Non-South African ’undesirable1 unattached women were regularly 54
deported under the Urban Areas Act. In most illicit liquor cases, however, much less drastic measures were taken - offenders paid fines. In many
cases up to £5, they preferred seven days’ imprisonment, and would also often choose fourteen days instead of the £10 penalty for possessing skokiaan. In some parts of the slums, there were organisations providing a sort of insurance to pay fines. The fines brought in thousands of pounds in the late 1930’s, and a couple of hundred thousand gallons of ’Native Liquor’ was destroyed each year. Women were also involved as intermediaries in the illicit supply of ’European’ liquor to compounds or in the central areas of the city. An unofficial commission asserted that there were indeed
55 prostitutes in the slums and dance-halls there.
Were liquor-brewers mostly single women out to make big money (the line the municipality took) or, on the contrary, . almost all respectable wives driven to supplement their husbands’ paltry incomes (as most Africans asserted)? The weight of evidence favours the latter claim, for the late 1920’s and the 1930’s at any rate. On the one hand, the municipal social worker, examining several cases of unattached women in Western Native Township in early 1938, noted how many were deserted wives from Basutoland,
53 Umteteli wa Bantu, 8 Sept. 1923, 16 May 1925; A. N. Wilson, ’The Underworld of Johannesburg’, in A. Macmillan (ed.), The Golden City Johannesburg (London, 1937?), 158; Umteteli, 17 March 1923; Report of the Native Economic Commission, 110.
54 Umteteli, 25 Jan. and 2 March 1929; Report of the Native Farm Labour Committee, par. 459*
55 SOAS M4581, Evidence of II. Britten, a magistrate, to the NEC, 7361-2; Phillips, Bantu in the City, 178; The Illicit Liquor Problem.... Unofficial Commission, 9, 10, 15, 18.
sub-tenants brewing skokiaan for ’easy money’: ’The location is not a home to them but only a convenient place of business’. One Skokiaan queen had. put aside a comfortable sum of money over the years; she now wanted to acquire a stand, build her own house, and live in respectable retirement.
Examples could be cited of really wealthy liquor queens, like the woman arrested in Klipspruit who said she had some £700 put away in her house, and on release from jail complained her husband had spent the
additional £200 she had buried in her yard. Even the Sophiatown Ratepayers Association, while calling liquor queens ’martyrs of the race’ and ’victims of a bad economic system’, asserted that they were among the few Africans who could afford higher education for their children. The Manager of the Municipal NAD summed up his verdict:
The big liquor makers and sellers are women who are not affiliated to any particular man here - those who are generally known as your skokiaan queens. These people come here purely for the purpose of making liquor, not because of the lack of wage, anyway, but because of the ease with which they can make a big income...But with the majority of decent families, the wife goes out to do charring, or washing, or something like that, no, they do not resort to liquor.
At the end of the decade, he was no less vigorously forthright and told the 1938 Conference on Native Juvenile Delinquency, ’The mawkish attitude that "the natives are so poverty stricken that the poor things must turn
56 to liquor selling" should be dropped’.
56 Johannesburg Native Affairs Committee Minutes, 21 Feb. 1938; SOAS M4581, Evidence of Detective Hoffman, 7656-7, ’Statement by the
Sophiatown and Martindale Non-European Ratepayers Association’, foil. 7725, and Ballenden, 8334; VUL, AD843, B56(d), Conference on Native Juvenile Delinquency, G. Ballenden, ’The Situation as Viewed by Muni cip al Autho ri ti e s’.
As against this viewpoint, Africans repeatedly told the Native Economic Commission of the economic compulsion upon women to become beer- brewers; they were backed up by more disinterested witnesses like Detective Hoffman:
Do you really think that the payment of low wages has anything to do with the present illicit
traffic? — I do. I think that women brew liquor simply for the sake of making both ends meet. That is my experience.
So that a reasonable improvement in the level of wages should do something towards reducing the trouble? — Yes, I certainly think so.
Ellen Hellmann’s research in a Doornfontein yard in 1933-4 underlines this judgment emphatically. She described convincingly the poverty, the
constant economic struggle of the hundred African families she studied there, and the absolutely central importance of the earnings of the women, which were overwhelmingly derived from the sale of beer they had brewed. Rooiyard provides classic accounts of the lanes and alleyways of the yard, which were ’literally subterranean cellars’, where the tins and drums of beer were sunk into the ground for fermentation and concealment. The
women there sold mainly to male and female domestic servants; the proximity of the yards and rooms of Ferreirastown, Doornfontein and Prospect to mines and suburbs gave them superior attractions compared to the municipal
locations, where police and local surveillance were greater and the potential market was smaller. The women brewed usually on Tuesday and Friday; the
size of their clientele would depend on the quality of liquor which they offered, their credit facilities and the number of their (more often their husband’s) friends and relatives. They also organised dances and concerts to attract customers and boost sales, showing unaccustomed mutual helpfulness at these functions. Beer-brewing fulfilled different economic functions according to a woman’s marital status:
The married woman supplements her husband’s income by selling beer. She supports the entire family when he is unemployed. The single woman, widow or deserted wife can by means of the beer-trade maintain her
independence and freedom of choice in regard to domicile.57
Clearly the centrality of beer to economic and social life in Johannesburg was a potential problem of some magnitude for the churches, especially those like the Methodists with a strong temperance tradition. The liquor trade was not a matter of a few ’loose’ women whom missionaries might resign themselves to hardly influencing; it pervaded the way of life of the bulk of the city’s poor black families. Not only did beer necessitate the disciplining of some women church members, but it also prevented
brewers, should they so desire, from attending Sunday services, as the busiest selling-time was over weekends. Rooiyard women explained to Hellraann, ’Here beer is our church.’ The 1935 Unofficial Commission, on which Anglicans, Methodists and American Board had representatives, concluded that the prohibition of kaffir beer had been a ’grave mistake’, which
indicates the impact of this question on the churches. The commission
called for the legalisation of beer and the raising of African wages; neither request was fully implemented.^
d) Washerwomen
Although the only African woman to die in the 1904 plague in 59 Johannesburg was a fifty year old washerwoman from New Goch Location, black women in fact found themselves generally edged out of laundry work
57 SOAS M4581, 7656; Hellmann, Rooiyard, 37, 39, 45-6, 53. 58 Hellmann, Rooiyard, 101; Unofficial Commission, 41. 59 Rand Plague Committee, Report, 9.
as a n occupational niche until the beginning of the 1920’s. It was licensed
Zulu ’washboys’ who washed the clothes of white Johannesburg instead, at first at various irregular washing sites within the municipal area, but after 1907 out at the Klipspruit washing site. A few hundred cement washing bins were built, there were corrugated slabs, together with ’beautiful clean piped water’, a wringing room and an ironing room. By 1920, washing fees no longer feature in the reports# The appetite of secondary industry for male labour, together with the growth of commercial laundries, provided the
structural underpinning of this change; washing was also being viewed by then as’the sphere of native females’. The shift of outlook was one which African women could only approve. The sign of the times appeared too in a 1917 reference by the Anglican woman missionary at the hostel to residents trying 'to cheat us too, and take in washing, at the expense of our coal and water’. In Western Native Township, a clothes washing place was built