Getting to know the name behind the busiest ‘William Nicol Drive’ in Joburg
You might be saying you are rather stuck in traffic on Winnie Madikizela Mandela Drive than you did before on Wiliam Nicol Drive. But who is the man named after this busy road? Fourways Review chats with the research associate.
We are waving ‘goodbye’ to William Nicol Drive and saying ‘hello’ to Winnie Madikizela Mandela Drive as recently announced by the ANC in Johannesburg.
But who was William Nicol and how come we have a road named after him? We spoke with a research associate from the University of Free State Dr Lindie Koorts to find out and explore some of the possible reasons we now have the famous, yet busiest William Nicol Drive in the City of Gold.
She tells us, that William Nicol, was known for being an Afrikaans clergyman and was very prominent in the Dutch Reformed Church. He studied theology in Stellenbosch and also abroad in Amsterdam before he came back to South Africa and entered the ministry.
“He was the minister of a church on the East Rand for many years before he moved to the east of Pretoria. William then became the moderator of the Transvaal Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church –- that means the highest position in the church in the Transvaal at the time.”
She said William Nicol was mostly known in a theological context and what was significant about him is that during those years, church ministers were also community leaders.
“They often acted as proxy political leaders although they were not formally involved in politics; they did have a political position. His [William Nicol] was closely intertwined with Afrikaner nationalism, so he did a lot to advance Afrikaans as a language in those years when Afrikaans was beginning to differentiate itself from Dutch.
“One needs to think of him within his Afrikaner context because in Johannesburg during the early 20th century, the Afrikaners were excruciatingly poor, very few people know of the so called ‘poor white problem’ and you don’t think of it if you look at the Afrikaners today. But he worked in Johannesburg during the years that Afrikaners became landless as many of them lost their land just after the Anglo-World War.”
That is why many of the Afrikaners left their farms and moved to the cities. “[Upon arrival], they were not able to speak English, which was the language of the city; they were not qualified or skilled for anything, so they ended up in those poor white slums. When nationalists did a lot trying to separate people by colour, poor people found themselves in the mix, and then they tried to separate that as well.”
But William Nicol in his own right, was involved in community upliftment and looked out for the poor in his community.
“So that sort of made him a figure in the Afrikaner circles. But then again, we cannot think of William Nicol without thinking about Afrikaner nationalism. When the National Party came to power in 1948, he was given a position in the new government as the Administrator of the Transvaal as it was then known.”
This, according to Dr Koorts, was not a political position even though it was a political appointment in a sense, “So, one can think it as something like a director general of a large government department.”
She said William Nicol was not deemed within the national circle but he was such an effective administrator that the prime minister stood by him, at the time.
“He gave up his position in the church for this government position. They couldn’t just let him go so he stayed in that position from 1948 to 1958. During that time there was a lot of increase in infrastructure, a lot of new roads were built, and then as it all happened, William Nicol Drive was named after him as the administrator and the man in charge of making these things happen.”
She added that it was a common practice for high-ranking government and political officials to have roads named after them at the time.
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