Building the Grid: The Electrification of South Africa, 1882-2000

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Building the Grid: The Electrification of South Africa, 1882-2000

by

Mark Hackney

920208125

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

in the

Department of Historical Studies

of the

Faculty of Humanities

at the

University of Johannesburg

supervised by

Dr S. Sparks

January 2018

ABSTRACT

The analysis of South Africa’s state-run enterprises, also known as the parastatals, has typically

focused on the relationship between capital and labour, with especial attention to the ways in which the

country’s racial segregation and capitalism created and entrenched a system of racial capitalism. These

analyses have been influenced by Neo-Marxist trends in South African historiography, which intended to

critique the overarching racial social engineering of apartheid through case studies of the systems and

organisations that were created to foster the growth of industry and a “modern” South African state. Central

to the establishment of secondary industries was the development of a national electrical grid that could

provide the cheap electricity to drive industrial growth. Far from being a simple process of building and

connecting a series of power stations, the Electricity Supply Commission had to engage and compete with

existing suppliers, including municipalities and private companies, in order to construct a nation-wide,

interconnected electrical grid. This research examines the process of building Escom’s National Grid from

a ‘systems building’ perspective, which takes a non-deterministic view of how social factors and technology

influence each other to construct a large, complex technological system. By introducing the systems

building theoretical and methodological framework, this dissertation seeks to determine what factors, aside

from the relationship between capital and labour, shaped the formation of the National Grid.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIGURES .........................................................................................................i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................................................... ii

ABBREVIATIONS AND TERMINOLOGY ......................................................................................................... iii

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................. - 1 -

1. Literature Review ................................................................................................................................................ - 2 -

1.1 Systems, Systems Building, and Socially Constructed Artefacts........................................................... - 6 -

1.2 The Apartheid State, Modernisation, and Technopolitics .................................................................... - 14 -

2. Research Aims and Objectives .......................................................................................................................... - 17 -

3. A Note on Units and Currency .......................................................................................................................... - 18 -

CHAPTER ONE – POWERING THE RAND: THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE JOHANNESBURG

MUNICIPALITY................................................................................................................................................. - 20 -

1. Gas Power, Failed Stations, and Trams: Early Electrification in Johannesburg ............................................... - 24 -

2. A Colonial Commission and a Colonial Law: Johannesburg, the Power Companies Commission, and the

Transvaal Power Act of 1910 ........................................................................................................................... - 29 -

3. Interwar Changes, Post-War Integrations: From the Electricity Act of 1922 Onwards .................................... - 33 -

CHAPTER TWO – “HARNESSING THE FALLS”: THE VICTORIA FALLS AND TRANSVAAL

POWER COMPANY, 1906 – 1948 .................................................................................................................... - 42 -

1. “A Six Million Scheme”: Starting the Victoria Falls (and Transvaal) Power Company, 1906 – 1922 ............. - 45 -

2. Witbank’s Coal for Johannesburg’s Gold: The VFP after the 1922 Electricity Act, 1922 – 1948 .................... - 49 -

3. After Witbank: The Rand Extension Undertaking, Klip Power Station, and Vaal Power Station .................... - 54 -

4. Integration into the System: Escom’s Purchase of the VFP in 1948 ................................................................. - 56 -

CHAPTER THREE – RAILWAYS, COOKING RANGES, AND RURAL SUPPLIES: ELECTRICITY

OUTSIDE OF MINING AND SECONDARY INDUSTRY ............................................................................ - 62 -

1. The Cape Railways: Electrification in and around Cape Town ......................................................................... - 67 -

2. Railways in Natal: The SAR&H, Escom, and the Colenso Power Station ........................................................ - 68 -

3. The Cape Rural Supply System ......................................................................................................................... - 72 -

4. Requesting Rural Electricity Supply: The Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Operatief) Beperk and the Electricity Control

Board ................................................................................................................................................................ - 74 -

5. Electricity and the Domestic Sphere: Appliance Hire-Purchase Plans and Advertising ................................... - 77 -

CHAPTER FOUR – “RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST”: NUCLEAR

POWER, BANTUSTANS, TOWNSHIPS, AND LINKING THE NATIONAL GRID, 1960 – 2000........... - 84 -

1. Completing the Interconnections: Connecting the National Grid ..................................................................... - 86 -

2. “Thousands of Experts”: Escom’s Nuclear Power Projects, 1960 – 1990 ........................................................ - 92 -

3. Electrifying Non-White Areas: Electricity in Townships and Bantustans ........................................................ - 99 -

CHAPTER FIVE – THE NATIONAL GRID AS A HUGHESIAN LARGE TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM . -

102 -

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................................. - 113 -

1. Conclusions on the Research Aims and Objectives ........................................................................................ - 113 -

2. Limitations and Associated Recommendations for Future Research .............................................................. - 114 -

BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................................. - 116 -

i

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIGURES

Figure 1 - Map of Escom's Areas of Supply in 1929 ............................................................... - 9 -

Figure 2 - Map of Escom's Areas of Supply in 1944 ............................................................. - 10 -

Figure 3 - Organisational Diagram of the VFP and Related Entities ....................................... - 44 -

Figure 4 - Electricity Sales to Category of Consumer in 1930 .............................................. - 63 -



Figure 7 - Traction Consumer Sales, 1927-2000 ................................................................... - 65 -

Figure 8 – Domestic and Streetlighting Sales, 1927-2000 ..................................................... - 83 -

Figure 9 - Total Electricity Sales per Annum, 1926-2000 ................................................... - 107 -

Figure 10 - Map of Eskom's Operational Power Stations, 2017 .......................................... - 111 -

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly, to my family. Thanks for the support, love, and willingness to operate an extra

camera during archive visits over the past five years. We’ve laughed, cried, despaired together for

years, but the fact that most of it has been laughter is fantastic. Mom, for the coffee and staying

cool while I was freaking out about finding sources or meeting deadlines. Dad, for feeding the

pigeons so that they would sit next to my window during the day and keep me from having to only

stare at my computer screen. Graeme, for the countless episodes of our favourite animated shows

that we’ve watched while eating or just taking a break – I think we’ve discovered that there really

is a Simpsons quote for every situation!

To my exceedingly patient supervisor, Stephen Sparks, thank you for the nudges (and

occasional shoves) in the right direction. The periodic emails with recommended articles and

books have been a boon and the pithy replies to my queries and comments have always been

greatly appreciated. I’m sure that “don’t worry, you’ll get there” has become something of a mantra

for you since you first took me on as an MA student.

Likewise, to everyone at the Department of Historical Studies at UJ, your encouragement

and support have been a constant reminder that I have been in the right place since the early days

of my Honours degree.

Thanks to my old friends at Good News Church. Your love and encouragement over the

years have been treasured. Of course, Deo Gratias.

iii

ABBREVIATIONS AND TERMINOLOGY

AC – Alternating Current, see DC AEB – Atomic Energy Board AEG – Allegemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft ANC – African National Congress BLK – The Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Operatief) Beperk BSAC – British South Africa Company CGU – Central Generating Undertaking DC – Direct Current, see AC Distribution Power System – Any power system that operates at or below 132kV. ECB – Electricity Control Board, also referred to as “the Board” EdF - Électricité de France Escom – The Electricity Supply Commission, also known as the Commission. The abbreviated

form taken from Afrikaans was Evkom (from Elektrisiteitsvoorsieningkommissie). After 1986, the organisation’s name was officially changed to Eskom

IDC – Industrial Development Corporation MK – Umkhonto we Sizwe NP – National Party RCEW – Rand Central Electric Works Limited RMPS – Rand Mines Power Supply Company SAR&H – South African Railways and Harbour Administration SWAWEK – Suid-Wes Afrika Water en Elektrisiteitskorporasie (South-West Africa Water and

Electricity Corporation) Transmission Power System – Any power system that operates above 132kV. Unit – The ECB specified that a unit of consumed electricity would be equivalent to a kilowatt-

hour.1 VFP – Between 1906 and 1909, the Victoria Falls Power Company. After 1909, the Victoria Falls

and Transvaal Power Company. Watt (W) – A unit of power used to measure the quantity of generated electricity used. A watt is

the amount of power that would move an object of one kilogram over a distance of one metre in one second. Increasing quantities are designated by a prefix to denote the size of the increase in increments of one thousand. For instance, a kilowatt (kW) is 1 000 W; a megawatt (MW) is 1 000 000 W; and a gigawatt (GW) is 1 000 000 000 W.2

1 "Fourth Sitting," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 634, ref. MM 2879/22. 2 U. S. Department of Commerce, The International System of Units (SI), National Bureau of Standards Special

Publication 330 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), p. 17; Bureau International du Poids et Mesures, The International System of Units (SI), 8th ed. (Sèvres Cedex: Organisation Intergouvernementale de la Convention du Mètre, 2014), pp. 7, 144, https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf.

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INTRODUCTION

Electricity has long held a special role in human societies around the world – whether it is

in the form of natural phenomena, like the spectacular discharge of lightning in a storm, or in the

concerted efforts to control and direct electricity from storage batteries and power stations.

Especially in the religious sphere, socio-cultural myths endowed heroic figures with the ability to

control phenomena associated with electrical discharges, from Zeus’ thunderbolts to Thor’s

hammer that could destroy mountains with a single blow.1 The importance of electricity, and the

ability to control it, has also transferred across into contemporary popular culture, and these

abilities are typically conferred upon the most powerful of characters.

Villains, such as the evil Emperor in The Return of the Jedi (1983), have the ability to create

and direct bolts of electricity at will; while characters like the titular character in DC Comics’

Static are heroes who use their electric superpowers to fight against their nemeses. It is not only

the use of electricity that has importance, but the lack of electricity has been used as a narrative

device in popular films and video games. In Jurassic Park (1993), Close Encounters of the Third

Kind (1977), Super 8 (2011), and The Division (2016), the lack of electricity signifies a fracture in

the structure of the manmade world in which these stories take place. In the case of Jurassic Park

and The Division, the events that destroyed the local power supplies were as much creations of the

characters in the story as the electrical grids, whereas Close Encounters of the Third Kind and

Super 8 both use disruptions in the electricity networks to show that unusual and potentially

frightening events are about to occur to the story’s characters.

The underlying concept throughout these stories is that electricity has tremendous power,

and it is only something or someone truly exceptional who has the ability to generate, control,

disrupt, or restore the flow of current. However, the social importance of electricity does not come

1 "Thunderbolts and Lightning," Wellcome Collection, last modified March 29, 2017, accessed October 23,

2017, https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/thunderbolts-and-lightning; Hank Campbell, "Is Thor Mighty or Just Magic?," Science 2.0 (blog), October 14, 2013, http://www.science20.com/science_20/thor_mighty_or_just_magic-104019.

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directly from pop culture and popular narratives. It is instead the oft unspoken importance of and

reverence for electricity that informs the use of electricity in these stories. Likewise, the plots about

the adventures of superheroes and interactions with extra-terrestrials reinforce the cultural and

social importance of electricity.

When this cultural and social importance is considered alongside the advent of electricity

generation and use in industry, business, and domestic contexts, it is easier to understand the role

that electricity (as both a force of nature and as a tool) plays in developed and developing nations.

While this research does not aim to understand or discuss the use of electricity in the global

context, or to discuss the civil rights aspects of twenty-first century electrification, it is important

to remember that South Africa has had, and still has, communities that could be nominally

characterised as either “developed” or “developing” within its borders. It is this heterogeneity that

simultaneously reflects and is reflected by the establishment of the National Grid.

1. Literature Review

Central to this research are the works of Renfrew Christie and Thomas Hughes, two

historians who wrote two foundational texts in the study of electrification, albeit in vastly different

contexts. Christie wrote Electricity, Industry, and Class in South Africa, which studied the

electrification of South Africa from the late 1800s onwards, while Hughes’ Networks of Power

examined the process of electrification in North America and Europe between the 1880s and

1930s.2

The periods covered by the two authors are fairly similar, but their methodological

considerations were vastly different. Christie’s book is a critique of how the electricity grid was

established and maintained by the segregationist and apartheid governments in order to support

2 Renfrew Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1984);

Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

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state capitalism. As such, it is heavily influenced by Marxist socioeconomic theory, and examines

the role played by Escom in the functioning of South Africa’s racialised capitalist economy.3 The

core argument in Electricity, Industry and Class is that electricity and electrical technologies were

used throughout the eras of segregation and apartheid to aid in the establishment and continuation

of capitalist economic forms that had close ties to racial domination.

For the historians writing during the phase in which South African academic historiography

was shifting from more top-down forms of Marxist analyses to radical revisionism, much of the

discussion focused on the interplay between racial control and capitalism. More specifically,

Renfrew Christie was critical of Escom’s claims that electricity was being used in the “Spirit of

Progress.” This comes through clearly in Christie’s emphasis on the introduction of “labour-

saving” mechanisation in South African mining and industry, particularly in relation to the effect

that mechanisation had on black labour and the relationship between black and white labour in the

country.

The same emphasis on the interaction between capital and the racial hegemony in South

Africa runs through Nancy Clark’s Manufacturing Apartheid, although Clark’s study looks at the

broader history of the country’s parastatals, not just Escom.4 This look at the wider context helps

to place Escom within the larger economic and social strategies behind the formation of the

parastatals. The addition of socioeconomic factors, especially by introducing the analytical

category of socioeconomic class into South African history, helped to highlight the ways in which

racial issues had influenced the formation of the South African capitalist state. Christie’s main

argument is also focused on how cheap labour made cheap electricity easily available, which

facilitated interwar industrialisation.

3 A short, but clear, discussion of the main tenets and criticisms of Marxist theory in South African

historiography is Michael MacDonald and Wilmot James, "The Hand on the Tiller: The Politics of State and Class in South Africa," Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 3 (September, 1993): pp. 387-405. For the placement of Marxist and radical histories in the larger context of South African historiographies, see Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager and Bill Nasson, "Introduction," in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, eds. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager and Bill Nasson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1-16.

4 Nancy L. Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

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In the context of South African historiography during the 1970s and 1980s, it was necessary

to bring race and class to the fore in historical analyses to counterpoint the predominant state-

endorsed narrative. For revisionist historians, it was essential to demonstrate how the statements

of the benefits that a parastatal such as Escom claimed to offer to a wide group of South Africans

were not reflected in reality. For instance, while townships were still denied access to national or

municipal reticulation grids, visitors to the Hall of Achievement at Escom House in Johannesburg

were greeted with a mural which claimed that the exhibits (and by extension, Escom) were

“dedicated to the ideal of cementing together by common endeavour for achievement all the people

of South Africa regardless of race or creed into a brotherhood of mutual trust and goodwill…”5

Neo-Marxist historians made a valuable contribution to the study of South African history

by focusing on the interplay between race and socioeconomic class. However, the use of Marxist

theories of political economy neglects some other important aspects of the development of

technological systems. The idea of racial capitalism, for example, can be used to explain why the

grid stayed outside of the large urban townships for decades and the impact of cheap electricity on

the relations between black and white labour, but does little to help understand the choices that

were made in the process of constructing the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant in Cape Town. The

intent in shifting analytic focus away from the labour-capital dynamic is to analyse how other

socio-political forces affected these processes.

An examination of the construction of the Koeberg plant would necessarily refer to the

relationship between Escom, the apartheid government, and the much-studied links between

capital and labour but would also need to rely on discussions about the various reactor designs that

could have been used; the decision to use nuclear power instead of coal; and the wider international

context that affected South Africa’s nuclear ambitions. It is in the hopes of helping to expand the

discussion on the growth of the South African National Grid that this research will include the

theoretical and methodological tools introduced by Science and Technology Studies (STS).

5 Escom, Escom House (Johannesburg: Escom, 1936), p. 11.

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Hughes’ Networks of Power offers an alternative methodological and theoretical stance to

neo-Marxist political economy, one which emphasises the systemic nature of electrical grids. Not

only are electrical grids systems, according to Hughes, but they are socially constructed systems.

Technology is not seen as a monolithic intrusion into society, nor does society dictate to system

designers and builders what forms and uses technology should have. Instead, the flow of influence

between technology and society works in both directions in the same way that classical Newtonian

physics states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. The forces that

society and technology exert upon each other may not always be equally balanced, as specific

historical, sociological, political, economic, or material facets of a particular technology or

particular society begin to affect these interactions.

The Marxian trend in South African studies of electricity persisted after the transition from

apartheid to democracy as scholars worked to understand how the parastatal would fit into the

post-apartheid context.6 Largely, these studies have a significant focus on the application of how

changes in the organisation, as well as changes in wider societal contexts, have affected the

parastatal, whether from the perspectives of socio-economic problems, environmental issues, or

service delivery. These researchers have tended to ask why the grid was built, not how it was built.

That does not mean, however, that such research is without value in the context of this dissertation.

These researchers tend to look for underemphasised or ignored aspects of electrification that

systems theory or STS researchers might not have studied, such as gender or environmental

issues.7

Yet, it is the work done by researchers who have combined Marxian concerns about the

nature of the relationships between state enterprise, capital, and labour with a focus on the themes

6 For instance, see David A. McDonald, ed. Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid (Cape

Town: HSRC Press, 2009). 7 For example, Wendy Annecke, "Still in the Shadows: Women and Gender Relations in the Electricity Sector in

South Africa," in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HRSC Press, 2009), pp. 288-320; David Fig, "A Price Too High: Nuclear Energy in South Africa," in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), pp. 180-201; Liz McDaid, "Renewable Energy: Harnessing the Power of Africa?," in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), pp. 202-28.

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and methodologies of STS. While the influence of Marxist analysis is visible within these studies,

such work has helped to refocus research on the country’s parastatals from heavily focusing on the

interrelationships between labour and capital towards examining these relationships as one of

many factors that worked in tandem to influence South African industrialisation. In the vein of the

research undertaken by Faeeza Ballim, Stephen Sparks, and Antina von Schitzler on state-owned

enterprise it is the intention of this dissertation to examine the growth of the South African National

Grid through an STS-focused approach.8

1.1 Systems, Systems Building, and Socially Constructed Artefacts

Within the field of STS research, the literature published on the Social Construction of

Technology (SCOT) and the Social History of Technology (SHOT) creates the possibility of filling

in some of the gaps that remain in existing historical literature. The foundational text in this regard

is the book The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology

and History of Technology. 9 Based on the proceedings of a workshop held in the Netherlands at

the University of Twente in 1987, the book brings together research on the history and sociology

of technologies as diverse as Bakelite and Intercontinental Ballistic Missile guidance systems.

What makes this a valuable source in methodological terms is not just its primacy amongst the

works on SCOT/SHOT research, but also that many of the ideas used to study the wide-range of

technologies across a significant span of history are applicable to the study of South African

8 Faeeza Ballim. "The Evolution of Large Technical Systems in the Waterberg Coalfield of South Africa: From

Apartheid to Democracy," (PhD Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2017); Stephen John Sparks. "Apartheid Modern: South Africa's Oil from Coal Project and the History of a South African Company Town," (PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 2012); Stephen Sparks, "Between 'Artificial Economics' and the 'Discipline of the Market': Sasol from Parastatal to Privatisation," Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 4 (2016): pp. 711-24; Antina von Schnitzler, "Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 4 (2008): pp. 899-917; Antina von Schnitzler, "Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa," Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (November, 2013): pp. 670-93; Antina von Schnitzler, Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

9 Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

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electrification. These chapters are also not only methodological discussions, but also integrate the

discussion of methodology with relevant case studies.

For his part, Thomas Hughes did not only apply a systems-oriented view from an

engineering perspective to his work on the history of electricity, but also brought some of the

language of sociology into his analysis. This combination of engineering and sociological terms

turns all the parts of a technological system into artefacts, whether they are technological,

organisational, legislative, or infrastructural in nature.10 Using the notion of artefacts in the study

of a technological system emphasises the interaction between technology and society, rather than

viewing systems as a series of impenetrable “black boxes.” Turning towards sociological

understandings of technology helps to counteract the effects of technological determinism – if

systems and their components are socially constructed, then the final form of a system cannot be

said to have been set in place before the system is built.

The idea of “looking inside the black box” is a vital part of the sociological history of

technology. In this metaphor, the “content” of the system’s artefacts contained within an opaque

box. Before the advent of SCOT/SHOT studies, the designs and workings of systems and their

artefacts were either marginalised or entirely ignored. By examining the way in which the artefacts

are designed and constructed to work together in the overall system, it becomes possible to not

only see the system as socially constructed, but to also see how the artefacts within the system are

socially constructed. Ignoring the inner workings of a technological system tends to lead to linear

models of development and construction, which suggests that the system did not also have the

ability to fail.11

10 Thomas P. Hughes, "The Evolution of Large Technological Systems," in The Social Construction of

Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 45.

11 Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 15-18.

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The notion that society and technology push and pull against each other can offer insight

into the development of the electrical grid in South Africa. The process of building generating

stations, transmission networks, substations, and distribution grids did not unfold smoothly from

one side of the country to the other. The establishment of these systems and their associated

subsystems did not take place in political, economic, or social vacuums, nor were these aspects of

the South African nation-state left untouched by technological changes. This is best illustrated by

Hughes’ use of the term “reverse salient” to describe the growth of a system.

Adapted from military parlance, a reverse salient is any part of an advancing front that is

still attached to the front, but that has fallen behind the rest of the advancing line. In technological

terms, this occurs when the progress of building a new system is inhibited by social, economic,

political, or technological factors, thereby preventing or restricting the future growth of the system.

An advancing front is an apt metaphor for the extension of large, infrastructure-intensive

technological projects like the electrical grid, especially when looking at the maps that Escom

published that showed the progress of the grid on a national scale. The first of these maps, from

the 1929 Annual Report, simply shows the areas in which each of Escom’s Undertakings had been

licenced to supply power, so each Undertaking is demarcated by a circle centred on the power

station relevant to that Undertaking (Figure 1).

By the next time that such a map was published in 1944, these shapes had started to change

as the areas of supply were being slowly extended (Figure 2). The outline of each area no longer

took the form of a perfectly geometric shape but looked remarkably like the line of an advancing

front on a military map. There are parts of each area that have extended further than others, while

some regions closer to the centre of the Undertaking have yet to receive electricity. In particular,

the area surrounding Cape Town has a series of branches growing out from the centre that showed

how the electrification of the railways was helping to extend the grid.

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Figure 1 - Map of Escom's Areas of Supply in 192912

12 Electricity Supply Commission, 1929 Annual Report, p. 4,

http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1929%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

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Figure 2 - Map of Escom's Areas of Supply in 194413

13 Electricity Supply Commission, 1944 Annual Report,


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Consumers in the system need to be considered in relation to which artefact(s) they are

consuming, and by the socioeconomic variables that affect their choice of artefacts. This helps to

isolate which variables affect their behaviour in relation to the system, which is not particularly

useful for understanding how the artefacts are created, invented, or developed. It is useful,

however, for understanding the diffusion of these technologies throughout the system.14 This is

especially applicable to the study of issues such as the hire-purchase schemes that Escom and the

municipalities established to encourage the use of domestic appliances (see Chapter Three).

The concept of relevant social groups is taken from Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s

chapter in The Social Construction of Technological Systems. 15 This idea was put forward as

means of refining the understanding of how artefacts are rejected or adopted as newer

technological forms are introduced to consumers. Pinch and Bijker state that by defining the social

groups who are involved in producing, selling, or consuming the artefact, it can be determined

which factors in the system are causing reverse salients and critical problems that need to be

solved.16

Pinch and Bijker studied the development of the bicycle and examined the multitude of

ways in which the design changed as various social groups found their own reasons for accepting

or rejecting specific design choices. Hughes wrote about the battle between the companies founded

by George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison over whether electric distribution systems would

use Alternating Current (AC) or Direct Current (DC). In the case studies of the bicycle and

electrical grids, there were advantages and disadvantages inherent to the design of components or

14 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of

Technology," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 253-6.

15 Pinch and Bijker, "Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts," in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction of Technological Systems, pp. 11-44.

16 Pinch and Bijker, "Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts," in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction of Technological Systems, pp. 22-28.

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subsystems that affected how the technology was perceived and/or utilised by various social

groups.17

Analysing the electrical grid as a system constructed and shaped through the interaction of

society and technology widens the scope of the study to account for aspects external to the system

itself, but that helped or hindered the construction of the system. Hughes states that a combination

of systems analysis and sociological analysis can help identify the “geographical, economic,

organisational, legislative, contingent historical, and entrepreneurial conditions” that shaped the

design and use of cultural artefacts.18

The work done by Charles Perrow on the nature of technological systems and accidents

highlights the way that the interactions between the components in a system can produce

unexpected, and even catastrophic, results. Perrow examined the accidents in specialised, complex

systems in the fields of nuclear power, aeronautics, civil engineering, chemical and petrochemical

manufacturing, and marine shipping to understand how these systems can still fail. According to

Perrow’s book, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies, it is the same complexity

that these systems rely on to function correctly that also result in their failure.

Even components or entire subsystems that are introduced to make the overall system safer

or more efficient add extra layers of complexity that increase the likelihood of something going

wrong, and may be responsible for the accident in the first place.19 This theory about the way in

which components and subsystems interact to produce unintended results can be seen in the later

history of Escom, especially when the various regional undertakings established during Escom’s

first four decades were first starting to show signs of interdependence in the early 1960s.

Related to the systems building perspective introduced by Hughes and the risk-based

systems analysis of Perrow is the work done by David E. Nye on electrification in the United

17 Pinch and Bijker, "Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts," in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social

Construction of Technological Systems, pp. 21-33; Hughes, Networks of Power, pp. 108-9. 18 Hughes, Networks of Power, p. 405. 19 Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1984).

- 13 -

States. In particular, the influence of Thomas Hughes and the sociological turn in the history of

technology can be seen in Nye’s Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology,

while When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America reflects Perrow’s notion of

the fragility of highly complex technological systems.20

Electrifying America concerns the adoption of electrical technologies by Americans during

roughly the same period that Hughes covered in Networks of Power but examines the processes

by which electricity became rapidly integrated into Western lifestyles. Rather than looking how

the electrical grid grew in the United States by looking at the people who built the grid, Nye

examines how the technology was used and shaped by the consumers. These are both important

points about the development of new technologies – Thomas Hughes wrote about how the

electrical grid was created by relatively small groups of people who perceived the need for

engineering, political, and financial expertise in their work, while David Nye wrote about how the

technology was integrated into society to become such a fundamental part of modern lifestyles.

This point about the importance of electricity is continued in When the Lights Went Out.

Nye’s central argument is that electricity has become an intrinsic part of contemporary lifestyles

in the developed world, yet it is simultaneously a part of life that few people give much thought to

while the system is working. Electricity has become so much a part of modern conceptions of time

that a blackout is seen as something exceptional. However, as Nye states, blackouts are typically

viewed only as technical or engineering phenomena, not as something that is also a social

phenomenon.21

In this analysis, electricity and electrical grids become “infrastructure” in the sense of the

term that is used by Paul Edwards. Edwards states that technological infrastructure cannot be

viewed only as the physical aspect of a technological system, infrastructure must be seen as

20 David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1990); David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

21 Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, pp. 1-6.

- 14 -

simultaneously technical and social. There is a distinct separation between notions of infrastructure

in the developed and developing world, since technological implementation into society needs to

be reliable and stable if it is to reach the point where people no longer give it frequent thought.22

1.2 The Apartheid State, Modernisation, and Technopolitics

There seemed to be an inherent contradiction in the apartheid government’s modernising

goals and the concerted efforts to keep the country as racially segregated as possible, but the

formation of a technologically “modern” state formed a large part of government policy.23 This

modernising drive was exemplified in Escom’s frequent statements that electrification was being

done under the “Spirit of Progress,” so much so that the concept makes an anthropomorphised

appearance in the organisation’s official history, A Symphony of Power. 24 While the book serves

as a starting point for finding out the essential basic information about the parastatal, such as

constructing a chronology of important events, it also tries to present the parastatal as a nominally

progressive and positive organisation.

The theme of modernising the public and private spheres of South African lifestyles is tied

to the theme of progress, despite the fact that these processes of modernisation and progress were

unfolding rather unevenly across the country. Problematically, the dual themes of progress and

modernity have often been accompanied by the goals implicit in the drive to “civilise” colonial

and former colonial nations. In portraying Escom, and in later sections Eskom, as the group of

people who brought light and technology to dispel the darkness, the book links back to the idea of

lighting up “darkest Africa,” even if these connotations are subconscious.

22 Paul N. Edwards, "Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of

Sociotechnical Systems," in Modernity and Technology, eds. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 186-225.

23 Deborah Posel, "The Apartheid Project, 1948-1970," in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, eds. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager and Bill Nasson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 319-68.

24 S. R. Conradie and L. J. M. Messerschmidt, A Symphony of Power: The Eskom Story (Johannesburg: Chris van Rensburg Publications, 2000).

- 15 -

The overall tone of the book is one of harmonious interaction between the parts of the

system, a tone that sometimes confers a pseudo-religious importance on the organisation’s work.

The opening passage describes the narrative as the story of an organisation “…that says: let there

be light where there was darkness.”25 This heavy-handed allusion to a biblical passage ties back

to the theme of exceptionalism in social understandings of electricity – if electricity is exceptional,

then the use of electrical illumination must also be exceptional. By making the organisation

capable of bringing light to a place where there was only darkness before, Eskom becomes the

organisation that technologically triumphed over the natural order.

The final chapter in the book takes the form of a semi-Dickensian tale about the

conversation between a fictional future manager of “uEskom,” the Spirit of Progress, and the Spirit

of Ubuntu. The two spirits take the new head of uEskom through the organisation’s history to

celebrate the achievements of men such as Hendrik van der Bijl, while ignoring or glossing over

controversial or difficult issues that the parastatal has faced in the past.26

Renfrew Christie’s counter-argument is that the apartheid system used electricity for the

benefit of white South Africans, and that the notion of technological progress was an effective

cover for the state’s broader goal of maintaining the racial status quo. While he admits that there

were some benefits to electrification, Christie’s point is that the new technology was largely used

by the government and industrialists to further marginalise black labour. 27 This is related to the

function of all systems as problem-solving or goal-oriented organisations, especially when they

are regarded as solving problems specifically for the system designers or the consumers. 28 In the

South African context, the electrical grid was designed to offer maximum availability to mining,

secondary industry, and white residential areas.

25 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 7. 26 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 349-65. 27 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 2. 28 Hughes, "Evolution of Large Technical Systems," in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction of

Technological Systems, p. 47.

- 16 -

The intersection between the post-1948 government’s politics and modernising plans

created a socio-political system of “technopolitics” that proved to be useful for both enforcing

apartheid norms and for generating prestige for the state. The state’s interactions with other nations

on the global stage, as well as the government’s domestic affairs, was based on the formation of

white Afrikaner ethnic identity around a set of values that was traced back to European and African

origins. Gabrielle Hecht and Paul Edwards argue that this brand of South African exceptionalism

was instrumental in the choices and policies made regarding large-scale technological projects.29

This contributes to the “technological style” of the system – the way in which local and regional

socio-political factors influence the shape and growth of the overall system.30

The technopolitics of electricity supply by Eskom have been examined recently by Sylvy

Jaglin and Alain Dubresson in Eskom: Electricity and Technopolitics in South Africa, but this book

has a much more contemporary focus than this dissertation.31 In this book, the discussion of events

before the late-1980s is restricted to fewer than fifteen pages in the first chapter, and the later

chapters are examinations of post-apartheid policies on the supply of electricity after 1994. This is

helpful in understanding the effect of policy changes, such as a shift away from racial capitalism,

have affected the parastatal since the mid-1990s. However, this contemporary focus does little to

help explain how Eskom had become the largest supplier of electricity to South Africans at the

point of the apartheid/democracy changeover.

Deborah Posel warns of the dangers inherent in characterising the apartheid state as

founded solely on the basis of racial segregation, stating that by focusing only the state’s racial

ideology, historians run the risk of creating a superficial and inaccurate picture of the nature of the

state. Racial politics were an exceptionally large part of government policy between 1948 and

29 Paul N. Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht, "History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid

South Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 3 (September, 2010): pp. 619-39. 30 Hughes, "Evolution of Large Technical Systems," in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction of

Technological Systems, pp. 61-64. 31 Sylvy Jaglin and Alain Dubresson, Eskom: Electricity and Technopolitics in South Africa (Cape Town: UCT

Press, 2016), translated from Électricité et pouvoir en Afrique du Sud (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2015).

- 17 -

1994, but it is also important to remember that the history of racially delineated segregation goes

further back in time than 1948.32 This makes is important to not only concentrate on the racial

aspects of the government’s policy regarding electrification, but to also consider economic and

socio-political factors. There were certainly overlaps between the racial, political, social, and

economic aspects of electrification, but the focus should be split between these facets, rather than

emphasising only a single factor.

In expanding the focus to include a larger range of socio-economic factors, there is a subtle

shift from using the state-owned enterprises as case studies in critiques of larger social issues to

examining these organisations themselves. This allows for such research to show how state-owned

enterprise was also instrumental in other key aspects of South African social and political life. For

instance, Saul Dubow has written about the expansion of the railways in South Africa as both a

unifying force and a forum for promoting the ideals associated with modernity. Such an analysis

helps to portray the parastatals as organisations that not only reflected the existing status quo, but

that were used for political purposes other than entrenching and reinforcing racial segregation.33

2. Research Aims and Objectives

As already stated above, the question of why the South African National Grid was

established as already been fairly well answered. Instead, the aim of this dissertation is to examine

how the grid was established, moving beyond the emphasis on labour in the neo-Marxist revisionist

literature. The answers to these two questions are closely linked – the reasons for electrification

will have an impact on the way in which the electrical grid could (or could not) grow and change

over time. However, the emphasis placed on the final uses of electricity in South Africa during the

32 Posel, "Apartheid Project," in Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, pp. 319-20; Harold Wolpe,

"Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid," Economy and Society 1, no. 4 (1972): pp. 425-6.

33 Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp 180-82.

- 18 -

twentieth century has restricted much of the discussion to the ways in which technological change

was driven and used by the government to enforce the continuation of racial segregation.

It is true that the eras of segregation and apartheid both relied on the use of race as a key

descriptor for the formation of policy. However, South Africa should not be viewed in isolation

throughout the period under discussion. The country was part of a larger global network of trade,

politics, and ideas that had an effect on the course of events. There were times in which

international politics and alliances played a role in the process of electrification, just as there were

times when local politics and alliances played their role.

Keeping the existing literature on the electrification of South Africa in mind, supplemented

by the scholarship on the social construction of technology and technopolitics discussed above,

the following themes are points of interest:

• The development of the South African National Grid was neither teleological nor entirely

uninterrupted by other economic and social factors. What were these “reverse salients”

that affected electrification?

• How were the reverse salients corrected, whether by consumers, municipalities, private

companies, or national government intervention?

• Since much of the focus in the past has been on urban electrification, how did rural

electrification proceed?

3. A Note on Units and Currency

In the primary and secondary sources on electricity, a variety of units of measurement and

currencies have been used, which are usually specific to a period in time. The standard unit of

measurement for generated and sold electricity throughout South Africa has always been derived

from the watt, which is the amount of energy required to move a one-kilogram mass over a distance

- 19 -

of one metre in one second.34 All larger measurements are denoted by an added prefix that shows

whether thousands or millions of watts are being measured. One thousand watts is a kilowatt (kW),

while a million watts is a megawatt (MW).

In cases where physical quantities are being measured, such as the amount of coal

consumed by a power station, the units used in the original source have been used throughout,

rather than converting such measurements. Where the original sources have used imperial values

for physical measurements, the conversion into metric units is specified in parentheses after the

original quantity. Conversions have used the conversion factors specified by the National Institute

of Standards and Technology at the U.S. Department of Commerce.35

Similarly, monetary quantities are also given in the original denomination, but are not

converted into contemporary values. Unlike the units used for physical quantities and

measurements, currency values change constantly, and are capable of changing rapidly. This

makes any currency conversions outdated within days, or even hours, of the conversion being

made. This issue could be worked around by stating the date on which the conversion was valid,

thereby allowing for future conversions to be made based on records of currency changes.

However, this does introduce a second problem with converting currencies, namely the issue of

adjusting values to compensate for fluctuations due to inflation and the buying power of the

currency. For these reasons, all monetary amounts are given in the original denomination and are

left unconverted.

In all cases where numerical amounts have decimals, as would be the case for most

currencies and where units have been converted, a decimal point has been used instead of the usual

South African practice of using decimal commas.

34 U. S. Department of Commerce, The International System of Units (SI), p. 17; Bureau International du Poids et

Mesures, The International System of Units (SI), p. 144. 35 Ambler Thompson and Barry N. Taylor, Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI), NIST

Special Publication 811 (Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2008), pp. 40-69, http://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=200349.

- 20 -

CHAPTER ONE – POWERING THE RAND: THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE

JOHANNESBURG MUNICIPALITY

The Electricity Act of 1922 brought much-needed standardisation and centralised control

to the electricity industry across South Africa, but the legislation arrived at an awkward time in

the country’s electrification process. Electrification had started in the 1880s, but the growth of

local grids had been sporadic and uneven. Industrial concerns, mines, and municipalities operated

highly localised and low capacity systems. As the needs of secondary industry and mining groups

increased, electricity was becoming more widespread, but the lack of central control meant that

design decisions were left up to each company or organisation, which resulted in an overall

inability to interconnect these localised networks.

The Electricity Control Board’s enforcement of standards was vital for the growth of the

National Grid – standardisation ensures that any generating station can provide power to any

portion of the grid without the added engineering challenges of changing voltages or converting

between frequencies. The head-start that the municipal councils around the country had in

generating and supplying electricity means that the story of South Africa’s municipal suppliers is

closely linked to the 1922 Electricity Act and the ensuing development of a national electricity

network.

Before the Electricity Bill was enacted by the Union’s Parliament in late 1922, most of the

country’s electricity was generated by municipalities and private companies.36 With these

disjointed grids spread in clusters across urban areas, factors such as the frequency and voltage of

the electricity supply were determined by the equipment used in the generating facilities – if one

area of supply suffered an outage, it was extremely complicated to obtain temporary supply from

other areas until local faults were identified and fixed. In emergencies, such as when the

Johannesburg Municipality’s power station was struck by lightning in February 1922, residents

36 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 13.

- 21 -

were asked to reduce the demand on the station for “two or three days” while maintenance

engineers performed emergency repairs to the station.37

Although this chapter does not deal directly with the process of standardisation across the

National Grid, the establishment of such a country-wide system requires centralised control over

laws, generating capability, and infrastructure. The fragmented systems of municipal suppliers

were not conducive to standardisation, interconnection, or improved service delivery. As

electricity consumers found out in the early 1900s, relying on municipal supply in a non-

standardised grid could result in unexpected inconveniences and financial costs when the

municipality decided to upgrade or replace their generating station.38

Technical standardisation is often seen as a simplification of the processes, materials, and

working methodologies used to manufacture products or services, but the implementation of

standards also has the potential to add extra layers of technical difficulty to the working process.39

In the case of electrification, standards have greater potential to simplify the generation,

transmission, and distribution of electricity than to add complexity. Unified voltages, frequencies,

and materials allow for more cost-efficient operation of generating plants and distribution

networks. Logistically, consolidated control also offers technicians and engineers easier access to

stockpiles of components, thereby improving worker efficiency and working costs. Despite these

advantages, it is possible that regulation of the industry adds extra layers of complexity to the

process, even if it is only because the system’s complexity grows with each new addition to the

overall network.

Engineering entrepreneurs found that during the electrification of the United States

imposing standards and specifications onto a system that already has some developmental

37 "Power Station Trouble: Lightning Causes a "Surge"," Rand Daily Mail, February 22, 1921. 38 X. Y. Z. [pseud.], "The New Lighting Plant," The Star, March 3, 1906; "Lighting Regulations," Rand Daily

Mail, May 11, 1906; "The Electric Light: Increase of Voltage," Rand Daily Mail, May 11, 1906; Property Owner [pseud.], "Electric Installation: A Strong Protest," Rand Daily Mail, May 11, 1906; J. R. C. [pseud.], "Lighting Regulations," Rand Daily Mail, May 17, 1906.

39 Amy Slaton and Janet Abbate, "The Hidden Lives of Standards: Technical Prescriptions and the Transformation of Work in America," in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, eds. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 94-95.

- 22 -

momentum can introduce extra complications that engineers and investors did not foresee. In the

case of the United States, the choice between Alternating Current and Direct Current distribution,

as eschewed by George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison respectively, resulted in a “War of

Currents” between the two engineering magnates. The battle for supremacy in the American

electrical industry was characterised by grandstanding and fearmongering as engineers and

entrepreneurs fought to convince decision-makers and consumers alike of the relative merits of

their systems.40 Even though the highly publicised Westinghouse-Edison battles reached more

grotesque and controversial heights than the arguments about South African electrification, the

introduction of standards and legislation offers a glimpse into the nature of electricity generation

and consumption during the embryonic stages of the national South African grid.41

The process of drafting and enacting legislation also helps to show how the municipalities

viewed themselves in relation to their ratepayers, as well as showing how they viewed themselves

in relation to larger governmental groups at the provincial and national level. For many of

Johannesburg’s residents, the issue of electrification centred on the municipal government’s

responsibility to provide a certain level of service delivery to ratepayers. For some of the city’s

residents, however, electrical service delivery was not so straightforward. David Nye wrote that

people in the United States at the start of the twentieth century saw electricity as “…a political

issue, an element of spectacle, a means of transportation, a motive force, and a source of profit.”42

Even though Nye was writing about American electrification, it is also possible to see these themes

appearing in the electrification of Johannesburg.

40 Tom McNichol, AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006),

pp 77-94. 41 Hughes, Networks of Power, pp. 108-9; Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and

Letters, 1882-1952 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), pp 51-90; Jürgen Martschukat, ""The Art of Killing by Electricity": The Sublime and the Electric Chair," Journal of American History 89, no. 3 (December, 2002): pp. 900-921; Roger Neustadter, "The "Deadly Current": The Death Penalty in the Industrial Age," Journal of American Culture 12, no. 3 (September, 1989): pp. 79-87; Terry S. Reynolds and Theodore Bernstein, "Edison and "the Chair"," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 8, no. 1 (March, 1989): pp. 19-28 describe the macabre history behind one of the most infamous attempts to discredit Westinghouse’s use of Alternating Current.

42 Nye, Electrifying America, p. 138.

- 23 -

Johannesburg serves as a prime candidate for the study of municipal power supply in South

Africa. Aside from the city’s relative prominence in South African history during the twentieth

century, the residents of early Johannesburg were amongst the first city-dwellers in Southern

Africa to receive electricity through municipal supply. The first South African town to install

electric streetlighting had been the mining town of Kimberley in February 1882. The attempt to

illuminate the town’s streets had been a disappointing failure, since many of the streetlights had

been damaged en route to Kimberley. The lights underperformed so poorly that they were said to

be no brighter than “a glowing coal”.43 Johannesburg’s status as an early adopter of the relatively

new generation and distribution technologies means that it is possible to show how changes in

political, technological, and social factors affected – and were affected by – the process of

electrifying the city.

Running throughout the history of Johannesburg’s electrification are the connected themes

of municipal socialism and municipal ownership of infrastructure. The municipal socialism seen

in Johannesburg was similar to that which Daniel Rodgers wrote about in his study of the transfer

of ideas between the United States and Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. It is

a form of socialism which Rodgers calls “…the socialism of the business classes.”44 In

Johannesburg, as was the case throughout South Africa, municipal socialism was affected less by

social class than by race, but it was crucial to the ways in which municipal, provincial, and national

governments interacted.

Tied to this is the idea of municipal ownership, which Rodgers called the

“municipalisation” of infrastructure – the best way in which municipalities could offer services to

their ratepayers, while still ensuring that there was a certain level of “rate relief,” was to own the

infrastructure through which the services were delivered. In some cases, especially during the

interwar period, the Johannesburg Municipality had to choose between allowing other electricity

43 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 5-6; Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 13. 44 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,

2000), p. 123.

- 24 -

distributors to supply the city’s residents and forgoing the municipal commitment to providing

electricity.

1. Gas Power, Failed Stations, and Trams: Early Electrification in Johannesburg

In June 1893, eleven years after the first streetlamps were turned on in Kimberley, and four

years before Johannesburg was granted official municipal status, a gas turbine at the municipally-

owned station in President Street was used to power the town’s electric streetlamps.45 The

streetlights in Johannesburg were less of an outright anti-climax than those in Kimberley, but there

were still complaints about supply shortages, poor quality service delivery, and changes that

accompanied the replacement of existing systems.46 These problems plagued the municipal power

supply for more than the first decade after the station at President Street went online, with

complaints about the quality of service delivery extending well past the turn of the century. In

1903, ten years after the municipality began delivering electricity, staff at the Post Office reported

that they needed to deploy oil-burning lanterns to supplement the electric lights, since they found

that the under-performing lighting system made their work extremely difficult.47

There were several factors that played a role in the problems encountered by the

municipality in their early electrification efforts. Firstly, the Anglo-Boer War between 1899 and

1902 interfered with all industry and supporting services across the Transvaal. Not only were the

usual wartime shortages of personnel, raw materials, and spare parts to blame, but sabotage by

Boer commandos at the New Kleinfontein and Brakpan stations in December 1900 and January

1901 affected the ability of the respective mining companies to supply their consumers.48 The

sabotage at these two power stations would not have directly impacted the growth of the municipal

grid, but output at the Witwatersrand’s gold mines had already been curtailed by conditions

45 John R. Shorten, The Johannesburg Saga (Johannesburg: John R. Shorten, 1979), p. 599. for the President

Street station. Charles van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand 1886 - 1914 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2001), p. 17. for the granting of municipal status

46 "Public Lighting," Transvaal Leader, July 17, 1902. 47 "Untitled," Transvaal Leader, August 24, 1903. 48 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 13; Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 24.

- 25 -

imposed by the outbreak of war. The welfare of the city was closely tied to that of the gold mines,

making any decrease in mining production a potentially serious economic blow to the city.

Secondly, the disjointed design of the grid made the system relatively inefficient. Not only

was electricity generated and distributed from smaller, less productive stations, but the

municipality had established multiple grids that acted as subsystems within the larger municipal

electricity system. These three subsystems provided electricity to different areas of the city for

different purposes and used a variety of technical standards that kept each “mini-grid” separated

from the others in the overall system. The layout of the grid was further complicated by the choice

to separate the two mini-grids that ran to non-tramway customers into separate voltages, depending

on whether the electricity was used for lighting or other purposes. These three subsystems split

electricity distribution amongst municipal customers as follows:

• The electric tramways ran on their own system that used 575 V Direct Current;

• Inner city consumers received 460 V Direct Current electricity, with a step-down system

converting the power to 230 V for lighting purposes;

• Suburban consumers received 400 V Alternating Current electricity, with step-down

transformers converting to 200 V for lighting consumers.49

In July 1904, the Municipal Council, acting on advice given by the engineering firm of

Mordey and Dawbarn, decided to upgrade the President Street Power Station with eight gas-

powered internal combustion engines. The generators would be installed by Stewart and Company,

who would also be responsible for running the plant during its first year of operations. Most of the

reasons for the gas-powered plant’s failure were evident from before the start of the project, but

the council and both engineering firms that they hired ignore these warning signs. Most

problematically, the gas engines were relatively unproven in large systems like the Johannesburg

municipal power system, and the tender specified that the large generators would only be tested

49 J. H. Dobson, "The Distribution Plant of the Johannesburg Municipal Electric Supply System," Transactions

of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers 6, (November, 1915): p. 280.

- 26 -

for the first time after they were installed at President Street. The engines had also been designed

to use gas produced as a by-product of processing anthracite, but the Johannesburg engines would

use gas manufactured from bituminous coal,50 which increased the unreliability of the generating

equipment.51

The delays involved in the installation of the gas engines and the equipment required to

produce the gas from coal meant that the first engine at the upgraded power station only started up

for the first time on May 1, 1906.52 In the meantime, the city had continued to use the older steam-

powered generators at the President Street Power Station, while also bringing extra capacity in

from Bertrams and Brakpan power stations.53

These problems in upgrading the power station were compounded by the decision to build

the three separate subsystems that supplied different areas of the city. The largest problem arising

from the implementation of the subsystems was the change in voltages that would accompany the

completion of the gas-powered equipment, since voltage changes would require changes in the

fixtures used by existing consumers. The municipal council’s position was that the voltage change

would be made for economic reasons, since the same generators could be used to power residential

and business premises, while still putting enough power into the system to run the tramways.54

The situation was exacerbated even further by the decision on the part of the Rand’s

insurance firms to insist that their policyholders would need to have their premises inspected, and

possibly rewired. This decision was made after a spate of electrical fires in Johannesburg had been

shown to be the result of poor quality work when the original wiring was done, but the combination

of the decisions made by the municipality and the insurers arrived at an inopportune time for their

50 Bituminous coal is a form of coal that becomes a “cohesive, binding, sticky mass” when it is heated. It

produces more energy when burned than anthracites, and contains high levels of volatile matter, which is suitable for coal-to-gas production, H. Wayne Beaty and Donald G. Fink, Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers, 16th ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2013), chap. 5.

51 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, pp. 600-601. 52 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 602. 53 "The New Lighting Plant," The Star, March 3, 1906. 54 "The Electric Light: Increase of Voltage," Rand Daily Mail, May 11, 1906.

- 27 -

customers. To the municipality and insurance firms, the changes were caused by two related, but

distinctly separate issues – one was a pragmatic necessity arising from the much-needed upgrades,

one was an issue of safety. To many of the ratepayers and policyholders, however, the two issues

were part of one larger, overriding concern – the short-term economic effects of replacing

equipment that had already been installed.55

The concerns over poor workmanship were not new to the residents of Johannesburg. Even

before the insurance companies noticed the correlations between poor interconnections and fire

hazards, there were complaints from ratepayers and electrical tradesmen alike on the matter of

electrical work. These earlier moments in which the issue had been raised were less related to the

safety aspect, and more related to race. Writing under the pseudonym of “Linesman” in July 1902,

a resident suggested that the city should ensure that all electrical work should be done by qualified

workers with the best quality tools and materials and questioned why the municipality placed “too

much faith in natives.”56

Likewise, laypeople expressed their discontent with the town council’s policy on allowing

black labourers to work in semi-skilled positions for the Electricity Department – a resident wrote

that “the state of the electrical trade is not very bright just now, and if natives are to do the work I

don’t see any chance of it improving…” after seeing a team of workers where the white supervisors

allowed black labourers to work on the electrical installation.57 A Belgrave resident bemoaned the

lack of white supervisors overseeing the streetlight repairs in the area, stating that they had only

seen black workers performing the work.58 The same racial themes continued in 1910, when the

Power Companies Commission in the Transvaal was investigating the state of electrification in the

Colony, and persisted even after the Power Companies Commission had filed its report. In August

1913, a severe storm had hit Johannesburg, resulting in difficulties throughout the Municipality in

55 "The New Lighting Plant," The Star, March 3, 1906; "Electric Installation: A Strong Protest," Rand Daily

Mail, May 11, 1906; "Lighting Regulations," Rand Daily Mail, May 11, 1906; "The Electric Light: Increase of Voltage," Rand Daily Mail, May 11, 1906.

56 "Linesmen and Reform," Transvaal Leader, July 25, 1902. 57 F. E. Oliver, "The Electrical Trade," The Star, September 21, 1906. 58 "Belgravia and Lights," The Star, August 28, 1906.

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keeping services running. In compensation for their extra work, a local resident suggested that the

entire town should give thanks to the staff who had kept the station operational during the storm,

taking pains to mention that every white member of staff “…from the chief downwards…” should

receive bonus cheques equivalent to a month’s pay.59

Once the initial installation problems had been solved, the gas-powered engines were a

remarkable failure – the first generator was started on May 1, 1906 and the plant seemed to have

overcome the initial difficulties that had so drastically delayed the construction and installation

phases of the upgrades, but the untested technology in the power plant soon started becoming

increasingly unreliable. During 1906, the station’s chief engineer, J. A. McMullen, resigned,

claiming that conflict between the general manager and the station’s departmental supervisors was

inhibiting the efficiency and productivity of the operating staff. 60

The plant was further hobbled when a backfiring engine destroyed two of the eight gas

engines in March 1907, thereby removing a quarter of the power plant’s capacity.61 Workers at

the municipal station also started to complain that working conditions in the vicinity of the gas

engines had started to deteriorate once all engines were running, particularly after the engines

started to develop chronic leakages. White workers who lodged complaints about the continual

health hazards presented by the gas leaks were fired and promptly replaced with black workers,

one of whom was killed in an on-site accident. 62 The combination of lowered total capacity,

undependable equipment, and underperforming components caused Stewart and Company to end

their contract with the municipality on May 15, 1907, barely a year after the first generator had

been started. The gas-powered plant was scrapped after the city’s council voted against taking over

the operations from Stewart and Company on June 30, 1907.63

59 Citizen [pseud.], "Public Indebtedness," The Star, August 15, 1913. 60 J. A. McMullen, "Those Gas Engines: Why McMullen Resigned," Rand Daily Mail, September 4, 1906. 61 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 602. gives March 28 as the date of the explosion, but Christie, Electricity,

Industry and Class, p. 33. gives an alternative date of March 26. 62 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 33-34. 63 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, pp. 600-602; Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 34.

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After the problems with the gas-powered plant had become evident, the city’s residents

began to question the decision to use the untested technology in the municipality’s power plant.

Following the failure of the gas-powered plant, the municipality was facing a critical shortage of

electricity. The municipality approached privately-owned companies, which mostly provided

electricity for the city’s mines, to negotiate contracts for emergency electricity supplies. The city

also contracted with the engineering firm of Reunert and Lenz to replace the defunct gas engines

with steam-powered engines.

2. A Colonial Commission and a Colonial Law: Johannesburg, the Power Companies Commission, and the Transvaal Power Act of 1910

In 1909, the Earl of Selbourne, in his capacity as Governor of the Transvaal Colony,

appointed the Commission of Inquiry into the Power Companies to investigate the extent of

electrification in the region. The four members of the Commission were charged with determining

the effects of large-scale, centralised electricity generation on the mining industry; secondary

manufacturing industries; agriculture; the Central South African Railways (CSAR); labour; and

“the Country generally”.64

The Commission found that the four largest electricity undertakings in the Transvaal were

the Municipalities of Pretoria and Johannesburg, the Rand Mines Power Supply Company

(RMPS), and the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company (VFP). The section on the

Johannesburg Municipal power supply is perhaps the shortest in the Commission’s report,

managing to reach a total of five sentences that briefly mention the original concession granted to

the Johannesburg Gas Company in 1889; the deals between the city and private suppliers to obtain

emergency supplies of electricity during shortfalls; and the installed and forecasted generating

64 "Report of the Power Companies Commission," National Archives of South Africa (TAB), CT 155, ref.

T39/56.

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station capacities. In what seems to be almost an afterthought, the report mentions that the

municipal grid did not provide any power to the mining industries on the Rand.65

For the Johannesburg Municipality, the concerns of the colonial government and mining

interests were of lesser importance than the implications of allowing privatised electricity supply.

The Mayor of Johannesburg told the Commission that the city’s council believed that a privatised

supply of electricity within municipal borders would be “injurious” to the city’s interests. In

explaining the council’s views on non-municipal suppliers, Chudleigh said that the city officials

believed that all private suppliers should be restricted from operating within municipal boundaries

without the city’s permission, since competition over an area of supply would negatively affect

the council’s ability to use the income from business and residential consumers to offset the high

costs of installing streetlights. It had also been municipal policy to place all high voltage cables in

underground trenches, and that granting any other supplier to install their own overhead cables

would prove too dangerous for Johannesburg’s residents.66

Professor Dobson, who had taken over the post of Town Electrical Engineer during the

failed attempt at running the gas-powered plant, gave evidence that the city would suffer a financial

loss if private supply was allowed. The city offered all residents and businesses equal tariffs across

the entire area of supply, based on the principle that a larger area of supply equates to overall lower

tariffs. The counter-argument to the city’s official testament against privatisation hinged on the

idea that lack of competition could negatively affect the city’s residents – without proper oversight,

the Commissioners believed, a Municipality could over-charge consumers for the service.67


T39/56, pp. 17-18. 66 "Power Commission: Municipal Witnesses," Transvaal Leader, August 27, 1909. 67 "Power Commission: Municipal Witnesses," Transvaal Leader, August 27, 1909; "Power Commisison:

Electrical Engineers' Evidence," Transvaal Leader, August 28, 1909; "Report of the Power Companies Commission," National Archives of South Africa (TAB), CT 155, ref. T39/56, pp. 50-51.

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The Commission’s findings led to the drafting of the Transvaal Power Bill in early 1910,

for presentation to the Transvaal Parliament shortly before the formation of the Union.68 The Bill

was enacted as the Transvaal Power Act of 1910 on May 28, 1910, less than two months after the

Power Commission had presented its final report to the colonial government.69 The municipal

objections to the Power Bill were similar to those brought before the Power Companies

Commission, and focused on what the city’s officials saw as an infringement of municipal rights.70

For Johannesburg’s Town Council, there was more at stake than the loss of exclusive rights to

supply electricity to ratepayers. Partly, the municipal councillors were concerned that the city

would lose the income from residents who switched over to private electricity suppliers, as their

representatives had stated to the Power Companies Commission. The city also had to consider the

economic effects of the failed gas plant, as well as the expenditure that would be required to

complete the installation of the new coal-burning equipment at the President Street Station.

The representatives from the Johannesburg Municipality were not the only ones to publicly

speak out against the legislation. A newspaper editorial published by the Rand Daily Mail in mid-

April 1910 portrays the Transvaal Power Bill as a stand-off between the municipal service

providers and private generation companies to determine who had the legitimate rights to supply

electricity within municipal boundaries. This editorial column favours the municipality rather

openly – the writer stating that “the municipality must insist upon nothing less than the absolute

right to distribute power within the municipal area — save to the mines.”71

Throughout the process of reading the Power Bill before the Transvaal’s parliament, the

colonial government had attempted to present the Bill as important to the mining industry. During

the first day of the public readings of the Bill, the parliamentarians in favour of the Bill had even

tried to reassure the opposition that the legislation would not adversely affect white labourers at

68 "Power Propositions: State Control," Rand Daily Mail, April 5, 1910.;"Power Companies: The Commission's

Report," The Star, April 8, 1910; "Power Propositions: State Control," Rand Daily Mail, April 5, 1910. 69 "Power Companies Commission," The Star, May 15, 1909; Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power,

pp. 44-45. 70 "Power Bill: How it Affects the City," Rand Daily Mail, April 14, 1910. 71 "The Power Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 18, 1910.

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municipal power stations. They went on record to state that the enactment of the Power Bill would

favour the use of large power stations, which could result in a decline in the demand for firemen

and engine-drivers required to operate the stations as power generation became increasingly

centralised. The hope expressed before the parliamentary gathering was that this decrease in labour

requirements would be followed by a commensurate increase in the number of electrical

mechanics needed to keep the stations running.72

The point of concern was not the total expected decrease in jobs that would result from the

centralisation of power supply, but rather in the way that changes in energy supply would affect

the ratios of different job positions in the power stations. The South African Engine Drivers’ and

Firemen’s Association objected to the use of electricity on the Rand’s mines, because of the fears

that the use of electricity would reduce the need for white labourers on the mines that still used

steam power. By extension, the Association was concerned that this would shift the racial balance

too far away from what they believed to be favourable. The Commission reported that the shifts

in one type of skilled work would be counter-balanced by the increase in the demand for other

skilled workers. Instead, the report stated, “the cheap power is likely to lead to the replacement of

manual work by mechanical contrivances, and the Native is not generally capable of adequately

supervising the latter in a suitable manner.”73

As the Municipal Council in Johannesburg would do again in the early 1920s, it presented

itself as the legitimate provider of electricity to the businesses, industry, and residents of the

growing city. Some of these fears about the Power Act were founded on the existing threat that

the VFP and RMPS already presented to the Johannesburg Electricity Department. The Municipal

Council wanted the Transvaal government to change the provisions that would allow non-

municipal suppliers to use municipal roads and pavements for setting up their privately-owned

infrastructure.74

72 "Power Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 14, 1910. 73 "Report of the Power Companies Commission," National Archives of South Africa (TAB), CT 155, ref.

T39/56, pp. 43-45. 74 "Power Bill: How it Affects the City," Rand Daily Mail, April 14, 1910.

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3. Interwar Changes, Post-War Integrations: From the Electricity Act of 1922 Onwards

The chronic shortages that had started before the misguided purchase of the gas-powered

engines, and that had been worsened by their failure, continued to affect Johannesburg a decade

after the gas-powered scheme had been scrapped. In November 1915, the Mayor of Johannesburg,

speaking at a gathering of the Association of Municipal Electrical Engineers of South Africa, stated

that the Johannesburg power plant “was second to none in the world.”75 Within two months of this

statement, the VFP put forward an offer to supply the city with bulk power purchases at lower

rates than the city could generate the power at its own station.76

Politicians, journalistic editors, and the ratepayers were split on the issue of whether to

accept the VFP’s offer, and not necessarily according to those three categories. A spat between the

Rand Daily Mail and the Evening Chronicle dailies started when the former made accusations of

journalistic impropriety against the latter publication after the Chronicle urged the city to accept

the VFP’s offer. The Daily Mail’s position on the contract offer should have been clear enough

from their initial article’s title, which warned Johannesburg’s residents of “The Cloven Hoof.” The

Chronicle responded in kind, with the statement that such accusations could only have come from

a “journalistic pervert”. 77

The point did not need to be laboured any further, but the Daily Mail published a series of

editorial cartoons on the debate around the VFP’s offers. In one cartoon, an exasperated

homeowner sees a stray cat climbing over his wall and exclaims, “Good gracious, I thought I

drowned that beastly thing five years ago.”78 In another cartoon, a travelling salesman offers to

help a domestic worker in exchange for “just getting his foot in the door,” to which she replies,

“I’ve seen that trick played before.”79 The message behind the cartoons was clear – the VFP was

more than a minor irritation, the company’s interference in municipal affairs was seen as an

75 "Municipalities and Electricity," Rand Daily Mail, November 16, 1915. 76 "Municipal Electric Supply (Report)," Evening Chronicle, February 7, 1916. 77 "Municipal Electric Supply (Report)," Evening Chronicle, February 7, 1916; "The Cloven Hoof," Rand Daily

Mail, February 8, 1916; "Municipal Electric Supply (Opinion)," Evening Chronicle, February 8, 1916. 78 ""The Cat Came Back"," Rand Daily Mail, February 9, 1916. 79 "Trying to Get His Foot In," Rand Daily Mail, February 17, 1916.

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unwelcome intrusion that simply would not desist. For those who were in favour of accepting the

VFP’s offer, the economic benefits of cheaper power from a non-municipal source made more

sense than the costlier option of upgrading the city’s existing power plant to meet expected demand

increases.

The economic arguments in favour of the VFP’s suggested contract gained further traction

when the state of local and global manufacturing industries during World War I was factored into

the debate. Wartime shortages of personnel, finances, and raw materials had caused British

companies and municipalities to impose restrictions on the availability of capital and labour,

restrictions which would have conceivably had an impact on the availability of new equipment for

Johannesburg’s power station. It was also stated that the interconnection of the two networks

would be beneficial for the engineers at both the VFP and Johannesburg power stations, since a

combined network would allow them to more easily balance the changes in demand over the course

of each 24-hour period.80

To the dissatisfaction of ratepayers, not to mention the VFP, the municipal councillors

voted against entering into negotiations with the Company. The town’s electrical engineers

believed that greater benefits could be derived from upgrading the existing municipal station than

from co-operation with an external entity.81

The 1910 Transvaal Power Act had helped to lay the foundation for the nationalisation of

electricity generation and distribution. The efficacy of centralised electricity generation from

larger stations had been proven by the start of the 1920s, especially by the success that the VFP

and RMPS enjoyed in supplying electricity to large swathes of the Rand, including the

municipalities of Boksburg, Germiston, Roodepoort-Maraisburg, and Springs.82 It should follow

80 "Town Finance: Power Station Plant," The Star, February 9, 1916; H. A. Wyndham, "Johannesburg and the

V.F.P.," Rand Daily Mail, February 11, 1916; "Town Council and the V.F.P.C.," The Star, February 14, 1916. 81 "Power Supply: Victoria Company's Offer," The Star, February 14, 1916; "Power Supply," The Star, February

16, 1916; "V. Falls Power: Town Council Turn Down Offer," Evening Chronicle, February 16, 1916; "Town Council and Power Plant," The Star, February 17, 1916; "Nothing Doing for the V.F.P.," Rand Daily Mail, February 17, 1916; "The V.F.P. Co.'s Offer," Evening Chronicle, February 18, 1916; Bernard Price, "Town and V.F.P.," Rand Daily Mail, February 18, 1916.

82 "V.F.P. Handbook," University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections Manuscripts, BC697, A15.1.

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then, that the establishment of a national system of control over the generation and sales of

electricity would be a logical step in the process of electrification. When the first drafts of the

Electricity Bill were read before Parliament in 1921, the municipalities of South Africa once again

felt that their political and economic welfare was at risk.

Municipal councils presented a threat to the centralisation of electricity that the Electricity

Act was designed to secure. In turn, the municipal bodies saw the passing of such legislation as a

threat to their function as suppliers of electricity to their residents and ratepayers, and therefore

insisted on taking part in the drafting of the Bill that would be presented to parliament.83 These

political concerns stemmed from the fear that they would be supplanted as service providers in

their areas of jurisdiction. In the initial form of the Electricity Bill, the ECB would be allowed to

determine which generating stations and networks would be integrated into combined networks,

without needing to consider who owned the infrastructure. Under this arrangement, a less

productive municipal station would face closure if a governmental or private station in the same

area proved to be more productive.84

For their part, municipal groups felt that the Electricity Bill offered too much leeway to the

governmental and corporate power stations. Municipalities had been informed that non-municipal

power stations would have the right to install infrastructure without having to consult with

municipal authorities first. This clause gave governmental stations the right to install underground

cables without municipal approval – in particular, the Johannesburg Municipal Council found this

problematic because labourers working for the national government would be digging trenches

along municipal pavements and roadways.85

83 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 82. 84 "Town Council Acts: New Electricity Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 2, 1921; "Manufacture of Electricity:

Important Draft Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 4, 1921; "Electricity Bill Dangers: Municipalities Alert," The Star, April 18, 1921.

85 "Manufacture of Electricity: Important Draft Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 4, 1921; "Electricity Bill Dangers: Municipalities Alert," The Star, April 18, 1921.

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In the earlier phases of municipal electrification, urban distribution networks in cities like

Johannesburg were almost exclusively subterranean.86 Allowing construction engineers to work

on municipal roadways and pavements without requiring any consultation with the city council

created a credible threat to the longevity of the existing roadworks infrastructure. The companies

that were responsible for laying distribution cables in the early 1900s in Johannesburg had already

earned a reputation for not keeping thorough maps of their installed cables, making

troubleshooting a somewhat lengthy and laborious process, even when the Municipal Council had

been involved at any stage.87

Economically, the municipalities were afraid of the implications of revised tariff structures

that would be introduced under the Electricity Act. Municipal suppliers created tariff schemes that

would get the highest possible profit margin from business and industrial consumers, with the

intent to use these profits as “rate relief” for residential consumers. Should the tariff structures be

standardised at a governmental level, the municipalities feared that they would lose this economic

freedom, thereby handicapping their ability to offer lower rates to residential areas. 88

The municipal councils were concerned that an organisation running at a national level

would develop their own infrastructure and consumer base, thereby leaving the municipalities with

unused infrastructure that had been developed at great cost to their ratepayers. The draft Bill also

gave large businesses and industry the right to request that their electricity supply be provided by

either government or corporate stations, thereby creating a further threat to the rate relief that

municipalities wished to provide to residential customers.89 Losing these industrial consumers

could be problematic for municipalities, since a considerable portion of the income from these

larger consumers went to rate relief. In 1955, the Electricity Department in Johannesburg

86 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 604. 87 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 605. 88 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 54, 82. 89 "Electricity Bill Dangers: Municipalities Alert," The Star, April 18, 1921.

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contributed £630,000 towards residential rates from the department’s gross annual income of

£4,000,000.90

Municipalities across South Africa countered these perceived threats by sending a

deputation of councillors to Cape Town in order to meet with F. S. Malan, the Minister of Mines

and Industry during the drafting of the Electricity Bill. The deputation presented Malan with a

petition, which requested that the Bill be withdrawn, so that municipal representative could consult

with the drafting committee before any legislation was enacted. They requested that the ECB be

comprised of members who were not directly linked to any specific existing parliamentary

portfolio, to ensure that no single MP could exercise undue influence over the Board. The

deputation also requested that the Bill be drafted to give them the authority to decide on who was

allowed to install infrastructure, and even requested that the city councils be given the opportunity

to work as sub-contractors during the installation of underground cables. 91

The deputation to Cape Town managed to secure a place for municipal representatives in

the drafting committee’s next series of meetings. The mayors of Johannesburg and Pretoria were

invited to attend the committee’s sessions in Johannesburg, accompanied by a representative of

the Municipal Association.92 After municipal representatives had commented on the Bill,

corporate and government suppliers would have to notify municipalities of any plans to establish

electricity stations or infrastructure within the council’s area of supply.93 Municipal stations that

had been in operation for longer than thirty-eight years were eligible for appropriation by the

Electricity Supply Commission, which required the Commission to purchase the station and its

90 Seventy Golden Years, 1886-1956, (Johannesburg: Municipal Public Relations Bureau, n.d.), p. 339. 91 "Town Council Acts: New Electricity Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 2, 1921; "Manufacture of Electricity:

Important Draft Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 4, 1921; "Draft Electricity Bill: Delegation for Capetown," Rand Daily Mail, April 6, 1921; "Electricity Bill: Council's Deputation Leaving," The Star, April 8, 1921; "The Electricity Bill: Deputation Leaving for Capetown," Rand Daily Mail, April 11, 1921; "The Electricity Bill: Proposed Amendments," The Star, April 11, 1921; "Electricity Bill Dangers: Municipalities Alert," The Star, April 18, 1921; "Live Question for Local Bodies: Electricity Bill," The Star, April 20, 1921; "The Electricity Bill," Rand Daily Mail, April 22, 1921.

92 "The Electricity Bill: A Local Conference," The Star, April 16, 1921; "The Electricity Bill: Effect of Municipal Representations," Rand Daily Mail, April 18, 1921.

93 Government Gazette of 24 July, 1922, vol. 44, no. 1256, p. lxxix.

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supply network at a value that took the type, number, and condition of the station’s assets into

consideration.94

Municipalities presented their opposition to the Bill as a concern for the wellbeing of their

electricity consumers, basing their arguments on ideas about who had “legitimate” authority to

provide services to municipal customers. Problematically, businesses within the Johannesburg

Council’s area of supply had been reporting declines in productivity and income following the end

of the First World War. This was partly caused by the decrease in generating capacity that had

started during war rationing, and partly because equipment manufacturers were not able to restore

their pre-war supply networks immediately after the 1918 Armistice.95 Urban electricity demand

had continued to grow during the war, but the city’s generation capacity had not grown to the same

extent. Orders that had been placed in 1915 to upgrade the city’s power station were not filled until

1921, thereby worsening the city’s supply problem, since the new and upgraded equipment

required further upgrades to keep pace with the continuing increases in demand.96

Once the shortage had made itself increasingly apparent, members of the Johannesburg

Municipal Council had been in consultation with the VFP to begin the first steps towards the

purchase of emergency electricity supplies to compensate for the shortfall – a move that did not

earn favour with many Johannesburg residents. There were some in the city who felt that their

monthly rate payments should not be used to pay another organisation for a service that the

municipality was already delivering. Councillors countered this argument by pointing out that the

municipality needed to conduct emergency renovations on the city’s existing power station to

repair and upgrade equipment, but that the city could not afford to continue running at minimum

capacity while the renovations were in progress. Residents in the newer areas of Johannesburg

stated that the Municipal Council should attempt to make any and all necessary arrangements to

94 Government Gazette of 24 July, 1922, vol. 44, no. 1256, p. lxxxii. 95 "Be Sparing with Electric Light," Rand Daily Mail, December 24, 1920; "Electric Current Shortage: Appeal to

Customers," Rand Daily Mail, November 2, 1919; "Pressure on Municipal Plant," Rand Daily Mail, October 28, 1919.

96 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 606.

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meet the needs of the city. Houses built during and after World War I were not supplied with

electricity because of the lack of capacity, even when a house had been built in an area that already

received electricity. 97

It is likely that the Municipality was not only interested in who had the right to supply

electricity to ratepayers but was also concerned about who owned the infrastructure through which

the electricity was supplied. Contracts between municipalities and third party suppliers had been

a feature of Johannesburg’s electricity supply since the start of the twentieth century, when the

municipality contracted with the Robinson Deep Gold Mining Company to buy bulk electricity

shortly after the end of the South African War in 1902 and had to purchase roughly 60% of its

power from the RCEW following the failure of the gas engines in 1906.98 The rationale used by

the city’s electrical engineers in opposition to the VFP’s contract offer in 1916 did not still hold

true in the era after World War II. By the mid-1950s, the Johannesburg Electricity Department

boasted that interconnection with Escom’s grid have saved the city roughly £7 million pounds,

money that would otherwise have been spent on new equipment. The Electricity Department also

stated that the interconnection of the city’s local grid and Escom’s regional grid allowed for

engineers on both sides to better manage the peaks and dips in demand.99

In 1923, demand had increased to the point that the station at President Street could no

longer meet the needs of the city, and new extensions could not add enough generating capacity

to keep up with future growth in demand. As specified by the Electricity Act, the city requested

that Escom write a report on the state of the local grid for when the time came to submit an

application to the ECB for changes to the municipal grid. However, throughout much of 1923,

Escom was engaged in negotiations with the ECB and the VFP over the licence application for the

Witbank Power Station (see Chapter Two).

97 "Johannesburg's Power Shortage: The Inadequate Supply of Lighting," Rand Daily Mail, September 23, 1921. 98 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, pp. 599-600. 99 Seventy Golden Years, p. 343.

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From Escom’s point-of-view, it would be unnecessary to construct a new power station in

Witbank, which was close enough to Johannesburg to offer a reliable supply of electricity to the

Municipality, and for the Municipality to build its own local power station. Instead, Escom

suggested that the Municipality wait until construction at Witbank was completed, either by the

VFP or the Commission, and purchase bulk power from the new station. The Municipality declined

the offer of power from Witbank, instead preferring to wait until a formal decision could be made

by the Provincial Administrator on whether a new municipal power station could be built. The

Municipality had to wait until January 1928 before receiving final approval for the new power

station.100

Once the plans for a new power station had been approved, construction started on the new

power station in Jeppe Street, roughly 200 metres from the President Street station. By 1932, the

Jeppe Street Power Station had taken over the majority of the load from the old President Street

station, which then started to act as a peak load station for periods of high demand. The Jeppe

Street Power Station was fully functional in 1939, but demand had grown to the extent that the

city had needed to start construction on another power station in Orlando in 1937.101

The Orlando Power Station took longer to build than expected, mostly due to the outbreak

of World War II during the plant’s construction. Aside from the widespread difficulties that Escom

experienced in getting machinery and parts during the War, the Orlando construction project also

suffered a setback when the ship transporting casings and bearings for one of the generators sank

due to enemy action.102 Most of these parts were replaced relatively quickly, but further equipment

losses and wartime delays meant that the station was not fully functional until 1946.103 Further

growth in demand required the construction of another municipal power plant between the late

100 "The Application of the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company and Its Relation to the Future Power

Supply in the Transvaal," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6, pp. 14-15; Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, pp. 606-7.

101 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, pp. 606-7. 102 "Sinking of Ship Affects City," Rand Daily Mail, November 1, 1940. 103 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 609.

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1950s and early 1960s. The Kelvin ‘A’ plant was completed in May 1960 and additional generating

capacity at the adjacent Kelvin ‘B’ plant was completed on February 14, 1964.104

The compromises that Escom and the Johannesburg Municipality reached with each other

benefited both parties by letting them retain a measure of control over their own infrastructure,

while also allowing them to balance their respective loads more easily than if the two networks

remained entirely isolated. This was an important step in the functioning of the National Grid,

because the final agreement meant that the Municipality and Escom could continue to function as

interdependent entities that could both fulfil their commitments to their respective consumers. It

also alleviated the need for Escom to supply electricity to municipal customers, who purchased

relatively small numbers of units each year, and gave the parastatal the opportunity to apportion

more of the country’s nationalised power stations to generating electricity for mining and industrial

customers.

104 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 616.

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CHAPTER TWO – “HARNESSING THE FALLS”: THE VICTORIA FALLS AND

TRANSVAAL POWER COMPANY, 1906 – 1948

Electrification and electrical technologies added extra momentum to the already vigorous

growth of mining activities on the Rand at the turn of the century, and the Victoria Falls and

Transvaal Power Company (VFP) played a central role in providing this electricity between 1906

and 1948. Within seventeen years of the Company’s founding, the VFP was generating more

electricity “than was consumed in the cities of London, Birmingham and Sheffield combined,”

largely due to the power that was being sold to the mines.105 Even though the first plans for the

organisation were soon abandoned, the VFP would become the largest electricity producer in the

British Empire and was a key element in the development of the National Grid.

Founded in 1906, the VFP was a subsidiary of the African Concessions Syndicate (ACS),

which was itself a subsidiary of Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC). The

Company was formed with the original intention of generating hydroelectric power on the Zambesi

River to supply electricity to the Witwatersrand’s mines, roughly 1 100 kilometres to the south.

The scheme was highly impractical, given the large transmission losses that would occur on such

long high-voltage power lines, the extreme costs of transmitting power over such long distances,

and the annual shortfall in electricity production that would occur during the dry season.106

Renfrew Christie has discussed much of the history of the VFP, but most of the discussion

in his book focuses on the intricate network of associations, contracts, concessions, and

subsidiaries that were required to establish the Company. The narrative of the VFP’s politics and

economics is a tangled, overlapping network of international deals made to secure generating

equipment, expertise, and capital from a variety of sources across Europe amidst the increasing

nationalism at the turn of the century (Figure 3). Aside from the challenges faced by the

Company’s founders, it is also important to understand the VFP’s contribution to the formation of

105 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 6. 106 "Rand Power: Problems Generated Some Notable Achievements," University of Cape Town Libraries Special

Collections Manuscripts, BC697, A15.3; Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class; Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power.

- 43 -

the National Grid – the purchase of the VFP’s assets by Escom in 1948 increased the Electricity

Supply Commission’s total generating capacity by almost a third.

In building a regional grid around the Witwatersrand, the VFP was drawn into a series of

negotiations, compromises, and agreements with local municipalities, the gold mines, and private

consumers, but it is the Company’s interactions with Escom that were most important for the

establishment of the National Grid. When the Electricity Act was signed in 1922, Escom was

charged with providing electricity that was both cheap and abundant; however, as the early annual

reports acknowledged, the parastatal was not responsible for beginning the process of

electrification, since other entities were already involved in generating and selling electricity. In

order to construct the National Grid, Escom would therefore have to negotiate agreements and

contracts with the owners of these other systems, whether to appropriate existing infrastructure or

to begin anew with establishing local and regional grids.

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Figure 3 - Organisational Diagram of the VFP and Related Entities

- 45 -

1. “A Six Million Scheme”: Starting the Victoria Falls (and Transvaal) Power Company, 1906 – 1922

Once it became evident that the plan to generate hydroelectric power at the Victoria Falls

was impractical, the Company changed its name to the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power

Company. As Renfrew Christie has noted, the Rand of the early twentieth century was proving to

be an ideal testing ground for the theory of centralised electricity generation and distribution.

Before the start of the Boer War, electrification in the Transvaal had not progressed much further

than streetlighting in the urban areas, and the mining companies had preferred the use of steam

engines to run machinery. By the eve of the First World War, the Witwatersrand’s gold mines

were the largest consumers of electricity in the country, and each of the largest gold mines

demanded more electricity than the entire coal mining industry. The differences in energy

requirements may be attributed to variables in the working conditions at gold and coal mines, such

as the type of rock in which the raw materials are found, but the vast differences in the needs of

the two industries does help to explain why the gold mines were responsible for consuming so

much of the electricity generated on and near the Witwatersrand.107

In October 1906, the VFP had requested permission to build a power station on the East

Rand. The Johannesburg and Boksburg municipalities objected to the application, on the grounds

that municipalities should be granted priority in supplying electricity to residential consumers. The

exact role played by the municipal objections in the government’s final decision is not entirely

clear, but the official rationale was that the Rand Central Electric Works Limited (RCEW) had

filed a protest against the VFP’s operations on the East Rand. The RCEW stated that the VFP was

not involved in mining operations, and therefore did not have the legal rights to construct or operate

any public services within the area.108

The VFP had encountered the first critical problem in supplying electricity to the Rand –

competition from the individuals, companies, and government groups who had already established

107 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 21. 108 "Rand Power Scheme: The Jupiter Site," Transvaal Leader, November 4, 1906.

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their hold on resources and areas of supply. The VFP’s solution to this was relatively efficient and

simple. They engaged in a series of negotiations, payments, and buy-outs that cost the company

dearly in short-term financial costs but ensured that the Company had a dominant role in the supply

of electricity to the major gold mines until after World War II.

Within six months of the East Rand application being rejected, the VFP had bought the

assets and licenses owned by the RCEW and the General Electric Power Company Limited

(GEPC) for a combined total of £500, 000. These two purchases made the VFP the single largest,

and almost exclusive, provider of electricity to the Transvaal’s gold mines.109

During the problems with Johannesburg’s power supply after the failure of the gas-powered

municipal power plant, the city had made an emergency agreement with the RCEW in March 1906

to provide supplies of electricity to municipal customers. Once the RCEW was integrated into the

VFP’s business holdings, the VFP took over the responsibility for the emergency bulk supply to

the city until June 30, 1908.110 This contract gave the Company the opportunity to consolidate its

hold on the supply of power on the Rand, but also gave the city a convenient scapegoat when the

chronic problems at the Johannesburg Lighting Department caused the department to suffer a large

financial loss for the year 1907/1907. The town council announced that the city was facing an

increasingly large deficit in the lighting budget, and promptly blamed the VFP for causing the

situation.111 The contract between the Company and the city expired in June 1908, but the

municipality opted to wait for the municipal power plant to be repaired, instead of allowing the

VFP to continue supplying ratepayers with electricity.

The Company made further gains in creating a monopoly over electricity generation when

the Rand Mines Power Supply Company Limited (RMPS) was formed as a subsidiary of the VFP

109 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 32; Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid, p. 26. 110 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, p. 603. 111 Willliam Bickell, "Municipal Electric Supply: The Council and the Power Supply," Transvaal Leader, March

21, 1908.

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to supply electricity and compressed air to the Rand Mines Limited group.112 Up until the VFP

subsumed the RMPS in 1924, they were considered as separate legal entities.113 The VFP was

registered as a company in Southern Rhodesia, but all its operations were governed by the laws of

Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and England. The RMPS, on the other hand, was registered in

South Africa and was subject to South African laws only.114 The legal wrangling necessary to

coordinate the activity of two legal entities that owned property, employed staff, and conducted

business across three countries was largely down to the payment of taxes – any tax incurred by the

VFP would be paid to the country in which the Company was registered. By registering the VFP

in Southern Rhodesia, the Company ensured that taxes were funnelled back to the BSAC.115

Even before the RMPS had started supplying power, engineers had already calculated that

the combined capacity of the VFP and RMPS would exceed that of the London Metropolitan area.

This system of amalgamating companies and establishing subsidiaries make it easy to understand

why a town councillor from Ophirton told the Power Companies Commission that the VFP wanted

“to have the run of Johannesburg, then of the Transvaal, next of the world, and finally of Heaven

itself.”116 This might be an overstatement of the VFP’s aims, but it is reflective of the tensions

between the VFP and local government.

Primarily, the objections raised by politicians outside of the greater Johannesburg area

related to the use of land by private electricity companies. The Transvaal’s farmers were concerned

that the private power companies would not need permission to obtain wayleaves for running high-

voltage power lines across farmland, and that the power companies would want to use any of the

coal reserves that might be found on agricultural land in the future. The coal industry was also

worried that centralised electricity generation would affect their returns on mining investment, and

112 "Compressed Air Supply on the Rand," University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections Manuscripts,

BC697, A15.5; Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 32. 113 "Souvenir of the Visit to the Rosherville Generating Station," University of Cape Town Libraries Special

Collections Manuscripts, BC697, A15.2. 114 "V.F.P. Handbook," University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections Manuscripts, BC697, A15.1. 115 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 36. 116 "Electric Power Schemes: Strong Opposition," Transvaal Leader, May 28, 1909.

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that the railways would lose revenue if coal was sent to the Transvaal instead of being transported

across the country.

Rather, the Witbank Colliery’s consulting mechanical engineer suggested to the Power

Companies Commission that the coal should be mined and transported by rail over long distances,

and that the Rand’s mines should invest in hydroelectric stations on the Crocodile River. The

VFP’s argument for privatised electricity generation was that a large company, such as themselves,

would be better suited to generating and transmitting electricity over longer distances, while

allowing smaller intermediaries to then distribute the electricity to individual consumers within a

specified area.

The Transvaal’s parliament had already drafted a bill to regulate the supply of electricity in

the colony before the Power Companies Commission had begun its hearings, but once the

Commission had started its work the reading of the draft was put on hold until the Commission’s

official report could offer recommendations on further legislation. When the Power Bill was

presented to the colonial parliament in April 1910, responses were largely determined by

organisational loyalty to either municipal suppliers or the VFP. For those loyal to the municipality,

the Power Bill was nothing but a ruse to hide the VFP’s attempts at establishing a monopoly in the

Transvaal – a “Power Plot” that threatened the city’s established right to supply services.117 For

ratepayers who felt somewhat marginalised by the lack of service delivery in their areas of

Johannesburg, the Power Bill offered an opportunity to frighten the city into improving services.

A municipal ratepayer complained that the municipality had only contacted him about receiving

electricity after their customer base had been threatened by the impending Power Bill.118

The Power Companies Commission reported to the Transvaal colonial government that

large and centralised generating stations would prove to be more cost effective in the long-term

117 "The Power Plot: City in Danger," Rand Daily Mail, April 16, 1910; "The Power Plot: Rousing the People,"

Rand Daily Mail, April 18, 1910; "Power Plot: Great Meeting of Citizens," Rand Daily Mail, April 19, 1910; "The Power Plot: Pretoria's Disapproval," Rand Daily Mail, April 23, 1910.

118 "Letters to the Editor: Power Bill — First Result," Transvaal Leader, May 12, 1910.

- 49 -

than a network comprised of isolated stations that each covered their own small area of the grid,

and “…that undertakings of this nature should be left to private enterprise.”119 The report

recommended that municipal and government suppliers refrain from investing their own capital in

the construction of new power stations, since the upgrading or installation of new technologies

carried financial risks. Municipal ratepayers, according to the Commission, would be better off if

their municipalities refrained from investing large sums of money in establishing new power

stations, as technological improvements could make even the newest machinery redundant.

2. Witbank’s Coal for Johannesburg’s Gold: The VFP after the 1922 Electricity Act, 1922 – 1948

Once the Electricity Bill was enacted in the second half of 1922, the VFP’s undertakings

took on national importance. As the largest supplier of electricity to the Rand’s mines, the

Company had been important to the Union’s economy after 1910, but the VFP was now going to

be involved in the electrification of all four provinces. While the Company had worked for the

preceding two decades to secure their customer base on the Witwatersrand, Escom also wanted

the coal mines in the Witbank region to have access to a supply of cheap electricity. Witbank

presented an ideal site for the construction of a large power station to supply the Rand’s mines

because the region had the combination of fuel supply from the coal mines; water from the Olifants

River; and the power station’s proximity to the Rand made high voltage transmission lines feasible.

Shortly after being established in March 1923, Escom had started to investigate whether it

would be feasible to construct a new power station in Witbank, but their inquiries were somewhat

truncated by the VFP’s application for a license to build their own station and provide power to

the Rand and Witbank areas in May 1923. The Company had already been granted a license soon

after the signing of the Transvaal Power Act, but the license had expired when the Electricity Act

was passed in 1922.


T39/56.

- 50 -

The rationale given by the VFP for choosing to construct a new station at Witbank – instead

of adding to the capacity at their existing station in Vereeniging – rested on the idea that they

would not be able to supply the gold mines forever, because the “Gold Mining Industry is a wasting

industry and must sooner or later fall away.” It would be in the best interests of the VFP and the

Railways Administration, according to General Manager Bernard Price, if the Company would

assist in the electrification of railways and the growing industries in Witbank.120 Price was forced

to retract his offer of a cooperative agreement between the VFP and Escom two months after

writing this letter, because the Company’s directors in London felt that there was not sufficient

time to negotiate with the South African government before the mines required extra power. Escom

believed that this meant that the VFP had reconsidered the construction of the Witbank station, but

the Company had instead decided to proceed with their plans for Witbank without government

assistance.121

On May 11, 1923, the ECB received notification from the VFP that the latter wished to

apply for a licence to establish a new power station at Witbank, with objections from the Railways

Administration and Escom being lodged on June 14 and June 15, 1923, respectively.122 The VFP

was concerned that future demand on the Rand would outstrip the available capacity in local power

stations, since the Company only had two spare generator sets that could be used to supply peak

loads. Engineers predicted that by June 1924, the Company would only have a single surplus

generator set that could be used for peak load supply.123

The Electricity Control Board was required to convene a hearing on the license application,

since objections were received from the Electricity Supply Commission; the South African

Railways & Harbours Administration (SAR); Government Gold Mining Areas, Limited; several

mining houses; and the Johannesburg Municipality. The mining houses based their objection to

120 "Bernard Price to Robert Kotze, January 26, 1923," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), ECB 10, ref.

56/8/1. 121 "Application of the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company," National Archives of South Africa (SAB),

PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6, p. 5. 122 "Sixteenth Meeting," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 634, ref. MM 2879/22, pp. 1-2. 123 "Sixteenth Meeting," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 634, ref. MM 2879/22, p. 2.

- 51 -

the initial licence application, because the VFP had not given all of the information required by

the Electricity Act. The Act specified that all licence applications needed to give estimates of

tariffs, minimum monthly consumption quotas, the classes of consumers that were expected to use

generated power, and the cost price of generating electricity at the new station.124

The complaints from gold mining companies were largely withdrawn in the later stages of

the Board’s hearings regarding the licence application, after the VFP agreed to offer better tariffs

and rebates to the mines once operating costs decreased when the Witbank station was fully

operational.125 In exchange for withdrawing Escom’s objections to the licence application, the

VFP had to agree to offer a rebate to all consumers who received power directly from the Witbank

station.

The Electricity Act of 1922 stated that in cases where an undertaking made a “surplus”

profit in the course of a financial year, all customers were to be granted a pro-rata rebate equivalent

to twenty-five percent of the profit. The VFP’s agreement with Escom was that all customers

receiving power from the Witbank station would be granted a rebate to the value of fifty percent

of annual profits accrued from the Witbank undertaking. In addition to this rebate, the Company

agreed to give all mining consumers a discount of 15 percent, which would be applied retroactively

from January 1, 1923. This discount would then increase to 17½ percent once the power station

was in full commercial operation.126

The Mayor of Johannesburg voiced his objections to the ECB’s decision that allowed the

VFP to consult with its head offices in London on a provisional license agreement without first

consulting the Johannesburg councillors. The Council claimed that their application for an

extension to the municipal power station was pending, while the ECB’s hearings on the Witbank

124 Government Gazette of 24 July, 1922, vol. 44, no. 1256, pp. lxxvii-lxxviii.; "Petition of the Government Gold

Mining Areas (Modderfontein) Consolidated Limited," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 682, ref. MM2990/23, pp. 10-11.

125 "Million Pound Power Station," Rand Daily Mail, December 4, 1923. 126 Government Gazette of 24 July, 1922, vol. 44, no. 1256, pp. lxxix-lxxx; Electricity Supply Commission, 1923

Annual Report, p. 6, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1923%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

- 52 -

station were in progress. The city’s councillors felt that if the VFP was allowed to establish a

successful station in Witbank, it would allow the Company to monopolise electricity sales in the

city, thereby making the municipal station defunct – a power station that the Mayor called “our

very birthright,” 127 and for which the City Council promised to fight “tooth and nail.”128

A report written by the Municipal Council in 1925 stated that the Town Council’s

stubbornness in dealing with the VFP, and especially towards the Witbank Power Station, was

based on fears that the Company’s power supply was prone to regular interruptions. Most of all,

the Council stated that the ubiquitous thunderstorms that occur during summer on the Highveld

presented too great a threat to the safety of the VFP’s transmission lines.129

This animosity between the Johannesburg Municipality and the VFP was hardly new, and

the acrimony lasted well after the Witbank station had already been completed. In 1930, General

Manager and Chief Engineer of the VFP, Bernard Price, told the Empire Mining and Metallurgical

Congress that Johannesburg was the only major municipality on the Rand that did not take

electricity from the Company.130 Escom saw the council’s objections to the VFP’s Witbank

application as an attempt to restore the Labour Party’s public image after municipal employees

who had participated in the Rand Revolt had been fired. According to an internal memo, Escom

believed that many of these civil servants were “rank socialists and bolschevists [sic]” who had

been employed at the power station before the uprising and that the Labour Party wanted to regain

its lost credibility by forcing the city to reinstate those workers.131

The VFP’s representatives managed to establish an interim agreement with Escom that

amended the Company’s original application, which helped to settle most of the objections that

the Supply Commission had brought to the hearings. The VFP and Escom created an unusual set

127 "The Town and the VFP: Mayor's Strong Criticism," Rand Daily Mail, October 30, 1923. 128 "A Corner in Power?," Rand Daily Mail, October 20, 1923. 129 "Report on the New Power Station of the Gas and Electric Supply Department " National Archives of South

Africa (SAB), MNW 717, ref. MM1288/24, pp. 2-7. 130 "Power Supply on the Rand," University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections Manuscripts, BC697,

A15.6. 131 "Untitled Memo," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 687, ref. MM3396/23.

- 53 -

of rules for building and operating the prospective Witbank Power Station that would stay in place

for more than two decades after the station was constructed. Under these terms, the VFP would be

allowed to apply for a license to construct and operate a power station in the vicinity of Witbank

but would not be allowed to supply electricity directly to customers in Witbank itself. Instead,

ownership of the station would rest with both the VFP and Escom, thereby allowing Escom to sell

some of the generated electricity to their consumers in Witbank.132

The VFP had to also agree to amend the licence application to change the proposed area of

supply that would be covered under the licence. Instead of being granted control over transmission

and distribution of power from Witbank, the Company had to allow Escom to apply for local

distribution rights to supply the Witbank area from the new station, while maintaining control over

the high-voltage lines that would connect Witbank and the Rand.133 In the final agreement, Escom

would not be allowed to request supply in any areas that were already supplied by the VFP, except

in cases where the Railways Administration requested electricity supply along sections of their rail

lines.134

In exchange for these concessions, Escom would recompense the Company for their share

of the station’s construction costs and would pay for a percentage of the monthly operating costs

once the station was completed. During months when Escom’s share of the station generated more

power than was needed, they reserved the right to deduct the costs of generating power from their

monthly payment to the VFP, effectively forcing the Company to buy the surplus electricity

generated for the commission’s customers.135 When the final agreement between the two

organisation was completed, the VFP had also agreed to apply the same scheme that offered lower

rates to the mining companies to all their customers taking supply from Witbank.136 The ECB

132 "Draft Heads of Agreement," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6. 133 "Twenty-Second Meeting," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 634, ref. MM 2879/22, p. 1. 134 "Draft Heads of Agreement," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6, pp. 1-2. 135 "Draft Heads of Agreement," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6. 136 "Agreement Relating to the Generating Station at Witbank Transvaal," National Archives of South Africa

(SAB), MNW 717, ref. MM1367/24.

- 54 -

granted the Company the license to start construction at Witbank on July 21, 1924 and Escom was

given permission to supply their consumers in the area on April 6, 1925.137 By the end of 1926,

the Company had invested £1 299 054 in construction, which included materials, land purchases,

machinery, and interest.138

Charles Merz wrote to Jan Smuts that these arrangements would ensure that “…the

Commission will not before the work proceeds have to make arrangements for finance…” and that

the VFP’s participation in the construction and operation of the station would protect Escom

against potential financial losses if electricity demand proved to be lower than expected.139 While

Escom was investigating the feasibility of operating a station from Witbank before the first public

hearings in front of the ECB, the parastatal did express some concern about the demand for

electricity in the area surrounding Witbank. The load in the immediate surroundings were not high

enough to guarantee that the station would be profitable, since secondary industry in the area was

still relatively undeveloped and the collieries did not use as much power as the gold mines. There

were two suggested solutions to this problem – either electrify the railway lines running from the

western edges of the Reef in Germiston and Springs to the Eastern Transvaal or convince the VFP

to buy a large bulk supply from the Commission on a monthly basis.140

3. After Witbank: The Rand Extension Undertaking, Klip Power Station, and Vaal Power Station

Even with the massive Witbank Power Station running, Escom and the VFP still needed to

continue adding to the available generating capacity in the Transvaal. Interwar electrical demand

had increased so rapidly that the station had already required the installation of extra generators in

137 "Report of the Commission on the Establishment of an Electrical Undertaking at Witbank (Transvaal),"

National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 717, ref. MM1367/24; Electricity Supply Commission, 1924 Annual Report, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1924%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

138 Electricity Supply Commission, 1926 Annual Report, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1926%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

139 "Charles H. Merz to J. C. Smuts, November 2, 1923," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6.

140 "Application of the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6.

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1929 and 1930.141 After the fifth set of generators had been installed in 1930, the site in Witbank

could not be extended any further, because the Olifants River could not supply enough extra water

for a sixth set of generators and boilers. The Company also needed to decommission its power

station at Simmerpan, which was only useful for generating extra power to boost capacity during

peak hours. 142

In March 1934, the Commission applied for permission for a new power station that would

be built near to Vereeniging and permission to begin supply from a new undertaking in the region

of the Rand. Once the ECB approved these licence applications, the permits were ceded to the

VFP as a continuation of the cooperation between Escom and the VFP in building and operating

power stations.143 Electricity for the Rand Extension Undertaking was taken from Escom’s power

stations at Witbank and the new Klip Power Station near Vereeniging, as well as from the VFP’s

Rosherville, Brakpan, Simmerpan, and Vereeniging Power Stations.144

Klip Power Station needed large quantities of water for cooling, and there was no guarantee

that enough water would available to meet the needs of future expansions in generating capacity.

To ensure that the power station had an adequate supply of water for the foreseeable future, Escom

made a deal with the government to give £81 000 towards the cost of the Vaalbank Dam. In

exchange, Escom was given the rights to use an extra 12 million gallons (approximately 54.5

million litres) of water per day from the Vaal River.145 Once construction on the Vaal Power

Station started in early 1939, Escom’s contribution to the Vaalbank Dam increased to £124 875.

The extra contribution to the dam’s construction gave Escom the right to take 18.5 million gallons

141 Electricity Supply Commission, 1928 Annual Report,

http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1928%20Annual%20Report.pdf; Commission, 1929 Annual Report; Electricity Supply Commission, 1930 Annual Report, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1930%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

142 "Rand Power: Problems Generated Some Notable Achievements," University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections Manuscripts, BC697, A15.3.

143 Electricity Supply Commission, 1933 Annual Report, p. 5, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1933%20Annual%20Report.pdf.



- 56 -

(roughly 84.1 million litres) of water per day from the Vaal.146 The negotiations between the VFP

and Escom were yet again mediated by Charles Merz, much to the consternation of the VFP’s

Chairman, Arthur Hadley. 147 This was probably the last significant Escom project with which

Merz was directly involved – he and both of his children were killed in an air raid during the Blitz

in October 1940.148

In March 1939, while construction work was still in progress on the Klip Power Station,

work started on another new power station near Heilbron in the Orange Free State. This station,

which was designated the Vaal Generating Station Undertaking, was designed to have a capacity

of up to 400 000kW, and required cooling towers that could handle twice the hourly throughput of

the towers at the Klip station.149 The last two generating sets at the Klip Power Station were

synchronised to the grid and put into commercial service in January and July 1940.150 Construction

at the Vaal Power Station was slowed by wartime shortages after September 1939, especially since

the main turbines had been ordered from Sweden, but could not be exported to South Africa after

the outbreak of hostilities. However, the overall electricity requirements on the Rand decreased as

mining demands dropped, which gave the Commission some extra time in which to complete

construction.151

4. Integration into the System: Escom’s Purchase of the VFP in 1948

The co-operative agreements between Escom and the VFP had been tremendously

beneficial to both parties – Escom financed the construction of new power stations between the


http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1943%20Annual%20Report.pdf. 147 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 127. Hadley disliked Merz so much that even in correspondence

with Bernard Price, who had maintained a close relationship with Merz for several years, he referred to Merz as Escom’s “yard dog”.

148 "Charles H. Merz, D.Sc.," Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 87, no. 528 (December, 1940): p. 708.



151 Commission, 1943 Annual Report, p. 12; Commission, 1944 Annual Report, p. 47.

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early 1920s and the outbreak of World War II, while the VFP had been responsible for staffing

and operating these stations. This arrangement meant that the VFP did not need to accumulate the

substantial capital necessary for building the power stations, and the Commission did not need to

worry about the rapid expansion of trade unions and industrial strikes that were taking hold

amongst South African workers during the interwar period. It was easier for Escom to find

financing for new power stations because of its standing as a state institution, while also selling

power indirectly to the mining industry.152

However, as Nancy Clark has stated, Escom had been given a mandate to supply electricity

at low cost and in abundance. Lowering costs through economies of scale was difficult, if not

outright impossible, if the parastatal was functioning almost exclusively as “a wholesale

producer.”153 In 1947, the last full year in which the VFP was acting as an independent company,

Escom’s bulk sales for mining and municipal resale accounted for 85.1% of the total sales during

the year. Of these bulk sales, almost 88% was being sold to the VFP for resale to mining consumers

(see Table 1). The fact that the VFP was the sole bulk mining sales consumers is evident from the

1949 Escom Annual Report, which states that the bulk mining group of consumers was no longer

active after July 1, 1948.154 In essence, almost three quarters of the total electricity generated by

Escom was being sold to consumers at higher prices than if the same number of units had been

purchased directly from the parastatal. To shift Escom’s role from that of wholesaler to that of

retailer, the Commission needed to eliminate as many intermediaries as possible.155

152 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 114-15. 153 Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid, p. 84. 154 Electricity Supply Commission, 1949 Annual Report, p. 11,

http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1949%20Annual%20Report.pdf. 155 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 145-7; Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid, p. 84.

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Consumer Class Units Sold % of Total

Bulk Sales

Bulk Mining 3 819 269 018 74.7

Bulk Municipal 534 161 654 10.4

Bulk Sales Subtotal 4 353 430 672 85.1

Direct Sales

Traction 454 255 098 8.8

Direct Mining 70 105 747 1.3

Direct Industrial 196 178 295 3.8

Domestic and Street Lighting 40 504 912 0.7

Direct Sales Subtotal 761 044 052 14.6

Total 5 114 474 724 100

Table 1 - Electricity Sales to Classes of Consumer in 1947156

The Electricity Act of 1922 had given Escom the right to give notice of their intention to

expropriate the VFP in 1948, which would allow the parastatal to take ownership of the Company

in 1950. Hendrik van der Bijl, the President of the Chamber of Mines, and the Minister of

Economic Development decided instead to give notice of Eskom’s wishes to begin negotiations

with the VFP in February 1947. By beginning the negotiations earlier than the Electricity Act

allowed, Escom would be purchasing the VFP’s assets, not expropriating the Company outright.157

Van der Bijl had been preparing for the expected expropriation since the VFP and Escom

had been planning the construction of the Klip Power Station in 1937. As part of the final


http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1947%20Annual%20Report.pdf. The figures given in the third column add up to 0.3% less than 100, because the individual amounts specified for each class of consumer have been rounded up or down for the sake of readability.

157 "Report of the Commission Upon the Establishment of an Electricity Undertaking: Acquisition of the Undertaking of the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Company Limited, and The Rand Mines Power Supply Company Limited," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN 3387, ref. 508.

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agreement between the two organisations, the Klip station would be the last power station that the

Company would be allowed to operate until expropriation and the installed capacity at existing

stations had to remain at 1937 levels.158

There was a measure of uncertainty about whether Escom could expect to be able to

expropriate the VFP in 1945 or 1948, which was caused by the differences between the Transvaal

Power Act of 1910 and the Electricity Act of 1922. The Power Act granted the government

permission to expropriate privately owned generating stations and associated infrastructure thirty-

five years after the company’s licence had been issued. The Electricity Act of 1922 had changed

this time limit to thirty-eight years after the licence was granted, but also specified that the terms

governing any licences which had been granted under the previous law were to remain

unchanged.159

To work around this problem, a tripartite series of negotiations were undertaken with

representatives from the VFP, Escom, and the Gold Producers’ Committee (GPC) to establish the

conditions and amount for which Escom would purchase the VFP. After a protracted process of

discussions and compromises that lasted from 1945 until May 1948, the three parties concluded

that Escom would pay £14 500 000 for a complete buy-out of the VFP.160

This purchase added the power stations at Rosherville, Simmer Pan, Vereeniging, and

Brakpan to Escom’s generating system, which granted a cumulative total of 297 600 kW of

electrical generating capacity and 117 600 kW of compressed air capacity to the grid. There were

also 41 miles (65.9 km) of compressed air pipeline; 711 miles (1 144 km) of power and telephone

lines; 1 309 miles (2106.6 km) of transmission power lines; 18 distribution substations; and 918

transformers that were added to Escom’s total generating and transmission system (see Table 2 for

a comparison of the size of the national transmission network in 1947 and 1949).161

158 "H. J. van der Bijl to J. C. Smuts, November 24, 1944," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN

3398, ref. 508. 159 "Expropriation of the Victora Falls and Transvaal Power Company, Ltd," National Archives of South Africa

(SAB), HEN 3387, ref. 508. 160 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 145-6. 161 Commission, 1947 Annual Report, p. 9.

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Perhaps more noteworthy than what the purchase of the VFP added to the rapidly growing

grid is what the purchase signified in political and economic terms. Buying out the assets of the

VFP gave Escom direct access to the vast consumer base of the gold mines in the Witwatersrand

and northern Orange Free State. This was important because it allowed Escom to begin reaching

its objective of supplying abundant power at low cost to all classes of consumers, and because it

meant that the large revenue from selling electricity to the mining houses was no longer going to

a foreign company.

Voltages 1947 1949

132kV — 255.05

88kV 957 2 156.82

66kV 0 115.46

40kV 140 576.57

33kV 458 493.19

20/21/22kV 257 475.47

10/11/12kV 372 758.82

2.0/2.2/3.3/6.6kV 523 —

6.6kV — 566.42

3.3kV — 81.14

2.0/2.1/2.2kV — 77.24

480/230V 457 —

525V — 127.52

380/220V — 640.51

Street Lights — 169.24

Totals 3 164 6 508.45

Table 2 - Comparison of Transmission Network Lines and Cables in Miles between 1947 and 1949162

162 Commission, 1947 Annual Report, p. 98; Commission, 1949 Annual Report, pp. 84-88.

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Tim Cross states that the purchase of the VFP in 1948 was the defining moment in which

Escom gained a true monopoly over electricity supply in South Africa. It certainly dramatically

increased the generating capacity of the parastatal, but Escom was still far from having “complete

control over the electricity industry”.163 In 1958, a decade after the sale, roughly 18 billion units

of power were sold throughout the Union, of which Escom had sold about 13½ billion units.164

Escom was definitely generating and selling the lion’s share of power in South Africa, but other

suppliers were still generating a quarter of the electricity sold each year.

163 Tim Cross, "The Afrikaner Takeover: Nationalist Politics and the Colonization of South Africa's Parastatals,

1948 to 1960," Institute of Commonwelth Studies' Collected Seminar Papers 48, (1994): p. 125. 164 Electricity Supply Commission, 1958 Annual Report, p. 67,


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CHAPTER THREE – RAILWAYS, COOKING RANGES, AND RURAL SUPPLIES:

ELECTRICITY OUTSIDE OF MINING AND SECONDARY INDUSTRY

When Charles Merz presented the South African government with the 1920 Merz Report

on the potential for future electrification, he proposed that the development of local and regional

grids should develop alongside the electrification of local railways. The Merz Report

recommended that centralised control over the generation of electricity would allow for fewer,

more efficient power stations to supply electricity to more than one class of consumer

simultaneously. This would, in turn, allow the power stations and their consumers to take

advantage of the economies of scale that result from supplying goods and services to a large group

of customers. It would also provide opportunities for industry and rural consumers in areas outside

of the major metropolitan centres to be supplied with electricity, because the local distribution

lines could be linked to the nearby electrified railways.

Figures 4, 5, and 6 show the importance of railway electrification, especially in the earlier

phases of Escom’s national electrification plans. For the sake of clarity, any contribution less than

10% of the total is shown in the bar to the side of the pie chart. This makes is easier to see the

smaller consumer classes, such as domestic and streetlighting sales. The first aspect of these charts

that is noticeable is the dramatic differential in the relative sizes of the contributions by each

consumer class, especially between mining, industry, and domestic consumers before 1950.

However, this does not mean that domestic electricity usage was necessarily small during these

years, since a portion of the bulk sales was comprised of large purchases by municipalities, who

acted as intermediaries between Escom and the ratepayers. In Figure 6, the bulk category

exclusively contains municipal bulk purchases, which made up 17% of the electricity sales in 1950.

In 1930, the largest portion of sales went to bulk consumers, with the most significant bulk

consumers being the VFP and the municipality of Durban. These two consumers purchased almost

90% of the 701 285 627 units that Escom provided to bulk customers.165 Traction sales made up

165 Commission, 1930 Annual Report, p. 4.

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just over 14% of the total sales for 1930, more than direct sales to mining, industrial, municipal,

and residential consumers combined.

However, this relative proportion of traction sales in comparison to total sales did not

remain as high as these early values. As Figure 7 shows, the percentage that traction sales

contributed to Escom’s annual totals declined significantly after the mid-1940s. On this graph, the

yellow blocks represent the total number of units sold for railway traction each year, while the

black line is the percentage of traction sales relative to the annual total. Even though the number

of units sold each year increased steadily, the ratio of traction to total sales declined rapidly after

the middle of the century.

Figure 4 - Electricity Sales to Category of Consumer in 1930166

166 Commission, 1930 Annual Report.

Domestic and Lighting

Industrial and MiningRailway Traction

Bulk Supplies

Other

Electricity Sales by Category of Consumer, 1930

Domestic and Lighting Industrial and Mining Railway Traction Bulk Supplies

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167 Commission, 1940 Annual Report. 168 Electricity Supply Commission, 1950 Annual Report, p. 101,



Mining Bulk

Municipal Bulk

Industrial Direct

Mining Direct

Railway Traction

Other


Domestic and Lighting Mining Bulk Municipal BulkIndustrial Direct Mining Direct Railway Traction


Industrial DirectMining Direct Railway Traction

Bulk Supplies

Other


Domestic and Lighting Industrial Direct Mining Direct Railway Traction Bulk Supplies

- 65 -

Figure 7 - Traction Consumer Sales, 1927-2000169

Periodic outbreaks of industrial unrest that had extended from the mid-1910s until the Rand

Revolt in 1922 meant that the South African Railways (SAR) were also eager to ensure that private

companies were excluded from railway electrification as much as possible, in order to prevent

higher charges for power and to have more control over the labourers who were working in the

power stations.170 General Manager of the SAR, William Hoy, was especially interested in taking

control of the power stations away from the municipalities, since the staff at municipal power

stations had proved more problematic during strikes and other industrial actions than their

counterparts at privately owned stations.171

Electrification of small sections of railways, especially along sections with steep gradients,

had already been investigated in 1902, 1904, and 1908, but technology and generating capacity

had to catch up to the point where these plans were feasible. Electric traction over these sections

169 Escom Annual and Statistical Reports, 1927-2000. 170 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 75-6. 171 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 82; "Electricity Bill," National Archives of South Africa (SAB),

PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6, pp. 1-2.

0

5

10

15

20

25

0

500 000 000

1 000 000 000

1 500 000 000

2 000 000 000

2 500 000 000

3 000 000 000

3 500 000 000

4 000 000 000

4 500 000 000

5 000 000 000

1927

1929

1931

1933

1935

1937

1939

1941

1943

1945

1947

1949

1951

1953

1955

1957

1959

1961

1963

1965

1967

1969

1971

1973

1975

1977

1979

1981

1983

1985

1987

1989

1991

1993

1995

1997

1999

Traction Consumer Sales, 1927-2000

Traction (kWh) Traction (%)

- 66 -

was theoretically more powerful and cheaper than steam locomotives, although the purported

savings were on labour costs, not on the costs of running the trains.172 The SAR had already started

to implement their plans to electrify the railways between Durban and Volksrust after 1912, but

the outbreak of World War I in 1914 meant that the resources intended for this project had to be

diverted to wartime production.173

Electrification of the railways also presented the solution to the problem of transporting

coal from the mines to power stations for the furnaces and to the harbours for export. According

to Escom, coal represented the largest cost involved in generating electricity, thereby making

thermal efficiency and fuel transportation costs vital for the economical functioning of a power

station.174 The need to balance thermal efficiency and transportation costs was reflected in the

design decisions and operational requirements of Escom’s power stations. The coal found in the

Eastern Transvaal typically had a lower caloric value than would have been optimal for use in

power stations, since more fuel would have to be burned at the station to produce each unit of

electricity, thereby pushing transportation costs up.175

Escom solved this problem by constructing the power stations in the Rand Undertaking as

close to the mines as possible. For power stations that could not be constructed near to the coalface,

the coal was sorted according to caloric value, so that these stations would receive coal of sufficient

quality.176 The reality was that these stations, particularly in Natal and the Western Cape, did not

always receive the required amount or quality of coal that was required for generating power.

This chapter looks particularly at the early work on electrifying the Natal main line and the

railway lines surrounding Cape Town, since these were the first two lines to be electrified after

172 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 46-47; Nancy Clark, "South African State

Corporations: 'The Death Knell of Economic Colonialism'?," Journal of Southern African Studies 14, no. 1 (October, 1987): p. 182n34.

173 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 46-47. 174 "Electrification of Rural Towns and Farms, With Special Reference to the Proposed Sale of the Zwartkops

Power Station by the Electricity Supply Commission," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN 3370, ref. 507/1/1, p. 2.

175 The caloric value of a fuel is the amount of energy produced when a fuel is burned in the presence of oxygen, James G. Speight, The Chemistry and Technology of Coal, 3rd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2012), p. 49.

176 "Electrification of Rural Towns and Farms," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN 3370, ref. 507/1/1, pp. 2-3.

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1922. A report on the proposed electrification of the country’s main railway lines was submitted

to Parliament by Merz and McLellan in June 1919, which suggested that the first lines to be

electrified should be centred on Cape Town, Witbank, and Glencoe Junction. From this report, the

SAR&H decided to electrify the Natal main line between Durban and Pietermaritzburg and the

suburban railway between Cape Town and Simonstown. The decision to electrify the Durban-

Pietermaritzburg section was changed to a scheme to use electricity on the Pietermaritzburg-

Glencoe line, since large amounts of coal were being transported along that section of the Natal

main line.177

1. The Cape Railways: Electrification in and around Cape Town

At roughly the same time that Escom and the VFP were negotiating the terms of the

Witbank licence application, the South African Railways and Harbours Administration (SAR)

approached Escom to discuss the construction of a new power station in Cape Town to assist with

electrifying railway lines in and around the city. The municipality seems to have initially resisted

attempts by the fledgling parastatal to build the new power station in the city, but this opposition

started to recede during a series of meetings between the Capetown Corporation and Charles Merz,

who was one of the official Consulting Engineers to both the city and Escom.

In his dealings with the city, Merz was of the opinion that the city council would reject any

plans for Escom to supply electricity to the local railway lines, since this would deprive the

municipality of the income that could potentially come from the SAR.178 It is also possible that

the municipality would resist any plans that Escom or the SAR would have suggested for the same

reasons that the Johannesburg municipality objected to the VFP’s and Escom’s proposals –

namely, that the town council wished to protect its existing contracts with its ratepayers. In either

case, Merz was the ideal person to arbitrate between the Cape Town municipality and Escom – the

177 "Report of the Railways and Harbours Board on the Electrification of the Capetown-Simonstown, Monument-

Sea Point and Monument-Table Bay Docks (Passenger Service) Lines," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 785, ref. MM1711/25, p. 2.

178 "Merz to Smuts, November 2, 1923," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), PM 1/2/56, ref. 15/6.

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report that he had submitted to the South African government in 1920 led to the drafting of the

Electricity Bill in 1921/1922 and had espoused the idea of railway electrification breaking the

ground for industrial, mining, and domestic consumption.

Hendrik van der Bijl, as Chairman of the Electricity Supply Commission agreed with the

idea that railway electrification should take priority over mining and industry, so much so that he

placed higher priority on concluding the negotiations with the Cape Town municipality than he

did on finalising agreements with the Rand’s municipal groups.179 The negotiations with Escom

and Merz meant that by April 1924, the Capetown Corporation had granted the parastatal

permission to build and operate a new power station on the Salt River, with the express purpose

of supplying power to the local railway lines. A year later, in April 1925, when the ECB granted

Escom the licence to operate the Salt River power station, the conditions specified that the station

would be allowed to supply all properties and railways within a radius of 110 miles, as well as any

customers within 5 miles of the electrified railways. This provision thereby allowed the Salt River

power station to supply consumers outside of Cape Town’s municipal borders.180

2. Railways in Natal: The SAR&H, Escom, and the Colenso Power Station

The SAR&H had started construction on the Colenso Power Station before the

establishment of Escom to electrify the main line running between the Rand and Durban. William

Hoy, as General Manager of the Railways Administration, was keen to electrify the country’s

railways, because he believed that the electrification of railway lines would encourage the

electrification of nearby towns and rural areas.181 The Natal main line was selected to be one of

the first main railway lines in the country to be electrified, because railway traffic in Natal was

179 Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid, p. 79. 180 Commission, 1924 Annual Report, pp. 22-27. 181 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 76-77.

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exceeding the available capacity, and because electrification was believed to be the best available

option for upgrading the line.182

Once the Commission had been officially founded in 1923, Escom and the Railways

Administration decided that Escom should expropriate the station from the SAR&H, but only once

construction was complete and the station was in full commercial service. This decision was

reached at a meeting between the Minister of Mines and Harbours, representatives from Escom

and the Railway Board, the General Manager of the SAR&H, and Charles Merz in September

1923.183

Before the discussions about the terms under which the station would be handed over to

Escom had taken place, customers along the planned railway route were already requesting

electricity. Escom felt that these customers should be connected to the grid as soon as possible,

because several of the requests were from municipalities that had delayed the necessary upgrades

to their local grids while appealing to Escom and the Railways Administration for power. Escom

was also of the opinion that these customers should be supplied by the Commission from the outset,

stating that customers would not want to enter into initial contracts with one supplier and then have

to enter into new contracts at a later stage.184 The permit to supply these consumers was granted

by the ECB in June 1925, but it would take until March 1928 for the plant to reach the stage where

Escom could take over operations.185 Based on advice from the Consulting Engineers, Escom and

182 "Reports on the Electrification of the Pietermaritzburg-Glencoe Section of the Natal Main Line," National

Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 785, ref. MM1711/25.@1 183 Commission, 1923 Annual Report, p. 8; "Report of the Commission Upon the Supply of Electricity From the

Colenso Power Station (Natal)," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 785, ref. MM1711/25, pp. 3-4; "W. W. Hoy to Messrs. Merz and McLellan, October 11, 1924," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC274/12; "Report of the Commission Upon the Acquisition of an Electricity Undertaking at Colenso (Natal)," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 785, ref. MM1711/25, p. 4.

184 "Report of the Commission Colenso," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 785, ref. MM1711/25, p. 4.

185 "Forty-First Meeting," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), MNW 634, ref. MM 2879/22, pp. 1-2; "Minutes of the Forty-Seventh Meeting of the Board," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN 3370, ref. 507/1/1, p. 1.

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the SAR&H agreed that the Commission should not only take over plant operations, but that all

employees at the power station would be transferred to Escom at the same time.186

By the end of 1925, it was clear that the installed equipment along the section of rail

between Pietermaritzburg and Glencoe Junction was already being overwhelmed with the demand

imposed by railway traffic. The Pietermaritzburg-Glencoe section of the Natal main line had been

designed to handle a maximum of 30 000 tons of rail traffic per day along the southbound parts of

the line, and it was expected that traffic on that section of the railway line in 1926 would reach an

average of 27 000 tons per day.187 These figures were based on year-long estimates of average

railway usage, during which the expected traffic would remain relatively steady between January

and July, increase during the annual maize harvest season between August and November, and

then decrease back to pre-harvest levels for December.

From the estimates given by the SAR&H, it was likely that the average load would only

increase above the 30 000 tons per day mark in late 1928. However, the Administration also

cautioned that estimates of daily averages could be deceptive, because the load could increase

substantially above average during the course of a single day.188 Calculations by the Railways

Administration showed that these once-off increases in daily traffic during the peak season could

push the system past its limits as early as 1927.189

Merz and McLellan, as the Consulting Engineers working on the construction of the

Colenso Power Station, recommended that relatively minor alternations be made to the power

plant to meet the increased railway traffic. The alterations would include two extra boilers at the

power station, one extra substation along the section of railway line, and one transmission line to

186 "Merz and McLellan to William W. Hoy, January 27, 1924," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS

19, ref. ELEC274/12; "A. C. McColm to W. W. Hoy, January 23, 1924," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC274/12; "W. W. Hoy to A. C. McColm, February 27, 1924," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC274/12.

187 "Merz and McLellan to General Manager South African Railways and Harbours, November 5, 1925," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC170/1; "W. W. Hoy to Assistant General Manager, December 10, 1925," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC170/1.

188 "J. R. More (Assistant General Manager) to W. W. Hoy, January 27, 1926," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC170/1.

189 "J. R. More (Assistant General Manager) to Messrs. Merz and McLellan, May 12, 1926," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC170/1.

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link the new substation to the transmission network that powered the Pietermaritzburg-Glencoe

line. This recommendation was based on lower estimates of average daily traffic, not on the higher

estimates that the SAR&H had given for the maximum expected daily traffic during peak season.

The Chief Mechanical Engineer suggested that the renovations suggested by Merz and McLellan

should proceed, but that the buildings at Colenso should be retrofitted to make space for extra

boilers that could then be added to the station after Escom had taken control of the station.190

Escom agreed with these proposals and decided to upgrade the power plant at Colenso.

Extra space was added for up to four new boilers in the boiler house; two new boilers were installed

to increase the station’s generating capacity; and the Willbrook substation between

Pietermaritzburg and Glencoe was upgraded to increase the capacity of the transmission

network.191

In June 1931, the Colenso Power Station, with Escom’s blessing, embarked on a scheme to

replace unskilled black workers with roughly half the number of white workers.192 With this plan,

Escom faced the problem that white labourers were typically expected to earn higher wages, but

the plan was ostensibly designed to ensure that operating costs at the power station did not increase

with the addition of extra white workers.193 The need to balance operational costs with higher

wages is, in all likelihood, the reason for Escom’s choice to employ fewer white workers in these

unskilled roles. From the outset, Escom stated that the experiment (and any similar labour policies)

would depend on the economic viability of white labour.194

For their part, some of the white workers objected to the types of jobs that they were

expected to perform, which required the plant’s managers to take “…strong disciplinary action”

190 "Messers. Merz and McLellan to General Manager, May 6, 1926," National Archives of South Africa (SAB),

SAS 19, ref. ELEC170/1; "F. R. Collins (Chief Mechanical Engineer) to General Manager, July 12, 1926," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), SAS 19, ref. ELEC170/1.

191 Commission, 1926 Annual Report, pp. 8-9. 192 "White Labour Policy: Colenso Power Station," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), TES 7996, ref.

F103/13. 193 "H. J. van der Bijl to A. P. J. Fourie, May 16, 1932," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), TES 7996,

ref. F103/13. 194 Commission, 1930 Annual Report, p. 15.

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by firing two workers who refused to do the work. The station’s manager was pleased to report

that this had seemed to change the remaining workers’ attitudes towards the nature of their jobs,

but also stated that he felt that the Commission should not replace all black labourers with white

counterparts, because the local climate in Natal “…during the summer may preclude white men

from doing work such as boiler cleaning, ash handling, etc.”195

3. The Cape Rural Supply System

Rural areas in the Cape Western Undertaking were supplied by the same power station at

Salt River that supplied electricity to the SAR&H. The Salt River Power Station had been built to

supply the SAR&H, as had been recommended by Charles Merz, but also included another design

that Merz had suggested during his discussions with the Capetown Corporation – Escom’s Salt

River power station and the Cape Town municipal station at Dock Road were to be interconnected

to share a common distribution network. Rather than the piecemeal system which existed on the

Rand, where conflict between Escom, the VFP, and municipalities slowed the process of

interconnection, the system in Cape Town allowed both power stations to supply their own

consumers, while also offering backup capacity during times of high demand at either station.196

This interlinked system would also provide Escom the benefit of taking on new consumers, even

while the Salt River station was under construction. Any power supplied by Escom before the

station was in commercial operation was purchased from the Dock Road power station and resold

to Escom’s consumers.

By the start of 1925, the demand for electricity in the areas surrounding Cape Town’s

municipal area of supply had risen sufficiently to allow Escom to begin investigating the

possibility of supplying electricity outside of the municipal borders. In order to receive supply of

195 "White Labour Policy," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), TES 7996, ref. F103/13, p. 2. 196 Commission, 1924 Annual Report, p. 25. Conradie and Messerschmidt state that the interconnection between

the two stations was only functional in 1934, see Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 87-88, however the link seems to have been established well before that date. Escom’s annual reports had stated that the interconnection had been in operation since at least 1929, see Commission, 1929 Annual Report, p. 29.

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electricity, these consumers had to agree to minimum monthly quotas, so that the scheme would

remain economically viable. A large percentage of the decisions that Escom made regarding

consumers outside of municipal areas were guided by a condition in the Electricity Act of 1922,

which stated that “…undertakings shall, as far as practicable, be carried on neither at a profit nor

at a loss.” The financial implications of having to continually break-even were further complicated

by the following section, which said that the finances of all undertakings had to be calculated

separately, thereby making it impossible to use the profit made by one undertaking to write off the

loss of another.197

The parastatal was given some leeway by the clause that said that the finances had to

balance “as far as practicable,” but in practice, the Commission was generally unwilling to take on

electrification schemes that could have caused a loss. Despite this, the risk that Escom took on the

Cape’s rural supply grid certainly paid off. In 1926, the first year that the Cape Rural Supply

Scheme sent power to industrial and municipal consumers, they sold 280 242 units; by 1928, the

rural consumers used 9 767 699 units annually; and demand in 1929 reached 11 231 658 units.198

The Cape Rural Supply Scheme benefitted from the higher population density in the areas

outside of Cape Town compared to similar regions in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The

larger populations had larger demands for electricity, and the industrial consumers in the south-

western Cape were willing to use relatively large quantities of electricity. The region also had the

advantage that several smaller municipalities, such as Wellington and Somerset West were

applying to Escom for electricity but could not be supplied by the Capetown Corporation’s Dock

Road power station.

197 Government Gazette of 24 July, 1922, vol. 44, no. 1256, p. lxxiii. 198 Commission, 1929 Annual Report, p. 31.

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4. Requesting Rural Electricity Supply: The Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Operatief) Beperk and the Electricity Control Board

The Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Operatief) Beperk (BLK) approached Escom and the Pretoria

Municipality in July 1948 to request that either of the government bodies allow farmers and

households in the region of Brits, to the north-east of Pretoria, to interconnect with the regional

grid. The city of Pretoria and Escom had both given provisional approval to the scheme, on the

condition that the BLK was given official permission by the ECB.199 The BLK was not the only

organisation requesting a supply of electricity to a rural area after World War II, but their process

of applying for the rights to interconnect with the local Escom grid is better documented than most

applications of the time. The remaining surviving letters and documents in the South African

National Archives in Pretoria offer a look at the procedure that such organisations had to follow,

as well as allowing for an examination of the reasons why the Electricity Control Board chose to

reject or approve these requests.

In the period during and after World War II, Escom was increasingly constrained by

materials and labour shortages, while the demand for electricity amongst all categories of

consumers was increasing dramatically – the total installed capacity of all Escom’s power stations

had doubled during the decade immediately after the War’s end, while ongoing construction

projects were still adding extra capacity.200 Despite the fact that Escom had built seven new power

stations between 1945 and 1955, the parastatal was still having difficulty in keeping up with

demand.201 Aside from these difficulties, Escom also displayed an overall reticence to supply

electricity to “sub-economic” electrification schemes, which were plans that would not be able to

adhere to the principle of making neither profits nor losses on electricity sales.

199 "Minutes of the 198th Meeting of the Electricity Control Board," National Archives of South Africa (SAB),

HEN 3371, ref. 507/1/1, p. 6; "W. H. Milton to Electricity Control Board, July 5, 1948," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), ECB 4, ref. 24.

200 Electricity Supply Commission, 1955 Annual Report, pp. 7-10, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1955%20Annual%20Report.pdf.


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Mostly, the electrification of rural areas would involve lengthy transmission lines and

expensive transformers on farms and in towns to convert the high-voltage electricity into useable

current for mechanisation and domestic use. Escom was unwilling to subsidise these types of plans,

even when under political pressure from figures such as Jan Smuts.202 As such, the BLK had

assurances from the Pretoria Municipality that would include a loan of £100 000, in order to assist

the organisation in setting up a small grid around Brits. Agriculture in the area to the south of Brits

focused mainly on the growing of tobacco, which needed to be dried before the produce was

marketable. On farms without electricity, the drying of tobacco was performed using the heat

generated by burning coal, which the local farmers’ associations felt was “…injurious and

wasteful…” and that using so much coal for the drying process was “damaging to soul, mind and

body.”203

In the case of the rural areas around Brits and Rustenburg, electricity was being presented

as more than a technological change. Part of the argument was that the technological change from

heat generated via combustion to heat generated by electricity would make the work on these farms

less labour-intensive and more cost efficient, but there was also the implication that the working

environment itself would be profoundly more wholesome. Even though the “injurious and

wasteful” coal will still have to be burned at the power station to generate the electricity, it seems

that there is a connotative difference, at least for the farmers’ associations, between the rural and

urban environments.

The ECB reviewed the initial request from the BLK, and gave provisional approval for the

scheme, providing that the city of Pretoria, Escom, and the BLK gave further details on the costs

and statistics involved in establishing the scheme. Pretoria, however, was having difficulty in being

able to justify the £100 000 loan to the farmers, since the Provincial Ordinance of 1939 prevented

them from being able to use municipal funds for public works projects outside of their municipal

202 Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid, p. 158. 203 "Explanation of the Objects of the Proposed Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Op) Beperk," National Archives of

South Africa (SAB), ECB 4, ref. 24, p. 2.

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borders. When informed about the Pretoria Municipality’s resolution to help the BLK, the

Provincial Administrator had queried the legality of the loan, leading the city to request that an

amendment be made to the Provincial Ordinance that would allow the Town Council to provide

this loan.204

When the report on the proposed scheme was submitted to the ECB, the Board voiced

concern over the area of supply that the BLK intended to cover. The area demarcated by the

scheme’s planners was problematic because it was partially within the area of supply covered by

the Pretoria Municipal licence; partially within Escom’s licence for the Undertakings on the Rand,

and partially outside of any licenced area. The councillors in Pretoria had already told the Board

that they had no intent of supplying current directly to the consumers in the area, but instead would

willing to sell bulk power to any organisation which wanted to supply power to these rural

regions.205

On the other hand, Escom was opposed to the suggestion that a piece of the Rand Extension

Undertaking be ceded to another organisation but stated that the Commission would be willing to

allow the BLK to supply power within that small section of the Undertaking. The Board decided

to notify the farmers’ associations of Escom’s conditions that would allow for the local grid to be

built.206

At this point in May 1939, the BLK seems to have no further direct correspondence with

the ECB about the licence application. It is not certain whether they opted to request direct supply

as domestic consumers from the Pretoria Municipality, or whether they requested supply from

Escom through the Rand Extension Undertaking. It is possible that Escom would agree to supply

the farms in the Brits area, since the 1949 Annual Report mentions that the Rand Undertaking was

204 "Proposed Bulk Supply of Electricity and Loan to Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Operatief) Beperk," National

Archives of South Africa (SAB), ECB 4, ref. 24; "Borrowing Powers: £100, 000: For Loan to Boere-Lig-en-Krag (Ko-Operatief) Beperk," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), ECB 4, ref. 24.

205 "Minutes of the 200th Meeting of the Electricity Control Board," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN 3371, ref. 507/1/1, pp. 3-4.

206 "Minutes of the 205th Meeting of the Board," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), HEN 3371, ref. 507/1/1, pp. 3-4.

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going to be extended in the direction of Rustenburg to offer supply to the South African Iron and

Steel Corporation (Iscor) in the vicinity of Thabazimbi.207

Not only do these microhistories, such as the story of the BLK, help to show more of the

otherwise hidden processes that were taking place behind the visible appearance of electricity

distribution networks, but they also show how the grid was taking shape. Each time that a

community was granted or denied access to Escom’s network, the area of supply would slightly

change shape. It is these small changes that turned the perfectly circular licenced areas in Escom’s

1929 map (Figure 1) into the amoebic blobs in the corresponding 1944 map (Figure 2).

5. Electricity and the Domestic Sphere: Appliance Hire-Purchase Plans and Advertising

The Johannesburg Municipality had been trying to encourage the use of domestic

appliances since 1911 by adjusting tariffs to lower the rates paid by residential consumers – which

the Star newspaper called “Good News For Housewives.” The problem with incentivising the use

of domestic electricity in this manner was that the wiring in most houses could not handle the extra

current required for cooking food. Early household connections had been designed and installed

to supply power for domestic illumination, and the concurrent use of appliances and lighting

fixtures would increase the amount of current flowing through the household wiring dramatically.

To avoid the potentially dangerous overloading of residential connections, people were advised to

keep all lighting fixtures turned off while domestic appliances, such as stoves and irons, were in

use. Residents were also required to inform the Electricity Department of the Municipality which

extra appliances they intended to use or face the penalty of having their electricity supply

disconnected.208

Rural electrification across the country after 1930 was hindered by the Great Depression,

World War II, and post-war shortages of materials and labour. During the Depression, the annual

207 Commission, 1949 Annual Report, p. 42. 208 "Cheaper Current: Cooking by Electricity," The Star, June 26, 1911.

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growth in demand slowed slightly, but electricity was less affected by the economic downturn than

other sectors in the economy. Escom attributed the continued increase in demand to the changing

social norms, as it seemed that South Africans in both urban and rural environments were starting

to see electricity as a key component of improving living conditions. This is attested to by the

continued success of Escom’s hire-purchase schemes for domestic appliances. The undertakings

at Witbank, Colenso, and Salt River had initiated a scheme whereby consumers who used power

from those stations could purchase cooking ranges, refrigerators, water heaters, and small

appliances209 on credit through Escom.

The sale of domestic appliances was important enough for Escom to dedicate a permanent

display of “approved appliances” in the Hall of Achievement at Escom House in central

Johannesburg. Customers interested in purchasing appliances would be able to browse through the

appliances that Escom had deemed good examples of domestic appliances, which the Commission

hoped would guide and promote the use of domestic electricity.210 A municipal counterpart to this

was opened by the Johannesburg Municipality on April 1, 1939.211

By-and-large, the Cape Undertaking sold the most appliances on an annual basis, with

cooking ranges being the most popular items on sale. Until December 31, 1940, the Cape

Undertaking had sold almost ten times more ranges than the Witbank Undertaking, but direct

comparisons between the two undertakings are difficult to make, because of the vast differences

in their consumer bases. In 1940, the power station in Witbank sold 1 593 028 units of generated

power directly to consumers for lighting and domestic purposes, which equated to approximately

one-tenth of one percent of the total power generated at the station. By comparison, the Salt River

Undertaking had sold 10 721 104 units to lighting and domestic consumers. 212

209 Escom did not specify which appliances were categorised as “miscellaneous small appliances,” although they

were distinguished from washing machines, refrigerators, water heaters, and cooking ranges. 210 Commission, 1936 Annual Report, p. 13. 211 "Electricity Showroom Opened," Rand Daily Mail, April 1, 1939. 212 Commission, 1940 Annual Report.

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Comparisons between the power stations are further complicated by the distinctions made

between different classes of consumers. For instance, Escom typically did not distinguish between

bulk purchases by companies like the VFP and those made by municipalities for domestic

purchases – bulk purchases were typically consolidated as a single category in the yearly statistics

before the late 1940s.

The hire-purchase schemes in larger urban areas were typically run by the individual

municipalities, rather than by the Escom-owned undertakings in the region, but the principles

behind these plans were the same. The split between Escom and the municipalities makes it

difficult to assess how rapidly electrical appliances transferred into the domestic sphere, since the

annual reports only gave the figures for appliances sold by Escom.

What can be ascertained is how social groups in Johannesburg related to the use of hire-

purchase schemes to sell domestic appliances, as per the discussion on relevant social groups in

Pinch and Bijker. 213 The municipality comprises the first group as the electricity suppliers, who

wanted to increase the demand for electricity by selling appliances to their consumers. The

suppliers did not want to increase demand for the sole purpose of increasing income but were also

interested in managing the load on their power stations by minimising the variations between peak

and average demand on the stations.

Demand would typically increase during the working day, then decrease as businesses and

industries closed during the night. By promoting the use of electricity in the home, especially

during the evening hours, the suppliers hoped to increase the demand on their power stations,

thereby negating at least some of the downturn in demand. Higher overall demand would also

make the power stations more efficient, since the stations would be burning extra fuel to meet the

increasing demand as the working day began again. The increase in the use of domestic appliances

did result in a commensurate increase in the consumption of electricity – by the middle of World

War II, increased demand and the lack of machinery for power station upgrades meant that The

213 Pinch and Bijker, "Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts," in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social

Construction of Technological Systems, pp. 22-28.

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Cape Times had to publish an article telling housewives how to tell which appliances in the kitchen

used the most electricity and how to conserve energy.214

The second group is made up of appliance retailers who were not part of the hire-purchase

plans, who objected to the financial terms of the agreements between the municipality and the hire-

purchase customers. The hire-purchase customers form the third group; from their correspondence

in the newspapers at the time, this group seems to have been mostly from lower income middle

class and working-class households in the city who wanted to take advantage of the financial

benefits of municipal hire-purchase plans.

The appliance retailers did not object to the principle of the hire-purchase scheme, since

the municipalities had initially started off by purchasing the appliances wholesale from the

retailers, which allowed the municipality to buy at reduced costs. The appliances were then resold

to consumers within the municipality at lower rates than if they had purchased the goods in smaller

quantities from the retailers. However, the friction between the retailers and Johannesburg

Municipality started to increase when retailers felt that their profits were being adversely affected

by the hire-purchase plan rules. Initially, customers would select appliances in the stores operated

by participating retailers; the retailers would sell these appliances to the municipality; the

municipality would then resell the goods to the customers at a specified rate. The new rules that

the municipality wanted to enforce from the middle of 1940 onwards stated that the municipality

would buy all goods wholesale, then resell the appliances to their customers with a 10% mark-up

that would cover administrative costs.215

The Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce told the Municipality that this would cause a

fundamental change in the relationship between the Municipality and the retailers, since they

would no longer be cooperating, but would be in competition with each other. The Chamber

believed that this would negatively affect businesses in the city, which would lead to reduced

214 "Anti-Waste in the Kitchen," Cape Times, February 3, 1942. 215 "Electrical Appliances: Council Scheme Opposed," The Star, December 19, 1940; "Municipal Trading," The

Star, December 20, 1940; "Opposition to City Instalment Scheme," Rand Daily Mail, December 20, 1940.

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income in the form of rates from businesses; and that the plan could potentially ruin long-running

businesses in the city. 216

A letter to the editor in the Star during December 1940 gave attention to one aspect of the

new hire-purchase agreements that had not been previously discussed – the issue of where the

Municipality got the money to cover their overheads on the hire-purchase plans. The writer noted

that businesses in Johannesburg needed to apply a 45% mark-up on electrical goods to cover their

running costs, whereas the Municipality would only be applying a 10% mark-up on goods

purchased through hire-purchase. This implied, stated the letter’s author, that the Municipality

would be required to make up for this rather large 35% difference in pricing by using revenue

accrued from other ratepayers. 217“Ratepayer” also asked why the Municipality was so intent on

providing easier access to specific types of commodities.218 The Municipality had based their

counter-argument to the Chamber of Commerce and the retailers on opposition to the prices of

imported goods in the city’s shops.219

In socio-economic terms, this represents a continuation of the municipal socialism evident

in the fight for the “right to supply” that the Johannesburg Municipality had been engaged in with

Escom and the VFP since the turn of the century. In this case, the dispute was not over who would

be providing the electricity, but who would be providing the means for the consumers to use the

electricity. The Municipality had already gained the right to supply their ratepayers, despite their

apparent inability to keep up with demand over time; the electrical retailers believed that the city

wanted to take control of the domestic appliance market in 1940.220

216 "Electrical Appliances: Council Scheme Opposed," The Star, December 19, 1940. 217 Ratepayer [pseud.], "Municipal Trading: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul," The Star, December 31, 1940. 218 Ratepayer [pseud.], "Municipal Trading: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul," The Star, December 31, 1940. 219 "Municipal Trading," The Star, December 20, 1940; Interested [pseud.], "Electrical Appliances," The Star,

December 23, 1940; Working Man [pseud.], "Council's Hire-Purchase Scheme," The Star, December 23, 1940; Householder [pseud.], "City Trading: Domestic Electrical Appliances," The Star, December 24, 1940; Suspicious [pseud.], "Electrical Appliances," The Star, December 27, 1940.

220 "Municipal Trading," The Star, December 20, 1940; "Opposition to City Instalment Scheme," Rand Daily Mail, December 20, 1940; Veritas [pseud.], "Threat to Commerce: Council's Trading Scheme," The Star, December 28, 1940.

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The use of electricity for lighting and cooking was advertised through the cooking

demonstrations that Escom and the municipalities held in their appliance showrooms, and through

public spectacles in large urban centres. Renfrew Christie mentions that labour recruiters for

Kimberley’s diamond mines in the early 1880s found that the installation of streetlights drew

people in from rural areas, thereby making the recruitment of black labourers easier. When Durban

held celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, the newly installed

streetlights were turned on for the first time as part of the festivities.221 The “Tower of Light,”

which still stands on the Western Campus of Wits University, was built through the co-operative

efforts of Escom, the VFP, and the Pretoria Portland Cement Company for the Empire Exhibition

of 1936 in Johannesburg.222

The provision of electricity to residential consumers highlights one of the obvious

discrepancies in both the eras of segregation and apartheid, namely the uneven distribution of

services amongst the country’s various racial groups. Provision of residential connections to all

consumers would have meant greater overall loads and faster growth in the residential sector.

However, the fastidious commitment to separate development kept municipal and governmental

services outside of the areas that were designed as “non-European” for far longer than even the

nominally working class white areas. The expansion of the grid into the townships, especially after

the end of the 1980s is seen clearly in Figure 8, which shows the relationship between the total

sales in domestic sales and the relative percentage that these sales contributed to the overall annual

total. Unlike Figure 7, which shows a decline in the contribution of traction sales each year, the

domestic and streetlighting sales begins to increase rapidly and fairly consistently after 1990. This

coincides with the beginning of Eskom’s first serious efforts to grant electricity supply to black

residential consumers.

221 Vivian Bickford-Smith, The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in the

Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 70. 222 Commission, 1936 Annual Report, p. 11; Jennifer Robinson, "Johannesburg's 1936 Empire Exhibition:

Interaction, Segregation and Modernity in a South African City," Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 3 (September, 2003): pp. 770-2.

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The sales of electricity to domestic consumers constituted a relatively small, but vital, part

of the growth of the National Grid. Between 1948 and 1994, electricity was an important signifier

of racialised social status within the apartheid system. At the period of transition during the early

1990s, the expansion of electricity grids for domestic use into the townships and black rural

households hinted at the shifts that were occurring in governance at the national level. Electrical

lighting and appliances underwent a change from being signifiers of the inequalities in society to

being signifiers of the level and pace of change. The provision of electricity to households has

somewhat normalised electricity, so that it has become a key part of the list of services that the

national and municipal governments are expected to provide to all South African citizens, on a par

with running water and healthcare.

Figure 8 – Domestic and Streetlighting Sales, 1927-2000223

223 Escom Annual and Statistical Reports, 1927-2000

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

0

1 000 000 000

2 000 000 000

3 000 000 000

4 000 000 000

5 000 000 000

6 000 000 000

7 000 000 000

1927

1929

1931

1933

1935

1937

1939

1941

1943

1945

1947

1949

1951

1953

1955

1957

1959

1961

1963

1965

1967

1969

1971

1973

1975

1977

1979

1981

1983

1985

1987

1989

1991

1993

1995

1997

1999

Domestic and Streetlighting Sales, 1927-2000

Domestic and Lighting (kWh) Domestic and Lighting (%)

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CHAPTER FOUR – “RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST”:

NUCLEAR POWER, BANTUSTANS, TOWNSHIPS, AND LINKING THE NATIONAL

GRID, 1960 – 2000

This final chapter is intended to cover the final forty years of the twentieth century, during

which the Electricity Supply Commission took the final steps to completing the National Grid.

The early 1960s make an ideal starting point for examining the last phase in the process of

nationalising the country’s electricity supply. Increasing local and international opposition to

apartheid placed the South African government under increasing pressure to change the country’s

political system, pressure from which state-owned organisations were not immune. Not for the

first time, electricity infrastructure in South Africa was subject to sabotage attempts at various

points between the 1960s and the early 1980s.

At the start of the decade, the six large regional areas of supply covered by Escom’s grid

were not fully interconnected, especially in the country’s interior. Each of these large areas of

supply consisted of a regional grid, known as an Undertaking, which pooled the power supply

from Escom’s power stations in that region. There were particularly large gaps between the

Undertakings in the southern part of the Orange Free State and northern Cape provinces, and urban

areas such as Bloemfontein and Port Elizabeth were not yet linked into the National Grid. Instead,

these cities still relied entirely on the supply from municipal power stations.

The beginning of the 1960s also marks the period when Escom began to investigate the

feasibility of nuclear energy for electricity generation. The Atomic Energy Board (AEB) had been

established in 1948 with the passing of the Atomic Energy Act (Act 35 of 1948) and was given

similar mandates to those handed to Escom and the Electricity Control Board in the Electricity Act

of 1922. The powers granted to the AEB, however, were shaped by the nuclear nature of the

board’s work. The AEB was charged with overseeing the mining, extraction, processing, sales,

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and use of nuclear materials in South Africa, as well as being granted the legal rights to supervise,

approve, or restrict patent applications in the field of nuclear technology.224

During the second half of the century, the political shifts in the country also required Escom

to start planning to extend electricity supplies outside of the exclusively white urban areas. A report

from 1961 states that in Natal,

“In so far as the consumption of electricity is concerned, Europeans are the

only significant consumers, although within the last ten years increasing

number [sic] of Indians and Coloureds within the Durban Borough have

become consumers. Native consumption for domestic purposes is virtually nil,

only one small township at Chesterville with 1, 200 houses, plus a small

number in Lamontville having been connected to the system.”225

The same report also mentions that the plans for electrification in the townships around

Johannesburg was expected to cost £2 500 000 over the next years, and the report notes, with a

curious hint of optimism that the forced removals in areas such as Sophiatown would result in

“greatly increasing loading in an extensive area, hitherto electrically undeveloped.”226 These plans

for extending the grid outside of white-owned residential areas seem to have not been implemented

for some time, since newspaper articles in the mid-1970s still reported that Soweto residents were

trying to secure government approval and finances to establish the grid.

A large part of this chapter covers the nuclear aspect of the National Grid. It would be

impossible to entirely extricate any writing about the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant from the

political or environmental aspects of the larger anti-/pro-nuclear debate. Likewise, there is a

duality inherent in any discussion of nuclear power that links the ostensibly peaceful use of

radiation for electricity generation or medicine to images of mushroom clouds over cities. These

224 Government Gazette of 9 September, 1948, vol. CLIII, no. 4022, pp. vi-xxxi. 225 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Application of Nuclear Power in South Africa, p. 8. 226 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Application of Nuclear Power in South Africa, p. 12.

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environmental, political, and military uses of nuclear energy are co-joined to the generation of

electricity, but the discussion of Koeberg as a part of the National Grid is still somewhat lacking.

The existing published work on nuclear energy in South Africa focuses almost exclusively on the

South African bomb project, uranium enrichment, the Vela incident, speculation on the

international origins of South Africa’s nuclear technology, and safety issues in nuclear power

plants.227 Instead, this chapter is intended to present the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant as a

significant, although controversial, addition to the more mundane process of electrifying South

Africa.

1. Completing the Interconnections: Connecting the National Grid

At the start of the 1960s, Escom still had not established the full set of interconnections that

would create the National Grid. The six Undertakings, mostly clustered around the northern half

of the country, were not fully capable of sharing power. The Cape Western Undertaking, which

had been the basis for the formation of the Cape Rural Supply System, was particularly worrisome

for Escom. Haulage on coal accounted for large differences in the running costs at Escom’s power

227 David Albright, "South Africa Comes Clean," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 49, no. 4 (May, 1993): pp. 3-5;

David Albright and Corey Gay, "A Flash from the Past," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 53, no. 6 (November/December, 1997): pp. 15-17; Edwards and Hecht, "History and the Technopolitics of Identity," pp. 619-39; David Fig, Uranium Road: Questioning South Africa's Nuclear Direction (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2005); Fig, "Price Too High," in McDonald, Electric Capitalism, pp. 180-201; Verne Harris, Sello Hatang and Peter Liberman, "Unveiling South Africa's Nuclear Past," Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 3 (September, 2004): pp. 457-75; Gabrielle Hecht, "Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the Making of the IAEA," Osiris 21, no. 1 (2006): pp. 25-48; Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012); Zondi Masiza, "A Chronology of South Africa's Nuclear Program," Nonproliferation Review 1, no. 1 (Fall, 1993): pp. 34-53; Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Anna-Mart van Wyk, "South Africa's Nuclear Programme and the Cold War," History Compass 8, no. 7 (2010): pp. 562-72; Anna-Mart van Wyk, "Apartheid's Atomic Bomb: Cold War Perspectives," South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): pp. 100-120; Jo-Ansie van Wyk and Anna-Mart van Wyk, "From the Nuclear Laager to the Non-Proliferation Club: South Africa and the NPT," South African Historical Journal 67, no. 1 (2015): pp. 32-46; Jo-Ansie van Wyk, "Nuclear Terrorism in Africa: The ANC's Operation Mac and the Attack on the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in Africa," Historia 60, no. 2 (November, 2015): pp. 51-67; Martha van Wyk, "Sunset over Atomic Apartheid: United States-South African Nuclear Relations, 1981-93," Cold War History 10, no. 1 (February, 2010): pp. 51-79; Martha S. van Wyk, "Ally or Critic?: The United States' Response to South African Nuclear Development, 1949-1980," Cold War History 7, no. 2 (May, 2007): pp. 195-225.

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stations – in 1960, a short ton (2 000 lbs., roughly 907 kilograms) of coal cost 10s. 7d. at Witbank,

while Salt River in Cape Town was paying 48s. 4d. for the same quantity of fuel.228

The Coalbrook Colliery shaft collapse in 1960 had also sent a stark reminder to the

parastatal of how vital a consistent supply of coal was for the running of the power stations. In

accordance with the existing policy of constructing power stations on or near to coalfields, the

Taaibos and Highveld stations had been built near to Sasolburg in the Orange Free State to make

use of the nearby coalfields. On January 21, 1960, a shaft collapse at the Coalbrook North Colliery

killed 437 miners and cut off all supplies of coal to the Taaibos Power Station.229 Operations at

the South Colliery, which provided coal for the Highveld Power Station, were able to continue,

but the North Colliery was closed until late February 1960. Escom had to start diverting the load

on the Taaibos station to as many other stations as possible, while also making arrangements for

emergency supplies of suitable coal.

The Coalbrook collapse resulted in the re-examination of working conditions in coalmines

throughout the southern and eastern Transvaal areas. The investigation into mine safety led to the

temporary closure of the Vierfontein Colliery’s East Shaft and both collieries at Coalbrook. The

Taaibos and Highveld stations were only able to resume normal operations after April 1960.230

Coal prices at the Highveld and Vierfontein stations were almost unaffected by the interruptions

in coal mining during 1960, but the average price per pound of coal at Taaibos was double that of

1959.231

This increase can be attributed to the way that organisational, technological, and design

choices were made at Escom in the years leading up to the Coalbrook disaster. The power stations

in the Transvaal and Orange Free State were typically placed as closely as possible to the


http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1960%20Annual%20Report.pdf. 229 This disaster also helps to highlight the racial disparity in the subterranean workforce during this period. Of

the 437 miners who were killed in the collapse, only 6 of the casualties were white, Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 121.

230 Electricity Supply Commission, 1959 Annual Report, p. 9, http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1959%20Annual%20Report.pdf; Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 163-4.

231 Commission, 1960 Annual Report, p. 66.

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coalmines that were contracted to supply fuel. Such stations were also designed to work most

efficiently with the specific grade and type of coal that would be supplied by the contracted mines,

which made it extremely difficult to haul coal in from other areas when the fuel supply was

interrupted.

Some of the features of the tragic mine collapse were beyond Escom’s control, such as the

geological features of the northern Orange Free State that made the coal so easily available, while

other factors were entirely within the organisation’s control, such as power station design. It is the

way in which these environmental and organisational factors overlapped and interacted with each

other that created a unique problem for Escom. If, for instance, the power stations had been capable

of burning a wider variety of coal types, it would not have been as difficult to find suitable

replacement fuel for the stations. After the Coalbrook mining disaster, Escom started to design

newer power stations to be more impervious to similar environmental factors, and especially to

make the plants harder to sabotage.232

The shortfall in power output during the crisis at Coalbrook was somewhat ameliorated by

the interconnections that were already in place throughout the Transvaal and Orange Free State.

The output at other stations in the two provinces could be increased to compensate for the decline

in production at the Taaibos and Highveld stations. Escom had already started the process of

interconnecting stations within the various undertakings and between undertakings before 1960.

In October 1954, the Commission applied to the ECB for permission to interconnect the Eastern

Transvaal Undertaking (the licenced area that was supplied by the Witbank Power Station) with

the Rand and Orange Free State Undertaking (comprised of Brakpan, Klip, Rosherville,

Simmerpan, Vaal, Taaibos, Wilge, Vereeniging, and Vierfontein Power Stations).233

Escom had also applied during 1954 to make changes to the licences for the Cape Northern

Undertaking, which supplied the area around Kimberly, and the two licences for the stations

232 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 164. 233 Commission, 1954 Annual Report, pp. 10-11.

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operating in Natal. The Colenso and Congella stations in Natal would cooperate in meeting the

combined demand for Natal, which Escom estimated would save more than £4 million in

equipment upgrades for the two stations between 1954 and 1959. For the Cape Northern

Undertaking, Escom was operating the power plant in Kimberley that had originally been owned

by De Beers, but the old power station was struggling to keep up with load demand in the northern

region of the Cape Province. Instead of upgrading at Kimberley to supply an increasing but

relatively small load, Escom decided that extra generator sets would be added to some of the power

stations in the Rand and Orange Free State Undertaking so that an interconnection could be

established between the two areas.234

In general, Escom had been finding the increase in demand after the late 1940s difficult to

match. Despite having enough installed capacity, the Cape Northern Undertaking was also

struggling in the years preceding 1954 to supply enough power to consumers in the area because

of chronic water shortages. The stations in the Cape Western and Natal Central Undertakings had

been experiencing problems throughout the early 1950s with ensuring adequate coal supplies,

sometimes having less than a day’s worth of coal in stock at the stations. Even when there was

enough coal to burn, the power stations in Cape Town had difficulty with the quality of the coal

that was being supplied. In the 1951 Annual Report, Escom noted that the Cape Western

Undertaking had to implement a ration system, “whereby consumers in certain sections of the

Commission’s and the City Council’s areas were in rotation liable to disconnection at times which

were notified in advance.”235

Power stations in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State needed help from the local

municipalities in meeting demand, and customers in the Transvaal had to start using the available

load more carefully. Even the often fiercely independent Johannesburg Municipality was willing

to interconnect the city’s power grid to Escom’s regional grid so that the two systems would be

234 Commission, 1954 Annual Report, pp. 10-11. 235 Electricity Supply Commission, 1951 Annual Report, p. 8,


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able to support each other during peak hours. This interconnection worked well because the two

systems had their respective peak demand during different times of the day – Escom’s load was

greatest in the late morning and early afternoon, while the city’s power stations experienced

increased demand during the evenings.236

These interconnections then grew in the early and mid-1960s into a high voltage

transmission system that would use a network of lines carrying power at 275kV and 400kV

between the Cape Northern, Rand and Orange Free State, and Eastern Transvaal Undertakings.

Another high voltage line would transmit power at 275kV between the Ingagane Power Station in

Natal, which was due be competed in 1963, and the Georgedale distribution network.237 By 1996,

Escom felt confident enough in the development of the technology used in transmission networks

to begin discussions with other governments in southern Africa to interconnect grids beyond South

Africa’s borders. This included talks with the Portuguese colonial government in Mozambique

about cooperating on the Cahora-Bassa project; to sign a supply agreement with Lesotho; and to

begin investigating the possibility of building at least two new power stations South-West Africa.

As administrators over South-West Africa, South Africa would work in conjunction with the

Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and Suid-Wes Afrika Water en Elektrisiteitskorporasie

(SWAWEK).238

The first tangible appearance of the fully interconnected National Grid appeared in October

1969, when the interconnection between the Eastern Transvaal and Cape Western Undertakings

went into service. At the same time, Escom had finalised cooperative contracts for the construction

of Cahora-Bassa and was contemplating an agreement with Swaziland to collaborate on a new

power station near to recently discovered coalfields in Swaziland.239

236 Commission, 1950 Annual Report, pp. 45-47. 237 Electricity Supply Commission, 1962 Annual Report, p. 14,

http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1962%20Annual%20Report.pdf. 238 Electricity Supply Commission, 1967 Annual Report, p. 12; Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of

Power, p. 139. 239 Electricity Supply Commission, 1969 Annual Report, p. 8.

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These interconnections were key parts of the foundation of the National Grid, but one of

the largest steps in facilitating the national connections between power stations was the formation

of the Central Generating Undertaking (CGU). The CGU was founded on January 1, 1972 after

the Electricity Amendment Act 60 of 1971 altered the relationships between the Undertakings.

This turned all the former Undertakings, which had been tasked with the generation and

distribution of electricity, into Distribution Undertakings and placed the control of the power

stations solely under the CGU.240

This effectively centralised control over the individual power stations, thereby creating a

shift in the role of each power station. No longer were stations important only in relation to their

own Undertaking, but their output was integrated with all other Eskom-operated stations in the

country. This meant that some of the less cost-efficient power stations would only be used during

peak hours, thereby lowing total running costs. The creation and running of the CGU also created

a fundamental shift in the economy of scale that Escom could leverage – the same logic that led to

the interconnection of power stations within an Undertaking led to the interconnection of power

stations across the country.241

It was this centralisation and the extent of control that was granted to the CGU that limited

its lifespan to six years. By 1978, the CGU had started to become increasingly unpopular amongst

Eskom management and within the distribution Undertakings, largely due to perceived managerial

and operational overreach. In September 1978, Escom reverted back to operating via Undertakings

that controlled their own generation and distribution, but transferred managerial control to Escom

head office.242

240 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 142. 241 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 142-3. 242 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 230-31.

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2. “Thousands of Experts”: Escom’s Nuclear Power Projects, 1960 – 1990

South Africa was pulled into the international nuclear community by a request from the

Allied Powers during World War II, when the British government asked Jan Smuts to begin

research on the availability of uranium ore in the country.243 In 1947, Smuts followed up with a

post-war project to get gold mines to assist in the process of adding uranium processing facilities

to the existing gold extraction systems.244 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the AEB was also

involved in establishing international networks for civilian nuclear research and signed agreements

with the United States and the United Kingdom, which included the eventual installation of the

South African Fundamental Atomic Research Installation (SAFARI-1) reactor in 1965.245

By the time that research was beginning to get underway at the SAFARI-1 reactor, the

South African government had already commissioned two reports on the future of nuclear energy

for electricity generation. In both cases, the reports reached the same conclusion – the country

could invest in at least one nuclear power station in the future, but any plans should be held off

until nuclear energy could compete economically with traditional coal-fired power stations. The

earlier of the two reports served as more of a preliminary study into the feasibility of nuclear power

stations and nuclear energy research. As such, it offered fewer recommendations on potential

technological and economic choices that would have to be made in the process of building a

nuclear power station.246

In researching the 1968 report, the AEB considered four of Escom’s undertakings as

potential sites for a nuclear power station. By the late 1960s, each undertaking did not consist of a

single power station, as was the case shortly after the signing of the 1922 Electricity Act. Instead,

an undertaking was comprised of several power stations that supplied a common area. For

243 Masiza, "Chronology of South Africa's Nuclear Program," p. 36. 244 A. R. Newby-Fraser, Chain Reaction: Twenty Years of Nuclear Research and Development in South Africa

(Pretoria: The Atomic Energy Board, 1979), p. 24. 245 Masiza, "Chronology of South Africa's Nuclear Program," p. 36; Newby-Fraser, Chain Reaction, pp. 8,10-11. 246 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Application of Nuclear Power in South Africa (Pretoria: The

Government Printer, c. 1961); Atomic Energy Board, Report on the Investigation into the Possible Introduction of Nuclear Power in the Republic of South Africa (1968).

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statistical and accounting purposes, the output and income for the stations within an undertaking

were combined. As their borders expanded, these undertakings would become the building blocks

of the expanding National Grid.

For their 1968 report, the AEB examined the Rand and Orange Free State; Eastern

Transvaal; Natal; and Cape Western Undertakings. The two inland undertakings were discounted

fairly soon, as the costs of coal in the Transvaal and northern Orange Free State were low enough

to make nuclear power uneconomical. The Natal and Cape provinces were also favoured as

possible sites for nuclear power stations, largely because of the easy availability of seawater for

cooling purposes.

All nuclear power reactors use the same basic physical processes to generate electricity; a

controlled nuclear chain reaction generates heat, this heat is used to boil water, and the resulting

steam powers the turbines that generate the electricity. The differences in between reactor designs

are mostly determined by factors such as the type of fuel used, or which materials are used to

moderate the nuclear fission reaction. In terms of technological choices, the AEB made the

recommendation to use relatively small reactors of the CANada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU)

design.

CANDU reactors use bundles of fuel rods that are placed inside tubes that run through a

pressure vessel known as a calandria, and use heavy water as a moderator to control the nuclear

reaction.247 The investigators also researched the British Magnox and the more commonly used

Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) types, but concluded that the CANDU design was more suitable

for South African purposes because the uranium fuel used in the Canadian designs did not need to

be enriched.248

The use of natural, or unenriched, uranium would have presented two advantages for the

South African government at the time the report was published. Enrichment processes are typically

247 "Nuclear Power Reactor Characteristics," World Nuclear Association, last modified May 2017,

http://www.world-nuclear.org/getmedia/80f869be-32c8-46e7-802d-eb4452939ec5/Pocket-Guide-Reactors.pdf.aspx. 248 Board, Report on the Investigation into the Possible Introduction of Nuclear Power in the Republic of South

Africa, p. 50.

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extremely costly, in terms of financial investments, the amount of time required to produce fuel

that is sufficiently enriched to support a chain reaction, and the amount of available electricity that

can be used to run the enrichment facility. Secondly, as Escom and the AEB discovered during the

construction of the plant at Koeberg, relying on foreign sources of enriched fuel can present

economic and political challenges that restrict the availability of the fuel.

When the time arrived for Escom to make the decision to proceed with a nuclear

construction project, the parastatal opted to build the station in the Western Cape. The site for the

Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant was approximately thirty kilometres outside of Cape Town, in order

to act as a baseload generating station for the city. The rationale for placing the station relatively

close to a major urban settlement was that the Duynefontein area is relatively geologically inactive;

the station would have easy access to the National Grid from that location; the seawater from the

Atlantic was well-suited to provide water for the cooling systems; and the nearest coal-fired power

station was roughly 1 500 kilometres away from the city. 249

Escom sent out a request for tender applications for the nuclear power station construction

project during February 1974. The original project schedule called for any successful tender

applications to be ready for addition to the grid in September 1982. The initial applications were

reviewed by Escom in October 1974, and three applications were selected for further

investigation.250 The three tender applications were submitted by groups of engineering and

construction firms that represented international and local interests. None of the three applications

proposed to use the CANDU reactor design that the AEB had recommended in 1968; two of the

proposals advocated using a PWR design, while one recommended a Boiling Water Reactor

(BWR) design.251

249 "Nuclear Energy: Koeberg Power Station," Eskom, accessed July 7, 2015,

http://www.eskom.co.za/AboutElectricity/FactsFigures/Documents/Nuclear.pdf. 250 Electricity Supply Commission, 1974 Annual Report, p. 10,

http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Annual%20Reports/1974%20Annual%20Report.pdf. 251 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, pp. 194-97; Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp.

204-5.

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The PWR and BWR designs both use light water to generate steam and to moderate the

reaction in the core and, unlike the CANDU designs, both require enriched uranium as fuel. The

key difference between the two design concepts is that the BWR design has only a single system

to circulate the water for both the coolant and turbine systems, while a PWR design uses two

separate systems. In a BWR, the water around the core turns into steam, which is pumped directly

into the turbines, cooled back into liquid water, and sent back to the core. In a PWR design, water

is circulated through a primary loop, which moves heated water from the reactor core into a steam

generator to transfer the heat into pipes that comprise part of the secondary loop. The primary loop

then carries water back to the reactor core to be reheated. The water in the secondary loop is turned

into steam and pumped to the turbines.252

A suitable analogy for the two systems would be like cooking food in a pot of boiling water.

The BWR system would be akin to placing potatoes directly into the boiling water – there is direct

contact between the coolant from the core and the generator turbines. A PWR system would be

more like sealing the potato in a plastic bag before putting it into the pot – heat is transferred from

the water to the potato, but the potato and the water are never directly in contact.

The eventual decision, announced officially in May 1976, was to tender the contract for the

nuclear power station to the French-led consortium of Framatome, Alsthom, Spie-Batigonolles,

and Framateg, who were contracted to construct two 1 000MW PWR reactors at Koeberg. There

was some initial confusion over whether the contract had been granted to the United States or

France, since the American tenderers, headed by General Electric Technical Services Co, stated

that they had been informed in April 1976 that they would be given the construction contracts.253

The final contracts were signed between the South African and French interests on August 5, 1976,

and an agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), South Africa, and

France was entered into on January 5, 1977. This agreement established safeguards and inspections

252 "Nuclear Power Reactor Characteristics," http://www.world-nuclear.org/getmedia/80f869be-32c8-46e7-802d-

eb4452939ec5/Pocket-Guide-Reactors.pdf.aspx. 253 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 196.

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protocols so that the IAEA would have regulatory jurisdiction over the Koeberg Nuclear Power

Plant.254

The apartheid state placed particular importance on the advancement of technology to

create a modern state, even if the idea of continued institutionalised racism is discordant with the

ideas behind modernity.255 This distinctly South African form of “technopolitics” can be seen in

the construction of the Koeberg power plant. Firstly, the use of nuclear technology has a long

history of being heavily politicised, even if the legal and diplomatic bodies charged with

overseeing the use of such technology are ostensibly apolitical. Secondly, the very term “nuclear”

is associated with specific connotations in the minds of diplomats, politicians, scientists, and

laymen alike. Over time, these connotations have created a sort of nuclear exceptionalism that is

transferred across into any discussion on the use of nuclear power. Associated with this nuclear

exceptionalism is the idea that there is not necessarily a clear-cut line between what constitutes

“nuclear” technology, or even where to draw the line between “dangerous” and “safe” uses of this

technology.256

These concepts of modernity, nuclear technology, and nuclear exceptionalism combined to

confer a certain amount of prestige upon the Koeberg construction project. From the perspective

of the South African government, the construction of Africa’s first nuclear power station would

demonstrate the country’s mastery of a potentially dangerous form of energy for the apparently

benevolent purpose of generating electricity.

As the first nuclear power plant, not just in South Africa, but on the African continent,

Koeberg provided a valuable opportunity for the country’s anti-apartheid movements to sabotage

254 International Atomic Energy Agency, Information Circular, INFCIRC/244, pp. 1-9. 255 Sparks, "Apartheid Modern," pp. 1-30. 256 For a historical overview of the development of nuclear exceptionalism in Western society, see Spencer R.

Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For the localised South African ideas surrounding nuclear technology, see Edwards and Hecht, "History and the Technopolitics of Identity," pp. 619-39; Hecht, Being Nuclear; Hecht, "Negotiating Global Nuclearities," pp. 25-48; Gabrielle Hecht, "The Power of Nuclear Things," Technology and Culture 51, no. 1 (January, 2010): pp. 1-30; Gabrielle Hecht, "On the Fallacies of Cold War Nostalgia: Capitalism, Colonialism, and South African Nuclear Geographies," in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 75-99; Gabrielle Hecht, "An Elemental Force: Uranium Production in Africa, and What It Means to be Nuclear," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 2 (March/April, 2012): pp. 22-33.

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a high-profile target, while still trying to ensure that casualties would be minimised. On the night

of December 18/19, 1982, four modified limpet mines detonated at the Koeberg construction site,

damaging the reactor heads for both reactors, part of a tunnel near the station’s pumphouse, and

some of the cabling systems that had already been installed. The four mines had been planted by

Rodney Wilkinson, who had been working on the construction project while also aiding the ANC

to plan the attack on the plant.

The Star reported the next day that the ANC office in Dar es Salaam claimed responsibility

for the explosions, stating that the power station had been attacked in retribution for a recent

incident, in which twenty-nine South Africans had been killed in Maseru during a South African-

led raid.257 It is most likely that the attack had not been carried out in response to the Maseru

incident, since the timeline that Wilkinson later described to journalists suggests that the bombing

had been in planning for at least a year beforehand.258

The bombing did cause delays in the completion of the Koeberg construction project, but

the project was already behind schedule – in July 1981, Framatome was trying to dispute claims

that South Africa had responded to construction delays by threatening to withhold payment until

the reactors had achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction.259 By July 1982, Escom had changed

the dates for the first unit to be ready for commercial operation from December 1982 to the less

specific deadline of early 1983.260 In any case, it may not be possible to calculate exactly how

much of a delay was caused by the sabotage attack, since there had already been other construction

problems before December 1982.

The construction on Unit-1 at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant was officially completed

when the reactor achieved criticality, thereby being capable of maintaining a stable chain reaction.

The connection to the National Grid went online on April 4, 1984. Coincidentally, a blackout

257 "Koeberg: Doubts on Security," The Star, December 20, 1982. 258 David Beresford, "How We Blew Up Koeberg (... And Escaped on a Bicycle)," Mail & Guardian, December

15, 1995. 259 "Framatome Denies South Africa Can Withhold Payment For Its Koeberg Units," Nucleonics Week, July 30,

1981. 260 "Koeberg: Doubts on Security," The Star, December 20, 1982.

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affected central Cape Town on the same day, prompting further suspicion about the plant’s safety

and efficacy. Escom later stated that the widespread blackout had been caused by a fault in one of

the three main cables leading into the city’s local grid, which had caused the remaining two cables

to overload.261

Further problems during the final phases of construction on Unit-2 delayed the plant’s

commissioning even more. During inspections on the water circulation systems, the plant’s

engineers discovered iron impurities in the stainless-steel pipes in Unit-2’s secondary water loop.

Escom decided on January 21, 1985, that Unit-1 should be shut down so that the pipes in the

reactor’s two water circulation loops could be fully inspected, a decision that further strained the

tense relationship between the parastatal and Framatome.262 After inspecting the primary and

secondary water loops on Unit-1, Koeberg’s engineers decided that the presence of iron in the

stainless-steel pipes did not present any significant threat to the system’s integrity, but the Atomic

Energy Corporation of South Africa (AEC), the governmental body that had been formed by a

merger between the AEB and Uranium Enrichment Corporation of South Africa (Ucor) in 1982,

wanted further proof that the pipes were safe.

Further inquiries into the iron impurities revealed that the company which had produced

the stainless-steel for Framatome had allowed the iron identification tags that were used as labels

on their ingots of stainless-steel to contaminate some of the ingot moulds. This resulted in the

contamination of the materials used to cast the pipes that were used at Koeberg.263 The additional

delays caused by the extra pipe inspections meant that Unit-2 at Koeberg only achieved criticality

on July 7, 1985 and was connected to the National Grid on July 25, 1985.264

261 "Heat Caused Power Failure," Cape Times, April 5, 1984. 262 Ann MacLachlan and Stephanie Cooke, "Dispute Over Koeberg Shutdown Erupts Between Escom and

Framatome," Nucleonics Week, February 28, 1985. 263 Stephanie Cooke, "Koeberg-1 Restart Delayed Because AEC Not Sure Steel Pipes are Sound," Nucleonics

Week, May 16, 1985. 264 International Atomic Energy Agency, Operating Experience with Nuclear Power Stations in Member States

in 2014, p. 567, http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/OPEX_2015_CD_web.pdf.

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3. Electrifying Non-White Areas: Electricity in Townships and Bantustans

Determining when and how electrification occurred in the areas of South Africa that were

nominally reserved for African, Indian, and Coloured residences is complicated by a lack of

consistency in government policy and nomenclature. Relatively late in the process of

electrification as 1952, Escom still referred to areas reserved for white residents as “townships,”

and some areas that the Group Areas Act of 1950 demarcated as exclusively non-white had already

received some measure of electricity supply before the National Party electoral victory of 1948.

John Shorten makes a brief reference to the final stages of “…the reticulation of Orlando Bantu

Township…” in May 1938 and to the completion of municipal grid extensions into Soweto in 1956

but does not mention for how long these installations were active.

It is also difficult to determine to what extent the grid in Orlando would have electrified the

township, since Shorten also does not mention whether it was meant for streetlighting, industrial,

or residential use.265 It is likely though, that the local distribution network in Orlando did not

extend very far past the point it reached in 1938, because Renfrew Christie stated five years after

Shorten’s book was published that people living in the Orlando Power Station’s immediate

surroundings still did not receive electricity from the station in their homes.266

In any case, concerted efforts at electrifying the sprawling townships that lay in proximity

to the major urban areas only started in the mid-1980s, and the 1990 Annual Report stated that

there were still more than two million urban households that were not electrified.267 Even in areas

that had received some measure of electrification, the terms of supplying electricity were

sometimes dependent on racial classification. For instance, permits to receive electricity in

Bophuthatswana in 1986 still specified that electricity would only be supplied to properties under

white ownership, and that all such properties could only then be resold to what the permit

euphemistically called “the qualified group.” It also seems that applicants were subject to

265 Shorten, Johannesburg Saga, pp. 609, 613. 266 Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class, p. 2. 267 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 269-70; Eskom, 1990 Annual Report, p. 13,


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screening process before permits were approved. A comment added by government officials at the

end of a permit application states that the South African Police “…vind niks nadelig teen die

karakter van die aansoeker nie.” (…found nothing objectionable about the applicant’s

character…).268

To electrify some of the larger townships in the country, Eskom needed to use its existing

relationships with foreign firms to put together the resources and manpower to rapidly establish

infrastructure in underdeveloped areas. The first of these collaborative efforts brought Eskom, the

Électricité de France (EdF), and East Midlands Electricity together in 1993 to supply roughly

43 000 households in Khayelitsha with electricity. 269

Despite these efforts, progress into the urban townships and former Bantustans was slow.

In an inversion of the conflict between the Electricity Supply Commission and municipalities over

who had the right to supply ratepayers, Eskom often clashed with governments at the municipal,

provincial, and national level over who should carry the responsibility for electrifying urban

townships. In this later situation, the conflict was not over who would be granted the coveted right

to supply municipal ratepayers. Instead, both parties believed that the right to supply the townships

was more of burden and tried to convince each other to take on the responsibility. There had also

been a certain amount of resistance to continued electrification from the parastatal’s management

when consumers in townships and rural areas either engaged in rates boycotts or did not settle

outstanding accounts.270 There was enough resistance, according to Conradie and Messerschmidt,

268 "Permit Issued in Terms of Section 21 of the Group Areas Act, 1966," National Archives of South Africa

(SAB), VBW 565, ref. 13/1/4/4054/53; "Beslissing: Permit Aansoek," National Archives of South Africa (SAB), VBW 565, ref. 13/1/4/4054/53.

269 Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, pp. 300-1. 270 Prishani Naidoo and Ahmed Veriava, "From Local to Global (And Back Again?): Anti-Commodification

Struggles of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee," in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), pp. 321-37; Greg Ruiters, "Free Basic Electricity in South Africa: A Strategy for Helping or Containing the Poor?," in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), pp. 248-63; Peter van Heusden, "Discipline and the New 'Logic of Delivery': Prepaid Electricity in South Africa and Beyond," in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), pp. 229-47; von Schnitzler, "Citizenship Prepaid," pp. 899-917; von Schnitzler, "Traveling Technologies," pp. 670-93. Discuss the history of, and responses to, the rollout of prepayment meters in South Africa’s townships for electricity.

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that some members of Eskom’s board argued that “electricity for all” should not be given priority

over other goals, such as starting work on the international southern African power grid.271

Eskom also had to contend with the overwhelming scope of electrification across South

Africa’s urban townships and former Bantustans – not only was the parastatal expected to supply

electricity to households across the country, but businesses, schools, and clinics had to be added

to the long list of properties that needed electricity. As of 2016, this monumental task was still in

progress – Statistics South Africa stated that 84.2% of South African households had access to

mains electricity, up from 77.1% in 2001. The remaining 15.8% utilise coal, wood, paraffin, gas,

and other sources of energy.272 Despite the work that still needs to be done in electrifying more

than a tenth of households across the country, the progress that has been made since the start of

the 1990s is significant. The World Bank Sustainable Energy for All database states that household

electrification in 1990 was only 56.5% and only reached the 75% mark during 2002.273

271 Ian McRae, The Test of Leadership: 50 Years in the Electricity Supply Industry of South Africa,

(Johannesburg: EE Publishers, 2006); Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 270. 272 Statistics South Africa, “General Household Survey,” Statistical Release P0318 (Pretoria: Stats SA, 2016),

pp. 32-35, http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182016.pdf. The publication does not specify which fuel types are classified as “other” sources.

273 "Access to Electricity (% of Population)," last modified 2014, accessed January 29, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?end=2014&locations=ZA&start=1990&view=chart.

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CHAPTER FIVE – THE NATIONAL GRID AS A HUGHESIAN LARGE TECHNOLOGICAL

SYSTEM

As a means of evaluating and summarising the progress of building the National Grid, it is

perhaps best to use the factors that Thomas Hughes listed as important sociological features that

give technological artefacts their particular localised style.274 There is, inevitably, some overlap

between these factors, especially when examining the effects of a social system as pervasive as

South Africa’s segregation and apartheid had on the development of a technological system with

a national scope. Even so, it is still possible to isolate some factors that fall distinctly within each

of these categories that each played a role in the formation of the National Grid.

South Africa’s physical and social geographies affected the shape and form of the grid

itself. Two of the most significant factors in South African physical geography were the

mineralogy and rainfall patterns of the country’s interior. After the Mineral Revolution in the late

1800s, interior urban settlements started to accumulate around the diamond fields in the vicinity

of Kimberley in the North-Western Cape and the gold veins in the Transvaal. This created a

significantly larger demand for electricity in the northern half of the country, especially after the

alluvial gold deposits had been depleted and the Rand’s mines needed to sink shafts ever deeper

to reach the Reef.

The city of Cape Town, one of the most populous cities in the country, had grown around

the site of the original settlement established by the Dutch East India Company after 1652. The

mining centres of the country had been established around the diamond mines in the region of

Kimberley and the precious metals on the Witwatersrand. The straight-line distance from Cape

Town to Kimberley is slightly more than 830km, while Johannesburg is roughly 1 260km from

Cape Town. The focus on these three regions created uneven urban settlement patterns that left

large swathes of the country in-between these three areas relatively sparsely populated. The

localised nature of mining and settlement patterns created regional clusters of electricity demand.

274 Hughes, Networks of Power, p. 405.

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Not only did the country’s mineralogy affect the geography of electricity demand, but also

determined where supplies of fuel could be located. Coal reserves have typically been found most

heavily clustered in the Eastern Transvaal/Mpumalanga region, with smaller deposits also

available in the Free State, Natal, and Northern Transvaal/Limpopo provinces. If electricity was

to be supplied as cheaply as possible, then Escom needed to keep fuel costs down. This problem

was largely solved by the construction of power plants adjacent to the coal mines.

However, there were still power plants near large urban or industrial centres that required

coal supplies, but that were too far away from the coal seams to make a pithead power station

viable. Between the 1920s and the early 1950s, power transmission technology was still relatively

undeveloped, making high voltage transmission from a pithead power station to the centre of

demand impractical. These stations, most notably the stations in and around Cape Town, relied on

the freighting of coal from the mines in the Transvaal and Natal to the site of the power station.

This solution vastly elevated the operating costs of these power stations because coal had to be

regularly carried via railways to the power stations. For the Commission, this made the physical

geography of the country and the economics of power generation and transmission overlap. In

1950, the average cost of coal per short ton at the Salt River Power Station in Cape Town was 32s

5d, while the cost for the same quantity of coal at Witbank was 4s 2d.275

In 1956, Escom reported that nuclear power would definitely be implemented into the grid

at some point in the future, but that conditions in the 1950s did not warrant building such a facility

at that point in time. The Annual Report for 1956 states that Escom believed that there were four

factors that stood against construction of a nuclear power station:

1. The plentiful supplies of coal in the Transvaal and Natal kept fuel prices at South African

power stations low;

2. Areas in which coal needed to be regularly freighted by rail still had relatively small load

requirements, thereby helping to maintain low fuel prices;

275 Commission, 1950 Annual Report, pp. 23, 27.

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3. Nuclear power was still proving to be more expensive in the long run than traditional

fuel sources;

4. Nuclear engineering was still experimental and needed much more development before

it was a viable alternative to fossil fuels.276

The high costs of coal transport from the Eastern Transvaal to the Western Cape, combined

with security concerns about the safety of the high voltage transmission lines leading into the Cape

from the 1960s onwards, presented Escom with the ideal opportunity to begin the planning and

construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant.

The economics of power generation and distribution were particularly important for Escom

for as long as the parastatal was mandated to supply electricity without making either a profit or a

loss, as had been specified in the Electricity Act of 1922. Not only did the overall balance sheet

for Eskom have to reflect as close to a zero balance as possible for each financial year, but each

undertaking had to be treated as an individual entity in its own right – thereby making it impossible

for the cumulative profits at some undertakings to be used to write off the losses incurred at others.

These financial restrictions affected urban regions somewhat less than rural electrification. Firstly,

many of the towns and cities across South Africa had municipal power stations that generated and

distributed electricity to local consumers. This made the electrification of these locales less urgent

for Escom between 1922 and the 1950s.

Secondly, Escom had to consider the relative population density of a non-urban area before

the residents could be offered electricity. This made it unlikely that larger farms would receive

electricity during the interwar period, mostly because of the costs involved in establishing these

local grids. In order to supply electricity to an agricultural region, Escom had to transmit the power

at relatively high voltages, in the same way that power was transmitted from the power station at

Witbank to the Rand’s mining consumers. This required the construction of substations at the site

of consumption to convert the current from higher transmission voltages down to the voltages that



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were used for machinery and domestic appliances. Such substations were typically expensive,

making it difficult for individual farmers to be able to afford the costs of electrifying their farms.

Escom was also not able to fund the construction of the substations, since the overall cost of the

substation would be too great when compared to the amount of revenue that could be gained from

the consumption of electricity on the farm.

This restriction was finally done away with when the Eskom Act 40 of 1987 was signed.

This legislation both renamed the organisation and changed the rules governing how the

parastatal’s finances worked. After the Eskom Act in 1987, the parastatal was officially known as

Eskom – a portmanteau of the former English and Afrikaans abbreviations for the Electricity

Supply Commission.277 The new law also stated that Eskom’s role was to generate and sell

electricity “…in the most cost-effective manner, subject to resource constraints and the national

interest…”278 This effectively freed Eskom from having to maintain a nil balance over the course

of each financial year, instead making the terms of supplying electricity to consumers more

nebulous than under the previous laws.

There had been previous stopgap measures that had been signed into law to help Escom

bypass some of the financial restrictions from the Electricity Act of 1922. In June 1947, the

Electricity Amendment Act 44 of 1947 provided the Minister of Mines and Industries some extra

leeway in providing electricity to an area where power would have to be supplied at a loss. In this

provision, the Minister had been granted the right to decide whether Escom should supply

electricity to an area that would normally either require Escom to charge consumers more than a

reasonable amount for electricity or to supply electricity at a loss. In these cases, the Minister was

allowed to use annual funds that were granted by Parliament to make up the difference between

the costs of supplying electricity and the income from these consumers. 279

277 Government Gazette of 4 September, 1987, vol. 267, no. 10893, p. 2. In English, the abbreviation “Escom”

had been used to denote the Electricity Supply Commission, while the Afrikaans term “Evkom” was used as an abbreviation for Elektrisiteitsvoorsieningskommissie.

278 Government Gazette of 4 September, 1987, vol. 267, no. 10893, p. 4. 279 Government Gazette of June 18, 1947, vol. 148, no. 3834, pp. xc-xcii.

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The most obvious political aspect of South African society that helped shape the National

Grid was the increasingly overarching role that racial segregation and control played throughout

the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1948, the government had remained committed to the

idea of segregation, even if it was not as deeply ingrained in as many aspects of society and

lifestyles as it became after 1948. The government led by the National Party became widely-known

for passing laws like the Group Areas Act 41 of 1950, but the segregation-era cabinets had signed

the Natives Land Act 27 of 1913 and the Immorality Act 5 of 1927 long before the advent of

apartheid.

These overtures towards establishing a segregated South Africa make it difficult to

determine what difference, if any, the defeat of the National Party in 1948 might have made on the

progress of electrification. It is extremely difficult, even nigh impossible, to distinguish where the

segregation government would have decided to draw the metaphorical line. In any case, such

speculation is typically outside the scope of historical research, but it would be fair to say that no

matter which party had won the critical 1948 national elections, black South Africans would have

waited much longer for electrification than their white counterparts. Despite the focus on white

consumers for much of the organisation’s history, the continued growth of the mining and

industrial sectors helped to ensure continued, if slightly uneven, load growth between 1926 and

2000 (Figure 9).

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Figure 9 - Total Electricity Sales per Annum, 1926-2000280

Figure 10 shows the state of the National Grid as of the time of writing at the end of 2017.

This map shows Eskom’s continued reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal. Fourteen of the fifteen

baseload power stations in the country are still coal-burning stations, with Koeberg Power Station

in Cape Town being the sole exception. Koeberg is also the only baseload station that is south of

the Vaal River, all other power stations to the south of the Gauteng-Free State border are used for

peak load or emergency supplies. This leaves all provinces southwards of Gauteng vulnerable to

disruptions in power supply, especially in major urban centres like Cape Town. This weakness in

the system was clearly demonstrated by events in the mid-2000s, when a series of equipment

280 Data from Escom/Eskom Annual and Statistical Reports, 1926-2000,

http://www.eskom.co.za/sites/heritage/Pages/Annual-Reports.aspx.

0

20 000 000 000

40 000 000 000

60 000 000 000

80 000 000 000

100 000 000 000

120 000 000 000

140 000 000 000

160 000 000 000

180 000 000 000

200 000 000 000

1926

1928

1930

1932

1934

1936

1938

1940

1942

1944

1946

1948

1950

1952

1954

1956

1958

1960

1962

1964

1966

1968

1970

1972

1974

1976

1978

1980

1982

1984

1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

Total Sales per Annum (kWh), 1926-2000

- 108 -

failures and maintenance-related mishaps between November 2005 and March 2006 resulted in

multiple blackouts in the Western Cape.281

The effects of these outages were worsened by the earlier closure of several of the older

power stations in the Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and Free State region. These power stations had been

constructed and commissioned between the mid-1930s and the late 1960s; many of these stations

had relatively small installed capacities in comparison to the newer station designs and were

decommissioned between 1987 and 1990. Commissioned in 1936, the Klip Power Station had an

installed capacity of 424 MW, while the newer Duvha Power Station, commissioned in 1980, had

3 600 MW installed capacity.282

Jaglin and Dubresson believe that the key problem in the energy crisis that became evident

after the problems at Koeberg was not a lack of supply, but that poor maintenance and a series of

decisions made in the late 1990s meant that the overall system had deteriorated to the point where

peak demand made the system too unstable.283 In particular, Eskom has been criticised for the

decentralisation of electricity generation and distribution. This decentralisation started with the

dismantling of the CGU in the late 1980s, and has been blamed for increasing system instability

and therefore making the system less resilient against widespread failure.284

In effect, the National Grid had become an increasingly complex technological system,

with components that were technological and sociological in nature. Smaller problems, which

individually would not have created a nationwide electricity crisis, overlapped and interacted with

each other to create a situation where the National Grid could not maintain stability when any of

the major power plants experienced an interruption in generation. By comparison, the coal supply

281 Thembani Bukula and Smunda S. Mokoena, Investigation into the Electricity Outages in the Western Cape

for the Period November 2005 to March 2006, http://www.sinetech.co.za/news/wcreport.pdf; K. L. Rodseth, et al., "Executive Report on the Koeberg "Bolt-in-the-Generator" Incident," Energize, September 6, 2006.

282 Commissioning dates, decommissioning dates, and installed capacity from Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 114.

283 Jaglin and Dubresson, Eskom, pp. 62-75. 284 Stephen Greenberg, “Market Liberalisation and Continental Expansion: The Repositioning of Eskom in Post-

Apartheid South Africa,” in Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. David A. McDonald (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), p. 101.

- 109 -

problems faced by Salt River Power Station in the early 1950s resulted in problems that affected

the stability of the Western Cape Undertaking, but the shortfalls in power generation from poor

coal supply remained confined to that Undertaking.285

It is this type of problem experienced with the supply of electricity via the National Grid

that highlights the value of the contributions made by STS research. Capital had played a role in

the electricity crisis, in that investment in infrastructure had almost come to a standstill while the

national government debated whether Eskom should remain nationalised. However, many of the

factors that caused the slow breakdown of the National Grid were caused by worsening coal

shortages, chronic maintenance problems at major power stations, a lack of experienced

technicians, and the inability of the National Grid to handle high demand (even within the

parameters of normal peak loading).286

The National Grid had grown since 1923 into a large and complex technological system.

The private companies, like the VFP and RMPS, had made way for the nationalisation of electricity

supply during the 1930s and 1940s. Municipalities, such as Johannesburg, had been increasingly

interconnected to the system, so that even those town councils that had tried to retain full

independence after the signing of the Electricity Act in 1922 were integrated into Eskom’s system.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the disparate Undertakings that had been formed around the

power stations were gradually interconnected as high voltage transmission technology advanced

to allow for high voltages to be carried over ever larger stretches of the country. Legislative

changes – such as the law that created the CGU – turned the formerly isolated Undertakings into

a web of power stations, high voltage transmission lines, distribution cables, and control systems

that could carry electricity from the point of generation in the northern Orange Free State to Cape

Town.

285 Commission, 1951 Annual Report, p. 8. 286 Jaglin and Dubresson, Eskom, pp. 65-68.

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After the 1980s, Eskom was faced with the need to rapidly expand this web into areas that

had been denied service delivery for decades. These changes in social and technological

components of the system have allowed the parastatal to carry electricity into the vast majority of

South African households. Yet, it is also these changes that created a situation in which seemingly

unrelated failures within the network worked in combination to create a nationwide crisis in

electricity supply.

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Figure 10 - Map of Eskom's Operational Power Stations, 2017287

287 Data on the locations of the power stations from "Power Station GPS Coordinates," accessed December 14,

2017, http://www.eskom.co.za/Whatweredoing/ElectricityGeneration/PowerStations/Pages/Power_Station_GPS_Coordinates.aspx. Map produced using ArcGIS Pro.

- 112 -

Power Station Commissioned Decommissioned Location Coal-Fired Stations Arnot 1971 — Middelburg, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Brakpan 1908 1970 Brakpan, Gauteng (Transvaal) Camden 1967 1990 290 Ermelo, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Central 1904 1966 Kimberley, Northern Cape (Cape Province) Colenso 1924 1985 Colenso, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Congella A 1928 1973 Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Congella B 1946 1978 Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Duvha 1980 — Witbank, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Grootvlei 1969 1990 Balfour, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Hendrina 1970 — Middelburg, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Hex River 1952 1988 Worcester, Western Cape (Cape Province) Highveld 1959 1995 Sasolburg, Free State (Orange Free State) Ingagane 1963 1990 Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Kendal 1988 — Ogies, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) King William’s Town 1948 1972 King William’s Town, Eastern Cape (Cape Province) Klip 1936 1987 Vereeniging, Gauteng (Transvaal) Komati 1962 1990 Middelburg, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Kriel 1976 — Kriel, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Kusile — — Kriel, Mpumalanga Lethabo 1985 — Viljoensdrif, Free State (Orange Free State) Majuba 1996 — Volksrust, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Matimba 1987 — Ellisras, Northern Province (Cape Province) Matla 1979 — Kriel, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Medupi 2015 — Lephalale, Limpopo (formerly Ellisras, Transvaal) Rosherville 1911 1966 Johannesburg, Gauteng (Transvaal) Salt River 1 1928 1979 Cape Town, Western Cape (Cape Province) Salt River 2 1955 1995 Cape Town, Western Cape (Cape Province) Simmerpan 1909 1957 Germiston, Gauteng (Transvaal) Taaibos 1954 1995 Sasolburg, Free State (Orange Free State) Tutuka 1983 — Standerton, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Umgeni 1954 1988 Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Vaal 1945 1989 Viljoensdrif, Free State (Orange Free State) Vereeniging 1912 1970 Vereeniging, Gauteng (Transvaal) Witbank 1927 1969 Witbank, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) West Bank 1292 1947 1978 East London, Eastern Cape (Cape Province) West Bank 2 1956 1988 East London, Eastern Cape (Cape Province) Wilge 1954 1995 Ogies, Mpumalanga Gas Turbine Stations Ankerlig 2007 — Atlantis, Western Cape Acacia 1976 — Cape Town, Western Cape (Cape Province) Port Rex 1976 — East London, Eastern Cape (Cape Province) Paratus/Kendal 1986 1986 Namibia/Kendal Hydroelectric Stations Colly Wobbles 291 1995 — Mbashe River, Eastern Cape (Former Transkei Bantustan) Gariep 1971 — Norvalspont, Eastern Cape (Cape Province) Ixopo 1956 1958 Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal Malieveld 1925 1928 Sabie, Mpumalanga Ncora291 1995 — Ncora River, Eastern Cape (Former Transkei Bantustan) Sabie Gorge 1927 1970 Sabie, Mpumalanga (Transvaal) Umtata – First Falls291 1995 — Umtata River, Eastern Cape (Former Transkei Bantustan) Umtata – Second Falls291 1995 — Umtata River, Eastern Cape (Former Transkei Bantustan) Vanderkloof 1977 — Petrusville, Northern Cape (Cape Province) Nuclear Power Koeberg 1984 — Cape Town, Western Cape (Cape Province) Diesel Stations Alice 292 1948 1954 Alice, Eastern Cape (Cape Province) Caledon 1939 1943 Caledon, Western Cape (Cape Province) Margate 1938 1944 Margate, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Port Shepstone 1944 1969 Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Volksrust 1939 1957 Volksrust, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Pumped Storage Schemes Drakensberg 1981 — Bergville, KwaZulu-Natal (Natal) Palmiet 1988 — Grabouw, Western Cape (Cape Province) Wind Turbines Sere Wind Farm 2015 — Vredendal, Western Cape

Table 3 - List of Commissioned and Commissioned Power Stations Owned by Escom/Eskom, 1923-2017293

290 Returned to commercial service in 2010. 291 Originally owned by the Transkei Electricity Supply Corporation (Tescor). Taken over by Eskom in 1998. 292 Taken over by Escom in the year listed in the “Commissioned” column. 293 Adapted from the table in Conradie and Messerschmidt, Symphony of Power, p. 114.

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CONCLUSION

1. Conclusions on the Research Aims and Objectives

As stated in the introductory chapter, the primary aim of this research was to examine the

development of the South African National Grid from a viewpoint that relied heavily on the

theories associated with sociological analysis of systems building. This perspective was chosen as

an alternative to the more traditional Marxist influences in published writings on South African

electrification. The Marxian trend in South African historiography had led to a labour-centric view

of the development of the country’s parastatals, which allowed for scholars such as Renfrew

Christie and Nancy Clark to answer the question of why the National Grid was constructed and

utilised. However, as also mentioned above, these published works had not sufficiently addressed

the question of how the National Grid was constructed.294

In particular, the systems building perspective helped in addressing the effects of factors

aside from capital-labour relationships and racial segregation in the growth of the National Grid.

In Chapter Two, the interactions between private and governmental capital were shown to have

directed the growth of electricity in the Transvaal area, especially between 1922 and the late 1940s.

From a pragmatic perspective, the VFP and Eskom were constrained some of their choices by the

distribution of the country’s mineral resources – power stations needed to be constructed in

proximity to load centres, fuel resources, and water supplies.295

Chapter Three demonstrated the link between the electrification of railway lines and the

country’s outlying rural areas. In the case of the railways, electrification was undertaken for

reasons that were mostly economic, but also for the more practical reason of hauling freight up the

steep escarpment that separates the country’s coastal regions from the Highveld.296 At the same

time, rural and agricultural areas adjacent to the railway lines were receiving electricity. The

294 Cf. Introduction, pp 5-21. 295 Cf. Chapter Two. 296 Cf. Chapter Three, pp. 65-75.

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majority of the farms and households in these non-urban areas were in nominally “whites only”

regions, but economic and technical considerations also played large roles in the development of

the network through these areas.297

Lastly, the discussion on the development of nuclear power in Chapter Five showed the

impact of sociological and political factors during the development of the National Grid from the

early 1980s onwards. The gradual changes in governance before the mid-1990s were reflected in

the uneven growth of the electrical network into the country’s townships and non-white rural

areas.298 National identity, modernity, and apartheid governance worked in conjunction to add

momentum to the addition of nuclear power to the South African National Grid. This was partly

due to the prestige that was conferred upon large technical projects during the 1970s and 1980s,

and partly due to increasing fears that the grid was susceptible to sabotage by anti-apartheid

groups.299

2. Limitations and Associated Recommendations for Future Research

There is little focus on the interplay between gender and the establishment of the National

Grid in this research. Primarily, this can be attributed to the male-centric nature of Escom and the

ECB during most of the period discussed. In the discussion on the electrification of the domestic

sphere, it also proved problematic to find records beyond those of the male engineers, politicians,

and journalists. In the surviving records of events such as the cooking lessons held at Escom

House, all information has been mediated and edited either by Escom or newspaper editors – there

seem to be no quotes, interviews, or articles that show any of these events from the perspective of

the female participants. Likewise, there are also very few sources that show how black South

Africans acted and reacted in response to electrification. Many of these sources have also been

shaped by the views of the writers and publishers, whether they are official parastatal publications,

297 Cf. Chapter Three, pp. 75-80. 298 Cf. Chapter Five, pp. 102-4. 299 Cf. Chapter Five, pp. 95-101.

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newspapers, or archival sources. Filling in these gaps would require access to sources such as the

diaries and personal correspondence of these participants. It might be possible to conduct

interviews with the people who participated in the more recent events, such as the construction of

the Koeberg power plant and the electrification of the townships, but the decades since Escom’s

early days would prevent similar interviews with early consumers. Whether such records remain

in the Eskom corporate archive is difficult to determine, because multiple requests for access to

these archives were declined at the start of the research process.

There is possible scope for more focused studies on the history of individual artefacts or

sets of artefacts within the South African context, such as those by Fred Schroeder and Damon

Taylor on electrical plugs and sockets in the United States and Europe.300 Such studies are useful

for examining the effect of more localised influences on the technological style of a system. This

would rely on the ability to not only find sources pertaining to the development of a national

system, but would also depend on the availability of sources on the choices (and the rationale for

these choices) by the engineers and systems designers who made those choices.

300 Fred E. H. Schroeder, “More “Small Things Forgotten”: Domestic Electrical Plugs and Receptacle, 1881-

1931,” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (July 1986): pp. 525-43; Damon Taylor, “Plugging In: Power Sockets, Standards and the Valencies of National Habitus,” Journal of Material Culture 20, no. 1 (2015): pp. 59-75.

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Building the Grid: The Electrification of South Africa, 1882-2000

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