The control of migratory labour on the South African gold mines in the era of Kruger and Milner

Jeeves, Alan H.

doi:10.1080/03057077508707940

Cited by 46 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…They established an association, the Chamber of Mines, which essentially created a monopsonistic cartel to avoid employers competing among each other for workers, and to ensure workers’ wages were kept low. The Chamber also played an active role in lobbying the government forcefully in 1890 for ‘an adequate supply of Kaffirs’ through ‘direct “encouragement” of mine labour by government officials in the rural areas’ (quoted in Jeeves, , p. 10). This included payments to chiefs who would use their traditional authority to compel members of their villages to enlist for work in the mines.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Responding to advocacy by the Chamber of Mines, a similar tax law was enacted by the Transvaal parliament, also in 1895 . The combined effect of these rules would be to compel Africans to work as cheap labour for the mines (Jeeves, ; Yudelman, ). This conscripting was necessary as ‘an active institutional device’ (Wright, , p. 1565) until the 1913 Natives Land Act, which confined Black people to a small proportion of the arable land and helped to create a steadier stream of Africans entering companies’ recruitment centres in rural areas…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality

Hamann

Bertels

2017

J Management Studies

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Social inequality is underpinned by exploitative labour institutions, yet the agency of employers in establishing and maintaining such institutions remains underexplored. We thus adopt the lens of institutional work in analysing South African mining employers' purposive efforts to ensure reliable access to cheap labour from the 1860s through until the infamous Marikana Massacre in 2012. We find that while labour is scarce, employers engage in forcing: creating exploitative institutional devices through conscripting and controlling. But as labour becomes abundant (and political winds shift), employers engage in freeing: liberalizing institutional controls to give workers 'choice', while simultaneously outsourcing responsibilities and costs associated with the unjust employment relationship to others, including workers themselves. We thus explain how employers purposefully create and perpetuate their advantage in interaction with labour market dynamics, contributing to our understanding of inequality and the role of actors' intentions in impacting social systems.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality

Hamann

Bertels

2017

J Management Studies

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“…Best known of all is that black mine labour was recruited via an elaborate network of agencies and private touts. 13 Years before mineral discoveries, however, black settlement in Cape Town was fuelled by rural impoverishment, starvation, deportation of convicts and prisoners of war, as well as by indentured labour. 14 In cases where entire African families did relocate to urban centres, theirs were often relatively short distance moves to smaller centres to escape unfavourable rural tenancy conditions.…”

Section: Pre-industrial Period 1652-1870mentioning

confidence: 99%

South African urban history

Pirie¹

1985

Urban History

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Johannesburg, in certain respects the Republic's leading urban centre, celebrates her centenary in 1986. Acquisitive citizens and indifferent officials have, however, long driven much of her past from the streets. Today carnival history is being manufactured hurriedly beyond remote tarmac parking grounds and behind ticketing turnstiles. Although its popularization is also overdue, scholarly interest in South African urban history fortunately has not attracted only whimsical attention. In the brief review which follows an attempt is made to sketch the outlines of the South African urban past, to capture the flavour of substantive research into South African urban history and to contour the intellectual climate in which this has been conducted and shaped. Emphasis is placed on research reported in scholarly outlets. Not unexpectedly there is a wide range of other publications which contain elements of urban historical interest, these ranging from newspapers and magazines to general historical texts and finely liveried, lavishly illustrated Africana. For the purposes of this presentation, the ‘modern period’ of South African urban history is closed during the 1950s.

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“…Conversely, the British state institution of electoral representation provided a means for converting outrage into an organized opposition within the state far more easily than the ad hoc petitioning practiced in the Republics', and British colonial conquests captured many more Africans in the toils of taxation and vagrancy laws. Moreover, for colonial officials, the control of natives was as important as the recruitment of labor was to the mine-owners, whose unprecedentedly vast investments demanded regularity of supply (Jeeves, 1975). By the 1890s, colonial rule was an essential element in South Africa's relations of production, in Mozambique where so many workers were recruited as much as in the British colonies.…”

Section: State Formation: the Case Of South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

States and Social Processes in Africa: A Historiographical Survey

Lonsdale¹

1981

African Studies Review

154

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This survey can only be one historian's view of a large and controversial matter. African states are contested objects of study on two grounds, the one particular to the changing preoccupations of Africanists, the other common to the humanities in general. European colonialism was a living denial of the ability of Africans to organize their own sovereignties. African studies emerged out of colonialism's decay, in part a sort of recantation, in part a dimension of informal empire. The analysis of past and present African states could not fail to act as a lightning conductor of warring emotions, ideologies, and theories, categories which have often not been very distinct. The first African histories after the colonial era tended to be, as the first studies in political science were necessarily, studies in state-formation as achievement. In more recent years, it has been objected that these were really chronicles of injury, not, as was thought, of pride; for states were and are engines of oppression, not civilization (for early protests, see Soyinka, 1967; Wrigley, 1971; Chanock, 1972b; and later, Markovitz, 1977: 25-55). Moreover, most Africans did not actually live in states until colonial rule fastened Leviathan's yoke upon them. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history could be said to have been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states. The dispute was really over the evolutionist assumption that it is in some sense “better” to live in states, a premise so deeply rooted in most of us that it can seem almost an insult to explore analytically “the notion of statelessness, long abandoned by historians of Africa” (Uzoigwe, 1980: 115).

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The control of migratory labour on the South African gold mines in the era of Kruger and Milner

Abstract: Journal of Southern African StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

Cited by 46 publications

References 7 publications

The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality

The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality

South African urban history

States and Social Processes in Africa: A Historiographical Survey

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