The Hidden Cost of Industrialization: Reflections on the Emergence and Reproduction of the African Industrial Working Class in Southern Africa¶
John Higginson (1992). The Hidden Cost of Industrialization: Reflections on the Emergence and Reproduction of the African Industrial Working Class in Southern Africa. Contributions in Black Studies. ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst.
| Type | journal article |
| Scope | Wider apartheid literature |
| Method | archival narrative |
| Period studied | 1900–1948 |
| Regions | South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Katanga (Belgian Congo), Mozambique |
| Themes | origins segregation, mining migrant labour, labour markets wages, unions strikes, manufacturing industrial policy, demography urbanisation, comparative theory |
| Citation key | higginson1992 |
Argument¶
Higginson offers discursive reflections on why industrial capitalism in southern Africa took the form it did before decolonisation. He stresses the neglected link between the labour process and the social reproduction of the industrial workforce. Colonial states and employers sought to proletarianize Africans without creating a working class, relying on migrant labour, pass laws, wage boards and convict or forced labour instead of a coherent labour policy tied to productivity. Piece rates, scientific management and the Depression remade the urban workforce, widened workers' grievances to housing and survival in the towns, and fostered militancy. Industrialization was the obverse side of agrarian transformation, and workers drew on millenarian and mutual-aid forms of organisation to shape their own consciousness.
Evidence and method¶
Mostly archival and secondary sources, with South Africa treated less fully than Southern Rhodesia and Katanga. Sources include National Archives of Zimbabwe files, Belgian colonial archives for Katanga, 1931-32 Native Economic Commission testimony, Southern Rhodesian mines and native commissioner reports and industrial census, strike counts, and an extensive secondary literature (van Onselen, Phimister, Perrings, Jeeves, Legassick, Johnstone).
Place in the debates¶
- Proletarianization and the reproduction of migrant labour (cheap labour / migrant labour thesis) (see Cheap labour thesis and the function of the reserves). Argues that states and employers proletarianized Africans without creating a stable working class, and that the rural areas increasingly could not reproduce industrial labour to employers' specifications. Emphasises the tension between the migrant system and the need for a settled workforce.
- Agency and consciousness of African workers (see Worker consciousness, strikes and conflict on the mines and shop floor). Holds that worker militancy and class consciousness did not arise spontaneously. They were shaped by peasant millenarian ideologies, mutual-aid societies, piece-rate work and urban conditions, so workers were active participants rather than passive victims.
Findings¶
-
By 1913 South Africa had completed the legal disenfranchisement of rural Africans, via the Masters and Servants and Native Land Acts. (p. 6)
By 1913 the legal disenfranchisement of rural Africans in South Africa was completed.
-
The 1918 strikers on the Rand pressed for proletarianization, linked to peasant tenants' plight and wartime labour shortages. (p. 6)
For their own good reasons, the African workers were "pushing for proletarianization."
-
No coherent labour policy emerged in any of the three industrial centres in the 1920s. (p. 7)
a coherent labor policy failed to obtain in any of the three.
-
Without a labour policy tying wages to productivity, a patchwork of pass laws, industrial councils and wage boards regulated African labour. (p. 8)
In lieu of a coherent labor policy that tied African wages to productivity, a much impoverished
-
Strike activity in the early Depression was large but defensive and achieved little. (p. 10)
there were 12 strikes in which the average number of strikers was over 5,000
-
The Depression initially sapped African workers' capacity to strike. (p. 10)
The first phase of the Depression sapped the initiative of labor, however.
-
Rail wages for Africans fell below the legal Wage Board minimum and stayed there until 1938. (p. 10)
African workers' wages in the rail industry fell below the minimum stipulated by the Wage Board, and remained there until 1938.
-
Employers' main response to the early-1930s crisis was to link manufacturing wages to those of migrant mine labour. (p. 10)
The major industrial firms of southern Africa had no immediate solutions to the crisis of the early thirties, other than to tie the wage rates of African workers in manufacturing
-
Reproducing urban African labour became a crisis by the mid-1930s, shifting workers' struggle to the townships. (p. 11)
wage labor in the urban areas had reached crisis proportions
-
In Southern Rhodesia mechanization was restricted to the largest enterprises, and the labour shortage persisted. (p. 14)
Mechanization, the standard response to labor shortage, was subsequently ruled out, except in the case of the largest
-
By the late 1940s Southern Rhodesian mining relied on a stable core of skilled African workers, as in the Copperbelt and Katanga. (p. 14)
Southern Rhodesia's mining industry came to depend on a core of permanent, relatively skilled African workers
-
Militancy and class consciousness were not spontaneous outcomes of industrial change. (p. 15)
Yet militancy and class consciousness did not grow spontaneously.
Evidence ledger¶
Sources used¶
| Source | Kind | Period | How used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native Economic Commission (South Africa) hearings and testimonies, 1931-32 (Durban, Capetown, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg) | commission or official report | 1930-1932 | Testimony of Africans, welfare-society officials and union leaders supplies evidence on pass riots, dock work, wages, rents and the changing urban labour force. |
| National Archives of Zimbabwe (NaZim) files, e.g. S138/10, S138/106, S1/14/24, S5441929, S542 | state archives | 1923-1929 | Native Commissioner correspondence, criminal records and Watchtower material document migrant routes, land and labour pressure, and millenarian protest. |
| Archives Générales de Carrières et Mines, Lubumbashi (AG) C8 files, and Archives Africaines, Brussels (AA) MOI files | company records or reports | 1925-1931 | Police and mine correspondence and the Sohier notes on labour control and African worker organization in Katanga. |
| Rene Lemarchand Collection (Hoover Institution) and Congo Collection: Martin van Rijck Papers (Lansing) | state archives | 1942-1946 | Association reports and court notes on Kitawala illustrate urban African associations and millenarian sects. |
| Annual Report of the Chief Government Mining Engineer and Chief Inspector of Mines (Southern Rhodesia), 1948, and Annual Report Mines 1935 | official statistical series | 1935, 1948 | Supplies the detention-camp convict labour quotation, wage declines in mining (28 to 20 shillings) and accident and mortality evidence. |
| Report of the Chief Native Commissioner for the Year 1935, 'Comparative Statement of Average Number of Natives in Industrial Employment, 1934 and 1935' | commission or official report | 1934-1935 | Source for the counts of skilled African mine workers (machinists, drillmen, hammer boys, trammers) by district around Bulawayo. |
| Official Year Book of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia 1930 and 1932 | official statistical series | 1930-1932 | Source for fatal accident data by mining district in Bulawayo, Gwelo and elsewhere, 1930. |
| Twelfth Report on the Census of Industrial Production (Southern Rhodesia), 1938-1952 | industrial mining census | 1938-1952 | Used for mechanization, labour shortage, workforce changes and the share of foreign-born railway workers. |
| Mansey, 'Strikes in South Africa', The Negro Worker, Dec 1934 | newspapers periodicals | 1930-1932 | Source for the strike counts, average strikers and working days lost from 1930 to 1932. |
| Ngonga (weekly journal, Katanga), 3 November 1934 | newspapers periodicals | 1934 | Quotes a former Union Minière operative on housing demands to show worker aspirations over reproduction. |
| Secondary data compilations: Phimister, Davies, Perrings, van Onselen, Higginson (1983 chapter) | secondary literature compilation | 1900-1950 | Figures on wages, forced labour shares, mine labour, and wage-board minima are drawn from these studies rather than from the primary tables. |
Inference¶
Quantification: Illustrative figures.
Interpretive, narrative synthesis across South Africa, the Rhodesias and Katanga; claims rest on selected archival testimony, quotations and scattered official figures set within a Marxian framework of proletarianization and social reproduction. There is no systematic dataset or formal test.
Key claims¶
| Claim | Basis | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Land legislation of 1913 dispossessed rural Africans and led mine owners to believe a permanent domestic workforce could replace migrant labour from neighbouring colonies. (p. 231) | Secondary literature (First, Jeeves) and legislative description; no primary data cited. | Asserted |
| Direct coercion (convict and chibaro labour) supplied about two-fifths of the industrial workforce in the Rhodesias and Katanga and a third in South Africa by the late 1920s-30s, depressing wages. (p. 233) | Secondary works (Perrings, van Onselen) and a Southern Rhodesian mines report quotation. | Asserted |
| Strikes during 1930-32 Depression in South Africa were frequent but largely failed, as wage cuts followed. (p. 235) | Strike counts from Mansey (1934) and NEC testimony on riots and wage cuts. | Partial data |
| Cape Town dockers' wages and living conditions deteriorated in the Depression, with rents and transport absorbing much of wages, forcing movement to squatter areas. (p. 237) | Native Economic Commission Capetown testimony. | Illustrative or anecdotal |
| Piece rates in Southern Rhodesian mines raised accident and fatality rates among skilled African workers near Bulawayo and Gwelo. (p. 238) | Chief Native Commissioner report 1935, Official Year Book 1930/32, Phimister. | Partial data |
| Depression-era mine wages in Rhodesia fell from 28 to 20 shillings a month and thousands of workers left the gold mines, followed by mechanization from American investment in the 1940s. (p. 238) | Mines annual report 1935 and Phimister; census of industrial production. | Partial data |
| Millenarian and Watchtower ideologies helped shape worker consciousness and protest in industrial settings. (p. 235) | Single anonymous note in Wankie archive file, plus secondary studies (Fields, Jewsiewicki). | Illustrative or anecdotal |
The author's caveats¶
The author calls the paper discursive reflections that are 'far from the last word'. He notes that official emigration statistics were deliberately distorted before 1928 and that officials' knowledge differed from the figures.
Gaps in the evidence¶
The argument about social reproduction of the workforce lacks systematic data on wages, household composition, rural-urban flows, mortality and fertility across the regions. Registers of the Chamber of Mines and WNLA/BTK, census returns and municipal records existed at the time and could test claims about shares of coerced labour and wage ratios. Many figures (two-fifths coerced, one-fifth white wage, 25 percent foreign railway workers) are given without clear sources, and archival quotes are used to generalize across very different territories.
Replicability: Data poorly documented.