farm and informed the government of the discovery of gold there, prospecting having already been in progress since early that year. As he reported to his superiors in Pretoria ‘Het rif ligt open in die Schacht en is acht voet breed.’ (The reef has exposed in the shaft and is eight foot wide.) It still remains on the south end of Princes Avenue. The prospector who exposed it was Cotten Acutt. Also present was J.k. hirst who represented Ethelbert Welford Noyce who had leased the farm from the government in 1885. The Benoni, kleinfontein and vlakfontein farms were proclaimed as gold prospecting areas between May and August 1888.24 Finally to conclude this first phase of mining development, W.P. Taylor was sent by the rand Mines group some time later to seek to purchase the farm Modderfontein, near Benoni, which he successfully did, and which would ultimately give birth to five fabulously rich mines.25
At this point the history of Ekurhuleni is getting perceptibly denser, and before long it would be recorded first in newspaper articles and later in a series of celebratory, often centennial, municipal publications. This history is, however, almost exclusively a white history and generally a white immigrant history at that. It is also cast in a very particular mould, which has been explored with considerable insight and subtlety, in the Eastern Lowveld of South Africa.26 The mould is of brave, rough-and-ready, independent, solitary, resourceful pioneers rising above the odds and overcoming all adversity in their way. While pictured in a generally romantic fashion, these pioneers come with an equally familiar set of flaws – forgivable flaws but flaws nonetheless. They are carefree – on occasion close to wastrels. They are generous, often to a fault. They are great believers in (and beneficiaries of) chance, but are not above bending chance in somewhat underhand ways, or duping their colleagues. They are heavy drinkers. They can be violent when protecting what they believe to be their rights.
Much of this pioneering history has two other attributes as well. It is remorselessly anecdotal, made up of cautionary tales, amusing as well as sometimes uplifting episodes, but never delving into the contexts and personalities involved. Equally problematically African voices and faces never appear, allowing us only to access them much later. These are our sadly limited raw materials for writing this early phase of the history of Ekurhuleni.
Three of these early pioneer narratives, two coming from Nigel, give some feel for this genre of works. According to one, the owner of Vlakfontein entered into an ‘agzt’ (agreement) in 1882 in a project to look for gold. Five years later a troop of gold-seekers on their way from Natal to the Rand camped on Vlakfontein and became aware that the prospector had located gold. They thereupon went to the owner of the farm and offered £1 000 to buy it. The absentee owner, Petrus Johannes Marais (Oom Lang Piet), happened to be reading the novel by Sir Walter Scott entitled The Fortunes of Nigel, a story about a young man who was the victim of a dishonest intrigue. Suspicious, he checked out his farm, only to find that a gold reef had been discovered on it. With this, the name Nigel was born and Marais sold his property in July 1888 to the Nigel Gold Mining Company.
In an alternative account, P.J. Marais purchased the Vlakfontein property between 1881 and 1884. Two years later a pioneer Scottish prospector, Nigel MacLeish, found a gold-bearing outcrop on the farm which he named Nigel’s Reef. On 15 April 1887, Marais sold half of the farm to businessmen from Pretoria who styled themselves as the ‘The Nigel Syndicate’.27 The Nigel Gold Mining Company was thereupon registered on 31 March 1888 and purchased the second half from Marais on 4 June 1888. Some connection to the novel Glenvelich Street is clear, inasmuch as all churches are named after churches in Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel.
Germiston’s origins were equally bound up with the discovery of gold. In 1886 two Harrismith merchants, John Jack and Augustus Simmer, bought a half share in the farm Elandsfontein following the initial discovery of gold in Langlaagte a few months before. Theirs was intended as a commercial/trading enterprise. The bleak spot which they chose was situated on a natural crossroads and was therefore the ideal site on which to erect a store. Within weeks, however, Paul Kruger declared the entire Witwatersrand a public diggings. Jack and Simmer immediately floated the first gold mine in the area (registered in August 1887), and then named the neighbouring township Jermiston, in honour of a farm seven miles outside of Glasgow in Scotland which had been John Jack’s boyhood home.28
Elsewhere in Ekurhuleni prospectors were engaged in a different quest – the search for coal – which had emerged as an increasingly vital prerequisite for successful mining. Towards the end of 1887 a German prospector, Johan Gauf, located a seam of coal near Boksburg which initially supplied some of the needs of the area’s proliferating gold mines. In 1888 Gauf extended his search eastwards and found better quality coal about 30 metres below the surface of Eloff’s farm Weltevreden in today’s Brakpan area. The Transvaal Coal Trust Company was formed to buy the farm. They put down a shaft at what is now the Brakpan Country Club, out of which grew the Brakpan Colliery which gave its name to Brakpan town. The connection to water in the naming of Brakpan and Springs is self-evident. A year later more coal was found in the vicinity of Springs. By the end of the century four mines were operating in Brakpan and five in Springs.29
Finally Kempton Park emerged out of another ancillary activity of gold mining. This town owes its origins to the dynamite factory built at Modderfontein in 1894 to supply explosives to the mines. The factory was half owned by a German company and its local director, Carl Friedrich Wolff, who soon bought up large tracts of land in the area upon which he later applied to establish a town. The township was approved in 1903 and named Kempton Park after the town of Kempten in Germany, which was Wolff’s birthplace.30
The story of the discovery of Benoni’s Modderfontein gold comes with a similar message and model. In 1890 W.P. Taylor, whose activities slot in first after the first wave of pioneers, was instructed by the Rand Mines Group to purchase the farm Modderfontein near Benoni from its then owner Wilhem Prinsloo. The episode that follows comes directly from Taylor’s autobiography, African Treasure. According to Taylor, and to local legend, Prinsloo was adamantly opposed to parting with his farm for anything less than £100 000. Taylor hung around for weeks and eventually a clever trick or subterfuge secured him his prize. As he puts it in African Treasure:
One bitterly cold evening the Hottentot servant brought in, in the bottom of a zinc bucket, the scanty milk he had drawn from half a dozen shivering cows [which gave Taylor an opening].
‘My poor friend,’ said Taylor, ‘I have a cow in Johannesburg that will fill that bucket twice a day; that is what I call milk.’
‘Yes,’ Taylor went on, ‘the cow will fill that bucket twice a day, and when I have bought this farm I will give it to my friend, your wife. If the cow does not fill the bucket twice a day, as I promise, there shall be no deal.’
There was a long silence and I knew the farm was as good as mine.
Next morning he appeared a tired man. ‘Englishman,’ he said, ‘you give me no peace. This woman has destroyed my rest with your dammed cow and its two buckets of milk. Let us bring the deal to a head. What is your offer?’
£30 000 in cash, forty thousand in shares and a cow that will fill your bucket with milk twice a day.’
He went back to his wife, and she, coveting the cow, counselled acceptance.31
MINING GOLD
The Ekurhuleni region (previously East Rand) is conventionally divided into an east central zone comprising Germiston, Boksburg, Alberton and the far eastern region comprising Brakpan, Springs and Nigel, with Benoni sometimes falling into the one and sometimes the other. Gold mining first developed at each end of the Far East Rand. This was due to the geological vagaries of the Main Reef series of ores. Benoni lies on the north-western edge of a huge gold-bearing reef known as the Far East Rand Basin. The reef more generally stretches in a straight line from Johannesburg until it reaches Boksburg. From there it curves south, and puzzled gold prospectors initially lost it as they interpreted it as a complete break in the gold-bearing formation. This they dubbed the Boksburg gap. The Far East Rand Basin which began at Benoni emerged as isolated outcrops at that point (i.e. the end of the gap). It then dipped down to about 2 300 metres in the vicinity of Springs, before turning upwards to surface