the visit by the ANC leaders, including Walter Sisulu, the children recited one of these poems as a form of entertainment. According to her, the poem went as follows:
Mo-Afrika, ke kgotsofetse ka se keleng sona. Le hoja naha ya rona e ne e se tshehla. Naha ya rona e fetohile lehaha la mashodu, teng ho phela batho ba mefuta yohle. Batho ba ikemiseditseng ho ripitla Mo-Afrika. [I am satisfied to be an African. Our country was never barren. It has been turned into a haven of thieves, where many people live. But some of these people are constantly preparing to destroy Africans (at which point she stamped her foot).]
Some of the members of the teaching staff at Dorcas House were members of the National Council of African Women (NCAW). Hilda Mantho Motadinyane was one. Until the late 1940s, the NCAW worked for the upliftment and upward mobility of African women. In the 1950s the organisation’s role had shifted and it became involved in political issues. Motadinyane joined the council after hearing one of its members, the late Winkie Direko, speaking about the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act, which was introduced in 1952, making it compulsory for women to carry reference books.
It does not look as if the ANC had a branch in Kroonstad at the time, although there were people who supported it: Curnick Ndamse, a teacher at Bantu High, was one of its staunch followers, as was Reverend Mahabane – having been the president-general of the ANC twice (1924–27 and 1937–40), he must have influenced some of the residents in the locations in favour of the ANC.
Political momentum was growing in Kroonstad’s black locations. The government’s decision to promulgate the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act intensified the situation. Recounting the indignation women felt about this law, Maggie Resha, a resident of Sophiatown and a member of the ANC Women’s League, wrote: ‘To extend the pass laws was to pull down the wall which protected the women from the humiliation of carrying these documents.’62 Throughout South Africa, women incensed by the Act protested. In a bid to coordinate the protests, 150 women from different parts of the country converged in Johannesburg in 1954 to adopt a ‘Women’s Charter’ and launch a new organisation, the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw). The following year, 2 000 women from the Transvaal marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria with a petition to the then prime minister, JG Strijdom. The fact that Strijdom snubbed the women did not deter them and they were to march again in 1956. Before that, however, in March 1956, African women marched ‘in virtually all the major cities ... from locations into city centres to hand in petitions and protests to town clerks, native commissioners, magistrates and other local affiliates’.63 In Kroonstad the campaign was led by some of the older women (possibly members of the ANC Women’s League). The most prominent was Matseki Majoro, who had been active in politics prior to the anti-pass campaign. Violet Selele remembered that Majoro also led the fight against high rent.
This group comprised older women of the same age as my mother. They would go to the town hall in town to protest against rent. They also protested against [the] lodger’s permit.64 They would demand that they should be arrested. Indeed, they were arrested. But they were later released.
Michael ‘Baba’ Jordan, a long-time resident of Kroonstad, also recalled Majoro as an activist, while Godfrey Oliphant, another resident, remembered her as a powerful orator:
As sy gepraat het [when she spoke], people would listen. [Addressing people she would say,] ‘It’s been long that we’ve been under the yoke of a white man’. Those were the words. ‘We’ve got to stand up as the people today and fight for our rights.’
Majoro is best remembered for her role in the anti-pass campaign. Selele recalled:
I can still remember I was sitting next to one of these women whose husband was a shopkeeper when I said, ‘Me Masielatsa, do you realise that there are some people here who will leave this meeting and go and tell the boers [police] that we don’t want passes. I think we should stop the meeting so that we can assess the situation’ ... here in Kroonstad we didn’t trust each other.
Selele’s fears were realised. Not long after the meeting, Matseke Majoro was detained. In an interview, John Modise recalled: ‘Matseki worked in town but she also liked to help other people within the community. She worked closely with Reverend Mahabane and Mrs Mahabane. When Matseki was arrested, Reverend Mahabane was also arrested – on the same day.’
When Mahabane arrived in Kroonstad he was politically moderate, but this changed after a visit to Ghana in 1957, when, according to some interviewees, he became actively involved in community issues, particularly conscientising the younger generation. In that year Ghana had won its independence under Kwame Nkrumah. ‘Baba’ Jordan recalled that he was told that Mahabane came back radicalised from Ghana, saying in a sermon that ‘the message from Nkrumah for blacks in South Africa was that they must get the boot of the white man off from their necks’. Lindiwe Gladys Mwelase, a relative of Majoro, returned to Kroonstad in 1956 after spending some time working in Johannesburg to find that Majoro had been arrested. ‘They accused [her] of being too influential about the pass resistance. I asked the people and they told me that they burned passes and she stayed behind when others fled.’ It is unlikely that Majoro was arrested for mobilising women to burn their passes as at this point passes had not been issued to women (this only happened the following year) and the burning of passes took place after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.
Despite the demonstrations the government swiftly implemented the extension of passes to women, starting with women in Winburg in the OFS. In 1957, passes were issued to African women in Kroonstad. Motadinyane, who was working at the day-care at Dorcas House at the time, recalls that ‘[t]he municipality police came to our workplace and took us to the hall. When we arrived there they took our photographs. We were the first group of women to be given passes.’ Like the men, women experienced the unpleasantness associated with passes. ‘Life became hard,’ said Motadinyane. ‘Police would knock at our doors in the middle of the night, demanding to see our passes. In my case, when they arrived at my place and demanded to see my pass, I would tell them to show me theirs first.’ The suppression of the anti-pass demonstrations marked the end of the ANC’s above-ground activities in Kroonstad’s black locations. But it did not end the protests. In 1959, the residents of Kroonstad’s black locations had reached their breaking point, after an increase in the number of raids by the municipal police.
The 1950s saw the NP government reversing all the limited reforms of the early 1940s and promulgating racial and segregationist laws which adversely affected African labour. In order to curb urbanisation, the government tightened and strictly monitored influx control. Through the pass system it divided Africans between those who had rights to be in an urban area and those who did not. Put the other way round, Africans without the ‘section 10’ rights65 were prohibited from being in an urban area permanently unless they were employed there, and if not employed they had to return to their reserve. The ‘urban right’ determined who had right to employment in an urban area. In a small town like Kroonstad, which had a limited manufacturing sector, it became extremely difficult for the majority of Africans with no right to be in an urban area to find employment. Consequently, gangs emerged, and the majority of the unemployed could not keep up with the rental payment demanded by the council.
In its attempt to recoup its rental money, the council unleashed its police force to raid – sometimes twice in a day – all households in arrears, claiming that these households owed it £300. On 22 February 1959 the residents held a meeting where they tabled their grievances to Mr De Vries, the manager of the Non-European Affairs Department. The grievances included their resentment of having to queue for long hours for permits to seek work only to receive them past noon when there was no more time to look for work. Mr De Villiers undertook to look into their grievances and promised to meet them again in March, but when the date of the meeting arrived he could not attend because he had honoured another meeting in Durban. He failed to attend another meeting on 1 April. The following day the residents met again and to this meeting came seven Europeans – officials and police (it is reported that some of them were displaying their revolvers). At this meeting the residents voiced their lack of confidence in the Native Affairs Department. Then the residents dispersed and not long afterwards shots were heard. Three Africans were shot and thirty-nine arrested,