The impact of missionary education and industrialisation on an early twentiethcentury family spans three worlds – the traditional, the transitional and the modern. Here miners are visiting their rural family.
The compound was designed to maximise control, with the compound manager’s office placed in the centre of the courtyard to give him a panoptic view of the entire premises. The lock-up room, the three-metre-high fence and the one entrance and exit to the compound ensured forceful discipline.
At first, migrants who were sent by their traditional leaders in age cohorts were young and unmarried. Indeed, there was an element of pride in undertaking dangerous and difficult work, braving the deep bowels of the earth. For many Sotho, for example, going to the mines became a rite of passage, a test of their manhood prior to marriage. But as the cash economy became entrenched in the rural homesteads, more and more married men came to work to shore up the integrity of the homestead.
The reserves had become reservoirs of labour. Deborah James studied the songs of migrant women and found that they increasingly bore the responsibility of managing the homestead economy, raising the children and caring for the old, the sick and the unemployed. Women became de facto heads of household and in effect their unpaid labour subsidised the cheap labour of migrant workers.
Leisure time in a De Beers mine compound in the early 1900s. During the short periods of respite from labour, migrants often resorted to familiar, indigenous and comforting pastimes such as games like bawu or mankala and craftwork – an affi rmation of home and identity.
As social coherence and the subsistence economy declined in the rural areas, the authority of the traditional leader, the chief, was also undermined. Increasingly, their stipends held them hostage, making them accountable to the government, thus contradicting the saying that ‘a chief is a chief by the people’. And so the bifurcation of the rural and urban was entrenched. It was the start of the widening gap between the ‘two economies’, identified as a continuing challenge by President Thabo Mbeki exactly a century later.
Aside from the reserves’ supply of migrant labour, black refugees from the farms or displacees of the 1913 Land Act also came to the city to find work. They found humble work in the service sector – as domestic workers, laundrymen (the amawasha from Natal), delivery ‘boys’ for the trading stores, milkmen, cleaners for the shops and factories, and so on. They lived in the poorer areas, but in time segregated residential areas, known as ‘locations’, were set aside for blacks.
