Oscillating Migrants, 'Detribalised Families' and Militancy
Mozambicans on Witbank Collieries, 1918-1927
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4810901 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Alexander (0000-0002-4749-391X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 505-525 |
| Publication date | 2001-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13632430120074563 |
| OpenAlex | W2165289030 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
Shula Marks argued that, by the early twentieth century, a working-class consciousness had developed among African migrants employed in the main mining areas of South Africa. Evidence from Witbank, the country's premier coal district, lends support for this proposition, and suggests we should qualify recent contentions that migrants 'exhibited a distinct unwillingness to join an uprooted proletariat'. Indeed, by 1926, 25 per cent of Witbank's African colliery workers had established new homes close to their work, and it is likely that, had it not been for regulations that prohibited collieries from accommodating more than 15 per cent of workers within married quarters, this figure would have continued to expand. Moreover, even non-settled workers revealed a degree of class consciousness, participating in a wave of strikes in 1918 and 1919, which, in one instance, demanded 10s. per day and justified this by reference to the wages of white miners. Given that the collieries preferred to employ at least some 'stabilised' workers, the article also rejects, as oversimplified, structuralist explanations of the migrant labour system
Class consciousness · Coal · Coal mining · Consciousness · Demographic economics · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Political science · Politics · Proletariat · Sociology · Working class · African history and culture studies · Engineering · Law · Psychology · South African History and Culture
Mineração de carvão, migração e etnicidade
Living in, out of, and Between Two Cities
African female immigration to the United States and its policy implications
Migration and Ethnicity in Coalfield History
Labour Studies and Labour History in South Africa
Women and Coal Mining in India and South Africa, c1900-1940
Grave matters
Challenging cheap-labour theory
The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa
| Citations per year | 0.47 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2007 - 2022 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |