Mining companies paid little attention to health and safety measures – on average, more than 700 miners would be killed in rock bursts every year. According to Gay Seidman’s calculation 69 000 miners died from accidents in the mines from 1900 to 1993, with over a million dying from lung and infectious diseases. These ranged from tuberculosis and mesothelioma (commonly known as ‘miners’ phthisis’ acquired from breathing the sharp dust particles of silica released from drilling the rocks) to pneumonia and infections from under-nourishment. The migrant labour system had little interest in the health conditions of black miners once they were home.
White miners, too, paid a heavy price. As full-time workers year after year, they did not receive the respite of even a month between contracts. The narrative of the white working class in the first half of the last century reveals the trauma of siblings, wives and children who lost their loved ones, miners who coughed their lives out in agony. In the early years of the twentieth century, it was found that the white rock driller could hope to live
for five years – the average age of mortality was 37 years.
While white workers were given accommodation in family houses and cottages on mine property, migrants were corralled into hostel barracks or ‘compounds’, whose sleeping quarters consisted of 20 to 60 concrete bunks in each dormitory. The food supply was minimal – a bowl of mieliepap (stiff maize porridge) would be supplemented by meat and gravy only if the underground worker had hammered or drilled the obligatory 29 inches of rock per shift.
