VIOLENCE IN A TIME OF LIBERATION

Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994By DONALD L. DONHAM

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4841-2

Contents

PREFACE………………………………………………………..ixGROUPS AT CINDERELLA IN 1994……………………………………..xiLOCAL TIMELINE IN RELATION TO NATIONAL LIBERATION…………………..xiiiINTRODUCTION……………………………………………………11. Picturing a South African Gold Mine…………………………….11Photo gallery by Santu Mofokeng…………………………………..252. White Stories………………………………………………..453. Ways of Dying………………………………………………..694. Good Friday at Cinderella……………………………………..885. Freeing Workers and Erasing History…………………………….1106. Unionization from Above……………………………………….1257. Motives for Murder……………………………………………1518. The Aftermath “They Were Enjoying Our Freedom”………………….174CONCLUSION……………………………………………………..186POSTSCRIPT Doing Fieldwork at the End of Apartheid…………………189NOTES………………………………………………………….197BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………217INDEX………………………………………………………….231

Chapter One

PICTURING A SOUTH AFRICAN GOLD MINE

AS I BEGAN FIELDWORK AT CINDERELLA, I was struck by the visual element of apartheid. The very notion of race in an everyday, if not a legal, sense assumed that race could be visually determined. And the separation of races across space instituted a social order that was unusually susceptible to being captured by visual means. This was nowhere more evident than in the segregated compound for black workers at Cinderella, which was something of a cross between a college dormitory and a prison, but perhaps most like an army barracks. Even in 1994, the vast majority of black workers, who numbered nearly 400,000, on the twenty-six gold mines in South Africa, lived in compounds—or hostels as they were increasingly called.

As I documented the mine and its compounds, it was my good fortune to work with the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng. Santu and I made several trips to Cinderella, and this experience, more than any other during my research, revealed the tensions between white and black that lay just beneath the surface. When Santu and I went underground, a white worker in the cage that carried us into the earth, began the rhyme “Eenie, meenie, maynie, mo,” leaving the next verse unfinished: “Catch a nigger by the toe.”

I had hoped to include photographs of both white and black workers in this book; after all, their changing relationships were crucial to the wider transformation of 1994. Only the lowest levels of formerly “white” jobs, mostly supervisory positions, were being performed by blacks. In assuming that Santu could photograph white workers as easily as black, however, I had not given enough thought to the social interaction that taking a picture presupposed. There is perhaps an irreducible element of power involved, as is manifest in the basic terminology of photography: we “take” a picture; those depicted are “subjects.” When the photographer is black in a context like South Africa in 1994, the power dynamic that plays out in the photographic encounter inevitably exposes social contradictions. There are therefore fewer images of white workers than I would have liked. Significantly, most of the exceptions involve work in the stopes, the cramped underground workplaces where the rock that contains the gold is drilled and blasted, and where the (common) danger of working two miles beneath the earth’s crust suspends, at least to some degree, racial tensions.

In the all-black compound, the tables were turned, and I was the one who was constantly reminded that I was out of place. Santu’s ability to connect with the workers in that context allowed me to look over his shoulder, as it were, and his sensibility allowed me to see the built environment and social relations of the compound in deeper ways. Far East Hostel at the mine, for example, was a recently constructed structure that housed about five hundred workers (figs. 3 and 4). Whether the wrecked truck in the field outside Far East had simply been abandoned from the nearby motorway, or whether it had once belonged to a particularly successful black worker from the hostel, I was never able to determine. In any case, the new at Cinderella was never separate in its newness; it seemed always linked with the cast-off debris of some past disaster, decaying in the present.

One such ruin was an abandoned mine compound at Cinderella, dating probably from the 1920s (a corner of which had been taken over by squatters and their laundry. See fig. 5). Viewed from the higher elevation of a nearby mine dump’s hill of sand, composed of ore that had been pulverized to extract its gold, the compound’s close and rationalized spaces become visible. In some areas of the United States, such as California, such a structure might have housed migrant farm workers during a certain historical period. In South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century, this particular compound had accommodated black mine workers. How had those men experienced their lives? Could an archaeology of a ruin be made to tell their stories?

Such relics of the mine’s past highlighted the modernity of structures like Far East Hostel. The first photograph that Santu took at the mine was a kind of still life of a mine worker’s room and belongings (fig. 6). The manager at Far East, a black man who had recently assumed a position formerly reserved for whites, had prepared for our arrival by asking a Mozambican worker to ready his room for visitors. The man’s shirts had been ironed. Curiously, the sheets on his neatly made bed bore the mark of the South African railway, but our encounter took place in a setting so determinedly proper that I did not feel free to ask how they had made their way to a mine hostel. On the bed lay a framed picture of the worker’s absent wife, a Bible, and two bars of soap. More than a little of South Africa’s colonial history had been staged for this photograph, which presents, perhaps, a black interpretation of what whites want to see.

The reality was quite different for most workers—specifically the five thousand or so black workers housed in the other compound in operation, which I call Cinderella. Built in stages, with some sections likely dating back to the 1930s, Cinderella did not look like the typical South African gold hostel in 1994. It was much older and more dilapidated. Formed by a maze of six interconnected rectangular blocks—the rooms, with their rusting, corrugated roofs, facing inward—the open spaces of Cinderella were larger than those of the abandoned compound (see fig. 7). In the open areas in the middle of the rectangle were located the toilets, showers, and facilities for washing underground gear, as well as the cafeteria. The windowless backs of rooms formed a continuous wall around the perimeter of the compound. There was only one entrance, close to the compound manager’s office, and at the back of the compound, a fenced and covered path led to South East Vertical Shaft.

For the photographic gallery that begins on page 25, Santu took the first five images just outside the compound gate, which was manned by mine policemen. The social concentration of the compound—representing close to five thousand regular salaries—attracted to the vicinity all manner of nonworkers, from visiting wives and relatives, to girlfriends, to any number of sharks, toughs, and sex workers. Not only was sex for sale, but also beer, dagga (marijuana), haircuts, and vitamins. Near the gate was the tribal dancing arena in which whites had been entertained by troops of black mine dancers until the late 1980s. Farther away, not shown, was the Chinese butchery from which the numbers racket, fah-fee, continued to be run.

Succeeding photographs take the viewer inside Cinderella compound itself, including an image of two workers newly arrived from home stays in one of the compound’s open spaces (gallery 6). After each twelve-month contract, migrant workers had to return home for an unpaid period (that, for Cinderella workers, because it had an oversupply of black labor in the early 1990s, could last for up to six months). Each man had just been issued a mattress, a plate, and a cup.

In most rooms, mine-issue mattresses were placed on concrete bunks, upper and lower. The upper bunks were unpopular since it was too easy to fall out of them after an evening spent drinking in the compound bar. Compound clerks arranged for injured workers to be transported to the mine hospital, and an examination of the log kept by clerks demonstrated just how frequent such accidents were.

Given its density and design, the compound was a social space in which it was impossible to do anything unobserved. Men ate, showered, shat, and slept together in public view. The packed, all-male environment created an edginess that sometimes flared into arguments about noise, petty theft, or rudeness. But the compound offered as well the possibility of male camaraderie, sometimes even homoerotic pleasure. During the height of apartheid, as Dunbar Moodie’s research has shown, “mine marriages” between older and younger black workers were publicly celebrated. Some white compound managers not only turned a blind eye to these relationships, but also encouraged them as a way of preventing the disruptions that competition for local township women typically provoked. According to Isak Neihaus’s research, romantic relationships among black workers could be quite intense in the compound—an environment that daily foregrounded the male body. One of Neihaus’s informants recalled, “Every Saturday there was a wedding. The Xhosa and Pondo sang and danced in front of our rooms. They would dance, jump up and down, and would pull their blankets so that their buttocks and genitals stuck out. They only covered it with the shell of the maraka fruit.”

Asked about mine marriage ceremonies in an interview in 1995 (such rites no longer took place publically), an older and successful Sotho-speaking black worker at Cinderella recalled,

Yes, indeed. How else would others know that that one belonged to you? You had to respect [hlompha] him [the boy]. On the day of the ceremony all these men with their boys [kocha] would meet. They would go out and buy food and other things for the ceremony. They would dress them up like a wedding. They would sing there, play the wedding ceremony. They would have these tee shirts and tennis balls. You fasten the tennis balls here [on the breast] and then put the tee shirt over them. Then the men would start playing, squeezing the tennis balls. [Laughs.]

The most intimate forms of sociality, such as these, have always been conditioned by economic structures. Capitalism as we usually think of it—that is, capitalism in the context of a liberal state—involves an opposition between public and private, work and home. To simplify, home is precisely the space in which market relations do not operate. Home constitutes a haven in an otherwise heartless world.

South African mine compounds were part of a different kind of capitalism, protected by a different kind of state. During the contract period, there was little oscillation between work and home for most black workers at Cinderella. Home, until the closing years of apartheid, referred almost exclusively to foreign countries like Lesotho, Swaziland, or Mozambique, or to the distant rural reserves of South Africa, each ethnically defined and presided over by chiefs, which were the only places that black South African mine workers had legal rights to live. Subject to apartheid’s “pass” laws until 1986, black workers had to carry an identity document that demonstrated to the police that they had employment in a “white” area like the mine (where they were housed in black compounds). At the end of the workday, black workers returned to the compound—a space in which the state and the company remained ever present.

In white mythology, the compound protected black rural migrants from the corrosive effects of an unregulated capitalism which threatened to destroy black “tradition.” Hence, it was not unusual for the white compound manager to see himself as a kind of “chief” or ubaba wetu, “father of all.” But this was paternalism with a (capitalist) bottom line. In many ways, the compound functioned as a labor machine, as a way of controlling and renewing black labor on a day-to-day basis. Loudspeakers woke up workers well before dawn. At Cinderella, the first bell was at 3:15 A.M., the second at 4:15, the third at 5:15. Cafeterias provided the protein needed for the workday as determined by Chamber of Mines studies, and compound bars sold the alcohol required to numb.

Nothing sums up this totalizing plan better than Moodie’s schematic of a typical South African gold compound, circa the 1950s (fig. 8). As Moodie argues, however, this plan, in its stark simplicity, was a kind of white fantasy. In many ways, black workers at Cinderella made the compound their own; not only did they conduct marriage ceremonies, but in their off hours they operated knitting machines and resoled shoes inside the compound. Indeed, the lines of control contained in the layout of the compound went only so far. Mine workers, even under the most oppressive of conditions, had a finely tuned and constantly renegotiated sense of what was their due, and when management stepped across that line, workers could resist, often effectively so. According to Moodie, writing of the 1950s: “Workers expected food of a certain minimal quality, as well as wages comparable to those at other mines, a limit on the amount of personal assault underground, fair adjudications of personal disputes, equal treatment for each ‘tribal’ category of workers, and a considerable measure of latitude in allowing workers private lives of their own in regard to matters such as homosexuality, beer brewing, hospitality for visiting friends, dagga smoking, and other ‘forbidden’ practices.”

If capitalism and the definition of the private in South African mine compounds were different from what one normally assumes, so was ethnicity. Ethnicity was not simply a cultural identification focused within a private sphere, outside the formally instituted relation between labor and capital, in which case it would be possible to speak of class and ethnicity as independent, interactive factors. Rather, ethnicity—or, in South African phraseology, tribe—was itself a part of the way that black labor was structured in this form of capitalism, in which laborers could go home only to ethnically identified reserves or to a foreign country.

At Cinderalla, ethnicity and nationality were class to the degree that they were fundamental parts of the way that black labor was defined and regulated. Different ethnic and national groups in the mine could therefore have different class interests, depending on their relative degree of proletarianization, of separation from means of economic survival at home. That meant, for example, that a black worker with access to land and to the possibility of supporting his family via some involvement in subsistence agriculture was in a different class position from a worker who had no such access. During the twentieth century, due to overcrowding in the black reserves, subsistence agriculture all but collapsed in South Africa, but this process took place unevenly across space and time. By 1994, for many but not all black workers at Cinderella, subsistence agriculture was only a memory.

Other photographs move the viewer into the compound bar during a cold night on the Witwatersrand, capturing both the comradeship and the anesthetized character of drinking at Cinderella (gallery 16-18); alcohol and marijuana prepared the men to work two miles underground the next morning. There, darkness, heat, and humidity made taking photographs difficult, but several of the succeeding images nonetheless illustrate much of the eeriness—if not the quiet terror—that underground workers faced every day. One of the last photographs is an (exceptional) image of a black worker interacting with a white higher official at Cinderella. It was that relationship, above all, that was transformed by the NUM’s presence at the mine (gallery 24 and 25) and by the ANC’s assumption of state power.

In the confined context of the compound, it comes as little surprise that fights occurred, sometimes between large groups of black workers. Records of such confrontations extend back into the nineteenth century. Rural fighting traditions played into these contests, which became known as “faction fights.” In most areas of southern Africa, herd boys learned the art of stick fighting, and rural institutions among Xhosa-speaking groups, for example, celebrated stick-fighting contests. Until the early 1970s, faction fights on the mines typically had the controlled and staged quality of these rural contests, resembling ritualized games. In such play, putting oneself and one’s buddies on the line was precisely a part of the masculine appeal, as Robert Gordon has argued. Risk to life deepened the game, but murder per se was hardly the object.

From 1947 to 1972, few faction fights were recorded in newspapers and mine records, though it is possible that some simply did not rise to the level of being written about. To most whites, after all, black faction fights were as expected (and as unremarkable) as mine tremors. They simply reflected the nature of things. In fact, the relative calm of the compounds during the 1950s and 1960s may have reflected black memories of white violence—particularly the viciousness with which the 1946 black mine workers’ strike had been put down. That year, sixteen hundred white policemen had been called into the compounds to end the strike; in the aftermath, nine black workers lay dead, and more than a thousand were seriously injured.

According to Kent McNamara and Dunbar Moodie, the frequency and character of faction fights began to change in the early 1970s. Raw murder became far more common. In 1973, violence in the mines burst into national consciousness with the “Carltonville shootings.” In September of that year, a work stoppage led to an intervention by the South African police in which eleven workers were shot dead. Five months later, Orange Free State mines became the site of confrontations among black workers themselves—between Sotho and Xhosa workers. That conflict left thirty-five dead, not from police bullets, for the most part, but from the homemade weapons of black workers themselves. Company property was destroyed. Production was put in disarray. Millions of rand were lost.

(Continues…)

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