The address is 36 Commissioner Street, Krugersdorp. The building standing on the corner of Commissioner and Market streets, two busy thoroughfares in Krugersdorp's Central Business District (CBD), is a tyre shop and garage called ‘Solly’s’ (figure 8.1). This Art Deco building was erected in 1940 by Kallenbach, Kennedy and Furner, an influential architectural firm in early Johannesburg with links to the Indian nationalist movement. Jubilee House, as it used to be known, was once regarded as the ‘jewel of Krugersdorp’. For most of the twentieth century, it was owned by one of the town's wealthiest Indian families, the Dadoos, who conducted business in Krugersdorp for at least three generations.

Across the road from Jubilee House is the south-eastern corner of Krugersdorp's original Market Square and Town Hall, one of its oldest architectural attractions and the site of the local municipality. Krugersdorp was founded in 1887 as a white mining town approximately 30 kilometres west of Johannesburg, following the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the 1880s. It was named after Paul Kruger, the Boer leader and president of what was then the South African Republic. The Mogale City Local Municipality today incorporates what used to be the white town of Krugersdorp; the townships of Munsieville (built in 1912 to house Krugersdorp's African residents who had been forcibly removed from the Old Location and relocated to the new site outside the town); Kagiso and Azaadville (built under apartheid's Group Areas legislation to accommodate Africans and Indians respectively, located even further away from white areas across the West Rand); and surrounding commercial farming areas such as Magaliesburg, Tarlton and Hekpoort. While the new expanded democratic municipality has taken the name of Kgosi Mogale of the Batswana ba Po – who had inhabited the area until Mzilikazi's Ndebele and the Voortrekkers broke up their polity in the 1820s and 1830s – Afrikaner right-wing organisations have so far successfully resisted the renaming of Krugersdorp itself.

THREE GENERATIONS OF DADOOS

Indian traders started arriving in Krugersdorp from the 1890s, attracted by the business opportunities opened up by the booming mining economy of the Witwatersrand. Among them was Mahomed Mamoojee (M. M.) Dadoo, a young Muslim immigrant from Kholvad, near the port city of Surat in Gujarat.