Immigrant workmen of the early twentieth century were not pioneers, frontiersmen or revolutionaries. The colonial society was not so different from their own as to cause a sense of alienation. They fitted into the order of things as they found it and did what they could to better their conditions. They combined in ways familiar to them in their home countries, pressed their claims on governments and employers, and took political action to shape legislation affecting their terms of employment. The means they used varied according to the state of the labour market, the composition of the working classes, and the attitude of their masters. These factors, rather than differences in origin or outlook, accounted for the contrasting policies adopted by the labour movement in the Cape and in the northern colonies.
The Cape's distinctive features were a non-racial franchise, an old tradition of legal identity between white and Coloured, a high proportion of Coloured artisans and factory workers, and the small size of the African population in the western districts. White and Coloured working people lived in the same neighbourhood, worked on the same jobs, inter-married occasionally and cohabited more frequently, and had much the same standard of living. The elements of an integrated society existed. Labour leaders and trade unionists accepted the position, canvassed Coloured voters and organized Coloured wage earners. When George Woollends formed a socialist party in 1904, he cited instances of hospitality extended to whites by Coloured families, and demanded justice for all working men, whether Dutch, Coloured, Malay or British-born. They should rid their minds of false ideas about colour distinctions, he urged, and unite on equal terms for socialism. 1
Not all trade unionists at the Cape were as tolerant. A small, tight society of about 150 stonemasons refused to admit any Coloured and monopolized their trade on public buildings. Robert Stuart (1870-1950), the union's secretary, came to Cape Town from his native city of Aberdeen in 1901, took part in forming the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1902, and became a leading organizer of white and Coloured unions. But he never attempted to break down the colour bar in his own trade. Other early unions in the south were less successful in maintaining a colour bar. The plasterers barred 'Coloured labour' from membership in 1901 and prohibited any member from working on the same scaffold 'with a coloured man, or a Malay, under pain of a fine'. F. Z. J. Peregrino (1853-1919, b. Accra), the West African editor and publisher of the South African Spectator, remarked scathingly that these 'inconsiderate and unreasonable white men' wished to perpetuate race prejudice, debase the Coloured artisan, and deny him the right to work at his trade. 'The Coloured Mechanic, Malay, black or Africander should make a common cause, and Organize, Organize, Organize.' 2 Bricklayers also adopted a colour bar in 1904. The Coloured artisans then formed their own union and undercut the white man's wage of 12s. or 14s. a day. Employers hired the cheaper man, and the white workers negotiated with the Coloured for a single union of bricklayers and plasterers.
Objections to an open, non-racial union came at times from the Coloured, as in Cape Town's bespoke tailoring trade. White journeymen, most of whom were Jewish, organized a society in 1905. It tried hard but without success to enrol the large number of Muslims in the trade. Working seventy or eighty hours a week, the Muslims cut and stitched in their homes, usually in a room where the family ate and slept, and earned on an average £3 10s. a week for piece work. 3 The union won its first victory in a test case, which decided that master tailors should pay for alterations to an ill-fitting suit. This, the union said, was tangible proof of its ability to fight also the battles of the Muslims, and should gain their confidence. The union then made an agreement with one big firm for a fifty-hour working week, a minimum wage of £4 4s. for a journeyman, and £2 for a woman. Even this victory did not convince the Muslims. They adhered to their traditional work patterns and preferred to deal directly with shopkeepers and master tailors. 4
Manufacturers of leather goods, confectionery, cigarettes and furniture had a free hand in the absence of factory or wage legislation. They employed juveniles and adults in badly ventilated shops, without proper toilet facilities or safeguards against injury. Employers giving evidence in 1906 before a select committee on a factory bill admitted to taking on boys and girls aged twelve years and upwards at a wage of 1s. 8d. to 2s. 6d. a week. Employees worked fifty-two hours a week and, where this was feasible, took work to be completed at home. African labourers were paid 3s. 6d. or 4s. a week; Coloured men might get 1s. more for the same kind of work. One tobacco firm paid girls of fourteen and sixteen years a weekly wage of 6s. 6d. to 8s. and women cutters 15s. to 35s. Another firm employing more than 300 white girls paid them an average wage of 11s. 3d. a week, and 16s. 7d. for packers. Skilled Coloured men in a food factory received an average of £3 a week, and white skilled immigrants £4 10s. or £5 a week. Wages in the leather trade ranged from £2 to £3 a week. Most of the higher-paid men were whites, but they overlapped with Coloured in all skilled and semi-skilled grades.
The two wings of the movement worked closely together in organizing May Day celebrations, soup kitchens for the unemployed, legal defence for Needham and Lewinson, two SDF members arrested in August 1906 for 'incendiary speeches', and elections. The societies of masons, printers, engineers and cigar makers hired the Federation's hall for meetings. When the cigarette makers struck work in June for higher wages, they turned the hall into a factory and set up a 'Lock Out Cooperative'. The tailors complained that a member of the SDF was cutting prices, whereupon it decided to call on him to resign if he refused to join the union. But the tailors refused to donate money to the Federation's committee on unemployment, 'as it will lead to trouble in their union to mix up unionism with politics'. 5
Coloured and white working men had similar interests. They joined in the big unemployment demonstrations of 1906 and in the campaigns of 1906-7 for a workmen's compensation and factories act. The Labour Advance party, formed in October 1905 by the Cape Town trades council and Social Democratic Federation, urged the adoption of a forty-eight hour working week, universal, free and compulsory education, and adult suffrage for all civilized persons. 6 The party's speakers declared that there should be no distinction between white and Coloured workers. All had the same aims and should work together. 7 Labour leaders drove the point home when addressing the cosmopolitan audiences at the Stone, the Coloured people's traditional open-air forum on the slopes of Devil's Peak in the working-class area of District Six. The Coloured were sceptical. They drew attention to a 'no Coloured labour' clause in the contract for new university buildings, and blamed the unions. John Tobin, a founding member of the African Political Organization (APO), accused socialists of being rotten with colour prejudice.
They denied the charge indignantly. Wilfrid Harrison, ex-guardsman, carpenter and Cape Town's leading socialist, asserted that the trades council had nothing to do with the obnoxious clause. All unions affiliated to the council welcomed any competent Coloured tradesman. He proclaimed himself to be a red-hot socialist revolutionary, at least in economic affairs, and like all genuine socialists repudiated a colour line. Harry MacManus, an Irish socialist, found a close resemblance between disputes over colour and the feud between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Le Roux, speaking in Afrikaans, ridiculed the idea that South Africa could ever be a white man's country. A. Needham, leader of the short-lived Socialist Democratic party, claimed that the 'colour question' had no relevance to socialism. They might as well speak of a 'red question' for men with red hair. 8 This was the language of orthodox socialism, couched in an idiom attuned to the liberal tolerance of the western Cape.
The Cape Federation regarded itself as a branch of the London SDF, sold its paper the Clarion, and adopted propaganda techniques that were suited to the conditions of a multiracial society. New members were welcomed with the singing of the Red Flag; a weekly journal, the Cape Socialist, appeared when funds permitted; study classes were held for immigrant Dutchmen, Italians and Jews; and speakers harangued the crowd in Afrikaans, Xhosa and English. The Russian revolution of 1905 was applauded at a public meeting, to which Olive Schreiner sent a message of solidarity and confidence: 'we are witnessing the beginning of the greatest event that has taken place in the history of humanity during the last centuries.'
The Federation gave much attention to the 'Native Question' and the 'Coloured Question', set up a 'Kaffir Propaganda Committee', and learned from Harrison that the Coloured people were beginning to consider the question of socialism and how it affected them. He suggested holding meetings at the Stone, the APOs open-air forum, but the Coloured comrades thought that this would be 'discourteous and inadvisable'. They reported 'a good deal of interest among the Malays ' and proposed a concert to assist the parliamentary election fund. 9
Staunch socialists on the Rand, in contrast, appealed to a white electorate for protection from Asian, African and Coloured competition. The divergence between the attitudes of the southern and northern wings of the movement can be explained in terms of a response to contrasting situations. It is less easy to decide how far organized white labour in the north was responsible for racial policies which it supported, developed and exploited for sectional gains. The republic's bitter racialism had infected the whole society, until discrimination seemed as natural and inevitable as differences in skin colour. In its agrarian setting, where farmers hired craftsmen and rarely competed with them, the discrimination determined status, land ownership and political power rather than the division of labour. The industrial colour bar of the mining era was a new development. It originated in the special skills of foreign-born technicians who turned their spheres of employment into a closed preserve.
The barriers were not so high or rigid at the end of the war as to keep all dark men out of skilled work. Coloured artisans, lured to the Rand by its promise of 'a golden pound a day', worked at their trades also on the mines. Africans with industrial experience could rise above the level of a labourer. Landless Afrikaners and unskilled immigrants were available for manual work at the lower end of the scale. The position was fluid and might have been shaped into the pattern of the Cape's open labour market. It was Milner's officials, acting under the Mines, Works and Machinery Ordinance of 1903, who took the decisions that led to a rigid demarcation of work along colour lines.
The ordinance itself did not discriminate or authorize a discrimination that would have brought it within the ambit of matters reserved by the constitution for the secretary of state's approval. By repealing the republican laws 11 of 1897 and 12 of 1898, the ordinance removed the sole remaining colour bar in the Transvaal's mining legislation. But Wybergh, the commissioner of mines, introduced new colour bars in regulations issued under the ordinance. These defined the posts of manager, engine driver, banksman and onsetter in such a way as to reserve them for whites. 10 Amended regulations of 1906 did the same thing for the work of a boiler attendant, lift operator, shift boss, surface foreman, mine overseer and mechanical engineer. 11 The discriminations were imposed by an all-powerful British administration, without public pressure, stated reason, or comment by trade unions, mine managements and the legislative council. As in the case of at least two other discriminatory measures - the municipal franchise ordinance and the precious stones ordinance of 1903 - Milner failed to reserve the regulations for approval in Whitehall. Was it to avoid publicity that Wybergh discriminated in an oblique, almost furtive manner by defining work categories?
When president of the Transvaal branch of the South African League, that instrument of British imperialism, Wybergh had conducted a violent and dishonest campaign against the republic in 1898-9. His political activities lost him a lucrative post in Rhodes' Consolidated Goldfields. The firm had been deeply involved in the Jameson Raid and was not disposed to allow its staff to commit it in a similar conspiracy. Milner rewarded him after the war with the key post of commissioner of mines, but forced him to resign in 1903 for having opposed the introduction of Chinese indentured workers. Elected to the legislative assembly in 1907, Wybergh told the Mining Commission that Africans should be barred by law from working on machinery, partly because they endangered lives but mainly to secure the jobs of white workmen. He suggested that the ban could be imposed without such a bill 'as would have to be reserved for the consent of the Home Government'. Simply prescribe that white men shall be employed, he advised, 'and you avoid raising the question of imposing disabilities on natives'. 12
Immigrant engine drivers, mechanics, miners and builders took advantage of the administration's racial bias. Many of their leaders, such as Whiteside, Walker, Waterston, Haynes, Crawford and Andrews, had served with the British army against the republics. Belonging to a conquering nation and a racial elite, they adopted the ideology of a colonial society. The crop of trade unions that sprang up after the war combined class militancy with colour bars.
Engineers, engine drivers, iron moulders and carpenters were represented on a joint mechanics committee that conducted a strike in April 1902 against piece work on the Crown Reef mine. Five months later, 103 men struck work on the Village Main Reef mine where Frederic Creswell, the mine manager, and Wilfred Wybergh, commissioner of mines, were experimenting with a white labour force. Creswell substituted two white helpers at 10s. a shift each for the five Africans who usually manned a machine drill at a wage of 2s. in cash and 1s. in board and lodging. To offset the rise in labour costs, he told the machine minders to supervise three drills instead of two. They preferred less work to more white labour, however, and walked out, taking the white helpers with them. 13 In spite of the setback, labour leaders insisted that it was sound for both economic and political reasons to employ large numbers of white labourers at rates intermediate between the African's 3s. and the artisan's 20s.
The administration was at first sympathetic, since the proposal fitted in with the Milner-Chamberlain object of attracting as many British immigrants as would swamp the Afrikaner population. Wybergh gave his official backing to the experimental use of unskilled whites on five mines. 14 The railways brought out navvies from Britain in 1903 to lay a permanent track for a wage of 5s. a day and all found. 15 But the white labourers were never given a proper trial. The mine owners had political and economic objections to their employment. Milner, ever complaisant towards the Chamber, was converted to its policy of introducing indentured Asians, and set his mind on preparing the white public for a decision that would cause as great an uproar as the proposed introduction of convicts to the Cape in 1849. Creswell and Wybergh were dismissed from their posts, the British railway navvies were repatriated, and an inter-colonial customs conference, held at Bloemfontein in March 1903, was manoeuvred into supporting the Chamber's scheme.
The conference found, on no evidence other than the reluctance of Africans to work for the prevailing rate of wages, that there were not enough of them south of the Zambesi to satisfy demands for labour. Therefore, the conference recommended, Asians should be admitted under strict state control and on the firm condition of eventual repatriation. 16 Milner appointed a Labour Commission to substantiate these findings, and negotiated for the introduction of 10,000 Indians to be employed on railway works. The Indian government rightly insisted on a relaxation of the Transvaal's anti-Asian legislation. 17 Milner refused to make any concessions, withdrew his request, and threw his weight behind the Chamber's policy of importing Chinese. The majority of the Labour Commission duly reported that 'white labour cannot profitably compete with black 'in' the lower fields of manual industry'. The gold mines, they said, were short of 129,000 labourers; the shortage would rise to 325,000 by 1908; and Africa could not meet requirements. 18
Two commissioners, Peter Whiteside and J. W. Quinn, disputed these findings. Whiteside, an Australian-born engine driver, president of the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council, and a nominated member of the Johannesburg town council, was a fervent racist. His associate Quinn later took a leading part in the agitation against the Chinese and for responsible government. Both men insisted that though white labourers, if given a fair trial, would supplement and even supersede Africans, mine owners wanted to perpetuate an 'inferior race' system of labour organization. They had a political bias against a big influx of white labourers, who would strengthen the working class and enable it to determine both wages and state policy. The minority report blamed the employers for the shortage of African workers, alleged that it was temporary, and urged the adoption of a fixed ratio between white and African workers. These were principles on which the labour movement would base its white labour policy in years to come.
The economic motives for the introduction of Chinese arose out of Milner's ' struggle for British supremacy. 19 The war had devastated the Transvaal and disrupted the recruiting system of the mines. The output of gold dropped from its peak of, £1,710,000 in August 1899 - under a supposedly corrupt and inefficient regime - to £823,000 in December 1902. As many Africans worked for a wage in the Transvaal as before the war, but the number employed on gold mines declined from 107,482 in 1899 to 64,577 in June 1903. 20 The decline revealed the African's good sense and the actual source of profit. For the owners had taken advantage of the war to cut his average wage from 47s.1d. in 1898 to 26s. 8d. in 1901-2. Men of the Cape, Basutoland and Bechuanaland 'refused altogether to engage themselves at the reduced rate of pay'. 21 Natal closed its borders to recruiters. Settlers in central Africa also opposed recruiting, which would force up wages, then 3s. or 5s. a month in Nyasaland. Mozambique alone continued to forward its conscripted workers, though even here old mine hands refused to work for the lower rate.
There was no time to spare, in the view of Milner and the owners; they wanted a ready-to-hand proletariat at the lowest possible cost who would restore the mines to full working capacity without delay, satisfy shareholders, attract new capital, save Milner's reputation and the Transvaal from bankruptcy. They would not wait for taxation and land seizures to turn African peasants into work seekers. ' Is this huge industry to be a school for teaching savages to become civilized workers? ' thundered Sir George Farrar when he moved in the legislative assembly on 28 December 1903 that government be asked to legislate for the introduction of Chinese. One of the men sentenced to death by the republic's high court for their role in Jameson's raid, Farrar admitted that it was a mistake to have reduced the African's wage; or to have thought, as his side did, that the war would last only six weeks. But, he added, they would make another mistake if they imported unskilled whites, for this meant labour combinations, discontent, strikes and nothing else.
He spoke for his class. Charles Rudd one of Rhodes' partners, and other company directors agreed that a big body of enfranchised white workers 'would simply hold the Government of the country in the hollow of their hand' and 'more or less dictate, not only on the question of wages, but also on political questions'. 22 There was, too, the fear of inter-racial fraternization. Top-ranking executives and engineers told Joseph Chamberlain in Johannesburg in January 1903 that the white man would forfeit his natural supremacy and cease to be the master if he worked side by side with Africans as fellow labourers. 23 Chamberlain's views were as misinformed and intemperate as the mine owners '. Africans alone among the world's great races, he said, believed that 'the only honourable employment for a man is fighting, that labour is the work of slaves'. Slavery had been abolished in theory, but the ' Kafir' bought his wives, who worked ' to keep him in idleness '. Abdurahman replied in a biting analysis of Chamberlain's speech, which, he pointed out, contained the same arguments as those used by mine magnates in favour of forced labour. Chamberlain had not mentioned the thirty per cent reduction in the African's wage, his unhealthy working conditions, or the over-capitalized mines ' which cannot pay a dividend until the Kafir is compelled to work at a wage fixed by the mining magnates'. 24
Africans and Coloured stood to lose most from an influx of low-paid, indentured workers; and voiced their objections at meetings in the Cape, Transvaal and even isolated Bechuanaland. Jabavu circulated a petition to the king to 'avert this evil' of importing Asiatics 'with no idea of any rights, and with morals and habits unlike those of the European races, in which your petitioners have been hitherto trained'. 25 The Chinese, he wrote after importing had begun, cost more and did less work than the African, who 'cordially detested' them. 26
White workers on the Rand were less united on the ' Chinese question'. The trades councils of Johannesburg and Pretoria claimed that all unions 'totally' or 'largely' opposed the importation. 27 According to Milner, however, the miners were predominantly, and other artisans mostly, in favour. 28 The trades council accused mine managements of browbeating their employees into acquiescence. For this reason, or because they believed that the industry and their jobs were in danger, a significant number of miners passed resolutions and signed petitions for the immediate introduction of indentured, non-British Asians to be employed only on unskilled work.
Mine owners told the men that they had less to fear from the Chinese than from a horde of unskilled whites who, Farrar warned, would soon become skilled ' and compete with you '. He dangled the prospect of sheltered employment before a miners' audience at Boksburg in March 1903. The Chinese, he explained, would be repatriated, prohibited from trading or holding land, and excluded by law from many specified occupations. 29 The Labour Importation Ordinance of 1904 duly prohibited the employment of Chinese in fifty-five scheduled occupations including such non-mining trades as bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing, painting, gardening and clerical work.
Among other consequences, the agitation for and against the Chinese aroused and hardened colour prejudices, precipitated the emergence of the Afrikaner Het Volk party, prepared the ground for cooperation between Afrikaner nationalism and the white labour movement, and facilitated the introduction of a code prescribing minimum standards of housing, food, medical care and sanitation for African miners. 30
The Chinese were employed under conditions agreed by the owners, the Transvaal administration, the British and Chinese governments, after lengthy negotiations which centred mainly round the issues of wages and repatriation. Alfred Lyttleton, the secretary of state for colonies, complained that he 'really could not defend an arrangement by which the Chinese would be used to lower Kaffir wages'. 31 He was later bullied into agreeing to a guaranteed minimum wage of 1s. to 1s. 6d. a shift, compared with the African's basic rate of 1s. 6d. for surface and 2s. for underground work. Housed in compounds and working sixty hours a week, the Chinese were allowed a daily ration of 1.5 lb. of rice, 0.5 lb. of vegetables, and 0.5 lb. of meat or fish. The maximum compensation for death or total permanent disablement was fixed at £10.
Medical officers attributed the occurrence of scurvy among African miners to the deficiencies of a mealie-meal diet and recommended the addition of rice, millet, legumes, meat and fresh vegetables. 32 The Chamber, however, 'viewed the native purely as a machine, requiring a certain amount of fuel', and took as its standard the 'minimum amount of food which will give the maximum amount of work'. 33 Regulations issued in 1906 prescribed a minimum of 2 lb. of mealie-meal and 0.5 oz. of salt a day, supplemented by 2 lb. of bone-free meat or fish, 1 lb. of soupmeat, 1 lb. of vegetables and 1 lb. of sugar or treacle a week. Though low in vitamins, calcium, animal protein and calories, the diet was a great improvement, saved many lives, and virtually eliminated scurvy as a cause of death. The men satisfied their craving for meat and milk by buying large quantities from the concession stores. No mine ever supplied milk, butter, cheese or eggs. Yet milk was a staple diet of men from stock-breeding communities and a primary source of the food constituents in which the mine ration was most deficient.
The same kind of cheeseparing policy was applied to housing, working conditions and medical care. Huts of brick or stone, built for the Chinese and later also for Africans, were badly overcrowded, with rooms holding twenty or forty men each. The regulations prescribed a maximum air space of 200 cubic feet per inmate, though Dr Turner, the Medical Officer of Health, insisted that even 300 cubic feet were 'far too little'. 34 The Chamber replied that the adoption of his standard would cost the owners an additional £1.25 million. No eating halls, tables or chairs were provided. The men drew their rations in tin bowls and mugs and ate squatting on the cement paving of the courtyard or sitting on the bunks in their sleeping quarters. They worked twelve hours a day on the surface or eleven hours underground without food, were often kept waiting in wet clothes for as much as three hours while the skips were being used to transport rock, and walked back to the compounds in a state of exhaustion, their bodies covered with stale sweat and grime. The regulations of 1906 compelled owners to provide change houses for white and Coloured miners, but not for Africans, many of whom contracted pneumonia and chest complaints through being exposed to sudden and great changes of temperature and altitude. 35
Most mines had no hospitals before 1906, when the health regulations obliged the owners to provide hospital accommodation for not more than two and a half per cent of the average number of Africans employed. In 1914, the Rand mines between them had only ten full-time doctors, each attending to between 82 and 265 hospital patients. There were thirty-nine part-time doctors, who had to reconcile their duty to helpless indentured Africans with the exacting demands of white miners backed by sick-benefit societies. The part-time men usually visited the hospital once a day to look at new patients and sign death certificates. Mine hospitals were managed by unqualified superintendents and untrained African nurses who were paid 29. or 2s. 6d. a day. Patients were underfed, mechanically treated with purgatives on admission, neglected, and forced to work during convalescence. Hospital costs were low and mortality rates high. Henry Burton, the minister of native affairs, asked in 1911: 'How is it that these things have not struck the mining people years ago? Here are these fellows, Iying in their beds, and dying off like a lot of rats, [yet] nobody does a thing.' The hospital services became efficient only after the government had put a stop in 1913 to recruiting in tropical regions north of 22 south latitude and compelled the mines to pay compensation for miners' phthisis. 36
The high turnover of migrants exposed great numbers of men to the unfavourable conditions, spread the risk of pneumoconiosis and venereal diseases over a wide area, and delayed the peasant worker's adjustment to an industrialized environment. Mine owners acknowledged that 'the immense cost' of labour was 'not in the actual wages which we pay, but in the time wasted in teaching new batches'. 37 A certain way to reduce the high death rate from pneumonia was to settle the miners with their families in villages along the Reef, advised General Gorgas of Panama fame. 38 The owners preferred to offset the cost of wasted lives and skills with savings on housing, food and wages. Africans received less than a living wage, while their families kept themselves on the land. The owners contended that the migratory system was 'a fundamental factor' in the mining economy and essential to their prosperity. If the African 'has not got the reserve subsistence to go back to', said Gemmill, the secretary of the Chamber, 'we cannot afford a wage to make it possible for him to live in an urban area'. 39
Segregation in compounds, labour migration and job reservation accentuated the racial and cultural differences between white miner and Africans. He was their 'boss', and not a fellow worker; and he tended to enforce his orders with kicks and blows. Africans 'were knocked about by irresponsible miners underground', said George Trow at a Tembuland meeting; but they would not complain for fear of being sjambokked by African mine police. 40 Jabavu, being anxious 'to secure a perennial stream of Natives to the Goldfields' and a reciprocal flow of wages to the reserves, had no time for the 'discontented troublemaker' on the mines; he attributed their unpopularity to compound managers drawn from Natal with Zulu police. 41 The correspondence columns of his paper recorded other grievances in 1907-8, when the Chinese were being repatriated. Labour agents misrepresented conditions to recruits who loafed, deserted or struck work on finding that they had been deceived. Task work was another serious grievance. Drillers were obliged to drill at least forty-two inches during a shift, for which they were paid 2s. with 0.5d. for every additional inch drilled. A driller might have to spend three or four hours clearing debris blasted out by the preceding shift before he reached the place marked for a hole. If he failed to complete the norm, however, his shift boss would refuse to mark his ticket. This meant that he was not paid for the day's work or credited with a shift towards the completion of his service contract. 42
Pneumatic drills were then taking the place of hand drilling. Originally operated by white miners with African 'helpers', the heavy, cumbersome machine was at first considered a highly specialized tool, and the operator a skilled workman. During the war, and as Cornish miners returned home or died of phthisis, Africans were employed to 'run' the machine drill for an unskilled labourer's wage. The white miner became a supervisor, responsible for one or two drills operated by an African 'helper' and his team. Creswell, as we have seen, wanted the miner to take charge of three drills operated by white labourers and so provoked a strike in 1902 at the Village Main Reef mine. In 1907 the manager of Knights Deep mine instructed each miner to supervise three drills manned by Africans. The miners' union, at that time a craft organization confined to holders of blasting certificates, accused the owners of diluting skilled labour in preparation for large-scale retrenchments of whites. The men at New Kleinfontein mine struck work on 1 May. The strike spread until more than 4,000 miners were involved.
Smuts, as minister of mines, made his first appearance as protector of the propertied class and of mine owners in particular. He called out the imperial garrison, who broke up picket lines and protected scabs. Africans and Chinese worked the mines without close supervision. Employers declared a lockout, dismissed the strikers and took on Afrikaners in their place. The strikers trickled back to work, and the union acknowledged defeat at the end of July. The executive's members and other leading strikers were victimized, the number of white miners employed was reduced by ten per cent, and the cost of breaking rock fell by twenty-five per cent. 43 Jabavu, ever partial to Afrikanerdom, applauded the entry of young 'colonials' in the industry. Their presence would establish 'a better understanding' between burghers and the mining populations, besides stopping the drain of money remitted by Cornish miners to their families. 44
H. L. Phooko, representing the Transvaal Native Congress, drew a more significant conclusion in evidence before the Mining Commission of 1907. By keeping the mines in production during the strike, he remarked, Africans had shown a capacity to master all parts of the mining operation. They were not intellectually superior and often performed skilled work, though the law denied them freedom of contract and held them down as unskilled. 45 The commission, too, rejected the theory that the African was a 'mere muscular machine' and no more than ' an aid to enable the White man to earn wages sufficient to keep him in contentment'. Africans, warned the commission, were not 'barred by lack of brain and industrial training from interfering with the White man's opportunities of employment'. 46 The Transvaal Indigency Commission of 1906-8 held a similar view, and refused to recommend measures to protect white workers. Africans were being trained in regular work, showed a great yearning for education, and would in time insist on higher wages and access to superior kinds of work. Protective devices such as a fixed ratio between racial groups of employees or a minimum white wage would only discourage the employment of whites, insulate them against pressures for efficiency, and so hamper them in the coming struggle for supremacy. 47
The miners themselves were in two minds about the white labour policy. A minority preferred African helpers. White labourers, according to this school of thought, were either casual, transient workers or Afrikaners who would learn the trade and saturate the market for skilled miners. 48 Men holding this view wished to maintain their bargaining power by limiting the diffusion of skills. Africans were socially inferior, easily handled and unlikely to compete. Jimmy Coward, a leading member of the miners' union and of the Independent Labour party, and at one time mayor of Germiston, claimed that he could take 'a raw green Kaffir from the Kraal' and within a week 'make him competent for me to leave my machine with him and go away whenever I have a mind'. White men were not willing to boss other white men in the same way as they would 'Kaffirs'. He for one would not do it. 49
Most labour leaders agreed with the Cornish miner Tom Mathews, secretary of the union from 1908 to the time of his death from phthisis in 1915. He would treat Africans decently but 'not let them be free', and would rather have a white youth under him than 'a kaffir, or two Kaffirs for that matter'. 50 The engineers' union, whose chief spokesman was its national organizer W. H. Andrews, set out the reasons for this preference with prodigious subtlety in a memorandum submitted to the Mining Commission. 51 The coloured races, if unchecked would rise to the top and endanger the state itself by reason of their numbers, vitality and low standards. Unfair competition by unskilled whites was therefore more natural and infinitely more desirable than competition by Africans. Since white men were citizens and voters, they were 'far more likely to look at the matter from the point of view of the general welfare of the community.' On the other hand, 'the kaffir has no interest in the country except that he gets his living here. He has no voice in the Government'.
Trade unionists who claimed privileges in the name of the capitalist state and for the general welfare of a class society had turned their backs on radical socialism. As members both of an inferior class and of a racial elite they were in an ambivalent position. It deflected them from their traditional attitudes. Experience of labour dilution convinced them that employers would substitute the cheaper coloured worker. A racial bar hardly needed justification in their eyes. It was a protective device, like restraints on the number of apprentices or on reclassification of jobs. Since the threat came from an alien and oppressed race, however, the trade unionists identified themselves with white supremacy so as to legitimate their class interests. Though Mathews, Andrews and other socialists of the time may not have been racists, they certainly excluded the African from their vision of the ideal commonwealth. Refusing to recognize him as a fellow worker and ally, they fused their craft outlook with the colour prejudices of feudalistic landowners in a struggle against both capitalists and Africans.
The time had not yet come, however, for governments to catch votes with promises of sheltered employment. More orthodox views about the value of competition prevailed, as in the report of the Indigency Commission. Trade unionists therefore found it expedient to demand protection from competition in the guise of protection against accidents. The plea that only trained and qualified persons should be employed in positions of trust seemed reasonable. Once the principle had been established, it was easy to equate a white skin with technical skills and a sense of responsibility. The owners themselves were to blame for the myth of the African's incompetence. They objected to a regulation of 1896 that obliged managers to explain to illiterate workers, 'especially persons of colour', the rules ' appertaining to their particular occupation and duty '. Formal instruction was confined to whites, first by way of apprenticeship and classes in drilling techniques, and later at evening courses conducted by the Transvaal University College. The government mining school opened at Wolhuter in 1911, admitted only white men. Africans and Coloured had to learn their trade on the job from the white miner.
Miners and mechanics who appeared before the Mining Regulations Commission of 1907-IO could claim with some plausibility that the mines would be run more efficiently and with fewer accidents if only white and preferably certificated men were employed on all engines and machinery. Dr F. E. T. Krause, the chairman, was sympathetic. As assistant attorney-general in the republic, he had clashed with one Forster, a lawyer who defended Baron von Veltheim in 1896 on a charge of murdering the magnate Woolf Joel. A series of bizarre incidents led to Krause being sentenced at the Old Bailey in 1902 to two years' imprisonment for an alleged attempt to incite the murder of Forster. Returning to Johannesburg in 1904, Krause sat on the municipal council in 1907-8, stood for Het Volk Party against Bill Andrews in the parliamentary elections of 1910, subsequently defended communists and other radicals in political trials, and spoke up strongly against the pass laws. When chairman of the commission, however, he advocated a white labour policy. South African whites and Afrikaners in particular he urged should be trained for the mining industry.
Trade unionists admitted frankly that they wanted a colour bar to raise the status of their trade and provide employment for whites. Tom Hannegan, on behalf of the engine drivers, said that they would do all they could 'to take these boilers out of the hands of coloured men'. 52 The Amalgamated Society of Engineers similarly coupled safety measures with employment opportunities. The 'growing practice of placing kaffirs and other coloured persons in charge of boilers, winches, engines and other machinery ' increased the danger to life and limb; it also reduced 'the sphere of employment for European labour without which this colony cannot progress'. The union urged that ' no Kaffir or other coloured person' should be issued with a certificate of competence or allowed to take charge of machines. 53 But none of the witnesses produced evidence to show that accidents were more likely to occur when Africans operated boilers and winches. 'It is reasoning and you do not require proof,' said Bill Andrews.
Government records showed that the number of mine accidents caused by overwinding was small and unrelated to the employment of uncertificated drivers. Managers, engineers and inspectors agreed that engines not used for hauling persons could be safely entrusted to uncertificated operators. Many uneducated and even illiterate men made excellent drivers. Training, sobriety, self-reliance and nerve were the qualities of a good driver. 54 Meeting in committee to digest the evidence, the commission viewed the proposal to license drivers of all types of engines with great scepticism. Krause suspected that the real motive was ' to prevent all intelligent work on the mines from being done by natives'. The commissioners agreed among themselves that drivers of motor cars should be licensed, but not the drivers of traction and stationary engines, including those used for hauling rock. 55
The commission criticized mine managements for employing large numbers of unskilled whites 'often entirely ignorant of mining, and whose principal and often only recommendation is their physical fitness and their suitability for rough work'. Yet when the commission reported in 1910, it submitted draft regulations that were heavy with colour bars. Some appeared in the interpretation of terms, as when the words 'white person' were inserted in the definition of banksman, onsetter, ganger and mine manager. Some took the form of an injunction to employ only whites in specified occupations, such as blasting, running elevators driving engines, supervising boilers and other machinery; or as shift boss and mine overseer. Furthermore, only whites would be allowed to obtain the certificates of competence required, for instance, by engine drivers and boiler attendants. The draft served as a model for the colour bar regulations issued by Smuts under the Mines and Works Act of 1911. The only reason given in the Krause report for this massive and far-reaching piece of racial discrimination was the bare and unsubstantiated assertion that 'wherever the safety of life and limb is concerned only competent White persons should be employed'. 56
The Chamber of Mines made a formal protest. It pointed out that discriminatory regulations would be ultra vires if not authorized by the enabling statute; and suggested that 'competent' or 'reliable' be substituted for 'white person'. 57 But the mine owners never contested the regulations until after the miners had suffered the great defeat of 1922. Owners and government acquiesced for political reasons in a discrimination that was both unjust and unlawful. The African's capacity was never seriously questioned. Engineers and mine managers agreed that selected Africans, adequately trained, would be as competent as the white man for any job including that of a mine manager. 58 No attempt was ever made, however, to give him systematic training for skilled work. None of the many commissions that inquired into the state of labour organization even considered the possibility of systematic training. Their only concern, when they discussed the African's role, was the degree of protection that should be given to white workers against competition.
The claim that the colour bar has a prophylactic function is not borne out by the exceptionally high incidence of accidents on the mines. More than 30,000 men died in accidents on gold mines during the first half of the century. Untold others died from septicaemia and other effects of accidental injuries, or lost limbs and sight or were otherwise disabled by accidents. The death rate from accidents on all mines in 1910 was 4-05 per 1,000 African employees and 3-36 per 1,000 whites. The rate fell to 156 for both groups by 1956, but the accident rate was then 58.7 per 1,000 miners, as compared with 30 in 1927, when the existing definition of accidents was first introduced. The decline in the death rate must therefore be attributed to improvements in first aid and medical treatment rather than to more effective preventive measures. For an accident is not a fortuitous, unavoidable event. It is broadly, the result of defective adaptation or inadequate control of environment. Though unintended and unforeseen it flows from a deliberate act, and can be averted by the adoption of sufficient care or by technical and material safeguards. The high and increasing incidence of accidents on mines points to deficiencies in management.
Far from saving lives, the colour bar reduced standards of efficiency and safety. By keeping Africans ignorant of their trade, the owners sent up accident rates and strengthened the white worker's claim to a monopoly of preferred occupations. Competence was identified with skin colour. Yet a large number of Africans, by dint of intelligence and long service, were more skilled than their white overseer. The Chamber acknowledged in 1914 that such men were 'in many cases as good, or better, judges as to safety underground' than the partially trained white supervisors. 'The time has now arrived,' urged Abdurahman, ' when we should agitate for the repeal of those regulations which prohibit Coloured men from performing skilled work on the mines.' 59 The regulations remained to block the African's prospects of promotion blunt his initiative and deprive him of incentives to become more proficient.
Colour bars discouraged efficiency for different reasons also in the white miner He was trained but left the actual manual work to Africans. The division of functions tended to cultivate indifference in miners and managements alike to the African's safety. Fergusson, Boksburg's outspoken mining inspector, drew attention to the consequences in his report for 1910-11. 60 In England where mining was something of an hereditary occupation a miner's son would assist his father by doing work of the kind allocated to Africans on the Rand. The English miner took great care to secure and make safe the places where a lad was set to work, and to point out dangers to him. In the gold mines, however 'the death of a native is not looked upon by the miners here as a very serious affair' The directors were well aware that 'hundreds of men lose their lives annually through carelessness on the part of the miners and apathy on the part of the officials'; but made no effort to have matters improved. The probable explanation for their indifference lay in the old adage: ' Dead men tell no tales ' For ' a live Kaffir who has been assaulted is in a position to do a great deal of harm on his return home by persuading his friends not to allow themselves to be recruited'.
Ten pounds were paid in compensation to the dependants of an adult killed in an accident and £5 to those of a young umfaan* The African was cheap in death as in life and scarcely worth the cost of safety measures that might slow down production. Mine owners objected vigorously to the first statutory obligation imposed by the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911 to compensate Africans for injuries. The benefits ranged from £1 to £20 for partial incapacity and from £30 to £50 for total permanent disablement. A man who lost a leg and became virtually unemployable received a maximum of £20, the equivalent of four months' wages, board and lodging. The higher scale was extended in 1914 to include cases of fatal injuries. Though grossly inadequate, and notably less in relation to earning power than the benefits paid to injured white miners, the statutory scales gave mine officials a powerful incentive to reduce the number of accidents.
Africans were expendable. They had a preferential claim to rough, hard and dangerous work, as in rock drilling, which exposed the operator to deadly clouds of silica dust. When the white miner became phthisis conscious, drilling ceased to be regarded as skilled and was entrusted wholly to Africans. Asked whether white apprentices could be substituted for young Africans in cyanide works and mills, Henry Hay, the manager of the Witwatersrand Deep, replied: 'You could not put white boys in the mill work, it is too dangerous; you could put them in the cyanide works, but you would have to be careful.' 61 Conventional divisions between skilled and unskilled labour often denoted the hazards of the operator's calling or his skin colour rather than the degree of skill involved. Thousands of Africans employed as drillers, trammers, packers, or in laying and firing charges, would be considered skilled in Europe and America. They were called 'boys' in South Africa and were paid one-ninth of the white miners' wage.
Discrimination spread from the mines to other trades in which the safety factor was insignificant. English-speaking immigrants asserted a prior right to all occupations. White South Africans learned from them to agitate for a white labour policy in government, municipal and railway services, in factories, bakeries and butcher shops. 62 The cry went up also in Natal, where labour leaders railed against the employment of Indians and Africans as crane drivers, riveters, mechanics and painters. 63 White supremacy claims were expanded early in the century into a demand for total segregation. J. E. Riley, president of the Johannesburg trades council and a militant member of the Operative Masons' Society, urged in 1907 that all Africans should be confined to reserved areas in the colony. 64 The trade unionists who pressed for a colour bar seldom attempted to reconcile it with their class outlook. Appealing to race prejudice, they applied their traditional, protectionist policies to what they regarded as an extreme case of unfair competition.
Africans were said to be the unwitting instrument of the capitalist class. Housed in compounds, paid less than a living wage, denied the right to strike or combine, they threatened the white man's job. Given a free hand, the capitalists would run the country with a multitude of bonded workmen for the benefit of foreign shareholders. Legal protection for the artisan was no more than a counterweight to the African's legal disabilities. 'I hold that the Kaffir should be allowed to get free,' said Tom Mathews 'but in the interim, as he is here only as a semi-slave, I have a right to fight him and to oust him just as the Australians ousted the Chinamen and the Kanakas.' If he were to be allowed to compete with the artisan, the African should do so on an open market, as a free worker and without the mean advantage of a servile status. 65
Labour leaders might have been acquitted of acting out of self-interest and racial arrogance if they had demanded equal rights for all workmen. Few, however, pressed for the removal of restraints imposed on the African's bargaining power by indentured labour, compounds, pass laws and the master and servant acts. Labour men even failed to protest on humanitarian grounds against the conditions that caused the death from disease and accidents of some 5,000 Africans a year on Transvaal mines between 1903 and 1920. These were the formative years of labour legislation. A firm stand made against discrimination could have done much to narrow the gap between artisans and Africans. The racists who led the labour movement missed the opportunity, as when the Transvaal parliament passed the Industrial Disputes Prevention Act of 1909. The first of its kind in South Africa, it introduced conciliation procedures in essential municipal services, mining, the building trades, engineering and metal works; and applied only to white employees and employers of more than ten white persons.
R. Goldman, the member for Newtown, said that Africans should not have the right to strike, since they could virtually paralyse the mining industry by withholding their labour. De Villiers, the attorney-general and minister of mines, agreed. Moreover, he said, Africans were 'ignorant and not competent to appoint an arbitrator'. He hoped that the day was far distant when they would be capable of combined action in a strike. It was left to Wybergh, a leading advocate of white labour policies, to defend, if sideways, the African. Who had dislocated the mining industry if not the owners themselves, by their 'indefensible and arbitrary' act in cutting wages 'to an enormous extent' before and during the war? The more they excluded Africans from industrial laws, the greater would be the incentive to employ them 'because they were being made humble slaves, not able to speak for themselves, therefore easier to be dealt with and more satisfactory to employers than white people'. That was his great reason, he explained, for wanting Africans to be covered by the act in the same way as whites. Even this appeal to self-interest failed to move Whiteside, Reid and Sampson, the Labour party members. They were prepared to include Coloured, among whom were first class mechanics. It would be a strange thing, said Sampson, if they were to remain in the shop while white men came out on strike. 'Nobody,' he added, 'intended to include the Kaffir.' 66
The advantages of inter-racial class solidarity seemed remote and problematical. White solidarity promised real and immediate gains. The small number of artisans in key positions could wrest concessions with comparative ease at the expense of labourers. Labour leaders were able to strengthen their hand by claiming that the interests of white workers were the same as those of the entire white community. Class struggles between whites, they argued, set a bad example to Africans. W. McLarty, the member for Durban gave this as a reason in 1903 for the introduction of industrial conciliation. A strike of white bricklayers, he said, was followed by a successful strike of African tramwaymen. ' We have the Native population growing up around us, and being educated, and they are learning to strike.' He uttered the same warning in 1909, when introducing a bill to settle disputes between employers and white working men. The Natal railwaymen's strike of that year was a grim reminder, he said, of the unsettling effects of a long strike on African, Indian and other workers. 67
Appeals to racial sentiment strengthened the case for factory legislation. What could be more persuasive than sensational disclosures of white girls working side by side with Africans and Indians in sweated food and clothing factories? This was the line taken by C. H. Haggar, the Labour member for Durban, in moving his factories bill in 1909. He spoke of 'Kaffirs moulding and kneading the dough in the trough, and the perspiration running down them into the trough'; of laundries where 'you find Coolies sleeping on the clothing sent there'.68 His bill contained a clause prohibiting employees of different sex and different races from working in the same rooms at the same time. This, rather than the protection of workmen against excessive exploitation, would have been the most significant effect if the bill had become law. In the event, many years were to pass before parliament implemented Haggar's proposal to segregate one racial group of factory workers from another.
*Xhosa for young boy, lad.