. 
 
 
 
 66
 class as ?social actors? and it was this process which, in turn, constituted working 
class consciousness. In this way, ?space and place? served as a ?mediating 
element? between large-scale social processes and social consciousness.257 
 
Katznelson's concept of cognitive mapping drew on Bourdieu?s ?habitus? which 
Katznelson understood as the way that people come to ?represent their lived 
experience? which, in turn, became a ?normative guide to action?.258 Importantly, 
though, the ?class dispositions? that resulted from these representations were not 
merely ?mirrors or reflections of class realities? but rather ?plausible and 
meaningful responses to circumstances?.259 Katznelson, thus, drew upon 
postmodernism?s concerns with ?cognitive and linguistic dispositions?260 to 
explain how working class experiences at work and at home have been 
?mapped? by workers into a normative guide that ?conditions? a self-conscious 
collective action by workers in pursuit of its interests as a class. Katznelson 
inserted both spatiality and the state into Marxist analysis that is instructive for 
urban social historians. 
 
Cognitive mapping is a fundamental ability and activity that enables people to 
comprehend the world around them through the production of mental 
representations or ?maps in the mind?. Kevin Lynch is generally considered to 
be the most influential writer in the field of cognitive mapping and a pioneer 
who has inspired a range of studies of human interaction with the built 
environment and the ?maps in the mind? that it produced.261 Lynch was 
influenced, in turn, by a number of studies of human orientation produced 
mostly by psychologists like Tollman (1948), and by geographers and 
                                                 
257 ibid. 
258 ibid., pp. 208-9. Katznelson draws on P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the  
    Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984. 
259 Katznelson, Marxism and the City, pp. 208-9. 
260    ibid., pp. 204-5. 
261K. Lynch, The Image of the City, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press,  
     Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1960, fourteenth printing, 1977. 
 
 
 
 
 
 67
 anthropologists, including the celebrated 1913 article by Trowbridge on 
?imaginary maps?.262 
 
Lynch?s famous book, published in 1960, sought to study the ?mental image of 
that city which is held by its citizens? concentrating especially on the ?visual 
quality? of that image and the clarity or ?legibility? of the ?cityscape?.263 Lynch 
explained that just as a printed page is legible as a coherent pattern of 
recognizable symbols, so the city could also be legible as long as its 
distinctive elements were arranged into a similarly coherent pattern. Portugali 
developed Lynch?s ideas to argue that cognitive mapping requires an 
understanding of both ??the structure and the architecture of the mind and  
the environment?.264 
 
Lakoff developed Lynch?s ideas by arguing that when people move through 
the city they construct ?image schemas? derived from the ?basic experiental 
level?, to represent the ?structure or experience of space?.265 It is the 
combination of these elements, however, into total patterns or complexes that 
is crucial as it can reinforce or enhance the ?imageability? of the spatial 
environment.266  
 
Another approach to imageability is Gibson?s concept of ?affordances? that was 
drawn from his ?ecological approach?.267 Affordances, according to Neisser, a 
follower of this approach, are the ?potentialities? that exist in the environment 
that make a certain kind of action possible.268 Affordances are not a property 
of environments alone, however, but a property of the ?relation? between 
                                                 
262 C.C. Trowbridge, ?On Fundamental Methods of Orientation and Imaginary Maps?,   
     Science, 38, December, 1913, pp. 888-897. 
263 Lynch, The Image of the City, p. 2. 
264 J. Portugali (ed.), The Construction of Cognitive Maps, (Cognitive Maps), Kluwer Academic  
     Publishers, Dordrecht, 1996, p. 21. 
265 G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind,   
     University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987, cited in Portugali, Cognitive Maps, p. 35.  
266 ibid., p. 85. 
267 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston,  
     1979. 
268 Niesser, U. ?From Direct Perception to Conceptual Structure?, in U. Neisser (ed.), Concepts  
     and Conceptual Development: Ecological and Intellectual Factors in Categorization,  
     Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 21 cited in Portugali (ed.), ?Cognitive  
    Maps, p. 20. 
 
 68
 organism and environment, so that while ?the structure and architecture of the 
brain/mind afford[s] certain cognitive potentialities, so do[es] the structure and 
architecture of the environment?.269  
 
Walter argues that a real ?sense? of a place had to go beyond perception and 
cognition to grasp it holistically in what he called ?expressive intelligibility?. 
People understand the spatial environment through a blend of experience, 
intellect, common sense, feeling and imagination. Too frequently, he argues, 
various disciplines focus only on one or other aspect of the urban experience, 
whether is it is environmental psychology, architecture, city planning, local 
history or geography. What is needed is the ?whole synthesis of located 
experience?, which includes the way ?we imagine as well as the sights, stories, 
feelings and concepts [that] gives us the sense of the place?.270 This is an 
approach that social historians could do well to adopt.  
 
Chapter Outline 
 
Chapter One 
 
This Chapter critically examines how Krugersdorp emerged as a town in 1887 
and explores how and why it was extraordinarily vulnerable to collapse during 
the period leading up to the South African War of 1899-1902. The town and its 
inhabitants were characterised by transience as both white and black miners 
left their families at home and lived in a rough-and-ready existence in a harsh 
environment with little commitment to the town. As a result most buildings 
were flimsy and the town lacked resources which only served to reinforce this 
attitude of transience. The unsettled nature of the early pioneers influenced 
the impermanence of the town and vice-versa. This Chapter explores the 
reasons for Krugersdorp?s fragility, focussing on its weak mining sector and its 
violent, ?masculinist? sub-culture. 
 
                                                 
269 Portugali (ed.), The Construction of Cognitive Maps, p.21. 
270 E.V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, University of Carolina  
     Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1988, p. 2. 
 
 69
 Chapter Two 
 
A nascent middle class composed of an elite fraction of white male 
professionals and shopkeepers played a vital role in ensuring that 
Krugersdorp became a settled town. Many of these men brought their families 
with them to the Rand and invested heavily in their businesses and private 
homes that took the form of substantial stone or brick-and-mortar buildings, 
especially churches and associated structures. By making use of cognitive 
mapping and semiotic analysis, drawing upon ?social semiotics?, this Chapter 
suggests that the example of commitment by these families were ?read? by the 
mobile white working class as a ?message? of permanence that inclined them 
to settle as well. The improved economic conditions that came with British rule 
after the South African War were also important as were the efforts of the 
white middle class to turn Krugersdorp into a town that was suitable for 
women and children.  
 
Chapter Three 
 
The early town of Krugersdorp was occupied by mostly English-speaking 
British or Australian white miners and the main part of the town was designed 
as a British mining town using ?English stands? in a grid pattern. The town 
was, however, surrounded on most sides by rural plots occupied by Dutch or 
Afrikaans-speaking, white farmers or ?Boers? and also acted as an agricultural 
town for the large Krugersdorp District. The British town dwellers interacted 
with ?Boers? at the Market Square as they bought the produce sold by the 
Afrikaner farmers. This relationship was amicable but distant. This distance 
was reflected in the formation of the ?District Township? which was located to 
the north of the town as a Boer town using ?erven? instead of stands. The two 
?halves? of the town remain relatively close but separate: a mosaic 
 
This Chapter explores how tensions increased between Boer and Briton as 
war approached and examines how the built environment reflected these 
changing ideological tensions as the Boer authorities inscribed a chauvinistic 
?Transvaal Republican? power onto important buildings while the British 
 
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 residents retaliated after the South African War with celebratory ?Imperial? 
architecture, ornamentation and park building. At two important stages, 
however, in 1897-8 and 1904-5, the English and ?Dutch? halves of 
Krugersdorp reconciled and this was reflected in the built environment. Black 
residents were caught up in these ideological struggles in peripheral but 
nonetheless important ways. 
 
Chapter Four 
 
This Chapter explores how demographic shifts, as single white men married, 
settled down and raised families impacted upon the built environment and led 
to an ideological struggle over schools, schooling and education. It is argued 
that attempts to develop support for a British imperial ideology in 
Krugersdorp?s white youth backfired for a variety of reasons and, instead, a 
nascent form of ?South Africanism? emerged as the dominant ideology of 
town?s white residents.  
 
Chapter Five 
 
The struggle over the provision of residential space for the black, mainly 
Coloured and African residents of Krugersdorp developed in a complex way 
that is analysed in terms of ?liberal? and ?repressive? strands of 
?segregationism? and the fluctuating and shifting forms of resistance that black 
residents developed against the local authorities. This study which follows a 
social history approach but which is dependent upon documentary evidence 
rather than oral testimony, sheds light on class and gender aspects of the 
early black residents of the town and deals critically with race and ethnicity 
through the prism of the ?history of ideas?.  
 
Chapter Six   
 
Indian residents struggled for the right to operate in various ways in the retail 
business, especially as ?shopkeepers? but faced relentless pressure from their 
white, mainly English-speaking competitors. Their rivals used their formal 
 
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 control over the Town Council as well as informal channels like boycotts to 
support their own commercial interests at the expense of Indian traders. An 
important strategy of the white shopkeepers was to ?quarantine? Indians by 
portraying them as ?disease ridden? and ?infectious?. However, the plans of the 
?English? shopkeepers were frustrated by various groups seeking their own 
interests including white, Afrikaner farmers, poor Afrikaner residents in the 
town and English-speaking white women.  
 
Chapter Seven  
 
White, female middle-class activists pursued a range of social reforms 
including temperance and social purity as well as the municipal vote with 
mixed success. This Chapter explores why these organisations arose when 
they did and examines their structures, tactics and efficacy in challenging 
white male patriarchy. The relationship between these women and other 
similar organisations around the country and internationally is explored while 
the relations between these women and Afrikaner white women is also 
examined and linked to the ?War Effort? ideology that emerged during the First 
World War, in order to illuminate how the War at first helped and then 
hindered their campaigns 
 
Chapter Eight  
 
By Union, politicised white working-class municipal candidates known as 
?labourites? began to be elected onto Krugersdorp?s Town Council, in line with 
similar developments elsewhere on the Rand. Many of these candidates 
identified themselves with the South African Labour Party (SALP) which was 
formed in 1909 and advocated an explicit platform of municipal reforms for 
Krugersdorp. These reforms, it is contended, aimed to shape Krugersdorp 
according to a vision of a white working-class town. These reforms, for 
example, advocated municipal socialism in the form of the ?municipalisation? of 
basic services like the supply of electricity and worked for the employment of 
substantial numbers of white working-class employees by the municipality.  
 
 
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 Other proposed reforms, which were not successfully implemented, included 
site value taxation and a Saturday Half-Holiday. This Chapter analyses 
municipal, Provincial and Parliamentary elections closely to argue that the 
SALP fared far better than conventional historians have suggested because 
they focussed closely on ?bread-and-butter? issues that were important to the 
white working-class electorate. By 1917, however, the labourites began to 
lose influence in Krugersdorp and although they fought a rearguard action, 
they had become much less influential by the end of the First World War.  
 
Chapter Nine 
 
Indian residents successfully evaded legal restrictions on their ability to trade 
and live in prime commercial spots in the town and this developed into a 
protracted and bitter legal struggle fought mainly in local but also in provincial 
and national court rooms. This Chapter explores how the law itself can 
become a site of struggle and examines what the implications were for 
ordinary Indian residents, particularly for Indian shopkeepers.  
 
The Town Council adopted this approach because informal, extralegal tactics 
such as the boycott of Indian traders and a white hawkers? association ? as 
described in Chapter Five ? failed dismally. A white commercial and 
professional elite used the law to deny trading licences to Indian traders and 
to restrict the activities of Indian hawkers, with some initial success.   
 
Increasingly, however, the Indian community began to strike back, challenging 
the Town Council robustly in the courts and developing legal loopholes that 
enabled them to run commercial enterprises in the heart of the town. The 
formation of limited liability companies was one of the most effective ways to 
evade restrictions on Indian ownership of land but this was challenged by the 
municipality in the famous court case of Dadoo Ltd v Krugersdorp 
Municipality, 1920. In the end the Council won a hollow victory but incurred 
heavy debts and made little difference to the widespread commercial success 
of Indian traders in the heart of Krugersdorp itself.