Ekurhuleni, one of the country's primary metropolitan areas, is merely a decade old. Whereas the promulgation of its more prominent urban neighbours – Johannesburg and Tshwane – as metropolitan areas involved the incorporation of smaller peripheral areas into major pre-existing cities, Ekurhuleni was created from the amalgamation of several relatively equal towns in what was historically known as the East Rand. Each of its constituent towns, including the suburbs, industrial areas, and especially the black residential areas attached to them, have rich histories going back to at least the start of the 20th century. This book is the first to attempt to weave together the separate threads of the pasts of each of these areas into a common historical narrative of the entire region.

Previously published books were usually commissioned by local municipalities to celebrate one or other milestone in the history of the white town. Written during the apartheid years, they focused almost exclusively on the achievements of the white population and were in fact premised on the basic notion that towns were places of white history and development. Their pages were filled with accounts of the experiences of white (usually male) pioneers in mining, industry and local politics. Black residents of these towns were excluded from these official histories, and when they did make fleeting appearances it was generally either as labourers and troublemakers or to demonstrate the goodwill and paternalism of the white authorities towards ‘its blacks’. Women and youth were similarly marginalised: white women were represented as wives or social entertainers, and white youth either as jovial or boisterously anti-social. Social strife, industrial action and political contestations were also downplayed (Benoni, Son of my Sorrow, is the one exception) in order to construct narratives of peaceful progress and enlightened development.

Several of these hagiographic accounts were produced prior to the 1970s. Those written after 1976 ignored or were oblivious to a large body of scholarly research undertaken from the 1970s, which produced fundamentally different histories and interpretations from the officially sanctioned books. Inspired by the turn to social history, academics and students based at universities wrote new histories that emphasised the role of ordinary people – women, men, workers, squatters, tenants and youth – in the making of their own history.