Gauteng

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the history behind this landmark day. The piece was first published on the City of Joburg's website on the 24 May 2007. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

It is a day violently etched on the South African collective conscience. Known these days as Youth Day, it commemorates the deaths of about 200 school children in Soweto, on 16 June, 1976.
 
Lest we forget the significance of the day, a museum exists to keep the memories fresh. The Hector Pieterson Museum, in Orlando West in Soweto, is just a few blocks from where students and police met in a violent confrontation.

Sign for the Hector Pieterson Museum (The Heritage Portal)

The sahistory.org.za website puts the number of dead at 200, in contrast with the official figure conservatively given as 23, according to Philip Bonner and Lauren Segal in Soweto, A History.
 
On that day the government and the police were caught off guard, when the simmering bubble of anger of school children finally burst, releasing an intensity of emotion that the police controlled in the only manner they knew how: with ruthless aggression.
 
Bantu education was introduced by the National Party in 1954. Prior to this blacks either didn't...

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie speaks with Hector Pieterson's sister and mother about the tragic events of June 16th. The piece first appeared on the Media Club South Africa website on 16 June 2014. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

Antoinette Sithole, Hector Pieterson's sister, finds that schoolchildren want to touch her to see if she is real, once they have heard the story of 16 June 1976, and see the famous photograph of her running alongside Mbuyisa Makhubu, who was carrying the dying 12-year-old Hector in his arms.
 
"They find the story unbelievable," she says now, 38 years later. On that fateful day, police opened fire on thousands of schoolchildren who were protesting against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in township schools. Hector was the first child to die on the day, in uprisings that spread across Soweto and the country in 1976. By the end of the year, there had been more than 500 deaths around the country.

Sithole now gives tours at the Hector Pieterson Museum in Orlando West in Soweto, built just a few blocks from where her brother was shot. The children say that the event happened a long time ago, and it's hard to believe it took place. "They just keep on touching me – I am the past and the present, and it is very exciting."
 
It is striking that the children of today don't appear to have unity, she says; she explains to them that back in...

Which of our city’s architectural treasures don’t receive the credit they deserve? During lockdown we explored Joburg’s most underrated historic buildings on our Instagram and Facebook pages, and we’re happy to share them here too! 

Our first nomination is the Lion Match Factory in Industria. Designed in 1936 by Richard Day, the monumental Lion Match Factory is an Art Deco palace of industry. The facade is delineated by a series of simplified columns, decorated with three matches on their capitals. The columns are framed by a cornice of crisp parallel lines that emphasise the building’s horizontality. The architect clearly defines three entrances - two on either end in monumental projecting wings, and the main entrance framed by elegant Art Deco waterfalls and topped with a clock and flagpoles.

Lion Match Factory, Industria (Johannesburg Heritage Foundation)

Our second nomination for Joburg’s most underrated historic buildings is House Hains in Yeoville. Almost everyone knows Dolobran in Parktown, the most whimsical and romantic of Parktown’s mansions. Its architect, Cope-Christie, designed precious few buildings in Johannesburg, but...

Ahead of the annual Youth Month anniversary on June 16, a heritage plaque will commemorate Mbuyisa Makhubu, one of the most tragic victims of the mass shooting by police of protesting students in 1976.  

Aged 18, Mbuyisa became the most recognised face of the Soweto student revolt, after his agonised figure was shown around the world carrying the murdered Hector Pieterson in the iconic image by journalist Sam Nzima. Mbuyisa picked up Hector Pieterson when he was mortally wounded, and took him to the nearest clinic.

After the photograph was published, Mbuyisa was harassed by security police, and forced to flee South Africa. He was given refuge in Nigeria, but disappeared in 1979, and his whereabouts have remained unknown. Ever since, speculation has swirled about whether he is dead or alive.

Mbuyisa was among a number of young South African activists who took refuge in Nigeria in the wake of the Soweto Uprising. His mother, Nombulelo Makhubu, testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that in 1978 she received a letter from her son in Nigeria, but that she had not heard from him since.

Known in family circles as “The Queen”, Nombulelo Makhubu worked for the South African Council of Churches, and was chosen as part of a team that promoted international sanctions against the apartheid regime.

A grief-stricken Nombulelo died from heart failure in 2004, without knowing what had happened to her son Mbuyisa.

Mbuyisa’s sister, Ntsiki Makhubu, now aged 65, still lives at the family home in Litabe...

EBay has on sale a medal to commemorate the declaration of Johannesburg as a city in 1928. I was immediately intrigued. I have never seen one of these medals but I am not a collector of such items. An internet search reveals that this medal is not regarded as rare but that prices fluctuate from as little as R45 to about $10 to as much as £18. It is a bronze medal.

Commemorative Medal

A medal opens a window on a bit of local history. It raised my curiosity. What makes a city a city or a town transition to a city? Is it the population of a city, the governance and administration, the capacity to run a comprehensive range of essential services. Or is it the presence of a cathedral and that tie between the civic and religious establishment. It would seem it could be any of these things.

John Shorten’s book, The Johannesburg Saga, (published in 1970) commissioned by the City of Johannesburg and meant to mark the city’s 80th birthday, in a chapter called City Status covers the interwar period of the 20th century. The chapter virtually opens with the essential fact that in 1922 (apart from the General strike of that year) the first Anglican bishop was installed in Johannesburg, a Dr ABL Karney. In May 1926 the foundation stone of St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Plein Street was laid. It was not consecrated until...

The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.

It took some hunting to find Kenneth Stanley Birch or KSB as he is sometimes called. With no telephone entry I began to feel like a private eye. I had incorrectly assumed him dead, because the dates on the prints of his memory provoking watercolours of Witwatersrand gold mines went back many years. My wife had found some of those prints buried in a charity shop. Knowing they would interest me, she bought some. They were more than interesting, providing as they did, a pictorial reminiscence of our economic heritage; the basic, golden reason for our existence in this great, forested metropolis on the highveld. I then made a few fruitless enquiries about the artist. Months later, Geoffrey Klass, of the Collectors Treasury (click here to read the essay on the Klass brothers), told me that he’d spoken to Ken Birch who sounded very much alive. But Klass could supply no contact details. After several other queries, someone confirmed that Birch had once been Group Architect for Anglo American Corp. So my quest moved to that company’s administration. Quite by accident, because Birch had taken a lump sum pension and was no longer on the books, a helpful woman ‘found’ the 90 year old. When contacted, he agreed to...

This commemorative booklet on the life of General Jan Christiaan Smuts was found at the Hospice Witwatersrand charity shop on Louis Botha Avenue, Orange Grove, about two years ago. The sale of donated items helps Hospice Witwatersrand fund their hospice activities throughout Gauteng. The Orange Grove charity shop is a place where one can discover a wide range of interesting and useful items, and often, the items donated reflect a by-gone era. Having visited the Smuts House Museum in Irene on several occasions over the years, I decided this was the obvious place to protect this booklet for the foreseeable future, and have verbally donated this copy to the museum library, via Marion Mengell, one of the committee members of the Friends of the Jan Smuts House museum. After the COVID lockdown has ended, I will be able to deliver it.

Booklet Cover

There are some of the wonderful photographs in this slim booklet, with several of General Smuts’ home at Doornkloof farm, Irene, now the Smuts House Museum. The Heritage Portal Newsletter recently featured the Smuts House Museum and the struggles to keep this facility in a good condition (click here to view). Chris Murphy also wrote an article on the life...

In 1920, St John’s College was still in its infancy. The school had been established in 1898 as a parish school of St Mary’s Anglican Church in downtown Johannesburg. Soon afterwards, the social upheaval caused by the Anglo-Boer South African War (1899-1902) – including the evacuation of many civilians from Johannesburg and the deportation of the school’s headmaster by the Boer authorities – had necessitated the closure of the school for some eighteen months.

After the War, enrolment figures had initially recovered quickly. However, the subsequent advent of the ‘Milner schools’ posed a mortal threat to private church schools such as St John’s. The ‘Milner schools’, heavily subsidised by the colonial government, offered better facilities and lower fees than St John’s. At the time, St John’s was located in the unassuming ‘Tin Temple’, constructed of wood and corrugated iron, in the vicinity of the present-day Noord Street taxi rank. The school had no playing fields.

Unable to compete with the better-resourced government schools in difficult economic times, St John’s College’s enrolment figures declined rapidly. By 1905, only forty-odd boys remained in the school, which was soon in substantial debt. The parish church, unable to sustain the school, handed it over to the Anglican diocese. Thus, St John’s became a diocesan school. But the general consensus was that the school was a ‘sinking ship’. Closure seemed imminent and inevitable.

As a measure of last resort, Archdeacon Michael Furse, who was the chairman of the College Council, requested the Community of the Resurrection to take charge of the school. The Community of...

In 1985 I found a brown A4 paper envelope at the Triomf municipal rubbish dump. The Triomf dump was a popular place for students to look for old furniture and household items, faded Tretchikoff prints, magazines and books. The dump no longer exists. The A4 brown paper envelope, which had a date, 1979, written on it in pencil, was found on the top of other rubbish in a large skip so must have been newly thrown away. It seemed likely that ‘Dad’ had passed away circa 1979, and that his family had kept some of his things, finally throwing them out in 1985. This small archive has intrigued me ever since. The archive attests to how some items are 'time travellers' and are kept, while other items are thrown away - and then found again. From these scant artefacts I have attempted to determine what Mr Man Tong’s  life in Richmond might have been like.

The material in the brown envelope consists of the business records of a Mr Man Tong from Canton (Guandong province) in China who ran a grocery shop at 25 Stanley Avenue, Richmond, in the 1940s until 1953. His real name was Li Guang He, as this is how he is addressed in the six letters received from a family member in Foshan in China. Man Tong was a generic nickname for a Chinese man, yet Li Guang adopted it as his ‘trade name’ for both his business and various local relationships. Presumably Mr Man Ton also came from Foshan...

JC Smuts was born on the farm Bovenplaats, part of Ongegund near Riebeek West, in the then Cape Colony, and what is now the Western Cape, to parents Jacobus Abraham and Catharina Petronella (nee de Vries) on 24 May 1870.

Bovenplaats by A Pretorious, 1986 (Collection University of Stellenbosch, R72)

Jacobus and Catharina Smuts, 1893 (by J Gribble, Paarl. Wikimedia Commons)

A picture of Mary Tait, one of Smuts’ granddaughters on a visit to Ongegund in 2019 (Chris Murphy)

The house in which he was born still stands, somewhat incongruously as part of the PPC Riebeeck facility after the farm was purchased for its lime deposits in 1946. After a period of neglect the main farmhouse was demolished, but Smuts’ birthplace was restored under the guidance of renowned architect Gawie Fagan, in...