Apartheid

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and often extremely unhealthy work conditions in the gold mines, and despite the huge profits
made by the exclusively white owners, black miners were still being paid wages below the
poverty line. Moreover, the black workers were subjected to routine humiliating room,
clothes, baggage, and body searches and even lived in cage-like compounds if they worked
with mining the most valuable minerals. Blacks were forbidden from owning or possessing
any minerals as well as factories or mills. They were also legally banned from becoming state
prosecutors, magistrates, or judges. Mandela, who opened the first black law firm in South
Africa with Oliver Tambo (who preceded Mandela as head of the ANC), also describes how
his and Tambo’s work was made nearly impossible by state agents harassing them. 443
What choices did the mine workers really have? Not many. Before apartheid in the
narrow sense, there was one period when black workers were able to try harder to achieve
better conditions. After the Russian revolution of 1917, several unions and leftist
organizations were formed and in June 1918 African municipal workers in Johannesburg
started a strike for higher wages. The authorities responded harshly. 152 workers were jailed
and sentenced to carry out their old jobs under armed surveillance. Later, strikes by African
workers were made entirely illegal. 444
The factories also subjected Blacks to ‘slave-like’ working conditions. For instance, as
late as 1987, the Sasol oil-from-coal processing plant, which was managed by South African
Whites alongside the US firm, Fluor Corporation, paid Blacks $1.80 an hour less than their
white colleagues on the factory floor, for performing the same work. Demanding higher
wages, the Blacks went on strike, but the management used state police and their own security
agents to attack and set dogs on the strikers. Some workers were killed and all the black
employees fired, according to a team of lawyers who sued the corporations on behalf of the
exploited and victimized black workers in 2003. 445
African farm workers were paid even less than those working in the industries. Yet,
they could not leave the white farms to seek more highly paid employment. White farmers
controlled the Africans by beating and whipping them, by placing them in debt and by not
providing them with the necessary passes. Withholding passes was the most effective way of
ensuring that Blacks remained on white farms, because it limited their freedom of movement.
African farm laborers were barred from adapting to either traditional or modern life because
they were not allowed to live in the reserves or the cities. This made them socially marginal
and ‘victims of systematic exploitation’. 446 The appropriateness of my choice of extending the
concept of apartheid to include the entire period of white domination is perhaps best shown
with the example of 20 th century farm workers, whose lot was barely different from that of
their slave predecessors in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.
From 1925, the government demanded a ‘poll tax’ of one pound each from African
men aged eighteen or more and a local ten-shilling tax per dwelling in the reserves. High
taxation and bad harvests (due to lack of infrastructure) worsened the already poor life quality
of the Africans in the reserves. Therefore, Africans (mainly males) came looking for
employment on white farms and in towns. Though the wages at the farms and in towns were
low, they became essential to sustain families living in the reserves. The black farm workers
remained on the farms as a result. From 1939 onwards Africans who had failed to pay the poll
443 Lepper & Robbins: Gold and International Sanctions against South Africa, 1990: 195ff; Mandela 2002
(1965): 43, 129. Clauss 2003: 130 describes how the Egyptian workers in ancient Alexandria’s profitable incense
factories were forced to leave the production facilities naked, officially in order to ensure that no theft was taking
place, but also in order to humiliate the natives. The same pattern is being repeated on a daily basis at Israeli
checkpoints, border crossings, etc. Here, the official issue is security, but the end result, humiliation and hatred,
i.e. insecurity, is the same. On apartheid humiliation, see also footnotes 245, 477, 657, and 738.
444 van der Walt: The Influence of the IWW in Southern Africa, 2005-6: 36; Mandela 2002 (1965): 167
445 Chege: S.Africans to Sue Fluor for Apartheid Wrongs, 2003. On the lawsuits against some of the largest
South African, American and western European companies that profited the most from South African apartheid,
see footnote 758.
446 Thompson 1990: 165f.