Abstract
At a meeting held on the 19th of September 1956, members of the board of the Gold Producers’ Committee agreed that an investigation into the perennial shortages in the supply of labour to the gold mines should be undertaken. The National Institute for Personnel Research was commissioned to carry out the endeavour. Dubbed “the problem of peaks and valleys”, this study was the gold mining industry’s reaction to the persistent fluctuations in the supply of rural African labour from the South African and British High Commission Territories countryside. Underpinning this problem was the strong bond that rural African migrants maintained with the subsistence economy of the countryside which was based on agro-pastoral production. The industry’s recruiters were competing with this bond and, in the context of increasing influx control restrictions, the apartheid state’s influx control apparatus in the form of the Native Labour Bureaux. Two chapters are dedicated to explaining how rural Africans were kept out of the migrant labour system at certain times of the year by the agrarian rhythms and livestock markets of the African countryside, and how this frustrated the industry’s recruiting efforts. However, as the rural environment deteriorated, the subsistence economy declined and, as a result, migrants’ bonds to the countryside were loosened enough for the migrant labour to eventually become the most viable source of income.
M.A. (Historical Studies)