The world the mine owners made Social themes in the economic transformation of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914 The struggle for wealth is at no time an edifying spectacle. Johannesburg has been a leaven in the land which has proved by no means an unmixed blessing to South Africa. The financial adventurer who has wandered to the Transvaal is not the type of man who would demonstrate the highest side of European civilisation to the Boers. Violet Markham, Notes from a Travelling Diary, 1899 In 1870 the first stirrings of a new giant in the area north of the Vaal river “Transvaal abruptly wansfereditseconomic ilSOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WITWATERSRAND 1886-1914 its industrial leg over a brief the accommodating ridges and depressions of the Witwatersrand became pock-marked wit revolution - mining headgear, ore dumps. slimes dams and the frayed ends of railway. starker thickets of technology, the same revolution urban sponges — the mining compounds and towns ~ absorb the ever-increasing numbers of black and white miners who made their tical and economic nerve cent jon inhabitants. The inexorable pressure exerted by people, houses, ‘pushed back the municipal boundaries from five square miles in 1898, tonine square miles in their twentieth-century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squander and ‘turn reflected how closely the iesburg’s periods of greatest ecoi ‘THE WORLD THE MINE OWNERS MADE ‘most noticeable investment ‘the mining industry — the great ‘Kaffir Boom’), it the most dramatic change in Undoubtedly oceoned by the South Affican War (1899-1902); whilst the periods of greatest social re-structuring appear to have taken place during the he major depressions that were isterperted between the booms inthe precisely the linkages betwe are of most interest to those who wish to understand how the mining industry ~ beyond the ‘hapter then, by way of an introduction, seeks to illustrate a few of the ways in which the world the mine owners made affected the lives of some of the ordinary people on the Witwatersrand between 1886 and 1914. The foundations of economy and society on the Witwatersrand, 1886-1891 discoveries of gold on the Rand were made along the length of the reef outcrop as it stretched from ca along this line, and that the gold friable and weathered conglomerate ly recover gold from the low grade of In the very first flush of development, however, the importance of this. harsh economic reality fully dawn on hundreds of diggers who were in _ any case pethaps more interested in the speculative gains that could be made from the buying and sel than in the more rigorous demands of productive mining. Bt wn accord has limited economic ‘momentum, and within the fields being opened the infant industry made the first of its many demands for more substantial capital ry for capital came in the boom of 1888-89 as, ick companies were floated ~ many of important ones expertise and financial resources of ca +ho had earlierSOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WITWATERSRAND 1886-1914 ‘THE WORLD THE MINE OWNERS MADE ‘made their fortunes on the Kimberley diamond fields. This development, jual enterprises tended to give way to la spanies, heralded and in 1889 the Diggers’ Committee gave of Mines. is irs boom, and for & while eventually be intersected at deeper throughout much of 1889 and 1890 lay Eckstein & Co, ~ later part of the powerful Wernher, acquire that property Which would in due course make deep-level mining a reality on the Rand.* But no sooner had this important element in the long-term future of the industry been assured than the golields were struck by wht seemed ikea discovered that gold- hundreds of companies to wind up. The cr ‘miners and promoters who sold off what were larger operators with financial resour fall, purchase additional mining ground to the refractory ore This technologically larger companies for expansion wi comps che purchase of the land to the south of the outcrop, and the subsequent slump, helped first to sketch, and later to fill out in bolder strokes, and, as might be expected, the earliest picture to emerge came al discovery of gold and the boom that followed rs, adventurers, agents and specu square. Throughout 1888-89 the market and its surrounding dusty streets filled with produce merchants, traders, shops, offices, banks, bars, saloons and canteens, formed the focal point for incoming transport riders as well ‘members of the digging community who were dependent on food and mining supplies brought into the geographically isolated South. the mining town, however, there were already to be detected the outlines ofa few striking features which, during the following decade and a half, did much to influence Johannesburg’s social development. Of these, two are of particular imy studies which follow this introductory essay. ‘middie class soon set up home on the Rand, the large m to be content with considerably less the skill Cumberland and Lancashire taking up residence “boarding-houses’, and the unskilled black workers from the Capes the ‘Transvaal and Mozambique being pushed into the repressive conformity ofthe ‘mine compounds.” Secondly, it is equally important to note the geographical di of these racially divided working-class institutions. The large Rand’s boarding-houses were located either on the mining proper one of the tow Fordsburg workers, were — Wi the point of production, and that in early Johannesburg no great d the place of residence from the place of work. ‘These cluster and mine compounds of king-class culture ~ and, in the case of the white miners, elements of British male culture in particular." Drinking, gambling and whoring, probably have played an important part in the emerging working-class culture of the Rand in any case, became largely divorced from the broader mediating influences of family life, and thus assumed a central role in the lives of thousands of skilled and unskilled miners. This dependence of black and white