8 - Healing Miners

Summary

The period from 1954 to 1980 saw the industry faced with two major challenges: a change in the pattern of recruitment and the introduction of treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Migrant labour was the life blood of the mines, and the Chamber of Mines had at various points in its history responded successfully to labour shortages. A cure for tuberculosis was something the mines had never faced. Apartheid would eventually prove the perfect setting for resolving that challenge to the industry's advantage.

After World War II the gold mines began to lose South African workers to better-paid jobs in other industries. By 1960, Malawi and Mozambique were supplying the bulk of mine labour. Ten years later only 25 per cent of black gold miners were South African, the rest being from Lesotho (29 per cent), Southern Mozambique (21 per cent) and the tropical North (24 per cent) – mainly from Malawi. Three factors led to a reversal in that pattern. The freeing of the gold price in 1973 initiated a period of expansion and enhanced profits for the industry as a whole. In May 1974 President Banda of Malawi withdrew all Malawian labour after an aeroplane crash killed miners in transit to Johannesburg. Finally, the revolution in Mozambique saw a dramatic drop in recruitment from that country. Deprived of labour from those sources, the mines used wage increases to attract workers from the Eastern Cape.