councils.
Although politics dominated the Kroonstad locations, there were other activities taking place, even during the tense moments. Children played games in the dusty streets. Violet Selele remembers the old locations as quiet and a fun place where girls played double Dutch (a jumping-rope game). Other children played ho tjheha dinonyana (to trap birds), morabarabara (drought) and mantlwane (playing house). Music, choral or band, also entertained the residents of the locations. Godfrey Oliphant described the mood of the times: ‘The people used to be excited with jive. There used to be a local group that used to play musical instruments. One of their members, Miki Matsepe, used to play piano.’
Sport was another form of entertainment, football the most popular. Everyone I interviewed in Kroonstad singled out Shamrock United, Blackburn Rovers and Union Jacks as the best football teams in the locations. John Motsiri Congae, who was born in 1940 in Kroonstad and started playing football at the age of eight, recalls watching big teams like Shamrock United and Callies, from Cairo, playing at Masakeng, so called because the football field was enclosed with hessian sacks
But Kroonstad was not always fun and games. There were fights and gangs in the locations. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe remembers, as a teenager growing up in Kroonstad, witnessing fights between Ama-Baca (a Nguni group) and the Russians (the Basotho gang). However, the most feared gang during this period was the Green-White (or ma-Green White, as it was called locally). This gang was led by Skapie Mofokeng. It began as a group of about ten or twelve young people in ‘B’ Location. Joseph Ditheko ‘Makula’ Molai, one of the gang’s surviving members, remembers that they were part of the baseball team called the Green-White, because of the team’s uniform: white shirts and shorts with green stripes. The members included David Gooie, John Sisana, Boy-Boy Ponyane, Choke Tlokotsi and Sydney Mashoe. The initial activity of this group was to protect the Basotho nationals who lived in ‘B’ Location from harassment by the municipal police who raided their houses searching for people in the location without a visitor’s permit. (Those who failed to produce it were arrested. The police also arrested them for defaulting on rent payment or the ‘lodger’s’ [permit]. Finally, the police harassed the Basotho women who traded in African beer.) The Green-White group liked workers from Lesotho who would share rations every month-end after receiving their pay. It was during the group’s fight with the municipal police that a gang called the Spoilers emerged and aligned itself with the police. This, according to Molai, forced them to form themselves into a gang. Fearing attack from the police and the Spoilers, the Green-White gang began acquiring guns by disarming the police. Molai claims: ‘We overpowered them. One of them who was well known was “Optel”, Mr Van der Westhuyssen; we even took his pistol.’ In 1955 all the members of the gang had stopped attending school at Bantu High and now channelled their energy into gang activities. The gang affected the community in more than one way. Youngsters in the locations were forced to join gangs to defend themselves – and the junior Green-White and the junior Spoilers were formed and fought each other.
Because of the government’s objective of supplying the agricultural sector with labour, more and more black men who were unemployed and could not find work were arrested and sent to prison farms, especially in Bethal, in the then Eastern Transvaal, to labour on the potato farms.71 To avoid being harassed by police for passes, members of the Green-White harassed whites in town, demanding stamps proving that they were employed. Molai recalls:
That Cross Street in town, we used to go from shop to shop and do as we pleased, and the shopkeeper must just shut up. If he attempted to run to the phone, he would find one of us sitting on the desk where the phone was. The police also used to collect loafers, those people who weren’t working, and throw them in the van. Our gang members used to collect all these rubber stamps from shops and we would stamp our IDs [reference book] to pretend as if we were employed. And when they wanted to see our reference and asked us waar werk jy? [where do you work?], they would find a lot of stamps in our IDs, those from Dixies Trading Store, Ellerines, Ackermans, what what. And after seeing the stamps in our IDs they would leave.
Echoing Molai, Tebello ‘Blackie’ Tumisi remembers that the Green-White members refused to look for work as stipulated in the law:
There were these guys called the Green-White. There were gangs, the Spoilers ... eh ... the Caspers ... but the Green-White was the strongest one. It was the most feared gang around here. People used to go to the pass office. But because they were a gang they decided that they won’t go there.
As with other gangs in different places, the Green-White’s era was brought to an abrupt end by the police. Members of the gang were arrested and others were shot and killed. By the 1960s Kroonstad’s black locations were free of gangs.
Fear and distrust characterised the post-Sharpeville period. Matsepe recalls that they adhered to an unwritten code, ‘do not talk’, because it could lead to trouble. Although in the 1960s the government had passed a barrage of severely repressive laws and there was an economic boom which in many ways caused the majority of black people to refrain from participating in politics, the government could not totally contain the black people’s anger. The people were now aware. In the next chapter I look at the role played by the Black Consciousness Movement in conscientising the generation of the 1970s. But first I explore the attempts by some individuals in Kroonstad to operate underground, with the intention of introducing the younger generation to politics.
Endnotes
1 Ntantala, P (1992) A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala, University of the Western Cape Mayibuye History Series No. 6. Cape Town: David Philip, p. 149.
2 Serfontein, D (1990) Keurskrif vir Kroonstad: ’n kroniek van die ontstaan, groei en vooruitsigte van ’n Vrystaatse plattelandse dorp. Johannesburg: Perskor-Boekdrukkery, p. 449.
3 Bonner, P and Segal, L (1998) Soweto: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, p. 13.
4 Serfontein op. cit
5 Bradford, H (1987) A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930. Johannesburg: Ravan
6 Setiloane, JSM (1997) The History of Black Education in Maokeng, Kroonstad. Cape Town: HSRC Press, p. 4.
7 Bonner, P and Nieftagodien, N (2008) Alexandra: A History. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p. 5.
8 Setiloane op. cit.
9 Reverend Mahabane is renowned for serving two terms as the president-general of the ANC, in 1924–1927 and 1937–1940. See City Press, 8 January 2012.
10 Serfontein op. cit., p. 519.
11 Setiloane op. cit., p. 6.
12 For an in-depth account on the creation of coloureds-only settlements in South Africa, see Parnell, SM (1993) ‘Johannesburg Slums and Racial Segregation in South African Cities, 1910–1937’. PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand.
13 Kentridge, I (2013) ‘“And So They Moved One by One” ’: Forced Removals in a Free State Town, 1956–1977’, in Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 1, p. 144.
14 Free State Provincial Archives (hereafter FSPA), G76, PAE 52 ‘Subject: Kroonstad Coloured School’.
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