Mary Fitzgerald Square

This guide to Mary Fitzgerald Square in Johannesburg opens with an image witnesses never forgot: a woman standing on an oil drum, shouting over striking miners as mounted police closed in, on the day this dusty patch called Aaron's Ground earned her name. It follows Mary Fitzgerald from a farm in County Wexford, Ireland, to a job typing letters for a mine workers' union that radicalized her, and by 1911 to leading the so-called pickhandle brigades of striking women. Notice how the theatres and museums of Newtown now ring the very ground where that crowd once gathered.