ABSTRACT
A majority - almost 99 per cent - of African miners live in mine hostels. These are single-sex quarters located close to mine shafts and they service the labour needs of individual mines. In the past they have also been called compounds, which refers to the time when mine quarters comprised basic and primitive facilities with large rooms, in some instances accommodating up to 20 miners in their public space, no private ablution, toilet facilities, electricity, and minimal, modest service provision (Wilson 1972: 57). Corporate embarrassment about compound life, brought about in part by a number of academic studies published in the 1970s (Wilson 1972; 1974; Johnstone 1976; Webster 1978; Lipton 1980), motivated the mining houses to reform and improve the mine residence and substantial sums of money were pumped into upgrading and, as Lipton (1980: 95) puts it, 'ameliorating the conditions of mine life'. Room size and propinquity were reduced, private ablution and toilet facilities provided, electricity was supplied and recreation and bar facilities became part of the hostel environment. The compounds were modernized quite considerably in the 1970s and part of this modernization was a change in nomenclature; they became known as hostels, a term denoting mass residence, but free of the pejorative and unsavoury associations of the term compound.
