in the professions as teachers or church ministers found employment at the South African Railways plant, at the Milling Company, at shops in town, on the roads and in the neighbouring farms. But most of the women were either housewives or were employed as domestic workers. For example, Lucy Mosele Taje, who was born in 1919 in April’s Kraal Farm in Kwakwatsi (Koppies), arrived in Kroonstad during ntwa ya Hitler (Adolf Hitler’s war, or the Second World War) and worked in the ‘kitchens’ (domestic work) for the greater part of her life.20 Jonah Setiloane, who lived in Kroonstad during this period observed that domestic workers ‘earned a mere pittance’.
In dire circumstances, some of the young people of school-going age felt obliged to take up part-time work in town to supplement their parents’ income. Many, like Jonah Setiloane, became caddies at the golf course.
I started to be caddy when I was about thirteen years old. I had to because the situation was bad really. I had to do that in order to help out at home by buying food. Initially my mother would hint at me saying, ‘Basimani ke bale ba dira [Other young boys are working]’
This nearly cost him his studies.
That’s how I started bunking school. My parents would think I was at school; meanwhile I was at the golf course. I used to caddy even during the week because the caddy master, Siebert, used to send me to town to buy him fish and other goodies. We sometimes earned about ten cents or twenty cents. Then I’ll take that money and give it to mother at home. She would then use it to buy meat.
Some of the families survived through farming – although on a very small scale. From oral evidence it appears that a significant number of families before the 1950s could keep their livestock (on which many depended to supplement their incomes) in the locations. Marubene Lydia Mokwena remembered that her parents had three horses, sheep, chickens and turkeys. From the chickens they were able to get a lot of eggs, she recalled. And Jonah Setiloane recalled that his father had a cow from which they could get milk so that his father, the sole breadwinner in the family, could use his earnings for other things such as their education. Tsiu Vincent Matsepe, who in the 1950s was still a teenager, remembered that his grandfather, who owned cattle, sold milk to survive. In the late 1950s, the municipality introduced regulations drastically reducing the number of cattle the location residents were permitted to keep, and some whom I interviewed claimed that they were allowed to keep only four cows. Others said two. For Lebone Holomo, who was born in Kroonstad in 1949, the cattle restriction impoverished people ‘because we were dependent on all that for milk’. Isaac ‘Sakkie’ Oliphant eloquently described the devastating effect:
Where the [Boitumelo] hospital is situated was a cattle camp. It was where we herded cattle. As a little boy we had ten cows at home and they have just cut the number, telling us that we could not have more than that. The old man used to have a cattle-drawn vehicle. He used to transport heavy things. The stone buildings that you see in town, he used to go fetch stones ... And they [he and his son] would shape those stones and thereafter used them to build those buildings. I don’t know how many other people were doing the same thing but he was one of the key players there. When they realised that people are benefitting well with these cattle, because cows were feeding us, we got meat and they were working for us, they started cutting down on the number of stock. At home we were left only with cows that we used for milk. The ones that were used for the cattle-drawn vehicle were no longer available. I was looking after ten cows and later on they went down to two. I remember my father died. I was six. Many fathers died at that time. I don’t know if it was because of heart attack but they died.
This incident left an indelible mark on the memories of many young people. Years later, in the interviews for my doctoral thesis, they were to invoke it as one of the factors that influenced them to become involved in the struggle for liberation. Holomo recalled that when growing up he would overhear older people complaining about the cattle limitation and connecting it to land dispossession.
Stock limitation was not peculiar to Kroonstad. It was actually being implemented in many other areas across the country. The political scientist Tom Lodge has argued that this was the NP government’s way of forcing black people to work on the farms.21 The industrialisation of the 1940s, stimulated by the war, had created an imbalance in the supply of labour to the agricultural sector because farmers were unable to offer wages to compete with the manufacturing sector. The abundance of stock that had, over the years, cushioned the majority of residents in the locations from pinching economic hardship was finally destroyed.
Kroonstad, unlike the Vaal Triangle and East London, had a limited industrial sector to absorb the increasing number of work-seekers. It was only from 1951 that talk began of seriously looking into expanding the town’s industry, when a local businessman told the Northern Times that the town council would have to provide new industrial sites very soon if prospective industries were to be attracted.22 The situation looked bleak, particularly for the unemployed. To survive, many engaged in trading despite the fact that this was deemed illegal. The Kroonstad Town Council refused to grant blacks trading rights, using the authority of the Urban Areas Amendment Act No. 25 of 1930, which stipulated:
Any urban local authority which has under its administration and control a location or native village – (a) may, and, if so directed by the Minister after consultation with the Administrator and after due enquiry at which the urban local authority shall be entitled to be heard, shall, on such condition as he may prescribe in the absence of approved regulations framed under paragraph (g) of sub-section (3) of section twenty-three, let sites within the location of native village for trading or business purposes.23
The council’s position was that it would make a definitive decision only after the sitting of the Native Trading Rights Inquiry on 5 September 1932. By January 1933 the government had still not made a decision about native trading rights, as was evident from a letter addressed to JD Rheinallt-Jones, one of the founders of the joint council system, by BW Shepherd from Lovedale in the Cape, asking about the outcome of the inquiry. The government does not seem to have been convinced by the Kroonstad Joint Council of Europeans and Natives’ representations on the subject, and as a result the town council refused to grant trading rights to blacks, who continued to trade illegally. A number were arrested and fined, providing funds for the council’s native revenue account. In June 1931, for example, seventeen-year-old John Moseka was arrested in ‘B’ Location and charged with hawking and peddling unlawfully. He was found guilty and fined £5 or one month’s hard labour. In the same year, Sam Kaulane, a ‘native sergeant’ in the South African Police, testified in court that he had arrested a man trading illegally in the location. He told the court:
On the 20 June 1931 I found accused in ‘D’ Location, in Kroonstad, pushing a handcart, shouting ‘goods for sale’. I saw him stop in front of hut No. 193 and selling some two packets of mealie meal, which he took from his cart. Accused had no licence of any kind.24
The failure by the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives to represent adequately the black people’s interests in trading rights (and the unabating arrest of black traders in Kroonstad) caused Father Martin Knight of the St Francis Priory and a member of the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives to address a letter to Mr Saffery, the secretary of the council, in March 1935. It lamented that the council’s inquiry into Free State trading rights ‘met here when it was too late’ and he recommended that in future the council should establish central committees in each area to deal with matters of local rather than national importance.25
Not all black traders were unfortunate. Some managed to engage in business without detection by the police. Lydia Malehlohonolo Mphosi is one of them. She was born in 1918 at Heuningspruit, a farming area in the Kroonstad district, and came to Kroonstad in 1942. She did not attend school, but instead conducted a vegetable business. Mokete Pherudi, in Who’s Who in Maokeng, points out: ‘At the time, no family in Maokeng slept without food because Mrs Mphosi was not only selling cheap but was also providing credit for weekend and month-end collection.’
The refusal to grant blacks trading rights continued until after the Second World War. In 1947–48 ‘the [Native Affairs] Committee in Kroonstad recommended that Abel Mathike, Sam Kuolane