Gold Mining in Southern Africa
Authors: Higginson John 
Published: November 2024

Gold has been mined in Southern Africa for nearly two millennia. The surface mining of gold at depths of 25 to 60 feet enabled Southern Africa’s early state formations to participate in the prosperous crosscurrents of the Indian Ocean trade until the end of the 15th century. Armed representatives of the emerging states of Western Europe violently disrupted and eventually subordinated the Indian Ocean’s commerce to the Atlantic Slave Trade from the end of the 15th to the 18th century. As a result, the fortunes of states such as Mapungunbwe, Phalaborwa, and Zimbabwe and the people of Southern Africa contracted dramatically.

Once the industrial countries of the West Atlantic world went on to the gold standard toward the end of the 19th century, there was a renewed interest in sources of gold in Southern Africa and elsewhere. In 1886, many fortune seekers descended upon the hills of the Witwatersrand in what was then the Boer South African Republic (Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek), just outside the chaotic and transient hamlet of Johannesburg. Within less than a decade this town of three thousand people had become an industrial city of over one hundred thousand.

Johannesburg’s size and the industrial productivity presented a paradox, however: Johannesburg was an industrial city without an industrial infrastructure. In place of steam laundries, there were Amawasha or Zulu washer men; in place of streetcars, there were Zulu and Indian foot-cab drivers; and in place of conveyor belts and rolling mills, there were Sotho- and Zulu-speaking adolescents fluctuating between domestic service in the mansions of the wealthy mine owners on Hospital Hill and hand-sorting gold ore in twelve-hour shifts on the surface of the mines. More and more African labor was needed to plumb the outcrop and deep-level mines of the Witwatersrand. Yet the working costs of the mines grew steadily because of the wages of a handful of White workers and the price of machinery. For a variety of reasons, willing African hands were in short supply and not always forthcoming.

The chronic shortage of African labor was further complicated by the desire of cash-short White farmers to retain African share and labor tenants, and by the protracted—and sometimes violent—struggle between Paul Kruger’s South African Republic and the British Empire over who, in fact, owned the world’s largest continuous seam of gold. Kruger’s struggle with the mine owners and Great Britain escalated into the 1899–1902 South African War. In 1901, in the midst of the third major conflict of the machine age, the mine owners or Randlords slashed the wages of African workers by half, dismissing their importance to the future expansion of the mines. In so doing, they unwittingly undermined the economic and social advantages of the British military victory. The British had won the war; but, in many respects, the Boer generals and more spirited White landowners and entrepreneurs had won the peace.

The postwar era demonstrated just how great an error the Randlords’ decision to slash African wages in the midst of the war had been. The absence of sufficient levies of experienced African workers at the base of the mining industry and an oversupply of white supervisory workers would hobble it for much of the next three decades. Ruthlessness and a callous disregard for human life compelled the mining industry to become a monopsony. These alleged solutions were proffered by the engineers and assented to by the mine owners. However, for their own reasons, neither Black nor White workers chose to accept these solutions and fought back wherever and whenever they could.