"Many Faces of Johannesburg" a Johannesburg Travel Page by cybernation

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Apartheid Riot Vehicle @ Apartheid Museum

Johannesburg why Johannesburg?

WHO gave his name to the city of Johannesburg when it was founded in 1886? The historians are unable to decide.

What is not in dispute is that it was named after a man named Johann. But Johann was a common Dutch name in the late nineteenth century, and there are a number of Johanns who could claim credit. The confusion can be blamed on a blustery wind which in the summer of 1886, blew away the tent of commissioner Carl von Brandis as he arrived to proclaim the new town to a motley crowd of gold prospectors.

Among the records to disappear on that stormy night, were the plans and instructions from the Surveyor General, believed to have announced - and explained - the new name. For Johannesburg was proclaimed in a great hurry - it had to be; the flood of gold prospectors had already begun. As a result, the decision bypassed the usual government procedures, and was left entirely in the hands of the Surveyor General's office, temporarily headed by one Johann Rissik.

When gold was discovered in mid-1886, the state sent two men, Rissik and Christiaan Johannes Joubert to investigate the area and choose a site on which a town could be built. Did the two decide to call the town Johannesburg because Johann was a name they both had in common?

Ten years were to pass before anyone sought to enquire as to where the name originated. In February 1896, the Swiss Consul in Johannesburg asked the government to kindly explain the name. A letter from the State Secretary's Office advised him that the town was named in honour of Rissik and Joubert.

Anna Smith, once the chief librarian of Johannesburg, who has written a useful reference book on the origin of many Johannesburg street and suburb names, quotes Rissik's daugher-in-law, who says her faither-in-law told her that Joubert suggested Johannburg as the name, in honour of Rissik. As Rissik thought the name too harsh and difficult to pronounce, he suggested Johannesburg, noting that Johannes was one of Joubert's own names.

Smith quotes an article in the newspaper Die Vaderland which in 1971 reported finding a departmental note written by Rissik and dated September 1896, in which he confirms that the town was named after Joubert and himself.

Dr Hans Sauer, the town's first district surgeon, and one of the first people to arrive on the reef after gold was struck, reminisced years later that he was present when Joubert decided to name the town after himself. When Sauer asked why Joubert had not used his first name, Christiaan, he said there was already a town called Christiana, so he was using his second name instead.

But there is also a strong lobby behind a third claimant to the title, veldkornet Johannes Meyer, the first government official in the area, and the first to attempt to bring order to the area with a system to peg out mine claims. Smith quotes early digger John Burrows, who said that "everybody at that time was under the impression that the suggestion to name the town after Johannes Meyer had been carried out."

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Nelson Mandela the living icon of Peace

Last Meeting at Liliesleaf Farm

IT was to be the last meeting at the secret headquarters of the banned African National Congress. The leadership had been worried for some time that police had learned of their hideout on a smallholding in Rivonia, 20 kilometres north of Johannesburg.

In the afternoon of 11 July, 1963, a dry-cleaning van drove up to the door. No-one had ordered dry cleaning. Armed policemen burst out . . . and from that moment, the word 'Rivonia' became synonymous around the world with the silencing of black resistance in South Africa.

The headquarters were on a smallholding called Liliesleaf Farm. The key leaders of the armed wing of the banned ANC, including Nelson Mandela himself, had operated from its outhouses for two years. In those days, Rivonia consisted of a rural patchwork of smallholdings, riding schools and farms, with few tarred roads. Today, it has been engulfed by the northern expansion of Johannesburg, to become one of the city's most luxurious suburbs, with property prices in the million rand region.

The Liliesleaf building still stands today, just one more bungalow-style house in a quiet side street, but the grounds have been sub-divided and sold off. Now there are plans to set up a Liliesleaf Trust, restore the area, and perhaps even turn it into a conference retreat for international negotiations, on the lines of the US retreat Camp David.

The outbuildings that belonged to the farm are now part of adjacent properties but these will be purchased in the coming months so as to restore the farm as it looked when the ANC bought it in 1961 for use as an underground base for the newly-formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC.

Nelson Mandela moved into the house in October 1961, while evading security police. He masqueraded as the gardener and cook, under the alias of David Motsamayi.

In December 1961, artist and designer Arthur Goldreich and his family moved in as the "legitimate" white owners of the house and as a cover for the covert MK operations. Goldreich was unknown to the security police, but he was one of the first members of MK. While Goldreich lived in the main house, the other ANC members lived in the outbuildings, to allay suspicions concerning blacks living in the "white" house.

The ANC operated from Liliesleaf Farm for two years before the security police found out about the location from police agent Gerard Ludi, who had infiltrated ANC structures.

Nelson Mandela describes the swoop on Liliesleaf in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom: "On the afternoon of 11 July [1963], a dry cleaner's van entered the long driveway of the farm. No one at Liliesleaf had ordered a delivery. The vehicle was stopped by a young African guard, but he was overwhelmed when dozens of armed policemen and several police dogs sprang from the vehicle. In the [the thatched cottage] they found a dozen men around a table discussing a document."

That document turned out to be the plan and outline of Operation Mayibuye, the MK plan for guerrilla warfare in South Africa. The men in the room included Goldreich, Raymond Mhlaba, Lionel Bernstein, Walter Sisulu, Bob Hepple, Andrew Mlangeni, Ahmed Kathrada and Dennis Goldberg. Mandela himself was absent - he was serving a five-year sentence on Robben Island for inciting workers to strike, and for leaving the country without a passport.

Mandela says in his book: "In one fell swoop, the police had captured the entire High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe."

It is significant that for a "terrorist" group planning sabotage, not one weapon or bomb was found on the property.

Mandela was brought up to Pretoria from the Island, having served nine months of his five-year sentence, and together with the other top MK members, was charged with sabotage, a crime carrying the death sentence. Says Mandela: "From that moment on we lived in the shadow of the gallows."

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Enoch Sontonga

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica(God Bless Africa)

AN act of vandalism at Braamfontein Cemetery helped locate the missing grave of Enoch Sontonga, the man who wrote South Africa's national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika (God bless Africa). The discovery of the grave, now a national monument, ended months of patient and ingenious detective work by city officials, archeologists and historians.

Sontonga, a teacher and lay preacher, wrote the first verse and chorus of the anthem as a hymn for his school choir. He died in obscurity in 1905, aged just 33, seven years before the African National Congress launched his hymn into prominence as an anthem of black struggle against oppression.

The search for Sontonga's grave started by chance at a dinner by the National Monuments Council in honour of then-President Nelson Mandela, in Cape Town in late 1995. A relative of Sontonga's who was present told Mandela that Sontonga was believed to be buried somewhere at the Braamfontein Cemetery in Johannesburg. Mandela called for a memorial to Sontonga in the cemetery, to be erected in time for the first post-apartheid Heritage Day.

The National Monuments Council instructed the Johannesburg Parks and Technical Services Department to investigate, with the project headed by Alan Buff, presently senior manager of Technical Support & Training.

But finding the grave proved far from simple. It took Buff almost nine months of intensive research - a lot of it in his own time - to locate the exact spot. One problem was that in the early seventies, the city council covered much of the long-disused cemetery with a metre of soil, and grassed it over, hiding all traces of the graves. Another problem was that although records of several graves under the name of Sontonga could be found, no grave could be found under "Enoch Sontonga".

Hal Shaper, author and musician, who at the time was researching the history of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, suggested looking under "Enoch". This tip proved correct: a grave number was discovered: grave number 4885, buried in the Christian Native section on 19 April 1905. Sontonga had died unexpectedly the day before, on 18 April 1905. Buff checked his death certificate - he died of gastro-enteritis and a perforated appendix. "It was a common cause of death at the time - the water was not very safe."

The Christian Native area consisted of three sections covering 10 acres, with 600 graves - but the plan for that section of the cemetery was missing. This called for sharp detective work.

Says Buff: "I took all the registers, marked off sections one by one and came up with an L-shape plan within which Sontonga was likely to be buried. But the problem was trying to establish the width of the pathways between graves and in what direction the graves were filled."

Infra-red photographs taken in 1979, which reveal ground disturbances by measuring variations in ground temperatures, helped solve some of these problems: they indicated grave shapes and pathways.

The Department of Archaeology at Wits University was called in to do a shallow excavation to help establish the precise burial spacing.

"This helped bring the search down to a triangle of graves of 40 square metres, containing 33 graves. I bought a bottle of whiskey in anticipation of the find," says Buff. But this still didn't answer the question: where was grave 4885?

"At the end of February, in the middle of my investigations, vandals removed tablets from the cremation wall," says Buff. The vandalism prompted Buff to take a look at documents from the cremation section of the cemetery - which he had not considered before - and there he discovered a plan of the cemetery.

"It was the original cemetery plan and showed the starting point of the section where Sontonga was buried. I could now count the graves and establish his grave - the 112th grave in the second portion."