‘We dig the gold out of the mines, but when it comes to be divided, we are not wanted. There are two nations here —black and white.’— Congress leader, Mvabaza, January 1919.1
We have seen how the workers were divided into two groups:
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a small group of white workers whose wages were high;
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a very large group of black workers whose wages were very low.
This section is a brief summary of the reasons why workers in South Africa came to be separated by the mine-owners. (The mine- owners did this to safeguard their profits and to protect their system of labour control.)
WHY MINE-OWNERS PREFERRED BLACK LABOUR
Mine-owners preferred to employ blacks. They preferred black workers for several reasons:
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Mine-owners argued that black workers could survive on two shillings a day because they had compounds to house and feed them and the reserves helped to support their families.
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Unlike black workers, whites were able to settle in the towns. There they had to find housing and food — which were not provided by the mine-owners. They relied completely on their -wages to support their families, but as we have seen, they were able to demand and get higher wages.
‘ The native is able in unskilled work to sell his labour at a price at which a white cannot live,’ said a government commission in 1903. -
Blacks were in a weak position. They had to accept whatever wages they could get.
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Poor, unskilled whites had more power than black workers. We have seen in that white workers’ voting power helped to topple the Smuts government in 1924. White workers also had trade union rights, which were denied to black workers. Furthermore, white workers were free of the pass laws and other systems of labour control that the mine-owners imposed on black workers. Whites were therefore free of the wage colour bar. They could demand — and get —higher wages.
Mine-owners tried as far as possible to employ black workers. They justified this policy by claiming that whites were bad workers because they did not know how to take orders and were too soft to do the hard labour of the unskilled miner. They refused to give unskilled jobs to whites, saying that unskilled work was ‘native’s work’.
‘I myself prefer getting a native to do native’s work,’ said one employer in 1913, ‘because I have less trouble with him.’
Another employer- said that black unskilled workers were easier to control than whites. ‘You can deal with the Kaffir very much as you like,’ he said, quite openly.
Managers saw how the 1913 strike by whites encouraged black workers to try the same methods of striking and picketing.
‘If a large number of White men are employed on the Rand in the position of labourers,’ wrote one mine-owner, ‘the same trouble will arise as in the Australian colonies.’ (He meant that the Australian workers had organised trade unions.) ‘The combination of the working classes will become so strong as to be able more or less to dictate, not only on the question of wages, but also on political questions by the power of the vote.’
Mine-owners felt it was important to distance white miners from the black workers, and to place one above the other.
‘The white miner is more a shift-boss than a miner proper, being required to take charge of gangs of natives, superintend work and get as much out of them as possible,’ the editor of the SA Mining Journal in 1893.
‘We do not want a White (working class) in this country,’ said the powerful mine-owner, Cecil John Rhodes,‘The position of the Whites among the vastly more numerous Black population requires that even their lowest ranks should be able to maintain a standard of living far above the poorest sections of the population of a purely White country.‘
The white workers
were only a small group of miners. The mine-owners could afford to
give them higher wages than they paid for labouring
jobs.
The black miners kept the mines going. It was more important
to keep them under control and their wages low. So white workers
were
gradually
given more and more supervisory work. They did less and less
of the actual mining themselves.
Although they were workers themselves, white supervisors had direct power over black workers. They issued loafer tickets, policed the workers underground and generally came to represent for blacks the mine-owners’ control over labour.
‘In this country, the white miner is more a shift boss than a miner proper, being required to take charge of gangs of natives, superintend their work and get as much out of them as possible. SA Mining Journal, 1893
The separation of
workers according to race was welcomed by white workers. They regarded
themselves as ‘higher’ than the black workers,
even if they were ‘lower’ than the other white groups in
South Africa. Why was this?
Most white South Africans were brought up to believe that they were better
than blacks — in other words, they were racists, because they thought
that one race was better than another.
Racism in South Africa goes back a long way. By the time gold was discovered,
most of South Africa’s land had already been conquered by whites.
To justify taking the land, many whites said that they deserved the land.
They claimed superiority over blacks, whom they had defeated. They were
stronger than blacks with the help of horses and guns.
Centuries of slavery and colonialism lay behind this feeling of superiority.
When whites became workers, this racism continued. Racism divided the
workers. We have seen how white workers came to fear the cheap labour
of the blacks. They spoke of the danger of being ‘pulled down to
Kaffir wages’ and fought for the job colour bar to protect their
positions and separate them from the black workers. Racism helped semi-skilled
whites to get higher wages. These whites called themselves ‘civilised’ because
they were white — and argued that they deserved ‘civilised’ high
wages.
The whites-only parliament
Racism helped the
mine-owners too. South Africa was a colonial society, where blacks
had been weakened by the loss of their land. The mine-owners profited
from this weakness, forcing blacks into cheap labour.
Racism gave them another excuse for paying blacks low wages and keeping them
under control. Racism helped mine-owners and managers to believe that blacks
were not the same as other people. One mine-owner, for example, gave a speech
to his company in 1903. He spoke of the black worker as a ‘muscular
machine’ — who did the hard labour on the mines, while the white
worker — he claimed — did the brain work. It suited mine-owners
very well at that stage to see blacks as machines, without feelings or brains — this
made it easier to excuse the low wages they got.
Many mine-owners and managers liked to think of blacks as backward and lazy,
or otherwise as children.
‘ The position of Kaffirs is in many respects like children,’ wrote
the editor of the mine-owners’ journal, the South African Mining Journal
in 1892.8 Both children and blacks needed ‘special control and supervision
when exposed to temptations’.9 The black worker could not be allowed to ‘roam
unrestricted, not improbably (drunk), at his own sweet will.” Blacks needed
to be put into compounds for their own sakes, concluded the editor.
A mine-owner warned: ‘We
should not over-pamper the native and thus weaken his naturally strong
constitution.’
In these ways mine-owners used racism to justify the treatment of their
workers.
Racism, therefore, resulted in direct benefits for both classes of whites — in
the form of higher profit for the capitalists and higher-paid, protected
jobs for the white workers.
Racism was used to justify the bad conditions in the compounds. Said the chairman of the Rand Mines: ‘In their own kraals natives in general live in a more OT less backward state of civilisation, and there is in my opinion a danger that we may be going too far in our endeavours to make them comfortable, and I think that the natives far prefer those compounds which are not too well-ventilated and airy. ‘
‘We are fighting our own battles and the white man is fighting his own battle. He does not consider us and we do not consider him in this respect, if I may say so.
— (A.W.G. Champion, 1925)
There was a widespread feeling on the part of the blacks bat white workers were using their power in a selfish way. The job colour bar was merely a form of protection against he mine-owners’ control over black workers. White workers did nothing to help liberate blacks from the forced labour system, which was the real cause of their own ~security. Few black workers therefore felt any sympathy for the whites struggle for trade union rights.
To sum up, then:
in South Africa, racism developed with the conquest of the land.
This racism continued into industrial times, and was used by the
mine-owners to justify the treatment of blacks.
A pattern of race discrimination emerged.
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Whites settled in the towns-but blacks miners were migrant workers.
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Whites were free from the pass laws and other forms of labour control. Blacks workers were not.
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White workers had strong bargaining power-black workers did not.
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Blacks, therefore were paid ultra-low wages-whites were not.
So it came about that the workers of South Africa were divided by race, and South Africa’s special form of racial capitalism as established.