Left it but love it - growing up in Boksburg

Those of us who took a stand against the apartheid regime often heard "if you don't like Suthefrika then leave it" whence the title of this blog, left it but love it nevertheless. Thanks to Carol Serrurier for this moving account of her home town: Boksburg.

Out of the Box
by
Carol Serrurier-Zucker


The town where I was born and grew up, Boksburg, was a small mining town on the East Rand about 30 km from Johannesburg. I say “was” because although the town still exists, for one thing it has spread out considerably in the intervening years, now forming part of greater Johannesburg, and, for another, its mine has closed down with the dwindling of the gold seam. Its name is not derived from “box”, although I certainly felt closed-in and claustrophobic living there; nor does it refer to “bok” – Afrikaans for “deer” - as in springbok. The town was named after Dr W.E. Bok, who was State Secretary in 1887. Gold was discovered in 1886, but it was the mining of black gold – coal – that took off first in Boksburg, which then became the centre for the eastern goldfields, holding the record for the deepest mineshaft of the Witwatersrand mines (and in the world) until about 50 years ago.

The town I grew up in was very conservative town with a large Afrikaans community. I spent my first 12 years in an attractive, middle-class English-speaking suburb south of the town centre, but then we moved to a larger house in a northern suburb, populated mainly by Afrikaners. This was agony to me as there was a very real antagonism between “die Engelse” – “die rooinekke” - and the Afrikaner “vrot bananas”, the difference made easily obvious to us children through the school uniforms we wore. Travelling on the bus surrounded by kids from Voortrekker Hoogte in my Boksburg High School uniform was not a pleasant experience. I found them too rough and aggressive; one wouldn’t dare make eye contact for fear of loud accusations: “wat kyk jy?” (what are you looking at?) since being looked at, it seemed, was offensive. No doubt, they also found us too something: too prissy? Too snobbish?

The drive into town took one down a long desolate road past Cason mine dump on one side and the prison on the other. One of the “sights” of Boksburg is its Lake, man-made in the late nineteenth century by Montagu White, the Commissioner at the time, in an attempt to lend this barren town a bit of beauty. I have good memories of my father driving us around the lake one night a year in the middle of summer to see the Christmas lights strung across the road and floating on the water. The lake had a moment of gory glory with its “suitcase murder”, where parts of a woman’s body were found in a suitcase which had been dumped in the waters.

A large part of the west of the town was mine property, with its headquarters, pithead, dumps, living quarters (where my father grew up) and the compound, the residence for the migrant labourers who mostly came from Natal to work in the galleries, deep underground. Each compound had its stadium where the workers could play football on weekends or hold traditional dance contests, including Gumboot dancing, a sort of hybrid of tradition and modernity, featuring the rubber boots worn down in the mines. Sometimes at dusk I could hear the rhythms of the drums in the distance, and we would occasionally go to watch the Sunday dancing with their entrancing almost frightening energy. We’d come away covered in a film of red dust which the dancer’s stamping had stirred up from the dirt floor.

Another particularity of that time was the convict workers, those who weren’t dangerous so became a useful source of free labour. They were let out of prison during the day in work teams to keep up roads and parks. I used to say “hello” to them and they would reply respectfully “More, Nonnie (Morning, small madam)”. I felt they were sad, but didn’t know then that often their only crime had been the inability to present a valid pass book when stopped by a policeman for an identity check.

Town celebrities include Gerrie Coetzee, once a world heavy-weight boxing champion, nick-named the “Boksburg bomber”, long before the town exploded into rioting, and Paw-Paw Scheepers, a stock car racer, who once amazed the crowd by driving a Jaguar off a ramp through the side of a double-decker bus! Presumably the aim was to clear the bus and land safely on the other side.

The burg became notorious for its conservative stance during the gradual disappearance of “petty” apartheid, when the signs “whites only” were being taken down in public places all over the country. The Conservative Party, who considered the National Party to be a bunch of “liberal lefties”, selling the country out with its reforms, was elected into the Municipality in the mid-1980s. In 1988, the council decided to put the signs back up and, in a moment of great inspiration, fenced off the Lake, barring Blacks from using its facilities. The Black communities of the various townships in the area, led by Reiger Park, a “Coloured” area, responded by organising a boycott of the town’s shops. Protest picnics were held at the Lake, leading to violent clashes with Conservative Party and AWB (extreme right) members. There were other towns like Carletonville and Krugersdorp on the Witwatersrand which also enacted retrograde policies and faced similar boycotts by their Black citizens.

These boycotts demanded self-control and some sacrifice from the protesters as they had to pay their transport fares to neighbouring, less “verkrampte” towns, a no-mean feat when every hard-earned cent was much needed. However the year-long defiance campaign was successful and had further-reaching effects as it was one factor in the eventual scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act by the government. In addition, an outlying suburb, Windmill Park, was declared a “free trading area” that same year, 1989, by the new president, F.W. De Klerk, and became one of the new “grey areas” henceforth open to people of all races. This further inflamed the right-wing extremists and in 1990, a group of them including the deputy mayor of the town, were accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate President De Klerk, Nelson Mandela and the Nationalist MP of the area, Sakkie Blanché.

But the most dramatic of the town’s infamy was to occur in April 1993, just as South Africa was struggling towards its historic moment of rebirth. On a Sunday morning as he returned from buying the papers, Chris Hani was shot dead in his driveway by a white extremist. Hani, secretary general of the Communist Party and very close to Nelson Mandela, was extremely popular and some even saw him as a possible vice-President in the new South Africa. Grief and outrage at his death gave rise to violence from the black community, demanding revenge, and Nelson Mandela appeared on national television to say that although a white racist had committed the assassination, it was thanks to a prompt call to police by one of Hani’s Afrikaans neighbours reporting the registration of the murderer’s car, that he had been rapidly apprehended and other assassination attempts thwarted. He implored the people not to enter into a spiral of racial hatred and destroy the negotiation process, which was precisely the aim of the assassins.

In returning to Boksburg regularly to visit family, I still recall the claustrophobic feelings of my childhood and continue to think it is one of the most unattractive areas in a beautiful country, but I am heartened to see some of the changes for the better that have come over the years. The first time I ever saw Black children wearing my old school uniform I was moved to tears. What a wonder to see the ease and confidence with which the youngsters chatted and laughed in groups, allowing one to firmly believe that the new generation will go beyond the horrible scars left by apartheid. Another good moment came in meeting musician Pops Mohammed in France, who when he heard that I came from Boksburg – a statement which usually elicits guffaws and mock-Afrikaans accents from my fellow-countrymen - delightedly proclaimed “so am I - from Reiger Park!” The passage of time and the changes wrought now allowed us to be fellow Boksburgers.

The new town council decided to repaint the formerly staid town hall, and chose to do it in a bright shocking bubble-gum pink. Impossible now to ignore this austere building in its new exotic garb. For its reopening, a poem was written by a young schoolgirl, Nompumeleo Motlafi, recapping Boksburg’s chequered history, which I happened upon in the local newspaper. I was touched by her sense of pride in a place I couldn’t leave fast enough and also by the fact that the paper, once reporting only white news, had honoured her young talent.

As is the case in many towns and cities, with the abolition of the Group Areas Act, black businesses have moved into the town centres and white professionals have moved out into the huge malls built on the outskirts of the towns. Boksburg’s centre is no exception and boutiques of sangoma herbs and potions, funeral parlours and the ubiquitous loan sharks flourish among other stores. The pavements are taken up by the hawkers of the so-called informal economy, spilling their wares of fruit and vegetables and handmade goods of all kinds. Needless to say, the shopkeepers who pay rents and overheads for their premises do not always see these pavement merchants in the best light!

Now Boksburg is part of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality and has as its mayor Duma Nkosi, a former ANC activist who served a nine-month jail sentence in 1985. I have had the opportunity of visiting surrounding townships like Voslorus, Thokoza, Katlehong and Geluksdal where I have seen amazing efforts being made by people who have so little, that little being further diminished by the ravages of AIDS. However, with the help of some good people, one of them being my sister-in-law, they manage to maintain the will to improve their lives through hard work and the sense of being part of a community that now pulls together instead of tearing itself apart.




Written in 2006.