Swazi migrant workers and the Witwatersrand gold mines 1886–1920

Abstract

At the core of southern Africa's industrial revolution were the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. The insatiable needs of the gold mining industry for cheap, unskilled black labour and the struggles of African communities to maintain a rural productive base led to the emergence of South Africa's notorious migrant labour system. Africans from all parts of the region were eventually drawn into the system, but not always with the ease and inevitability that some accounts suggest, or without reaction and resistance from black workers, homesteads and communities trying to exercise a modicum of control over the terms of their own proletarianization. In order fully to appreciate the complexity and chaos that beset the migrant labour system at its inception, it is necessary to explore the variable and particular historical experience of different groups of migrant mineworkers. The incorporation of Swaziland and Swazi workers into the mine labour system was ragged and uneven, being drawn out over a protracted thirty-year period. This particular aspect of southern African migrant labour history can be divided into three broad phases. Within each phase patterns of Swazi migration to the Witwatersrand are reconstructed and related to the general character of the evolving capitalist labour market, the impress of colonial coercion, rural production and ecological calamity, the internal relations of Swazi society and, most important, the struggles of Swazi workers against the forces of capital and state trying to restrict their lives and control their labour.