ABSTRACT

During the 32 years, the making of the white working class in Johannesburg was a continuous and sometimes contradictory process punctuated by five economic crises related to the mining industry, a costly and bloody war, and three major political changes in 1902, 1907 and 1910. By the 1910s the rapid urbanization of Afrikaner rural workers had brought the poor white problem to the fore in a context in which the state, as we have seen, had not developed the infrastructural or political means to deal with it. White worker's anger, however, was not limited to working men in the workplace. The economic, social, political and ideological processes that took place between 1890 and 1922 influenced the lives of Johannesburg's white workers creating an embryonic sense of community and identity amongst some of these men and their families.