1930s: (The Depression and the Collapse of Wages — Wage Labor Suffering Across Mining, Plantations, and Urban Centers, Significant African Unemployment Appea…

1930s: (The Depression and the Collapse of Wages — Wage Labor Suffering Across Mining, Plantations, and Urban Centers, Significant African Unemployment Appearing in South Africa for the First Time, the Cost of Living Falling but Hardly Offsetting Real Decline, Inflation Hitting Urban Workers, and Living Standards Not Recovering Until the Late 1940s): The 1930s witnessed a collapse in wages across the continent — wage labor suffered in the mining economy, on white-owned plantations, and in the urban centers to which Africans increasingly drifted. South Africa saw, for the first time, significant levels of African unemployment, largely unknown since the rapid expansion of the industrial economy at the end of the nineteenth century. The impact of declining wages was to some extent offset by a corresponding fall in the cost of living, but this was hardly significant in real terms. The 1930s was a period of genuine hardship for millions of Africans and large numbers of poor whites alike, and the fall in living standards was not reversed until the second half of the 1940s. Inflation in many territories affected urban wage labor in particular, and wages did not increase in real terms until the late 1940s. The white working class also suffered — the commercialization of farming had driven tens of thousands of poor whites from their land into cities, where they competed with Africans for jobs, hence the color bars described in earlier chapters. Poor white farmers who remained on the land existed in considerable hardship, struggling to supply maize to the burgeoning cities. The poor white population, both urban and rural, would constitute a threat to South Africa’s delicate sociopolitical balance — it was their support that ever-more-radicalized Afrikaner nationalist leaders would seek to mobilize.