Once exploitable, they are now expendable. But they have reinvented themselves in ways that haunt the industry that milked their toil in South Africa’s mines to build Africa’s most industrialised economy while providing global markets with a mother lode of gold and other commodities before tossing them on history’s scrap heap.
The late musician Johnny Clegg once sang that “the warrior’s now a worker, and his war is underground”. Many of these workers are warriors once again and their war is yielding bitter fruit. The rise and fall of the migrant labour system – and the ANC’s failure to deal with the fallout because of corruption and incompetence – is on glaring display at the Vulingcobo Junior Secondary School in the former Transkei, reached by a rough dirt track off the N2.
Mining companies are increasingly filling the gaping voids left by the state. This is partly regulatory obligation as they require a “social and labour plan”. It is also rooted in environmental, social and governance concerns – ESGs – in response to growing pressure for a kinder approach to capitalism.
His older brother Cebicile was among the 34 miners shot dead by police at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in August 2012. His father is a silicosis sufferer who recently received about R150,000 in compensation as part of a R5-billion class action suit on behalf of miners with the incurable lung disease. The answer lay in one cost the mines could control: wages. For more than half a century the real wages of migrant black mineworkers actually declined, according to numerous historians – a feat of exploitation that paid massive dividends for the Randlords.
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