A village in the reserves. The system of migrant labour originated as the main form of labour for the mines but in the twentieth century assumed an important additional function: it limited urban blacks to adult males engaged in migrant labour. By the 1930s the subsistence crisis, seen in this picture, had become so severe that people began streaming from the reserves to the cities.
A rural coloured woman bakes bread in a clay oven. The majority of coloured people were very poor, employed as unskilled labourers on farms or as domestic workers. Most of the trade unions refused to accept coloureds as members, and skilled workers earned less than half as much as their white counterparts. There were virtually no coloured people in senior administrative positions in the civil service and few in the professions. Coloured teachers, nurses and policemen serving the coloured population suffered discrimination with respect to their salaries and pensions. Coloured women, who mostly worked as domestic workers, received very low wages.
A crisis was building up as a result of congestion in the reserves. The Native Economic Commission warned that pressure on land in the reserves was too severe to provide a home subsistence base for most migrant workers. Although half of the black population lived in the reserves, only a very small proportion was not connected to the ‘white’ economy, mostly through migrant remittances. Prominent liberal historian W.M. Macmillan wrote in Complex South Africa that the inhabitants of the reserves were ‘dragging along at the very lowest level of subsistence, blighted by ill-health and starvation’. There was an appalling infant mortality rate. Families were more and more dependent on wage earning ‘to relieve a dead level of poverty inside’.
By the 1930s the migration to the cities of the white and black poor had become the major social phenomenon. Addressing white and black students in 1930, Dr A.B. Xuma referred ‘to the spirit of fear, of unrest, of uncertainty’. The mines and the farms demanded more labour, the municipalities wanted more power to deal with unemployed ‘redundant natives’ and the government adopted even more laws. More than half the adult male population of working age was employed as migrants. This not only eroded the subsistence farming in the reserves, but also weakened the ability of migrant labourers in the city to organise. It impacted very negatively on African family life and the prospects for a settled black urban society.
The Native Economic Commission concluded that the reserves could not support their populations, but was obdurate that the answer did not lie in allowing urbanisation. It was rather to control the movement away from the reserves and farms, and to develop the reserves. But the commission also accepted that there was a need for a population of permanently resident ‘natives’ employed by secondary industry. Their level of education and efficiency had to safeguard them against being undercut by the flow of cheap casual labour from the reserves.
In some ways the commission foreshadowed the apartheid thinking of a decade later, but, as Macmillan argued in Complex South Africa, restricting blacks to remote reserves and imposing pass laws on them forced them to work for very low wages. It was not their blackness but their cheapness that threatened the permanent urban workers. If the curbs on blacks from the reserves were removed the domestic market would grow and the wages of whites as well as blacks would rise.
