Source: J Crush, V Williams and S Peberdy, ‘Migration in Southern Africa’. A paper prepared for the Policy Analysis and Research Programme of the Global Commission on International Migration, September 2005, p. 3
Workers, far from their homes and families, were penned for achingly long periods of time in soulless, single-sex compounds, where they were subject to a tribalised and authoritarian system of administration. These prison-like structures were also designed to minimise workers’ contact with trade unions and political organisations. The impediments to worker organisation, collective consciousness and action under these conditions are a much more credible explanation for a low-wage economy than continuing access to rural resources of the families of migrant workers.
The costs of labour also remained relatively low because the mining industry and its centralised recruiting agencies – aided and abetted by successive governments – were able to create a vast ‘labour empire’, which stretched as far north as Tanzania and channelled southwards large numbers of workers who were prepared to work for relatively low pay.3 This pattern was set early. By 1900, three-fifths of black gold miners came from Mozambique. After the South African War, labour shortages led not to an increase in wages, but to the recruitment of more than 63 000 labourers from north China. Most of these wokers were repatriated by the Union of South Africa in 1910, as changing race politics in British colonies and the newly stabilised mining economy pushed them out. Thereafter, migrants from Mozambique and elsewhere on the subcontinent dominated the ranks of foreign workers. From the 1940s onwards, difficulties with the local labour supply saw another drive to recruit foreign workers and, by the 1970s, they made up 70 per cent of the labour force in the gold mines, with men from Mozambique, Malawi and Lesotho predominating.
Migrant workers from within South Africa dominated the labour market created by the rapid expansion of secondary industry and office employment in the mid-1930s, which offered significantly better wages and working conditions. South Africans were able to draw on more effective social networks, better quality of information, mobility and language skills. They also found new forms of accommodation. Some parastatals and municipalities built their own compounds, while ‘locations in the sky’ were created by men moving into the servants’ quarters on the top of blocks of flats. City councils also established hostels to house migrants who were not in their employ. These were initially situated relatively close to city centres and new nodes of economic growth. In Johannesburg, for example, Wemmer, Jeppe, Mai Mai and Denver hostels were built between 1924 and 1946.4
While these institutions had much in common with the mine compounds, there were also significant differences. Ethnicity was not the official organising principle, although clustering on the basis of village and district ties was widespread. The world of the hostel-dwellers was considerably less regimented and controlled than that of mineworkers and there were much lower barriers between these men and the wider urban world, including unions and political parties. But considerable social distance and tensions remained between hostel-dwellers and more fully urbanised households and settlements. Large concentrations of single men with predominantly