50 Years Ago: South Africa under British Rule (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent happenings in South Africa, . . . in which British miners, and British soldiers, and British (!) capitalists, and British knights, and the highest of high officers of the British Crown, are concerned, show clearly enough that in all essentials, the "cultured" ones of our Western civilisation are quite as capable, given the materials, as any Portuguese half-breed in the pay of British capital, of creating a "Devil’s Paradise" of their own, with British blood and brawn, on the soil of the British Empire.

While they are busy fulminating against the "White Slave Trader" at home, they are, with brutal cynicism, crowning the blood-reeking fortunes of South African millionaires with titles. So that the political funds of the "Great Liberal Party” may benefit, they make murder respectable by covering it with the cloak of knighthood.

Those who do not know how, and at what cost of working class suffering and misery, these South African fortunes have been amassed, are invited to think over the scanty particulars here reproduced.

" 'However healthy a Transvaal rock-drill man may appear to be on his return to this country,’ Dr. Haldane told the Departmental Committee on Industrial Diseases in 1907, he will probably be dead within a year or two.' ” (“Pall Mall Gazette," 7.7.13.)

"The death rate of one section of the men who mine the gold—the machine men or rock drillers—is over 230 per thousand from one disease —miner’s phthisis—alone. Such a death rate from a single occupational disease must be unparalleled in the whole industrial world. It can only be compared with King Leopold’s Congo Free State.

"Speaking before a representative meeting of mining engineers in Johannesburg in September last Mr. Koetze, the Government mining engineer, said: 'Sooner or later every worker underground in these mines will contract miner's phthisis.'

"The practical result of commissions of inquiry have been recommendations that water be used to keep down the dust which causes the disease. These recommendations have been urged upon the mine- owners, in each case with the same result—utter callousness and neglect.”

These extracts were written by Dr. G. L. Ugmara, M.R.C.S.. LJLCP., and were reproduced in the "Morning Leader" for December 2, 1911.

It cannot be pleaded that this wholesale murder of black and white is the work of a few of the capitalists alone. It is aided and connived at by the whole master class as such.

The war which was engineered in order that the mine owners might squeeze another four millon pounds profit per annum out of the writhing and quivering carcasses of their white and black slaves was the work of a Tory administration, but it was reserved for a Liberal Government to make the Transvaal a "self- governing" colony, in order that they might be able to say when miners were to be butchered on the Rand: “ We cannot interfere". 

[From the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard.]