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Heritage Route
Explore the rich history and cultural significance of our municipality’s Heritage Route.
Heritage Route
Did you know?
On 31 May 1961 a monument honouring all who fought and all who died during the Anglo-Boer War was unveiled by the then Prime Minister, Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, in Vereeniging.
Former President Nelson Mandela officially signed the New Constitution of South Africa on 10 December 1996. Sharpeville was chosen as the venue for the signing of one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world.
Vaal Teknorama Museum
Witkop Blockhouse
Maccauvlei Golf Course (Garden of Remembrance)
Peace Negotiation Site
Sharpeville human rights Precinct – Sharpeville Memorial
Peace Monument
Constitution Square
The Vaal Teknorama Museum is the Regional Museum of the Sedibeng District Municipality. The Vaal Teknorama Museum also houses the Heritage Section of the Sedibeng District Municipality.
The Vaal Teknorama Museum boasts with an interesting exhibition featuring the mind boggling pre-history of the area. This includes paleontology, stone age and iron age artifacts.
Modern history in the museum tells the visitors the establishment history of the towns in the Sedibeng Region and the important people related to the history.
The industrial development of the region steps to the foreground in the Heritage Exhibition because of its importance in the area.
The Sedibeng Region boasts with several Heritage Sites related to the South African War of 1899 – 1902. The town Vereeniging and its people also played very important roles in bringing the war to and end. Therefore part of the Heritage Exhibition is dedicated to the South African War.
Residents of the area were involved in national and international conflicts and exhibitions on the First and Second World War form part of the exhibitions at the Vaal Teknorama Museum.
The Liberation Struggle forms an integral part of the history of South Africa. The Vaal Triangle played a central role during this era of our history. The exhibitions at the Vaal Teknorama Museum consist of a whole section dedicated to the Liberation Struggle in the Vaal Area from the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 to the signing of the New South African Constitution in 1996.
The first blockhouses were built on the orders of the British Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Lord Roberts in 1900. The main aim of the blockhouse was to protect the railway lines, which were the main supply route for the British army. These blockhouses were two storey constructions built with stone. The entrance to the structures was through a door on the first floor, seven to eight feet off the ground, which was made accessible with a ladder. Each blockhouse cost between 800-1,000 pounds and took approximately three months to build. These blockhouses were extremely effective as not one bridge near them was blown, as was the practice of the Boer forces. The Witkop Blockhouse is an example of this type of blockhouse. In the Eastern Transvaal smaller blockhouses were built from corrugated iron.
As the Anglo-Boer War progressed the Boer forces launched the phase of guerilla tactics (the first time that this sort of warfare had been employed), which made it more complex for the British troops to bring them to battle. Lord Milner, the British High Commissioner of the Cape, suggested extending the line of blockhouses away from the railway lines and building them across the veldt to literally fence the Boers in. A cheaper, easily constructed blockhouse was designed to make this plan practical. These blockhouses were also made from corrugated iron and were round, making it even easier to construct in the shortest time; six hours to be exact!
To protect the blockhouses from possible attack a low stone or sandbag wall was built around it and a trench was dug. Wire entanglements were twisted together and anchored around the forts to make it even more tricky for the Boers to get near. Bells and tins were connected to the wire to act as alarms. A blockhouse was always built on a rise so that the troops could survey the surrounding area. The blockhouse was a successful strategy in that aided in the surrender of the Boers.
The Witkop blockhouse is situated on the R59, near the Engen garage (Traveling South from Johannesburg). It is one of only fifty blockhouses left in the country.
With the declaration of war between the Boers and British in October 1899, countries within the Commonwealth offered assistance to Britain out of loyalty for their Motherland. Prime Minister Barton of Australia had said, “The Empire is one nation, and if so much as a quarter is attacked, so is another.” Three countries that are best remembered for their participation in the war are Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
7,000 to 8,000 Canadian troops were sent to South Africa and 16 nurses served. 200 to 300 Canadians died during the skirmishes. The Australian troops that were sent totaled 16,175 and eight New Zealand Contingents were sent.
The Garden of Remembrance, situated at the Maccauvlei Golf Course, is the final resting place for seventy-four Canadian, Australian and New Zealand soldiers who died in the Vereeniging/Meyerton District during the Anglo-Boer War. These soldiers were initially buried at Klip River, Meyerton, Vereeniging and Engelbrechtsdrift and were reburied at Maccauvlei.
An interesting grave at the site is of Lieutenant Robert McKeich who was a member of the 2nd Brigade of the New Zealand Contingent. He was killed at Nitnengt, near Vereeniging, on June 4th 1902. Lieutenant McKiech was the last officer killed in the war, as peace had been declared on 31 May 1902.
Mr. HF Oppenheimer officially opened the Garden of Remembrance on 12 March 1961.
The Anglo-Boer had begun to take its toll on the Boer Nation. The soldiers saw their women and children dying in Concentration Camps, their farms and property being looted and destroyed and their fellow comrades being captured and placed into Prisoner-of-War Camps outside of their Motherland.
The war between the two Boer Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and Britain had ripped throughout South Africa from October 1899. It was a war for Boer independence and for British supremacy, as the British were already in control of the Cape Colony and Natal. By 1902 the Boers realised that the only way to ensure self-preservation was to reach an agreement to end the war. President Burger of the OFS had said to the Boers, “ We have lost so much already that it would be hard, indeed, to lose our independence as well. But, although this matter is so near to our hearts, we must still listen to the voice of reason. The practical question, then, which we have to ask ourselves is, whether we are prepared to watch our people being gradually exterminated before our eyes, or whether we should not rather seek a remedy.”
Sammy Marks, businessman, founder of Vereeniging and personal friend of President Paul Kruger from the Transvaal, offered a site in Vereeniging for the Boers and British to negotiate a Peace Agreement. On the misty morning of 15 May 1902 sixty delegates from the Boer Republics and sixty delegates from Britain met at a site at Vereeniging Brick and Tile (present-day Vereeniging Refractories). A marquee tent had been erected for the negotiations to take place under and was called the “Tent der Saamekoms” (meeting tent). Barbed wire surrounded the negotiation site and sentries heavily guarded it. A shroud of secrecy surrounded the negotiation process, which caused major frustration for the press who tried in vain to determine what was progressing inside the camp.
A resourceful journalist for the London Daily Mail, Edgar Wallace, had the fortunate advantage of knowing one of the sentries on duty at the negotiation site. Each day he would travel from Pretoria to Vereeniging by train and sit in the coach, read a newspaper and smoke a pipe. Each day the guard would walk to the fence closest to the station and wipe his nose with one of three coloured handkerchiefs. A red one meant that there was a hitch in the negotiation process, a blue one that the negotiations were running smoothly and a white one that peace would definitely be signed. In this manner Wallace was able to cable the news that the Boers had surrendered to the British to London 24 hours before the news was made official.
Peace was signed on 31 May 1902 at Melrose House in Pretoria.
The negotiation site is situated at Vereeniging Refractories’ cricket pitch and was former President FW de Klerk officially opened a memorial at the site on 31 May 1992.
Monday, 21 March 1960, was the date chosen by the PAC for a national launch of the first phase of their Positive Action Campaign against the minority rule in South Africa. The first phase of the campaign was targeted at the pass laws, the most reviled of all the apartheid laws.
The pass system ensured that husbands and wives were separated if one could not obtain a permit to reside in the same area as the other; children were separated from their parents as children over sixteen had to obtain a special permit to reside in the same area as their parents if they stayed outside the Bantustan reservation; Black men and women could not work for whom they chose as a special permit had to be obtained to look for work, and the permit was only valid for a limited period. Anyone not adhering to the pass law regulations would face arrest and imprisonment.
The campaign was lead by the PAC President at the time, Mr. Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe. His intention was to organize a peaceful, mass demonstration where every Black pass law holder would march to their nearest police station, without their passes, and offer themselves up for arrest. The principal aim of the campaign was to ensure that a large number of the Black labour force was behind bars, thus crippling the industries and forcing the Government to accept the PAC’s terms.
In a letter written to the Commissioner of the SAP, Major-General CI Rademeyer, two days before the planned march, Sobukwe wrote, “…We will surrender ourselves to the police for arrest. If told to disperse, we will. But we cannot expect to run helter-skelter because a trigger-happy, African-hating young white police officer has given thousands or even hundreds of people three minutes within which to remove their bodies from his immediate environment.”
These words would later prove to be haunting.
On 21 March 1960, in a little known township called Sharpeville, demonstrators gathered at the police station in Seeiso Street. Saracen armoured vehicles were stationed in the surrounding area and SAAF jets flew overhead. The policemen on duty that day were nervous as many were facing a crowd situation for the first time, and the memory of nine policemen that were killed by an angry mob in Cato Manor near Durban two months before, was fresh in their minds.
It is not known what the exact number of demonstrators were there on the day. The police reported 8000, the superintendent reported 5 000 and the PAC reported 2 000. The crowd was relaxed, although rowdy. They were singing and shouting political slogans. They sang songs like Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika and Senzane na iAfrika and shouted slogans like Izwe Lethu, I’Afrika which means “our country.” The exact reason for what was to happen is uncertain. Witnesses stated that a policeman was accidentally pushed over, feared for his life and started to pull his trigger. No order to fire was given, however the policemen started firing on the crowd for 20 to 40 seconds after hearing the initial gunshot. After the guns stopped there was silence for a long time. Many witnesses to the Sharpeville Massacre recall the rain that fell after the tragedy that washed the blood off the streets. One witness, Mr. Ruben Rapoetsoe, recalls, “Immediately after the massacre, the rain came and cleaned the despair from the streets.”
Sixty-nine people lay dead in the streets of Sharpeville, 180 lay injured. Seventy per cent of those killed were shot in the back. A massacre of innocent people. That same day two demonstrators were killed at Vanderbijlpark and five at Langa and Nyanga in Cape Town.
Soon after the massacre, the Government banned the PAC and the ANC, a State of Emergency was declared and most of the country’s leading anti-apartheid activists were arrested or forced to work underground. The question of apartheid was brought up for the first time in the United Nations Security Council and the international community started putting pressure on the South African Government to end the racist regime. The Sharpeville Massacre can be seen as the beginning of the end.
To honour those lives lost during the Sharpeville shooting and to all those who died for the liberation of South Africa, the Sharpeville Memorial was opened on 21 March 2002, a day now known as Human Rights Day. It is located in Seeiso Street in Sharpeville, opposite the police station where the shootings took place.
The Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 left a bitter taste for the Afrikaner Nation. By 1902 the Transvaal and Orange Free State Republics were almost entirely under enemy occupation and the Boers were outnumbered six to one by the British military. The Boers had no other choice but to surrender.
The war began in October 1899 and the British were convinced that the war would be concluded by Christmas that same year. Although the world’s greatest imperial power outnumbered the Boers, in fighters and in weaponry, they required nearly three years to defeat the tough nation of fewer than half a million. The Anglo-Boer War can be seen as a military campaign against civilians.
By the end of the war 448,000 imperial and colonial troops fought in the Anglo-Boer War, 22,000 of which died (14,000 of these died from illnesses). 87,360 troops fought for the Boers, 7,000 of which died and almost 27,000 died in the Concentration Camps. A little known fact is that almost 20,000 Blacks died in the Concentration camps too (the official British figures state 14,145 deaths, but the latest research shows that the numbers are more in the region of 20,000).
After the war the land of the two Boer Republics was in turmoil, especially in the Orange Free State. Outside of the largest towns there was hardly a building left, about a tenth of their livestock remained and in most areas no crops had been sown in nearly two years. Many returning soldiers were met with shock as their farms had been destroyed. This was a nation on their knees. Herman Charles Bosman wrote after the war, “ … My home was burnt down. My lands were laid waste. My cattle and sheep were slaughtered… My wife had gone into the concentration camp with our two children, and she came out alone. And when I saw her again, and noticed the way she had changed, I knew that I, who had been all the way through the fighting, had not seen the Boer War.”
Although the Boer nation lost their freedom to the British, they never gave up their fight for Afrikanerdom and quickly picked up the pieces of their lives after the war. A truly great feat for any nation to achieve.
On 31 May 1961 a monument honouring all who fought and all who died during the Anglo-Boer War was unveiled by the then Prime Minister, Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, in Vereeniging. Vereeniging was chosen as the site for the monument because the peace negotiations that ultimately ended the war took place in Vereeniging.
The monument was designed and crafted by renowned artist Coert Steynberg (he was also responsible for the Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek and the Kruger Bust in the Kruger National Park).
The mediums used for the creation of the monument are granite, from the quarry at Leeukop, and steel, which was cast at the Iscor works in Vanderbijlpark. Grey-white granite was chosen so that the monument is not a representation of a somber past, but a bright future.
The monument comprises a base, a reclining figure and a steel structure rising up from the figure. Engraved on the base are a soldier’s hat, a bandolier, a wreath and a resting gun. All these represent peace. On either side of the monument is the coat-of-arms of the Transvaal and Orange Free State, the two Boer sides that fought in the war. The reclining figure represents the wounded Boer nation who lost their freedom to the British. Steynberg decided not to dress the figure in soldier’s gear as he wanted the monument to have a universal and timeless appeal. This suggests that the monument not only represents the heroes of the Anglo-Boer War, but anyone who has fought for a cause, be it on a national or international level or on a personal level; it represents anyone who has lost his battle.
The steel structure rising up from the soldier represents a strong spirit rising from a defeat. It represents the strength of the human spirit and the perseverance that will eventually win. The motto of the monument is “Wounded but not Defeated”, a clear statement that reaffirms the meaning of the Peace Monument, and what it will mean for our generations to come.
The Constitution of South Africa has an interesting history.
In 1910, Britain withdrew from the government of South Africa and the country became a Union. The new Government adopted its new Constitution in 1910, which effectively gave rights to the white minority and took away the voting rights of the majority. On 31 May 1961 South Africa became a Republic and adopted its second Constitution. This ensured that the rights of the Blacks were taken away. In 1983 South Africa’s third Constitution was signed and this created a tricameral Parliament. There was a separate Parliament for Whites, Coloureds and Indians.
This Constitution excluded the Blacks and automatically made them citizens of the homeland where they were born and they had no rights outside these homelands.
On 2 February 1990 the National Party Government unbanned political parties, released political prisoners and detainees and unbanned political activists, such as Nelson Mandela. This fundamentally lead to the negotiation process to end the apartheid regime and to begin building a democratic South Africa.
In 1994 twenty-six parties negotiated and adopted an interim Constitution that gave the voting right to all South African citizens. This Constitution was in place for two years and during this time the newly elected ANC Government worked as the Constitutional Assembly and drew up the final Constitution.
Former President Nelson Mandela officially signed the New Constitution of South Africa on 10 December 1996. Sharpeville was chosen as the venue for the signing of one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world. Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa, Chairperson of the Constitutional Assembly, best explained the reason the Vaal was chosen to play host to this historic event:
“At Vereeniging in 1902, a treaty between the British and the Boers effectively disenfranchised the black majority. And here at Sharpeville, tragic events revealed starkly how far removed we were from human rights culture.
Here at Sharpeville, in Vereeniging, both powerful symbols of past relationships between South Africans, we are making a break with the past. A break with the pain, a break with betrayal. We are starting a new chapter.”
The historical importance of the negotiation process that took place in Vereeniging in 1902 to end the Anglo-Boer War and the tragedy of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 played as the backdrop to the signing of Constitution. The survivors of the Sharpeville Massacre were invited as honourary guests on the day.
After the signing Mandela proceeded to Sharpeville where the shootings took place and laid a wreath on a memorial stone to honour the victims of the Sharpeville Massacre, after which he opened Constitution Square at the Vereeniging Civic Centre. In his speech on 10 December 1996, he said: “… we will redeem the faith, which fired those whose blood drenched the soil of Sharpeville and elsewhere in our country and beyond.
Today we humbly pay tribute to them in a special way. This is a monument to their heroism.
Today, together as South Africans from all walks of life and from virtually every school of political thought, we reclaim the unity that the Vereeniging of nine decades ago sought to deny.”
The Constitution became law on 18 December 1996 and for the first time all South Africans of every race, creed, religion and sex have the right to human dignity, equality and freedom.