The Underground Route to Mining: Afrikaners and the Witwatersrand Gold Mining Industry from 1902 to the 1907 Miners' Strike Elaine N. Katz The Journal of African History, Vol. 36, No. 3. (1995), pp. 467-489. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8537%281995%2936%3A3%3C467%3ATURTMA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 The Journal of African History is currently published by Cambridge University Press.

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Journal of African History, 36 (1995), p p . 467-489 Copyright 0 1995 Cambridge University Press

THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE T O MINING:

AFRIKANERS AND T H E WITWATERSRAND

G O L D M I N I N G I N D U S T R Y F R O M 1902

T O T H E 1907 M I N E R S ' S T R I K E *

B Y E L A I N E N. K A T Z

University of the Witwatersrand A R O U N D1892 the Witwatersrand gold mines, formally launched in 1886, were transformed into an industry that required a huge complement of skilled and unskilled mineworkers. Yet few South African-born whites, more especially Afrikaners, were able to take advantage of the new industrial openings. For reasons of cost, they were excluded by management from doing the unskilled physical mining jobs. Instead, these were performed by rural African migrant labourers, who were extremely 'cheap' at unit cost; their wages were at least three or four times lower than those customarily accorded in South Africa to unskilled, proletarianized whites. Nor were Afrikaners trained to do skilled tasks on the gold mines. As southern Africa had very few industries and virtually no mining heritage, the vast majority of Afrikaners lacked the training and experience for artisan work and skilled assignments tied to the actual mining of gold. Such jobs were monopolized by immigrants, mainly from Britain, who were attracted to the Reef by relatively high wages, an inducement offered by most contemporary overseas mining camps that were similarly remote.' Notwithstanding these impediments to the employment of Afrikaners in the industry, by the beginning of 1907 they comprised roughly 17 per cent of the total white work-force on the gold mines. Superficially this seems to be a relatively small proportion, but these Afrikaners represented, in fact, nearly one-third of a discrete category of skilled underground workmen, namely miners. Another significant feature of the industry's skilled white work-force needs to be noted : although artisans on the Witwatersrand mines outnumbered miners by at least two to one, these craft jobs, during the period under review, were beyond the reach of the South African-born. Because Afrikaners procured skilled work solely as miners, the term 'miner' needs to be distinguished, and applied to workers underground, from the broader term 'mineworker' in general, and from the contrasting term ' artisan ' in particular. T h e term 'mineworkers' is the generic expression for wage-earners on the mines and today includes both black and white mineworkers. At the

* T h i s article is based on a paper originally presented to a symposium hosted by the History Workshop and the Sociology of Work Unit held at the University of Witswaterstrand, Johannesberg, in June 1993. I thank the referees of this journal for their valuable suggestions for improving the paper. See, for instance, H . Jennings, The Mining Industry: Enidence and Report of the Industrial Commission of Enquiry, with an Appendix (Johannesburg, I 897), 2 I 8 ; and Cornubian (18 Oct. 1901).

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468 E L A I N E N. KATZ beginning of the twentieth century, however, when blacks were officially and unofficially designated as ' kaffirs ', ' niggers ', ' coloureds ' and ' boys ', the term 'mineworkers' can be said to have included all workmen of European descent who worked on the mines. These were broadly divided into two categories: the artisans and the miners. T h e skilled artisans (plus technicians, semi-skilled operatives and other sundry tradesmen) comprised roughly 60 per cent of the white work-force on the mines.' They typically performed their tasks assisted by one or two African helpers. Although the artisans regarded themselves as 'surfacemen ', a fair sized contingent (approximately 20 per cent), including engine drivers, boiler attendants, electricians, drill sharpeners and so forth, nevertheless worked underground either intermittently or on a full-time basis. T h i s was a disproportionately large number of artisans compared to other mines in other parts of the world, and the reason for it was that each Witwatersrand mine possessed ' fairly complete workshops ' responsible for the installation, repair and maintenance of equipment. T h e mines' employment of their own artisans was in contrast to most other overseas mines, where such jobs were subcontracted to outside firms.3 At the turn of the twentieth century (from roughly 1890 to 1910) the professional underground miners in South Africa (as was true all over the world) constituted a distinctive and discrete category of mine employees. Working solely underground, they constituted approximately 30 per cent of the total white work-force on the Witwatersrand mines and approximately 60 per cent of the white work-force employed beneath the surface. Here the miners were employed in one of two capacities: either as specialist pitmen or as supervisors. T h e specialist pitmen (pumpmen, pipe fitters, plate layers and timberers) constituted about 10 per cent of the underground white workforce and, like the artisans, were each assisted by only one or two African helpers. By contrast, the supervisors, who comprised the complementing 50 per cent of the underground white work-force, were involved directly either with mine 'development' or production of the goid-bearing ore. T h e primary purpose of development tasks was to expose the ore. Miners therefore conducted development in barren rock, and their techniques included the sinking of shafts and the driving of horizontal and vertical tunnels. Production was directed to the actual excavation of the gold-bearing ore and was accomplished by the procedure known as stoping. "or these and the following statistics, plus their method of calculation, see E. Katz, 'Miners by default: Afrikaners and the gold mining industry before union', South 63-j. African Journal of Economic History, V I (1991), R. E. Browne, 'Working costs of the mines of the Witwatersrand', rournal of the 332-3. Cf. P.Richardson, 2nd J . J. VanSouth African Institution of Engineers, X I I (1907)~ in S . Marks and Helten, ' L a b o u r in the South African gold mining industry, 1886-1914', R. Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870-1930 (Burnt Mill, Essex, 1982),82-3; R. Davies, 'Mining capital, the state and unskilled white workers in South African, 1901-13', J . Southern Afr. Studies, 111 (1976),68, whose categories of surface and underground workers are as wrong and confusing as the conclusions they draw from them. For a corrective, see, for instance, Transvaal Government [ T G ] I 1-1908,iZlinutes of Ecidence of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, 1906-1908,404, statement by the Council of the Mine Managers' Association.

T H E UNDERGROUND ROUTE T O MINING

469

As supervisors, the professional miners, who were relieved of doing customary physical jobs, directed the drilling activities of small groups or large gangs of African labourers: Africans bored the holes (with hammers or machines) in preparation for blasting; and the supervisor, who had to be in receipt of an official blasting certificate, was personally responsible for detonating the holes. So-called semi-skilled white gangers (roughly 9 per cent of the underground white work-force) worked in close association with the supervisors. They, too, were overseers of Africans, more specifically those doing oreremoval tasks, including shovelling (also known as lashing) and tramming (the conveyance of ore from the working place, or stope, to the shaft). I t was these tasks, especially tramming, which Afrikaners, as will be later shown, often used as a stepping-stone to acquiring the blasting certificate, so qualifying them to be classed and paid as skilled. I n the early days of mining on the Rand, skill and skin 'whiteness' tended to coincide. But within a short time, as the mines became industrialized, many skilled tasks were arbitrarily reserved for whites, such discrimination being justified on the grounds of mine safety. Accordingly, in 1896 when statutory certificates for blasters were introduced, the award of these was, in practice, confined to whites by the informal customary colour bar; the job was formally reserved for whites by the statutory colour bar only later in 1911. T h e safety rationale, with respect to blasting (and various other 'dangerous' jobs), initially carried a certain degree of plausibility. But as persons of ' colour ' increasingly gained experience and acquired proficiency in mining tasks, the so-called 'skilled' status of miners became an increasingly artificial and racially based construction, designed to protect them from the competition of lower-paid workers who were not white." I t is against this background that the historiography of Afrikaner employment on the gold mines is now reviewed. T h e access by Afrikaners to a substantial proportion of jobs as skilled miners is conventionally linked to the failed miners' strike of 1907, a sectional dispute, which mainly involved socalled professional miners from abroad. According to this interpretation, management resorted to employing roughly 1,000 jobless Afrikaners as strike-breakers during the dispute, which enabled South African-born men for the first time to gain a permanent and relatively large niche in the industry, as their employment continued after the strike had ended.5 For many South African labour specialists, then, the 1907 strike marks the starting point for the rapid and uninterrupted growth until very recent times of Afrikaner miners underground in the gold mining i n d ~ s t r y I. n~ short, as

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E. Y. Katz, A T r a d e Union Aristocracy : A History of W h i t e Workers in the Transvaal and the General S t r i k e of I 9 1 3 (Johannesburg, 1976), 38, n . 72, 5 5-6, 339, 464. See also Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (South African Republic) [ZAR], W e t t e n (Laws), 1893, no. 3, section (65), 1896, no. 1 2 , section (89), 1897, no. I I , section (89), 1898, no. 1 2 , section (87). " See, for instance, P. C . Grey, ' T h e development of the gold mining industry on the Witwatersrand 1902-1910' (D. Phil. thesis, University of South Africa, Pretoria, 1969), 291; Richardson and Van-Helten, ' L a b o u r ' , 8 1 ; and J . J . Fourie, 'Dee1 I : 1886-1924', in E. L . P. Stals (ed.), Afrikaners in die Goudstad (Pretoria, 1978), 85. 9. Yudelman, T h e Emergence of Modern S o u t h A f r i c a : S t a t e , Capital, and the Incorporation of Organized Labor on the S o u t h African Gold Fields (Cape T o w n and Johannesburg, 1984), 7 j .

470 ELAINE N. K A T Z a recent study baldly claims, one of the important results of the strike was that. 'Afrikaners were here to stay'.' T h i s paper challenges the standard view that 1907 was a landmark in the history of Afrikaner employment in the Witwatersrand gold mining industry. Not only does this explanation ignore the evidence that the overwhelming majority of the strike-breakers, who were first-time miners, lost their jobs shortly after the strike had ended,8 it also cannot explain why at the beginning of 1907, well before the strike even began, approximately 40 per cent of the white underground work-force were already Afrikaners employed as miner^.^ T h i s relatively large proportion of Dutch-speaking miners (about 33 per cent) contrasted sharply with the conspicuous lack of skilled Afrikaners among the artisans in the industry at the same time: in July 1905, for instance, 'roughly about 90 per cent [of artisans were] from overseas'.'' T h e industry had absorbed a large proportion of Afrikaner miners before the 1907 miners' strike for at least two structural reasons: first, the extraordinary degree to which labour practices, including supervision, peculiar to the Witwatersrand gold mining industry fragmented the range of tasks elsewhere given to overseas professional miners because of their allround capacities; second, the growing shortage of overseas professional miners, especially from 1904 onwards, at a time when the industry was sharply expanding after its initial post-war stagnation. T h e entry of Afrikaner miners into the industry was also facilitated by a less obvious, but equally important, factor : the devastating impact of silicosis (miners' phthisis) on the overseas miners. By 1907, the disease, which had not in any way been ameliorated since its identification on the Witwatersrand in 1901, had not only disabled and decimated most of the pioneer rock drillers of the I 890s but was also in the process of destroying the lungs of the few pioneer survivors and of those who had joined the industry immediately after the end of the Anglo-Boer War in 1902." In short, the Afrikaners filled the vacancies created by the ravages of silicosis. T h e local miners were, of course, not immune to the disease. But as silicosis is a chronic disease which develops insidiously over time, its inroads among the Afrikaners became

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K . L . Thorpe, 'Strikes on the LVitwatersrand gold mines (1886-1907), with specific reference to the 1907 strike' (XI.A. thesis, university of Stellenbosch, 1986), j08. Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 132. See also Report of the Gocernment lZlining Engineer [ G i Z I E A R ]... 30 June 1907, 48; Transvaal Chamber of lZlines Annual Report [ T C i Z I A R ] , 1907, 38, letter; and Public Record Office [PRO], Colonial Office [CO], despatches, 291/119, Deputy Governor of Transvaal to Lyttelton, 9 Sept. 1909. Thorpe, 'Strikes', 496-7, also makes this point, as does Charles van Onselen, ' T h e Main Reef Road into the working class', Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914 (2 vols.), Vo1. 2: rvew 2Vineveh (Johannesburg, 1982), 142-3. Cf. Yudelman, Emergence, 75. His percentages, which show only a 'slight' fall-back in Afrikaner numbers after the strike, derive from different kinds of data bases, which should not be used, as he has done, to draw direct statistical comparisons with one another. Calculations based on the following, either singly or in combination: Final Report of the Mining Regulations Commission [ F R l Z l R C ] , 1910, vol. 2 , 241, D r L . G . Irvine; G A T E A R ... 30 June 1907, 13; and T C i Z I A R , 1907, 38. l o Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (July 1905)~9, W. Cullen, inaugural address. l1 E. S . Katz, T h e W h i t e Death :Silicosis on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1886-1910 (Johannesburg, 1 9 9 4 ) ~209-20 and passim.

THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

47'

manifest only several years later: only in 1912 did doctors publicly begin to express their concern about its casualties among the South-African born." THE ORGANIZATION O F WORK UNDERGROUND

O n the Witwatersrand both the artisan and the overseas professional miner were initially categorized together as skilled workmen, and both were paid in accordance with their shared elite standing as 'aristocrats of labour'. But the nature of their expertise differed considerably. Whereas the artisan possessed a formally defined mastery of a specific craft, it was the miner's range of experience and abilities that constituted his so-called skill. Unlike the artisan, the overseas professional miner did not serve a formal apprenticeship that culminated in a prescriptive trade test. Instead, starting generally as a young boy of ten or twelve, he learned his trade hereditarily from the 'bottom'. Under the tutelage of his father or other elders, he performed unskilled physical tasks, such as lashing and tramming, for a number of years, before he was allowed to graduate to more skilled assignments, including drilling and blasting. I n the course of his long, but informal, apprenticeship he also learned semi-skilled techniques, including plate laying, pipe fitting, pump minding and timbering. Consequently, at the end of his protracted apprenticeship a miner had acquired the range of abilities that qualified him as an 'all-rounder'.13 As management noted: ' [ T h e miner is] one who can do any practical work demanded from the collar of the shaft to the bottom'.'' With experience of that sort the overseas professional miners on arrival on the Witwatersrand experienced no difficulties whatsoever in passing the statutory blasting certificate test. After all, blasting was just one of their many accomplishments. Indeed, most foreign miners who occupied jobs as specialist pitmen also possessed blasting certificates and could switch from pit jobs to supervisory drilling ones if they so wished. T h i s certificate was therefore the hallmark of the professional miner. It was regarded as being the equivalent of the artisan's formal trade qualification, and possession of it entitled the miner to be classified and paid as skilled.15 Miners possessed of many practical talents were not, however, needed on the Witwatersrand, given its reliance on less expensive African labour for many of the 'all-round' tasks they did elsewhere.16T h e overseas professional miner was required to use only one or two of his numerous accomplishments in a specialized capacity; he was either a drilling supervisor, or he occupied one of several discrete pit jobs." When the jobs of skilled artisans were fragmented, it was usually the result of advances in technology. But on the Witwatersrand this fragmentation among the miners (or less precisely, l 2 Union Government [ U G ] I 9-1 91 2 , Report of a commission . . . to enquire into the prenalence of miners' phthisis and pulmonary tuberculosis .. . , I 3, para. 23. l 3 T G 2-1908, Mining Industry Commission, Minutes of evidence with appendices and index, 227, 481, 1245, qq. [questions] 2203, 5406, 18,239-41, J. B. Roberts and J . Coward; T G 11-1908, 344, 345, qq. 8454-6, 8517-19, H . Hay and J . H . Johns. '"ournal of the Chemical, iWetallurgica1 and Mining Soczety of S o u t h Africa (April I ~ I Z )410, , J. 11. Phillips. " Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 56-8. l 6 See, for instance, T G 2-1908, 891, q. 12,992, W. T. Anderson. l i See, for instance, T G 2-1908, 162, qq. 1435-6, E. J. Way.

472 E L A I N E N. K A T Z deskilling) happened in quite a different way. It took place not solely through the introduction of labour-saving machines but also-and in the first instance - through management's employment of low-paid black labourers, who were considered mere human machines. In fact, many mine owners referred to African mineworkers as 'muscular machines' lacking 'any intelligence'.'' Although many of the manual jobs performed by Africans were in reality semi-skilled, the wages of African mineworkers were pegged at unskilled wage rates, the average maximum being only 2s. 3d. per day.lg This was far liss than the unskilled rates accorded to whites on the rare occasions that the industry employed them to do ~ u r e l yphysical work; they usually received daily rates three to five times as great, ranging from 7s. 6d. to IOS.,the latter being one-half of the daily skilled rate of E I . ~ ' A miner who was a stope supervisor did not have to do any hand drilling himself. His skills were directed at training and supervising his gang of approximately 25 'hammer boys'. He showed his subordinates where to place the drill holes, and he did the blasting himself. Nor did he have to perform unskilled ore-removal tasks, as was customary elsewhere. These jobs, as noted, were done by black labourers under the supervision of nominally semi-skilled white gangers: the lashers and trammers. Specialization and supervision by white miners also accompanied the introduction during the 1890s of machine drills, known as rock drills. When rock drills were introduced in Cornwall and at other mining camps, a pair of miners, usually equal in status, operated the machines. Their work, however, was not unduly specialized; in addition to drilling, they often did their own timbering and other general pit tasks.'l But on the Witwatersrand rock drillers were responsible solely for drilling, and the pit tasks, which were separately categorized, were delegated to specialist pitmen: pipe fitters, pump minders, plate layers or timberers. Each rock driller in the South African mines had two African assistants: the first, the 'handle boy', helped him operate the machine; and the second, the 'spanner boy', did sundry jobs, including collecting, returning and sorting the drills." I n 1894, two years after intensive use of the machines began, management on several mines began to experiment with rock drill supervision, and by 1897 this form of supervision had become general, though not universal, practice." For an additional 5s. per shift (for a total of ' q e e , for instance, Merriman Papers, 1914, no. 274, enclosure, ' T h e Economic Commission ' ; Cd. 1 8 9 7 1 9 0 4 , Reports of the Transaaal Labour Commission, 403-4, paras. 15, 2 1 ; T G 2-1908, 1462, q . 21,067, F. D. P. Chaplin; and Parliamentary Select Committee Report [SC] 9-1913, Select Committee on European Employment and Labour Conditions, 326, q. 2231, R. N. Kotze. l 9 S . J . van der Horst, N a t i v e Labour in S o u t h Africa (London, 1 9 7 1 ) ~ zoj-7. SC 9-1913, 3, qq. 40-1, H. R. Skinner; Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 63, 78, 3 54. For a comparison of the wages of unskilled whites and blacks, see R. H . Davies, Capital, S t a t e and W h i t e Labour in S o u t h Africa : A n Historical iZlaterialist Analysis of Class Formation and Class Relations (Brighton, 1979), 59, table 4. T G 2-1908, 316, 489, 518, 699, qq. 2917, j547, 6072, 9000-8, S. S. Crowle, J. Coward, E. Moore and F. Crean. Transvaal Chamber of Mines Archives [TCMA], file W6(c), F . H. P. Creswell to Secretary of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines [TCM], [Sept.] 1902; T G 2-1908, 342, qq. 3344-5, C. C. Smith. 23 TCRIA, file CV6(c), F. H. P. Creswell to Secretary of the T C M , [Sept.] 1902.

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THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

47 3

2 js. per day) miners agreed to supervise two machines with the help of five Africans. A 'handle boy' and a 'spanner boy' operated each of the two machines, while the fifth African was responsible for 'bossing up [overseeing] the drills' for both machines.'"he deployment of the all-round miner in a single task, instead of many, was called 'specialization'. In development, supervisors were almost invariably in charge of machines, whereas in production, where the stopes were excavated either by machine or hand, they might oversee either of the two methods of stoping. By 1899 supervision was so thoroughly entrenched in the structure of labour underground that the term 'miner' became virtually 'obsolete' on the Witwatersrand : it was superseded by the term ' supervisor ' . ' 5 African subordinates working under white supervisors thus replaced many miners. Like the overseas miners, the Africans served an informal, practical apprenticeship that equipped them to perform increasingly skilled categories of work. T h e pioneer miners of the 1890s seemed oblivious to the threat that growing African skills posed to their jobs. They regarded the African workers as inherently unlikely to challenge them, as they lacked the 'intelligence and industry' of other possible competitors, like the indentured Chinese labourers whose importation they bitterly, but unsuccessfully, opposed in 1903.'~

THE BEGINNINGS OF AFRIKANER EMPLOYMENT O N THE MINES

As supervision and specialization whittled away the professional miner's allround practical skills, his versatility, the nebulous criterion on which his skilled standing rested, was rendered irrelevant. This paved the way for the employment of lesser trained men, notably the South African-born, particularly Afrikaners. A 'specialist' knowledge, that is one confined solely to drilling and blasting, was sufficient to earn them blasting certificates and so to qualify them to become supervisors on equal terms with the experienced, all-round foreign miners. At the end of the Anglo-Boer War the number of jobless Afrikaners grew rapidly in the Transvaal urban centres, especially in Johannesburg and Pretoria." During the 1890s many had been forced off the land, and their distress had been intensified by the war." T h e post-war years brought no relief. In fact, the reconstruction plans of Lord Milner, Governor of the Transvaal and High Commissioner of South Africa, exacerbated the plight of the so-called ' poor whites '. His 'costly experiment ' to introduce a system of 'close settlement' in the Transvaal failed, and the general result was that the bulk of the 'poorer agriculturalists' drifted into the towns 'helping to swell the ranks of the unemployed, [and] adding to the class of "poor Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 72. TCRIA, file W6(c), T . J . Britten to Secretary of the TCRI, 29 Aug. 1902; T G 2-1908, 226, q. 2178, J. B. Roberts. See also Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 72-3. ' W a t z , Trade Union Aristocracy, 19-20, 109-52 and passim; E. S . Katz, 'White workers' grievances and the industrial colour bar, I 902-1 9 I 3 ', S o u t h African Journal of Economics, X L I I ( I 974), I 52-3. '' Charles van Onselen's stimulating essay 'Main Reef Road', I I 1-70, concerning the Afrikaner proletariate on the Reef, is indispensable reading. Fourie, 'Dee1 1 ' , 73-4; S C 9-1913, 355, q. 2466, P. G . W. Grobler. 24

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474 E L A I N E N. K A T Z white " '." For most of the impoverished Afrikaners (and their sons), surface jobs in the gold mining industry, the single biggest employer of labour in South Africa, were unavailable. T h e y had no artisan skills. Nor could they be indentured as apprentices: they were either too old or, if young enough, lacked the required standard-four e d ~ c a t i o n . ~ ' I t was very difficult for the Afrikaners to get underground work on the mines also. As it was much cheaper for the industry to employ low-paid African migrant workers than higher-paid unskilled whites, from the mid1890s the mine owners opted for a policy that deliberately excluded whites from most, but not all, so-called unskilled categories of work.31All the same, as early as 1900 approximately 147 burghers from the South African Republic were employed in production as s t o p e r ~After . ~ ~ the hostilities had ended approximately j per cent of miners were South African-born.33These figures indicate the existence, at the turn of the nineteenth century, of a moderate number of South African-born miners, and their specialized duties also contradict the conventional assumption that the industry employed Afrikaners solely as ' labourers ' during the 1 8 9 0 s . ~T~h e acquisition by the Afrikaners of a small, but relatively stable, niche in the industry explains why a 'few' had by the beginning of 1907 (before the miners' strike began) worked for an adequate length of time and with sufficient proficiency to merit promotion to mine captains.35 During the reconstruction period the number of South African-born mineworkers steadily i n c r e a ~ e d By . ~ ~December 1906 Afrikaners occupied approximately 1,700 of the 5,703 jobs as miners in the industry and at least despite the fact that another joo positions as semi-skilled t r a m r n e r ~ . This, ~' they had little or no access to unskilled jobs, the traditional starting point for

'' PRO, CO, despatches, 291186, J . Brown to Selborne, 9 Oct.

1905. T G 11-1908, 336, q. 8228, Capt. R . YI. Crawford; S C 9-1913, 26-7, qq. 280-6, H . R. Skinner. 3 1 See, for instance, T C M A , file W6(c), T. Leggett to Secretary of the TCRI, 26 '4ug. 1902 ; Letterbook of City Deep Limited, 1910-1 I , (in the private possession of E. N. Katz), J . Whitford to Rand IbIines Ltd, 24 Feb. 1911; Corner House Archives [CHA], White Labour File [WLF] (now housed, but as yet unsorted, in the Barlow Rand Archives), T C k I circular letter, 12 Sept. 1905; and S C 9-1913, 3, qq. 40-1, H . R . Skinner. 32 Calculations based on the following confidential letters in T C M A , file W6(c), addressed to the Secretary of the TCLT: T. H . Leggett, 29 Aug. 1902, F . Hellmann, 29 Aug. 1902, T. H . Britten, 5 Sept. 1902, F . H . P. Creswell, [Sept.] 1902, G . A. Denny, 9 Oct. 1902. See also T C M A R , 1900-01, 63. 33 TCYIA, file W6(c), T . H . Leggett to Secretary of the TCRI, 29 Aug. 1902. 34 Cf. Grey, 'Development', 232; Richardson and Van-Helten, 'Labour', 8 1 ; and 35 T G 2-1908, 899, qq. 13,164-5, R. N . Kotze. Davies, Capital, 53. 3fi TC>T.L\, file W6(c), T. J. Britten to Secretary of the TC>T, I I Sept. 1902, file . L \ I ( ~ ) , Secretary of the TCYI to J . Erasmus, I j June 1907, enclosure, confidential letter from the .L\ssociation of >Tine >Tanagers, 6 May 190j ; C H A , W L F , L . P. Cazalet to L . Phillips, 27 Oct. 1906; T G 2-1908, 826, 899, 999-1000, qq. I 1,93I , 13,164-5, 14,777, R. Raine, R. S . Kotze and G . H . Somers; S C 4-1914, Report of the Select Committee on Working of Miners' Phthisis A c t , 1912, 99, q. 581, J. Hindman. 3' Calculations based on the following, either singly or in combination: T G 2-1908, 83-4, annexure, E. H . Weldon; Journal of the Chemical, lZletallurgica1 and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (Dec. 1906), 173; and T G I I-1908,403, statement by the Council of the IbIine >Tanagers' Association. 30

THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

47 5

the overseas professional miner's informal apprenticeship. Quite simply the Afrikaners gained entry to the ranks of the miners on the Rand through a route that was rather different from the customary one. It is difficult to establish the initial point at which Afrikaners attained positions as miners and trammers, the latter being a job category that they virtually monopolized by 1907. It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that their prominence there was one of the results of the 'white labour experiments' conducted between 1902 and 1904 on many mines, especially those belonging to the Corner House, by far the largest of the nine mining houses. This scheme of employing unskilled white labour was the brainchild of F. H . P. Creswell, manager of the Village Main Reef Mine in 1902 and parliamentary leader of the South African Labour Party in 1910. He had earlier, in 1897, conducted a similar, but far smaller, trial on the Durban Roodepoort Deep Gold Mine, which he claimed had been highly successful.38 Creswell and his followers were convinced that unskilled whites were more efficient than their African counterparts. They contended that the greater productivity of whites would more than offset the higher costs of unskilled white wages relative to those of blacks; one white, they argued, could easily do at least twice as much work as one black.39But the mine owners and most members of management strongly disagreed. They believed that Creswell's assumptions were n ~ n s e n s e , ~and ' they treated the 'white labour experiments' as merely a temporary expedient.41As in 1897, so also in 1902, they consented to Creswell's 'white labour policy' only because they wanted to relieve the shortage of African labourers on the mines. T h e post-war scarcity was particularly acute; many thousands of blacks withheld their labour, principally because of wage reductions, the outcome of the industry's revised wage schedule of I 900.~' T h e unskilled white labour plan was initially intended to provide former members of the British irregular troops used in the war with some means of temporary employment; many wanted to stay in the country but could not find jobs in the Transvaal during the post-war depression. But as the exirregulars did not come forward in sufficient numbers, the scheme was extended to 'all able-bodied' men and therefore recruited many indigent Afrikaners who, in fact, outnumbered the British-born.43In 1904 the white workers involved in this unskilled project numbered I ,003 (just under 3 per cent of the underground white work-force) and comprised 44 'aliens', 408 'of British nationality' and 55 I ' Boers '." Katz, T r a d e Union Aristocracy, 78-9. F. H. P. Creswell, ' T h e Transvaal labour problem', Independent Review, 1 1 ( 1 9 0 4 ) ~ 124-36 a n d p a s s i m ; Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 190, L. Phillips to J . Wernher, 13 Apr. 1908. ' O See, for instance, Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 190, L . Phillips to F. Eckstein, 13 Apr. 1908. " PRO, CO 291/42, despatches, nlilner to Chamberlain, I Sept. 1902, telegram; T C M A , file W6(c), T. Leggett to Secretary of the T C M , 26 Aug. 1902; T G 2-1908, 990, qq. 14,692-j, J. Davies. TCRIA, file W6(c), 'Report of the Special Committee', [Oct.] 1902, T. Leggett to Secretary of the T C M , 29 Aug. 1902. 43 PRO, CO 291/42, despatches, Milner to Chamberlain, 1 2 , 15 Sept. 1902, telegrams. Cd. 2183-1904, Further Correspondence Relating to Labour in the Transvaal Mines, j, no. l o . 38 39

" "

476

E L A I N E N. KATZ THE L O W WAGES RELATIVE TO THE H I G H COST O F LIVING

T h e scheme was unsuccessful principally because the unskilled white wage was extremely low relative to the high cost of living on the Witwatersrand. T h e men were paid 5s. per day and were provided with lodgings and ' rations ', the cost to the companies being 9s.per worker per day.35This wage was too low to provide a single man, let alone a married man, sufficient income for s u b ~ i s t e n c e .In ~ ~ 1907, F . H . Hodgkinson, secretary of the Federated Association of Mine Employees, provided cost-of-living figures for the Transvaal Indigency Commission. He showed that his organization's minimum monthly wage requirements 'without any extras ' for 'the average ' married and single 'tradesman' were E 2 5 (approximately E I per day) and A 1 2 (just under 10s. per day). This was so, given that house rentals on the Witwatersrand averaged A7 per month and that board and lodging at the boarding houses on the mines ' ran from E6 to E7 per month '. He amplified : ' W e think that is the minimum wage a man can live on if he is going to live in a self-respecting manner, and as he should l i ~ e ' . ~ ' Although Hodgkinson was a member of a 'non-political ' union sponsored by the Chamber of Mines, his sentiments reflected the views of the average working man and not those of his employers. Indeed, they were vigorously affirmed by executive members (and the rank and file) of the bona$de miners' union in evidence to the Mining Industry Commission a year later." In a heated exchange with one of the commissioners, a mining director, who contended that the miner's average monthly wage should be reduced from E29 to L 2 0 , Thomas Mathews, organizer of the Transvaal Miners' Association, exclaimed : D o you know that in the United States I used to work for A4 or A5 a week and an eight hours day, and the cost of living there was only half of what it is h e r e . . . How can we live on Azo per month [here] and have a wife and family. T h e house is A5 and the groceries E6, and the butcher I 2s. 6 d . . . T h e n there are incidentals A z , and we have E I zs. ~ 6d. for these things alone, without having a baby or anything like that.

These were not extravagant claims confined to workmen; they were endorsed in I 907 by no less a personage than the Governor of the Transvaal, Lord Selborne. T h e persistent high cost of living on the Witwatersrand was the single most important reason that most British mineworkers on the Reef were bachelors or married men living on their own, and who preferred to be migrants rather than permanent Transvaal dwellers." These characteristics 45 A. H. Duminy and W. R. Guest (eds.), FitzPatrick : South African Politician : Selected Papers, 1888-1906 (Johannesburg, 1976), 344, J . P. FitzPatrick to J. Wernher, 8 Sept. 1902; T C M A R , 1902, I 18. 46 T G 11-1908, 343, 344, qq. 8451, 8481-4, H . Hay. " Ibid. 67, 71, qq. 1655-7, F. H . Hodgkinson. 48 See, for instance, T G 2-1908, 316, 329, 376, 495, 519, qq. 2973, 3181, 3876-86, 5666, 6984, S. S. Crowle, T. Willis, F. Coward and E. Moore. 49 West Briton (6 June 1907). See, for instance, Mining Industry, 1897, 41, 47, S. J. Jennings and J. P. FitzPatrick; Report of the Council of the Association of M i n e Managers (23 Feb. 1903),appendix 4; West Briton (6 June 1907) ; Browne, 'Working costs', 332-3 ; and Barlow Rand Archives [BRA], Hermann Eckstein [HE], ( 1 3 4 ) ~S. Evans to R. Schumacher, 20 Nov. 1905.

T H E UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

477

were as true of the miners during the reconstruction era as in the days of Kruger's republic. According to a mine manager in 1907: On most of the [other overseas] fields a man can take his wife and family, whereas, here [on the Witwatersrand], living is so expensive that unless he earns a high wage he cannot maintain a family here in comfort.jO Owing to low wages and lack of incentives, most of the participants in the white labour experiments were intermittent workers who could not be relied on for a month's continuous service.51 Because of the constant stream of engagements, discharges and departures, most managers had to have hundreds of men on their books to be able to provide the smaller number of workers they needed at any one time." For instance, in June 1906 the Crown Deep gave employment to more than 500 unskilled men to maintain an average working complement of I I 5 . j 3 T h e consequently intermittent work patterns of the white labourers annoyed the mine managers because they disrupted production schedules: many attributed the failure of the scheme to the workmen's dislike of manual work. ' T h e y did not want to do the drudgery ', said a mine manager, ' [and] at the end of the month they would come and tell us to get somebody else to was only partly true, as a sympathetic do the dirty ~ o r k ' . ~ T hexplanation is mining engineer explained : One manager told me that they had go men, lashers, etc., pass through their hands in thirteen days. As soon as they got a few shillings they gave it u p . . . their 'hearts were broken'; they were probably mostly clerks, men who had never done a day's hard work, i.e. manual labour in their lives.. . in one - - case I saw a man's hand quite raw. The men were there just to get a day's pay."" I n short, apart from the low wages, the scheme failed because many Afrikaner and British men, particularly those of mature age, simply could not cope with the physically demanding and often dangerous unskilled tasks that they were compelled to do. Most members of management recognized the limits of relying on them: 'As a temporary measure the unskilled white man will consent to do "Kaffir work", but he will never be content unless he sees a future ahead whereby he can become a skilled labourer. '56 Although many of the 'grown m e n ' treated the experiment as only ' a very temporary billet' and ' t o earn something to live on',5' others - both young and mature men - availed themselves of the opportunity to become 'skilled' miners. T h e 'clever ones', those who possessed 'grit and backbone, and T G 2-1908, 1225, q. 17,875, J. H . Johns. T G 2-1908, 826, q. 11,925, R. Raine. 5' Transvaal Archives Depot [TAD], Secretary of Mines [MM], 649105, memorandum by H . Weldon, 13 Apr. 1905. j3 PRO, CO 291102, despatches, Selborne to Elgin, 20 Aug. 1906. See also T G 2-1908, 617, 826, qq. 7553, I I ,914-26, W. T. Hallimond and R. Raine. 5 4 T G I 1-1908, 344, q. 8463, H. Hay. j5 Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (May ~ g o g ) 390, , W . S. Price. 5 6 T C M A , file W6(c), T . Leggett to Secretary of the T C M , 26 Aug. 1902. See also ibid., T. J. Britten, I I Sept. 1902, G . A. Denny, 9 Oct. 1902, and F. Hellmann, 29 Aug. 1902. 5' Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (May 1908), 349, C . B. Saner; T G 2-1908, 922, q. I 3,624, P. Harvey. 50

51

478 E L A I N E N. KATZ stuck to their work', were promoted to trammers, machine helpers and assistants to the supervisors of the stopes drilled by hand.'' T h e y comprised approximately one-quarter to one-third of the 'hundreds' who had been 'taken on'.59And within a short time they gained their blasting certificates, which qualified them, at least on paper, to look for billets on the same basis as the overseas professional miner.60 Although, as noted, both English- and Dutch-speaking men took part in these experiments with white labour, the few extant figures suggest that Afrikaners outnumbered the English speakers by at least two to one, and impressionistic evidence confirms this.61 Likewise, although locally trained English-speakers joined the ranks of the foreign miners, they appear to have been far fewer than their Afrikaner counterparts, ' t h e people of the land ', as the overseas professional miners distinguished them.62 T h e upward mobility of Afrikaners from unskilled labourers to 'skilled' miners was not solely because of their participation in the white labour experiments. A number of the South African-born gained their blasting certificates through their own initiative, as informal volunteers, and 'gladly ', without receiving any payment, as a mine manager explained: ' If a man wants to learn mining, it often happens that he will go down with his particular friends and do that particular work [especially rock drilling] and do it for his own benefit. '63 Within a short time many of these 'raw green men ', who had been ' m a d e ' locally ' o n the ground', acquired enough knowledge to obtain their blasting certificate^.^^ T h e average 'learning' period was six months, but periods of two months, sometimes even less, were not uncommon.65 T h i s blasting certificate qualified them officially for entry into skilled work, namely supervising hand or machine drilling and executing blasting.66 Many Africans, certainly those who had served relatively lengthy con5 8 Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (May ~ g o g ) ,390, W. S. V. Price; BRA, H E , (138), L. Reyersbach to A. Dodd, enclosure; T A D , M M , 649105, memorandum by H. Weldon, 13 Apr. 1905; T G 2-1908, 611, q . 7382, W. T . Hallimond; Duminy and Guest, FitzPatrick, 346, J . P. FitzPatrick to J. Wernher, 8 Sept. 1902; Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 79-80; T C M A , file W6(c), F. H . P. Creswell to Secretary of the T C M , [Sept.] 1902. j9 T G 2-1go8,61 I , q. 7383, W. T . Hallimond; T G I I-1908,344, 345, qq. 8466,8513, H . Hay. 6 0 T G 2-1908, 976, q . 14,503, J. Davies; T A D , M M , 649105, memorandum by H . Weldon, 1 4 Apr. 1905. 6 1 PRO, CO 291102, despatches, Selborne to Elgin, 20 Aug. 1906; T A D , M M , 1883106, minute 2439106, by H . Weldon to Secretary for Mines, 9 Aug. 1906; T G 2-1908, 227, 643, 985, I O I I , 1361-3, qq. 2208, 8022, 14,645, 14,940-1, J. B. Roberts, R. Raine, J. T. Turner, J. G. Hancock and F. Hellmann; Fourie, 'Deel 1 ' , 39. " T G 2-1908, 976, q. 14,503, J. Davies; T A D , M M , 649105, memorandum by H . Weldon, 14 Apr. 1905; S C 4-1914, 99, q. 581, evidence of J . Hindman. Calculations also based on U G 19-1912, 51, tables XIV and XV. 63 T G 2-1908, 823, q. I 1,856, R. Raine. See also ibid., 61 I , 643, qq. 7383, 8023, W. T . Hallimond and R. Raine; and T G I 1-1908, 344, q. 8463, H. Hay. 6 4 T G 2-1908, 193, 641, qq. 1870, 7967, G . E. Webber and R. Raine. "Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (Oct. 1906), I I 1-12, C . B. Saner; F R M R C , 1910, vol. 2, 14, 153-5, 236, T . Mathews and M . Trewick, J. Yates and D r L. G . Irvine ; S o u t h African Mines, Commerce and Industries Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 56-8. (17 Mar. 1906), 3.

T H E UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

479

tracts, or several intermittent ones, probably also had sufficient training to earn certificates, but they were, as earlier noted, precluded from the award by the customary informal colour bar. Their exclusion, at least initially, was supported by the mine owners and their expert advisers. I n the words of Ross E. Browne, the American consulting mining engineer for the Corner House, who investigated the industry's working costs from January 1904 to September I 905 : The assignment of similar work to whites and blacks would result in lowering the standard for each, and breaking down the barriers which are essential to the supremacy of the white race. '4 distinct line of separation in the duties of skilled whited and unskilled coloured labour is of paramount importance. Fortunately for the mining industry this division of labour, with efficiency on both sides of the line will lead to the best possible results. This is doubtless generally conceded by those most familiar with the work.. . It is furthermore only in this way that a high average wage of skilled labour can be maintained, and a desirable status for the white man can be ~ p h e l d . ~ ' I t was not difficult for the Afrikaner with a recently acquired, but only rudimentary, knowledge of mining to pass the blasting certificate test. After the Anglo-Boer War the Department of Mines often lowered the requirements for passing: in many instances the applicant did only an oral test based on knowledge of the mining regulations, without having to demonstrate practical skills.68A critical mine manager griped: 'Any man could take the regulations and read them up, and if he was used to conversation with miners he could pass that examination every time'.69 Unlike before the war, the ' inference ' was no longer ' clear' that the blasting certificate was a 'guarantee of competency in a miner'." Although the locally trained miner of this era was classed and paid as skilled, he understood only the bare essentials of his calling. T h e system therefore produced ' a very large proportion of men calling themselves miners [but who were] miners in name only ' : all that it meant was 'that a man [had] probably done a certain amount of b l a ~ t i n g ' . ~ ' During I 904, I 905 and I 906, mining inspectors granted approximately I , I 96, I , I 39 and I ,223 permanent blasting certificate^.^' These were 'issued to all classes and grades of men indiscriminately', as the President of the Transvaal Miners' Association ~ o m ~ l a i n e dWhile . ' ~ some of the recipients were newly arrived professional miners from abroad, others had experience only as butchers, bakers, clerks and painters, as well as tailors, hairdressers Browne, 'Working costs', 297-8. Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 56-8. See also F R M R C , 1910,vol. 2, 14, T . Mathews and M . Trewick. T G 2-1908,891,q. 13,010,W. T. Anderson. 7 0 Council minutes of the Association of Mine Managers, 6 Aug. 1907;T G 2-1909, G M E A R .. . 3 0 June 1908, 45.See also Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (Apr. 1912),412,J. M . Phillips. S o u t h African Mines, Commerce and Industries (17Mar. 1906), 3. See also SC 9-1913, 28, q. 294, H.R. Skinner. " Calculations based on the following sources : G M E A R .. . 3 0 J u n e 1904, 5 4 ; G M E A R . . . 3 0 June 1905, 63; and G M E A R .. . 3 0 June 1906, 62. 7 3 T G 2-1908, 381,q. 3968,T. Willis. 67

"

480 E L A I N E N. KATZ and at least one ship's As important, the awards of 1906 also included Afrikaner miners, who had previously been confined to the lowly status of socalled 'learners' on the mines. THE LIMITS OF TRAINING

T h e learners emerged in 1906, when the mine owners sanctioned two kinds of training schemes on the mines. - - Although both were introduced to raise the low standard of local miners,'" the motives of the mine owners were far more complex than just this. They viewed these schemes as a means of establishing a trained and 'loyal' core of Afrikaner miners willing to accept wages that were lower than the skilled rate customarily paid to men from overseas. They further argued that the presence of the South African-born would lessen the industry's dependence on the overseas professional miners, whose monopoly of skills and collective strength had up to then thwarted management's attempts to cut costs through increased output. In addition to these economic advantages, the training schemes had the potential for future political gains. As the mine owners reasoned, the industry's assistance to the ' surplus Boer population ' would ' in time ' be recognized - and rewarded by 'their political leaders '.76 T h e evidence strongly suggests that in both schemes the overwhelming majority of learners were Afrikaners: in most of the literature they are referred to as 'Dutchmen'." Most were young single or married men, 'between twenty and thirty ', but there were also married men of 'middle age ' and even ' some old men '." Only ' a portion ' of the trainees were drawn from the 'zone of poor white settlements ' around Johannesburg (the western suburbs of lower Fordsburg, Vrededorp and Newlands), whereas 'considerable numbers came from the countryside generally' - from the 'outside districts ' of the Transvaal (Heidelberg and Potchefstroom), from the Orange River Colony and from as far afield as the Cape.jg These rural dwellers, according to management, were 'better class men than the men you pick up round Fordsburg'.'' T h e first programme was initiated in June 1906, when 41 mines began to employ unskilled white labour 'on an important scale', some 668 men." In 7 4 F R M R C , 1910, vol. 2, 14,T. Mathews and M . Trewick; T G 2-1908,700,924,qq. 9049, I 3,659,F . Crean and P . Harvey; London Mining Journal (19Oct. 1912),1 0 1 5; Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (May 1go8), 349,C. B. Saner. 7 5 C H A , W L F , Selborne to L . Phillips, 1 3 Jan. 1906,enclosure. Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L. Phillips to Wernher, Beit and Company, 18June 1906. 7 7 See, for instance, T G 2-1908,646,q. 8039,R. Raine; Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L . Phillips to Wernher, Beit and Company, 18 June 1906;and T G 11-1908, 240, 344, qq. 8464-73, 8513,T. B. Gilchrist and H . Hay. 7 8 T G 2-1908,646,q. 8039,R . Raine; S C 9-1913, 130,q . 965,D r L.G.Irvine. See also Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L . Phillips to Wernher, Beit and Company, 18June 1906. '' T G 2-1908,663,q. 7790,S . A. Smit; S C 9-1913,129,130,qq. 962,964,D r L.G . Irvine. For details on the western suburbs of Johannesburg, see T G I 1-1908,240-1,q. 5369,T . B. Gilchrist. 344, qq. 8472-73, H . Hay. T G 11-1908, PRO, C O 2911102,despatches, Selborne to Elgin, 20 Aug. I go6 ; Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L. Phillips to Wernher, Beit and Company, 18June 1906.

''

THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE T O M I N I N G

48 I

contrast to the earlier white labour schemes, these labourers did not actually perform the physical work, such as lashing and tramming. Instead, they supervised it at an average wage of 10s. per shift.s2 They were not employed to prove Creswell's theory that 'white men doing unskilled labour can oust the Kaffir'.s3 Rather, they were 'taken into training to do skilled labour'.s4 This was an obligation that management was more than ready to discharge; as soon as any of the men showed signs of promise, they were placed in the stopes as learners, where they received instruction in hand drill or rock drill supervision and b l a ~ t i n g . ~ ' T h e mine managers anticipated that not all the new employees would prove suitable: they expected that 35 per cent would have to be 'scrapped'. All the same, they were optimistic that at least another one-third would ' b e good miners in time'.86 In their keenness to realise this goal they were prepared to overlook a certain amount of intermittent attendance, which they claimed was not due to the men's aversion to 'steady work'. Rather, it was because 'they were mostly married men who keep running off to spend a little time with their wive^'.^' In the second scheme, which also involved unskilled white labourers, the men were specifically trained to run machine drills in the stopes. Following the lead of the Corner House, most of the mining houses introduced this programme, so that throughout the industry, and at any one time, there were approximately 87 of these trainees, also called 'learners '.88Learners on some of the mines were obliged to sign indentures for as long as two years. But on other mines, they were engaged on a voluntary basis and could usually finish their course within six months, provided they persevered.sg Even as learners, the Afrikaners, many of them hand-picked, failed to acquire an adequate training. This was largely because they were rejected on cultural and ethnic grounds by their British-born instructors, the professional miners and certain mine officials. At this time, throughout the world, mining camps were often dominated, from managers to the lowest paid workmen, by a particular national group. As a mine manager explained: ' I n California they run by camps. If the camp has the name of being the Austrian Camp, the Austrians flock there; if an Italian camp, the Italians flock there'.gOAnd similarly, on the Witwatersrand, a British 'camp' in this sense, the Afrikaner miners were seen as trespassers, the more so because PRO, C O 291/102,despatches, Selborne to Elgin, 20 Aug. 1906;T G I 1-1908,240, J . B. Gilchrist. 83 Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 190,L. Phillips to F . Eckstein, 13Apr. 1908. S C 9-1913,330,R. N. Kotze; Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L. Phillips d espatches, Selborne to Wernher, Beit and Company, 1 8June 1906;PRO, C O 291/1oz, to Elgin, 20 Aug. 1906;T G I 1-1908,240, J . B. Gilchrist. 8 5 See, for instance, Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L. Phillips to Wernher, Beit and Company, 18June 1906. 86 T G 11-1908, 344,qq. 8464-70, H . Hay. Fraser and Jeeves, A l l T h a t Glittered, 164,L. Phillips to Wernher, Eckstein and Company, 18June 1906. Calculations based o n T G I 1-1908, 403, statement of the Council of the Association of Mine Managers; and T G 2-1908, 121, 1352, q. 964, L.J . Reyersbach and F . Hellmann. T G 2-1908, 887, 992-1002 and passim, q. 12,919,W. T . Anderson and G . H . Somers. T G 11-1908,344, q. 8485,H . Hay.

482

E L A I N E N. KATZ

they had not been trained in the traditional way and lacked the hereditary commitment to mining typical in the United K i n g d ~ m . ~ ' While ethnicity and culture were the transparent sources of British discrimination against the Afrikaners, less obvious, but equally important, were the economic reasons for it. T h e overseas professional miners were hostile to the local ones, because they suspected - and sometimes found proof - that Afrikaners were undercutting the customary daily wages and were thus becoming their competitors.92 It is therefore not surprising that the Transvaal Miners' Association initially made no efforts to welcome Afrikaners as members.93 Quite naturally, too, the overseas miners were reluctant to share their skills with the Afrikaner n e ~ c o r n e r s .As ~ ~ a learner explained to the Mining Industry Commission in I 907 :

I found that I could learn more by going and watching the native and asking him about it than I could by going to get the white man to come and explain anything. Consequently I took the nearest way of learning the machines by watching the natives and speaking to them, and learning from them the best way to run the machines and the simplest way of fixing up the bar and tightening the nuts and other things in connection with the working of rock drill machine^.'^ T h e learners faced other forms of discrimination from their instructors: when they asked for help, 'they were generally spoken to in a very rough m a n n e r ' ; and, when they were put on night shift, their teachers went to sleep.96 O n some Corner House properties, the training of learners even threatened to become a strike i s ~ u e . ~ ' T o overcome the opposition of the overseas professional miners the Corner House directors resorted to a new stratagem in 1906: We are gradually employing more and more Dutchmen in the mines and [G. E.] Webber is going to arrange to teach a number of promising young Dutchmen to use the rock drills. [L. P.] Cazalet told us on Friday that he thinks he has a good man to train them. Directly we can turn out a dozen efficient rockdrillers, particularly if they are Dutchmen, we shall have no difficulty in getting each of them to take a helper of his own nationality to learn the business; and in this way hope gradually to import a new class into the business.98 T h e consignment of learners to South African-born instructors may therefore have suited the economic designs of the mine owners, but it certainly did not improve the standard of local training: it continued to produce, as had other methods before, poorly trained Afrikaners who were nonetheless absorbed into the ranks of those paid and regarded as skilled." 'l T G 2-1908, 442, 627E, qq. 4815, 7686, T. hlathews and S. A. Smit; BRA, HE, (138), S. Evans to W. Bradford, 8 Mar. 1905. 9 2 T G 2-1908, 442, 629, 672E, 999-1000, 1013, qq. 4815-29, 7711, 7686, 14,777, 14,975, T . Mathews, S. A. Smit, G . H . Somers and J. G . Hancock. 9 3 T G 2-1908, 444, qq. 4863-4, T. Mathews. 94 T G 2-1908, 442, 627E, qq. 4815, 7686, T. Mathews and S. A. Smit; BRA, HE, (138), S. Evans to W. Bradford, 8 Mar. 1905. 96 Ibid. 998, q. 14,765, G . H . Somers. 95 T G 2-1908, 999-1000, G . H. Somers. BRA, H E , (138), S. Evans to W. Bradford, 8 Mar. 1905. Fraser and Jeeves, All That Glittered, 163-4, L. Phillips to Wernher, Beit and Company, 18 June 1906. '' T G 2-1908, 952, 1495, qq. 14,240, 21,601, G . J. Hoffman and W. W. Mein.

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THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

483

Although the Dutch-descended South Africans undoubtedly earned a large proportion of the thousand-odd blasting certificates awarded in 1906, many of them had no desire whatsoever of making a career of mining. Such lack of vocational commitment was responsible for the low standards of the local miners as much as was their limited training. T h e limitations of employing such Afrikaner miners were confirmed by a mine manager, who gave two reasons why the Witwatersrand was unable to produce so-called 'practical miners ' in the mould of the overseas professionals : First. -One class of our men is recruited from a purely agricultural and pastoral race who are devoid of any instinct of mining or even discipline. These, in the great majority of cases, are driven to work on mines by force of circumstance. Their intention is not to become miners, but to earn enough money - no matter in what capacity - to enable them to purchase a few breeding cattle or a span of oxen and a wagon, when they will either retire to their 'farms' or go transport riding. No more will be seen of them until their cattle or oxen die, when they will again return to work in the mines with the same object in view as before. Second. - another class comprises those who are ex-army and ex-policemen or who have been retrenched from the civil service, and these from necessity - not choice - drift into the mines. Their hearts are not in the work and they are out of their element, and with the exception of a few.. . they quit on the first offer of work in more congenial surroundings.100 English-speaking colonials also worked only intermittently, but they tended to do so by drifting into mining from banks, butcheries, bakeries and so forth during times of commercial depression and then returning to those occupations when times improved. They thus had greater access than the Afrikaners to more agreeable work in the ordinary trades.lol But the Afrikaner miner had little alternative but to remain on the mines, skilled or not.

And here, despite the relatively high wages paid to miners, especially rock drillers, his chances of saving and so accumulating a small capital sum were slim, largely because of the industry's payment practices regarding miners. Unlike the artisans, who invariably worked on day's pay, most miners worked under contracts of a month's duration, under terms that ostensibly provided them with financial incentives for increased productivity. Under this contract system the mine manager gave the miner a one-month verbal contract stipulating a price per fathom or per foot excavated.lo2Either party could terminate the contract at any point on 24 hours' notice. At the end of the month miners wishing to continue negotiated the contract's renewal. Management supplied the contractor with all his equipment and labour but charged him for many of the items provided: the wages of his African assistants, the sharpening of drills, explosives, lights and machine lubril o o Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa (Apr. I ~ I Z )409, , J. M. Phillips. See also Fourie, ' Dee1 I ', 86; and London Mining Journal (19 Oct. I ~ I Z )1015. , lo' London Mining Journal (19Oct. I ~ I Z )101 , 5.

lo' For details of the contract system, see Katz, White Death, 83-6.

484 E L A I N E N. K A T Z cants.lo3T h e contractor's net monthly takings equalled the earnings on his total yardage excavated, less his debit for company charges. Ostensibly a contract gave a hard-working miner the opportunity to earn more than he might have on day's pay. But in practice it was a gamble. Often a minercontractor earned less than the E I he would have had.lo4 Sometimes he ended his contract in debt to the company. Although remuneratively high earnings, 'handsome wages' ranging from A40 to A60 per month,lO' two times the average rate, and more, were the lot of a tiny successful minority, their good fortune became the yardstick against which all miner-contractors imagined their prospects. As a consulting mining engineer acknowledged in I 897 : ' Contract work does not greatly exceed that average pay, [A24 for the month], in my experience'.lo6 T h a t impression is born out by the actual data. Approximately 26 per cent of the contractors appear to have prospered. Another 50 per cent earned payments that on average equalled a day's wages. T h e remaining 24 per cent earned less than A I per day, and nearly half of these earned nothing and were in debt to the companies.10' As a mine manager observed: ' [ I t is] the man who has become a machine man locally in a m o n t h . . . who is usually in debt at the month end, gets the sack and goes to the neighbouring mine and repeats the experiment. 'log But by yielding to the temptation of the dreams of high income from contract work the miners gave u p the security of the fixed day's wage. Theoretically the miner was a subcontractor with 'scope for individual enterprise'.logAll the same, his semi-independent entrepreneurial initiative was heavily constrained on the Witwatersrand relative to other mining centres, where the contract system also pertained: elsewhere contracts operated for six months to a year;''' and on the Reef, unlike at other mining centres, the miner-contractor had no say in the choice of his equipment or in the selection of his work complement."' Indeed, as the artisans put it, the miner's contract was merely a version of piecework, which, by driving the contract miners to produce more at the given contract price, would inevitably lower the competing hourly wage. I n their view, the miner-contractor was little more than an ordinary tradesman in receipt of a variable monthly piece payment.''2 T h a t the contract system provided clear advantages for the mining companies is evidenced by the fact that the contract, initially a voluntary undertaking in the 18gos, was made a virtually compulsory form lo3 S. J . Truscott, T h e Witwatersrand Goldfields' Banket and Mining Practice : W i t h a n Appendix on the Banket of the T a r k w a Goldfield, W e s t Africa (London, 1898), 291-2, l o 4 T G 2-1908, 442, q. 4819, T . Mathews. 361-2. l o 5 CHA, WLF, L. Phillips to Selborne, 18 Jan. 1906; SC 9-1913, 29, q. 302, H . R . Skinner; R a n d Daily M a i l ( I 7 Dec. 19 10). l o 6 Mining Industry, 1897, 251, T. H. Leggett. lo' UG 12-1914, Report of the Economic Commission,January 1914, 56, para. 106, table 21; Merriman Papers, R. Barry to J . X. Merriman, 1 1 Dec. 1913. lo8 Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (Oct. 1906), I I 1-12, C. B. Saner. l o g W. P. Taylor, African Treasures : S i x t y Years among Diamonds and Gold (London, 1932), 217. 110 T G 2-1908, 3x1, 316, 338, 352, qq. 2905, 2972, 3500, S. S. Crowle and C. C. 11' Katz, W h i t e Death, 88-9. Smith. 112 Katz, Trade Union Aristocracy, 48, 252-3.

485 of employment during the 19oos."~ Clearly, on the Witwatersrand, even more so than elsewhere, the odds were heavily stacked against the minercontractor. THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE T O M I N I N G

THE IMPACT OF SILICOSIS

Despite their inefficiency, the locally trained miners, 'the yokels' as they were derisively called, had no difficulty whatsoever in securing jobs:'14 the demand for miners always exceeded the supply.'" Two inter-linked reasons account for this. First, the industry regained its pre-war production levels in 1905 and subsequently grew larger, although the increase in the absolute number of skilled underground mineworkers was relatively small - between 1905 and 1907 approximately only 800 new skilled underground jobs were created, growth of roughly 10.5 per cent116- these jobs were taken up mostly by the locally trained miners. More important, overseas professional miners were no longer attracted to the Witwatersrand, and a number of their fellowworkmen avoided the Reef because of its notorious reputation as a silicosisstricken mining camp :"' ' T h e mortality from miners' phthisis [on the Rand] is unequalled in any part of the world' was the honest, if morbid, assessment of a local d o ~ t o r . " ~ T h e locally trained miners also filled hundreds of other jobs vacated by the pioneers who had died of silicosis.11sAs silicosis daily took its devastating toll of the post-war rock drillers and of a great many pre-war general miners, by the end of 1906 the overall death rate among underground workers, namely general miners and rock drillers, reached the horrific rate of 30 per 1000 per annum.120 Among rock drillers, as a single class of miners, the annual mortality was even higher: in 1907 it was as much as I O O per 1000.'~'It was therefore without exaggeration that a rock driller claimed in 1908: 'At the present time we are dying faster than we are made'.122 Silicosis is an incurable, but preventable, occupational illness caused by continuous and prolonged exposure to excessive amounts of fine silica dust. In its typical, slow-developing chronic form it severely crippled or caused premature death among nineteenth-century miners at an average age of fifty, after they had ~vorkedfor approximately thirty years.12"ut during and shortly after the Anglo-Boer War the condition manifested itself in a more virulent form among rock drillers on the Witwatersrand (and in Cornwall). It progressed so rapidly that it caused miners to die when they were young men: on the Witwatersrand their average age at death was 33, and the most Katz, W h i t e Death, 83. 11' Ibid. ll"G 2-1 908, I 62, 165, qq. 1434, I j30, E. J. Way. See also ibid., 690, I 2 2 j , qq. 8846, 17,872, F. Crean and J . H. Johns; S C 9-1913, 320-1, q. 2168, R. N. Kotze; and L i n i n g Industry, 1897, 42, E. J . Way. Calculations based on the following: T C M A R , 1905, 1906, 1907, 221, 385, 380, ' Distribution of ~ v h i t eemployees '. 11' Katz, W h i t e Death, 192-3. J. P. Johnson, ' T h e miners' phthisis problem', Sozith African lZledical Record ( I I Nov. 1916), 334. l1%atz, ' ILliners by default ', 75-80. 12' Transcaal Leader (29 Aug. I 910). 12' Katz, W h i t e Death, 122. 12' T G 2-1908, 315, q . 2946, S . S . Crowle. 12"ee, for instance, Journal of the Chemical, Metallzirgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (Jan. 1 9 0 7 ) ~230; Transcaal ~WedicalJournal(July 1908), 324; and W. C. Bailey, M. Brown, A. Buechner, H. Ichinose and M. Ziskind, 'Silico-mycobacterial disease in sandblasters', American Reciew of Respiratory Disease, cx ( 1 9 7 4 ) ~I I 5-25. 113

4g6 E L A I N E N. K A T Z common age was 29.12"his ' n e w ' form of the disease was the result of exposure to abnormally high dust densities that were a feature of the Witwatersrand mines. Although white miners on the Reef were stricken in large numbers by the accelerated form of the disease, its incidence among blacks was minimal. Because the Africans worked only as migrants serving relatively brief, intermittent contracts, most were not exposed to continuous and lengthy periods of heightened dust densities. Those blacks at risk were only the tiny group of 'long-service Africans'.12' Both chronic and accelerated silicosis can be prevented by the use of water at the point of production to dampen the silica particles that fill the air and by the introduction of effective ventilation, remedies which were well known during the period under review.126T h e mine owners were aware that silicosis was responsible for killing the overseas professional miners, whose skills they applauded, but whose high wages and collective strength they deplored. Against the advice of their own engineering experts, they did the bare minimum to introduce anti-dust precautions for the disease.12' Quite simply, they believed it was cheaper to train and employ an abundant supply of short-term 'inefficient' Afrikaner miners than to implement the costly preventive measures, especially ventilation, necessary to eliminate silicosis. Not only did the mine owners disregard the serious mortality among the overseas professional miners, but they also dismissed the warnings of doctors in 1906 that in the future casualties would include the ever-increasing number of South African-born miners.12' These forebodings materialized in 191I following the investigations of the Medical Commission on silicosis. From a representative sample of white silicotic underground mineworkers, the commissioners found that as many as 35 per cent were South Africanborn, most being positively identified as Afrikaners.12' I n short, the mine owners ignored the advice of management that the industry could not attract an adequate supply of skilled manpower given the low level of spending they were prepared to devote to silicosis prevention. As the costs of eradicating the disease clearly exceeded the profits they could make from greater efficiency and better health among the miners, they treated the Afrikaners as labour as expendable as the overseas professional miners.

From 1902 to 1907 the Dutch-descended South African miners were no more impotent than their British counterparts in influencing their working conditions and living arrangements on the mines. But what made the Afrikaner's position more acute - perhaps more tragic - was his 'invisibility' to the whole industry. Afrikaner miners worked and lived in isolation from the rest of the white work-force. When the overseas professional miners worked in pairs, their

''' U G 19-1912, 36, table I , l.411 Miners'. "' S. V. van Niekerk, 'Miners' phthisis on the Witwatersrand'

(M.D. thesis, Lniversity of .4berdeen, 1 9 1 4 ) ~I I 1-31 and passim. Report of the ,&!liners' Phthisis Commission, 1 9 0 2 4 3 , XXI, paras. 71, 72. "' Katz, White Death, 152-76 and passim. lSs See, for instance, Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa (Dec. 1906), 186, Dr D. Macaulay and Dr L. G. Irvine. lS9 UG 19-1912, 23, para. 23; SC 4-1914, 99, q. 581, J . Hindman.

487 partners were invariably national compatriots with a shared mining heritage and training. Such kinship and working bonds were replicated on the surface: in their living quarters and during recreation. While culture and language obviously played important parts in separating English and Afrikaner, what really shaped and reinforced this ethnic divide was the prior job segregation of Afrikaners as learners, a situation that the industry's social and economic practices promoted, indeed often enforced. As the learners received on average only 10s. per day, they could not afford to live at the mine boarding houses, where rentals ranged from L 6 to L 7 per month. They were therefore compelled to lodge in the 'single quarters', separate low-cost dormitory housing provided by the companies. Here, two men, at a nominal cost of 5s. or 10s. each per month, shared a tiny, sparsely furnished room, devoid of any washing or cooking facilities. In addition to these and other shortcomings, the back-to-back rooms, adjoining one another in a long row, lacked ventilation and were often infested with vermin.'" Such lodgings isolated the learners from the overseas professional miners, who shunned the 'single quarters' because they found them so offensive. Most learners, for economic reasons, wanted to organize their own eating arrangements. Yet many mine managers compelled them to take their meals at the mine boarding houses. Although special rates were sometimes arranged, these being I S . per meal instead of the customary 3s., the Afrikaners were again isolated from the rest of the mineworkers, being obliged to eat on their own, at separate tables. Instead of ' a choice of three or four meats and different kinds of pudding.. . soup, fish, entree, roast meat and pastry ', the learner received 'porridge and meat every day ', but without 'fresh eggs, pickles, or preserves'.131 Consequently, like their distasteful housing, their unpalatable food, suitable only for 'poor whites', served to distance them from the overseas mineworkers. THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

CONCLUSION

By the time the learners qualified as miners, so great was the void between them and the overseas professional miners, so complete was their ostracism, that they had, in effect, become unnoticeable. I n 1 9 0 7 , Mathews, organizer of the Transvaal Miners' Association, affirmed the invisibility that has subsequently made the Afrikaners on the mines difficult to detect: 'From my own experience round town, I do not know that I ever saw a Dutchman underground. As a rule, he had other things to do in Oom Paul's time and after the war. 'I3' It took the 1907 miners' strike for the Randlords, to learn, like Mathews, of the large number of Afrikaner miners who had already quietly and unassumingly infiltrated the industry.133And so they entered subsequent historiography. A number of combined factors had facilitated the entry of Afrikaners into the mining profession well before the 1907 strike: the labour practices on the 'O

For fuller details, see Katz, W h i t e Death, 78-81.

13'

TG 11-1908,344,qq. 8474-80, H. H a y ; TG 2-1908,630,631,qq. 7736,7763, S.

A. Smit ; Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of S o u t h Africa (July ~gog),14,T. Johnson. 13' TG 2-1908,444, q. 4865, T.Mathews. Ibid. 633,q. 7789, S . A. Smit.

488 E L A I N E N. K A T Z industrialized Witwatersrand gold mines that reduced reliance on broadly skilled overseas miners through job fragmentation; the economies of a lowgrade cost-sensitive industry, which excluded whites from unskilled labour; and the employment practices and cost-paring policies of the Randlords that favoured low-cost rural Afrikaners. All these were underpinned by the selective high mortality among their long-term predecessors underground from the fatal, though preventable, occupational disease : silicosis. However, the Afrikaner miners made little impact on the social fabric of the industry before 1907,in spite of their relatively large numbers. I n the disease-ridden shadows of the mines these 'raw green m e n ' , the 'mushroom lot of miners', made their shunned, silent and unobtrusive debut.13' Their culture and value systems influenced the industry later, but not before hundreds of them, like their overseas predecessors, had been disabled and killed by silicosis, the dust disease they contracted in their careers underground. SUMMARY

T h i s paper challenges the con\rentional view that the 1907 miners' strike constituted a landmark in the history of Afrikaner employment in the Witwatersrand gold mining industry. According to this view, the participation of Afrikaners during the dispute, as first-time miners and strike-breakers, gained them a permanent and proportionally large niche in the industry, for the first time. I n sharp contrast, this paper demonstrates that Afrikaners already constituted a substantial percentage of \vhite underground workers, particularly as a discrete category of workmen, the miners, well before the strike had even begun T h e Afrikaner miners lacked training and mining skills. Yet, like the overseas professional miners, most of whom were British-born, they were classed as skilled workmen, eligible for skilled wages. 'This anomaly occurred because the so-called skills of the overseas professional miners were fragmented by the labour practices peculiar to the Rand. T h e expertise of the foreign miner derived from his all-round capabilities and experience. These were exclusively defined to constitute his socalled skill, and hence his skilled wage. But on the Witwatersrand, the overseas professional miners were required to draw on only one of their numerous accomplishments in a 'specialized', but only semi-skilled, capacity. 'They were employed either as super\~isorsof Africans, who performed drilling tasks, or as specialist pit men doing a single pit task among many: pump minding, pipe fitting, timbering or plate laying. Such fragmentation of the foreign miners' all-round skills facilitated the entry of lesser trained men as miners, notably the Afrikaners. T o become a miner, more specifically a supervisor, the Afrikaner needed only a brief period of specific instruction, which he acquired in one of several ways: through mine-sponsored experiments with unskilled white labour, rather than black; through the informal assistance of qualified miners; and through management-sponsored learner schemes intended to provide a core of compliant Afrikaner miners xvho would break the monopoly of skills and collective strength of the overseas professional miners. Such training enabled the Afrikaner to earn the compulsory, but readily available, blasting certificate, the award of which was confined to xvhites. Although most Afrikaners possessed this certificate, the hallmark of a skilled miner, they could not earn the customary white skilled wage because they xvere obliged to work under a system of contracts and not on day's pay. '34 Ibid. 193, q. 1870, G. E . W e b b e r ; J o u r n a l of the Chemical, Metallurgical a n d M i n i n g Society of S o u t h Africa (Oct. 1906), I 12,C. B. Saner.

THE UNDERGROUND ROUTE TO M I N I N G

489

T h e incompetent Afrikaner miners nevertheless obtained billets easily, partly because of the industry's growth, but mainly because the overseas pioneer miners were decimated by the preventable occupational mining disease, silicosis : the locally born simply filled their places. T h e Afrikaners, of course, were also vulnerable to silicosis; but it was only from 191 I onwards that this gradually developing disease claimed them in significant numbers too. T h e overseas miners shunned the Afrikaners not only for ethnic reasons but also for material ones: they feared that the local miners, who were inefficient and had not been trained in the lengthy apprenticeships traditional in the industry, would undercut skilled wage rates. Management also scorned them because of their incompetence. Despite their relatively large n u m b e r s they comprised at least one-third of the miners - the Afrikaners, who were unsuccessful, isolated and spurned, made little impact on the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the industry's work-force, either at the time of the 1907 strike or during its immediate aftermath.