ABSTRACT
Johannesburg has, for many decades, been recognized as the dominant economic center of southern Africa comprising the largest concentration of people and capitalist enterprise in the subcontinent. The age/sex structure of the Johannesburg African population has altered from one dominated by working-age men who, with working-age women, constituted 93 percent of the total population in 1921, to a structure that increasingly showed a rise in the proportion of both women and children under 15. Extraeconomic forms of coercing people into wage labor in southern Africa date back to the early 1800s. Rural African men were proletarianized and encouraged to remain in wage employment by vagrancy laws, taxes, and regulations regarding employment contracts. Legislation to complement the 1913 Natives' Land Act was enacted in 1923 after being delayed by World War I. African wages in the postwar period fell as the demand for labor decreased.
