‘NATURAL FAMILY CONDITIONS’: NARRATIVES OF STABILIZATION AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN COAL MINES, 1910–1970

ABSTRACT

The historiography of migrant labour in Southern Africa focuses on explaining the origins and persistence of migrancy. Two alternative historical narratives of labour migration and stabilization have emerged, based respectively on the experience of the Copperbelt and the Witwatersrand. This paper first reviews these contrasting narratives and their historical representations of migration and stabilization. The paper then turns to the case of the South African coal mining industry. The history of labour practices on the South African coal fields demonstrates that Copperbelt-like stabilization could and did develop within the South African economic and political environment. Through a narrative account of labour migration and stabilization on the coal mines before the major mechanization programmes of the 1970s, the paper shows the inadequacy of the modernist model of unilinear transition. The actual outcomes were neither pre-ordained nor inevitable but the product of conflict and contestation. The coal mining companies, having ceded the right to their workers to live outside the compounds, were powerless to shape the form that stabilization took on the ground. Their grounding vision of a stable workforce living in ‘natural family conditions’ was a long way from the practical realities of migrants' lives.