Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

which even adult sons and daughters had to pay, seemed to grow day by day. Among the most vulnerable to these pressures were widowed site holders, and it was they, along with many of the other women in Germiston’s location, who then decided to seize the initiative themselves. According to Sofia Koerkop, a widow and domestic worker, who had lived 29 years in Germiston’s location, a Wives’ Association had long been active in the location. When the court challenges to the permit system began in 1927 these women and wives were among the most active in collecting subscriptions and in supporting the campaign. However, as Sofia Koerkop and many other women in the location increasingly saw it, the anti-lodger fees campaign had been badly mishandled. The money was wholly controlled by men and had twice disappeared. In addition, they claimed, all that the men seemed to do was to speak to the Council and get no reply. Sofia Koerkop and the other leading figures in the Wives’ Association, therefore, decided in the middle of 1930 to take matters into their own hands and to form the Women’s League of Justice (WLJ), whose primary targets would henceforth be lodger permits and increasingly common and invasive police raiding for illicit liquor (which was again produced by the location’s women). The WLJ was composed predominantly but not exclusively of women. Its active supporters/members numbered between one and two thousand, a few dozen of whom were men. For the next three years the WLJ was to be the pre-eminent, though not unchallenged, political force in the locations whose confrontations with the location administration would ultimately bring matters in the location to crisis point. In June 1933, for example, 1 026 WLJ members marched on the Town Council offices. At a climactic meeting in January 1933, which would ultimately disintegrate into riot, between one and two thousand women were present.²⁷

      Woman beer brewer

      The struggle for Germiston location was exceptional but not atypical. It was exceptional because nowhere on the Rand did such an intense protracted and feminine political struggle unfold. At the same time it bore resemblance to many other low level political insurgencies that were in the process of emerging elsewhere in Ekurhuleni by condensing a number of their characteristic features in a particularly potent and concentrated form. The most noteworthy of these conflicts took place in Brakpan, Benoni and Springs. As in Germiston it was the issues of permits and brewing that were the main bones of contention in these neighbouring towns. Among the various repercussions of the great depression on the area was a massive increase in the illicit brewing of liquor and a perceptible rise in drunkenness, violence and social disorder. In response, most municipalities tried to tighten up their policing of liquor brewing and liquor selling.²⁸ Among the first salvos to be fired in this offensive was the introduction of the pick-up van (or lorry). In the 1920s the lorry had opened up many parts of Africa to capitalist penetration. In the 1920s it played the same role in many of South Africa’s municipal locations by exposing them to much more invasive policing and control. The principal virtues of the pick-up van appear to have been that it increased police mobility and allowed the same number of men to make many more arrests. For this reason it was widely hated among the Witwatersrand’s African communities. It upset what had seemed to be a relatively stable and acceptable balance between the police and those placed under their control. Complaints about the pick-up van first appear early in 1933. From that point on pick-ups were used extensively against permit and liquor law offenders. So ubiquitous and invasive did the pick-up become that it was taken up as one of the central planks of the Communist Party of South Africa’s (CPSA) Reef political campaigns during the 1930s. In 1933 the CPSA organised a conference to oppose unemployment, beer raids and the pick-ups among other things, followed by a mass demonstration in December under the slogan ‘to hell with the pick-up and police brutality’.²⁹

      Besides the pick-up, the municipalities deployed a variety of other weapons against the perceived evil of illicit brewing. Practically all the Witwatersrand municipalities increased their police complement either temporarily or permanently, with the principal objective of rooting out this menace, while both the Brakpan and Springs municipalities built fences round their locations in 1934 and 1937 respectively, to deny the access of mine workers to the liquor brewers of their locations. At a conference convened in 1935 the Reef municipalities went further and urged the government to enact an integrated package of measures which would confer on them the powers necessary to establish control over their location populations. These found legislative expression in the Native’s Laws Amendment Act of 1937, which provided for the control of influx and the removal of idle and undesirable men and women, as well as virtually requiring the construction of municipal beer halls and the municipal monopolisation of beer production and beer sales.³⁰