gold discoveries at both ends (at Nigel and Benoni).32
Four mines began operating in the Benoni area from 1887: the Benoni Gold Mining Company and the Chimes Company located on Benoni farm, and the Van Ryn and New Kleinfontein Company on Vlakfontein and Kleinfontein farms, respectively. By the end of 1890, all four companies had failed and had later to be financially reconstructed. This was partly because of the exhaustion of surface workings, which was compounded by the absence of a rail link; the diseases that afflicted animal-borne transport; and irregular supplies of labour. Further contributing factors however were, plain and simple, incompetence and self-indulgence. In 1890, for example, the Mining Journal attributed the failure of the Van Ryn Mine to ‘incompetent management, defective organisation and extravagant expenditure’, faults which apparently accompanied many pioneering South African ventures. The first Benoni gold mine, which opened in September 1887, went bankrupt in 1888. Many other small mines in Ekurhuleni suffered the same fate, and for some of the same reasons.33 Additional problems facing all mines in the area as well as the communities they spawned were the absence of fuel on the treeless Highveld and a shortage of water.34 The shortage of fuel was partly resolved by the discovery of coal, first on the farm Vogelsfontein near Boksburg, then in the vicinity of Brakpan and Springs.35 The issue of water was a good deal more intractable. Drought struck the Witwatersrand gold fields ferociously and from the very beginning. At the end of the first winter in the life of the gold fields in 1886 it was reported that water was very scarce. In October 1887 Johannesburg’s Landdrost Von Brandis telegrammed State Secretary Bok in Pretoria in desperation: ‘What about a waterworks for Johannesburg? The wells are dry’. In 1889, 1890 and 1895 exceptionally severe droughts again struck the Witwatersrand, placing both mines and local communities in Ekurhuleni in a position of acute stress.36
The drought of 1890 coincided with the exhaustion of the surface workings of gold-bearing outcrops. This forced the gold mining companies to search for gold-bearing reef ever deeper underground. A massive problem they encountered when pushing more than 40 metres below the surface was that the characteristics of the gold ore they were mining changed. The iron pyrites they then found in the ore made the gold much more difficult to extract, so that only a quarter of the available gold could be recovered. As a result a major economic depression settled on the Rand. Many mines closed. The Stock Exchange collapsed. Almost a third of the Rand’s white population packed their bags and left.37 The industry was only rescued from its plight in 1892, when it began to employ the potassium cyanide-based extraction process discovered by MacArthur and Forrest in distant Scotland three years before. One immediate requirement of the MacArthur-Forrest process was water – 2 009 litres to mill one ton of ore.38 In Benoni, and other parts of Ekurhuleni, huge dams were built to supply this need – these formed the lakes which now dot the area and are such a conspicuous feature of its landscape. At the end of 1895, for example, the Kleinfontein Estates and Township Company bought Kleinfontein farm, mainly because of the stream that ran through it, upon which it constructed two huge new dams – the first called Homestead Dam and the second New Kleinfontein Dam (beside which the city of Benoni is now situated).39
Deep-level mining, however, also required access to massive resources of technology, expertise, labour and capital. To mobilise these, the mining houses embarked on a process of take-over, amalgamation and concentration out of which the group system was born.40 It was these groups that gave birth to the new generation of mines that sprang up in the mid-1890s. In Benoni New Kleinfontein, New Modderfontein and Van Ryn Estates were launched, the former owned by Sir George Farrar. In Germiston and Boksburg, Angelo, New Comet, Driefontein, Cinderella, New B, East Rand Proprietary Mines (ERPM) and Driefontein, also sprang into life, many controlled by George Farrar’s group.41 The industry had taken off. By 1898 the Witwatersrand’s mines produced 27% of the world’s gold. By 1913 this had leapt to 40%.42
Between Benoni and Nigel, however, there remained a large tract of empty land – the inscrutable ‘Boksburg Gap’. Not a single gold mine was established in these parts. It would require further technological breakthroughs before these could be exploited, or indeed even located. As late as 1919 the East Rand Express could proclaim, ‘Even on the East Rand the feeling is still prevalent that civilisation ceases after Boksburg is left.’43 However, what the East Rand Express did not realise was that a turning point had already been reached. Only in 1909/1910 had the idea first been seriously considered of the gold reef extending into the centre of Ekurhuleni. The reef was finally located in 1911. Technological advances facilitated the rapid development of gold mining in the region in the next decade-and-a-half. Critical here was the introduction of the Francois Cementation Process, which allowed shafts to be sealed off from water-bearing fissures in 1916. This left the way open for the East Rand Basin to be fully explored and exploited. A clutch of what would prove to be highly profitable gold mines then came into existence: Springs, New State Areas, Modder East and Van Dyk. Collectively they pushed Ekurhuleni to the forefront and to a pre-eminent position in the industry, which was uncontested by the mid-1920s when many Central Rand/Johannesburg mines closed down operations. In 1922 Ekurhuleni took over the role of the leading gold-producing region on the Witwatersrand, and hence in the world, a position which it would retain until the early 1950s.44
Early gold mining in Boksburg
LIVING IN EKURHULENI
Following close on the heels of mining development came the founding of Ekurhuleni’s earliest towns. The first two were Boksburg and Germiston. Boksburg claims the position of the second township after Johannesburg to be proclaimed on the Rand – in this case in 1887, at which point it became the government’s administrative centre for the Ekurhuleni gold fields.45 The diary of an early visitor who had a brief sojourn in Boksburg in September 1887 leaves us the following account:
The place is still in its infancy yet, tents and mud houses being the predominant features. The walls of the government offices are beam high but they are by no means strong. The walls of half of the gaol have also been run up some eight or nine feet [three metres] being built of stone, with small air holes some distance from the floor. We pity the poor unfortunates who may have to be locked up in that dismal hole. A considerable amount of mining work is being carried on near Boksburg.46
When Montagu White, the first Mining Commissioner, arrived in Boksburg in 1888 he registered what he called ‘the two defects in South African scenery … the absence of water and the scarcity of trees’. He accordingly resolved to build a big dam, as would later be done in Germiston and Benoni. Black, long-term prisoners were imported from Johannesburg to carry out the work, while 40 000 trees were planted above the railway line. In 1891, after two years of drought, the dam finally filled up.47 The first steps in the transformation of the physical landscape of the town had been taken.
Germiston followed a similar track. Two hundred stands were laid out on the farm Elandsfontein in May 1887, which presumably marked the proclamation of the township. At this point, according to a letter from John Jack to a correspondent in Johannesburg, a stream of water ran down one side of the township beside which a mill (to crush mealies), and a hotel, a store, a blacksmith’s shop, a wagon maker, an agent, a private boarding house and one or two dwelling houses had been built.48 Later tin shacks, tents and waggons lined the streets. A major fillip was given to the town when the railway line from Vereeniging (and hence Cape Town) reached Germiston in 1892. Shortly after, a line linking Germiston ww to Pretoria was built.49 It was then that Germiston assumed its position as the railway and transport hub of the Rand, which in turn sparked off a wave of development in the town.
Benoni’s development was somewhat more belated. A prospector’s account dating back to 1887 speaks of the fellow prospector whom he was coming to assist and who lived in a grass hut near Benoni Hotel which was ‘the only building in the district, with the exception of the far-away homesteads of the Boers’. The hotel itself was anything but salubrious offering ‘room for two beds with a table in between’. The first store was opened in 1888, a wood and iron building without ceiling or