JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: Minerals Council’s migrant labour move closes a sordid chapter

The decision by the Minerals Council SA to phase out the use of workers from neighbouring countries in SA mines over the next eight years will close a chapter in the country’s sordid economic and political history. It’s a chapter on how the development of mining, which spurred wider economic growth, depended on cheap black migrant labour.

The mining industry, gold in particular, played a key role in SA’s economic transformation. Articulating the importance of gold mining to SA, economic historian Cornelis Willem de Kiewiet described the industry as one “which feared neither locusts nor cattle diseases, neither drought nor summer floods.… Its product always commanded a ready sale in the financial centres of the world. War or peace, depression or inflation — none seemed to affect the demand.”

These features, De Kiewiet wrote in the History of SA: Social and Economic, enabled gold to stabilise government revenues and undergirded the country’s foreign trade. “Like a great flywheel the mining industry gave stability to a country that otherwise would have been singularly sensitive to movements in world economy. Farming, so sensitive to world conditions without, and to drought and pestilence within, found comfort and strength in the lee of the Witwatersrand. Were SA suddenly to be bereft of its gold mines, the effect upon its economic system would be catastrophic,” De Kiewiet said.

But as many historians and economists have pointed out, gold notched all these achievements because the industry, with the help of government, was assured of the supply of cheap black labour, including workers from neighbouring countries, primarily Mozambique and Lesotho.

‘Conveyor belt of humans’

How key cheap labour was to the extraction of gold is best articulated by JDF Jones in Through Fortress and Rock, The Story of Gencor, 1895-1995. He writes that the wiser “Randlords” understood that the future strength of the industry lay in the region’s enormous reserves of low-grade, deep-level ore. “To extract this ore required an assured and self-replenishing supply of cheap labour, never mind if it was unskilled. If the labour had not existed, the reserves would have been too low grade to justify extraction.”

To illustrate the importance of cheap labour, Jones quotes an unnamed historian who said if an ore body similar to SA’s had been discovered in North America or Australia it would have been left in the ground.

The supply of cheap black labour required a huge machinery for signing up workers and transporting them to the mines in Johannesburg, which the Chamber of Mines (now the Minerals Council) mobilised. This included the creation of institutions that would later be amalgamated to form The Employment Bureau of Africa (Teba). Teba was in effect a conveyor belt of humans running between SA’s rural areas and neighbouring countries, and the mines.

The effectiveness of the machinery also entailed greater control of workers once they arrived in Johannesburg and signed up to the individual mines, a feat that was achieved through the enforcement of harsh pass laws. It has been said that if any black person moved into Johannesburg during the peak of the mining industry’s labour recruitment and control, the Chamber of Mines would have known about it.

Pass laws

In its submission to the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, trade union federation Cosatu quoted the Commission of Inquiry into Safety & Health in the Mining Industry, chaired by Judge RN Leon, as saying that the Chamber of Mines “played a specific role in putting in place the pass laws which played a critical role in manning the migrant labour system for over 100 years”. The pass laws would later become the cornerstone of the apartheid architecture aimed at controlling the number of black people who settled in urban areas.

From the employer’s point of view, Cosatu said, the pass laws were necessary to try to ensure a regular supply of labour at wages the mining industry felt were reasonable. In his recent book, The Night Trains, Charles van Onselen writes about the movement of workers from Mozambique to Johannesburg on an industrial scale, “an extraordinary logistical feat”. He estimates that between 1910 and 1960 about 5-million passengers were moved by train between the Komatipoort border post with Mozambique and the Booysens train station in Johannesburg.

“Indeed, the easy and guaranteed access to cheap Mozambican labour — for close on half a century — contributed centrally to the profitability of the gold mining industry that, in turn, drove SA economic prosperity and allowed its white ruling classes to indulge in moral and political electoral self-indulgence for more than a century.”

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity. His book, ‘Maize and Gold: The Two Commodities that Changed SA’, is due to be published later this year.