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“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”: “Tropical Africans” on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1903–1904

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2014

Alan Cobley
Alan Cobley*
Affiliation:
The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados
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Abstract

In May 1903, 380 Africans were recruited from British Central Africa (modern Malawi) by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association on one-year contracts to work in the gold mines. It was an experiment designed to test the potential for recruiting cheap black labor for the mines from the region north of the Zambesi. By the end of the contract period, more than a quarter of the men were either dead or permanently disabled. Their struggles to adapt to the harsh working conditions in the mines fueled a racist discourse among white South Africans about “Tropical Africans,” which focused on their supposed susceptibility to disease on the one hand, and their supposed “natural indolence” on the other. Notwithstanding these issues, the mine owners considered the experiment a success and moved rapidly to expand recruitment from the region in the years that followed. This article tells the story of this pioneering group of migrant workers, detailing their grim encounter with modernity and the power of capital in South Africa. It also suggests ways in which their experiences helped to determine the conditions of employment for the generations of migrant mineworkers that followed them.

Type
African Labor Histories
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 86 , Fall 2014 , pp. 36 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

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References

NOTES

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26. Dr. Charles Lane Sansom, DMOH Witwatersrand, to Pass Commissioner, Native Affairs Department, December 5, 1903: TAB SNA 180 NA2654/03.

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28. Reports of Transvaal Labour Commission, 243.

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30. H. S. Cooke, Inspector, to Chief Inspector, June 24, 1903.

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35. H. S. Cooke, Inspector, to Chief Inspector, Native Affairs Department, June 27, 1903.

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55. Transvaal Labour Commission. Minutes of Evidence, 244.

56. This is an apparent reference to the Tonga people found in the north of the territory, who are closely related ethnically and linguistically to the Shangaan people of Mozambique.

57. Packard, “The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker,’” 271.

58. Packard, “The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker,’” 290.