Black Workers Boycott the Mines

The Anglo-Boer War ended with the defeat of the Boers in 1901. During the fighting, the mine-owners closed down the mines and went on ‘holiday’ to the Cape until the war was over. In 1901, when the British entered the Transvaal, the mines started up again. Most of the mine-owners were very pleased with the result of the war, because the new British government in the Transvaal did a lot more to help the mines than the old Boer government. For a start, it introduced stricter laws to control labour.

In 1902 the mine-owners dropped the wages of black unskilled workers. They announced that the new wages would be 30 shillings to 35 shillings a month (which was about 15 shillings or R1,50 less than workers were getting before the war.) The mine-owners were confident that with the new government’s tighter control of the labour force, workers would have to accept jobs on the mines at lower wages.

But the mine-owners were wrong. Many black labourers did not return to the mines after the war. They stayed home, or they went elsewhere for jobs.
After the war there was a lot of rebuilding in South Africa. The Cape and Natal both started building new railway lines. The ports became busy again and needed more labourers too. The de Beers Dynamite factory and the diamond fields in Kimberley were also looking for more workers. They went to these places and not back to the gold mines.

All of these employers were paying higher wages than the mines.
The work was not underground and it was not dangerous.
The employers did not demand long contracts, as the mine-owners did.

For all these reasons, the gold mines on the Witwatersrand were the last place that unskilled workers went to look for jobs.

The result - a massive shortage of cheap labour for the mine-owners.
Black workers had resisted the attempt to lower their wages by ‘voting with their feet’ - that is, by withdrawing their labour.

The mine-owners now realised that the new government controls were not enough to force black workers into the mines at the low wages they were offering. But they did not raise mine-labourers’ wages. Instead, they began to look for unskilled labour outside of Africa. They called for thousands of unskilled workers from China.

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