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Going for Gold

University of California Press

This book may be read on a number of different levels. At its most accessible, it is a detailed description of the lives of black South African mine workers, written as far as possible from their point of view. Their tale is about men who migrate from all over Southern Africa to work the gold mines of the South African high veld. By 1910 there were about 200,000 of them; by 1940, 300,000; by 1985, 500,000. Historically, they have come from as far north as Angola and Tanzania, have been barracked together in huge single-sex compounds, and herded before dawn to work thousands of feet underground in desperately dangerous conditions.

The mines themselves opened on the Witwatersrand near Johannesburg in 1886 and spread east and west. By the 1930s the most profitable mines were in the far east. Now they lie in the far west and the southwest, so that the gold-bearing reef forms a great semicircular rim like the edges of a giant geological saucer, tipped and broken, covering a narrow, buried slice of gold-bearing rock, many meters beneath the earth (see maps 1?4).

Many have written of the forces, especially colonial conquest, taxation, and economic underdevelopment, that drove these men to the Rand and of the exploitation, indeed superexploitation, they suffered there. The standard works from this perspective are Wilson 1969 and Johnstone 1976. Others, usually associated with the industry, have claimed that the workers came of their own free will, led on by the lure of cash wages and a spirit of adventure. This book makes no effort to repeat these arguments or to refute them. Instead, it tries to tell of the integrity with which these migrant black working men, disciplined and controlled as they were, retained their senses of identity, measuring them not only against those of the white men who employed them and those who supervised them but also against those of black officials in the compounds and black supervisors

underground. Migrant masculinity was sustained in solidarity with fellow mine workers and in partnership with women and other men at home. Thus, migrant miners understood themselves as men not only in relation to their wage labor in the capitalist system on the mines but also through their independence as patriarchal homestead proprietors in the country.

The book tries to capture black miners' changing conceptions of personal integrity and collective solidarity within the power structures of the migrant system over three-quarters of a century. It analyzes changing discourses about personal identity, work, power and seniority, sexuality, solidarity, and violence. It seeks to relate these discourses and accompanying changes or practice to different rural opportunities and satisfactions, changing work conditions, shifting family and sexual politics, and changes and continuities in management control and worker action.

My own interest in black miners was initially an effort simply to understand their lives within their social context. In 1976, I directed a team of participant observers on the Welkom Mine for Anglo American Corporation and was adviser to a group of black theological students who engaged in work-study on the mines under the auspices of the Agency for Industrial Mission. Since then, with the help of Vivienne Ndatshe and others, I have striven to spread my net as widely and as deeply as possible to understand what migration to work on the gold mines has meant to the workers themselves. This resulting study is an interpretation of evidence from participant observation, archival documents, old men's stories, young men's reflections, the life histories of women, and testimony from black unionists. Of course, the book is my own interpretation of these varied accounts. Nonetheless, I hope it will ring true to the different owners of these voices even as it widens their own understanding of their total situation.

On the first level, the book is about character, about the practical integrity of black South African migrant miners. Here integrity is defined as taking responsibility for one's own life project, within the limits and pressures imposed by structural constraints, in accordance with consistent conceptions of the right way to live, and in partnership with others. The self is, of course, socially constructed within certain ideological, political, and economic contexts, but within these constraints (even in total institutions) I argue that there is space for character building, for the "practice" of integrity. Although I have not attempted to hide my opinions about the moral worth of various strategic choices or practices of integrity (and indeed wider moral implications can only be assessed contextually), this book is not an ethical treatise. Rather it seeks to show how men with integrity actually exercise their limited strategic options and how those lacking integrity manipulatively and self-indulgently exploit social structures.

Perhaps it is necessary to add at the outset that this book, dealing as it does with a gender-segregated male labor force, is primarily about men and their lives within very specific cultural and socioeconomic contexts (although country wives are essential to the men's formation of self, and town women are by no means irrelevant). My analysis emphasizes the gender identities of these migrants as men and the complicated way in which their practice of integrity intersects with male and female gender roles on the mines and in the countryside.

Character formation takes place in solidarity with like-minded others. Integrity, then, is as much a social as an individual affair, implying membership (whether explicit or implicit) in networks of social support. Thus, while character involves the exercise of responsibility within a particular moral context, it is false to assume that such responsibility is only individual, based on some sort of abstract personal commitment of means to ends. Male integrity becomes practical in the company of other men.

On a second level, the book has been organized as a series of historical essays on crosscutting aspects of mine life. Changes in discourse and practice occurred within formal structures erected out of struggles between migrant cultures, mining management, and the state between 1910 and 1920. Given that formal structures are sites of struggle and yet persist over time, they are always in contention and subject to reinterpretation. Social structures cannot be firmly fixed but must be protected by the constant vigilance and strategic shifts of dominants and their agents, who modify them in response to resistance from subordinates and changes in external environments. Actors may bring in rights and resources from the outside, for instance, the varying rural resources of migrant proprietors or the political privileges of white miners. Moreover, changes in the work environment, including technological improvements in production methods and supply problems, may radically alter the terrain of struggle and the actors' understanding of their situation.

On a third level, this book assumes that in a capitalist society personal integrity is ultimately trammeled by the forces and social relations of a system of production based on the contradictory logic of capital accumulation. In turn, formal structures and informal conceptions of order, whatever their particularities, are similarly bounded. For the migrant miners in this study, this level of analysis manifests itself most clearly both in systemic...