Early 20th Century: (Industry and Migrant Labor in Southern Africa — South Africa Producing 40 Percent of the World’s Gold by the First World War, Johannesbu…

Early 20th Century: (Industry and Migrant Labor in Southern Africa — South Africa Producing 40 Percent of the World’s Gold by the First World War, Johannesburg with 250,000 People, Color Bars Reserving Certain Jobs for Whites, the Witwatersrand Native Labor Agency Recruiting Across the Region, Workers Housed in Compounds on Short-Term Contracts to Prevent Working-Class Consciousness, the 1913 Native Land Act Restricting Africans to 7 Percent of Land, and the Northern Rhodesian Copper Belt from the 1920s): Across southern Africa, mining economies shaped political administrations while migrant labor systems linked the Union, the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, and southern Congo. By the First World War, South Africa was producing forty percent of the world’s gold, and Johannesburg had a population of 250,000. Large-scale mining was dominated by huge companies whose profits were made possible by European capital and cheap African labor. Between 1903 and 1907, some sixty thousand Chinese workers were brought in at low wages, threatening white workers who demanded and received color bars specifying that certain jobs could only be filled by whites. A cross-border labor recruitment system developed — the Witwatersrand Native Labor Agency recruited from impoverished rural areas across the region. Workers were housed in compounds, hired on short-term contracts to prevent working-class consciousness, came without families and were paid lower wages as single men. The 1913 Native Land Act restricted Africans to some seven percent of land in the Union, and the last African voters were removed from the roll in 1936. In the 1920s, large-scale copper mining began in Northern Rhodesia, pursuing similar policies of migrant labor, low wages, and reserved skilled positions for Europeans. A regional economy developed, brutal and exploitative but dynamic, whose bedrock was an itinerant, underpaid African labor force.