ABSTRACT
The history of South Africa is the story of conquests, gold, apartheid and more recently democratic transition. It was the discovery of gold which attracted foreign attention and marks the beginning of an era that saw the lives of ordinary whites and blacks change. As the mining of gold was labor intensive, it was the beginning of African subjugation to a system of wage labor. “We must have labor,” declared the president of the Chamber of Mines in 1912. He further added: “the mining industry without labor is as bricks would be without straw, or as it would be to imagine you could get milk without cows.”1 As labor was central to the success of gold mining in the pre-industrial period of South Africa, the priority of the mining industry was to secure its access for the mines, and this was achieved primarily through coercing Africans to sell their labor.2
