Microsoft Word - PhD Thesis Final.pdf - University of Limpopo ...

concentrate on subsistence in the rural areas if wages were too low for their
liking, or go home before completing their contracts if they were dissatisfied
with their working or living conditions.
The mining companies together with the successive White governments,
therefore looked for ways of forcing rural Blacks into migrant labour and
ensuring that they completed their contracts. They therefore developed
various methods in order to achieve these aims. One of the methods to
force rural Blacks into migrant labour was to deprive them of land. By the
end of the 19 th century, much of Blacks’ land was taken up by the Whites in
which most Blacks lived on those White-owned farms where they rented or
as share croppers. Many of these people were very productive and they
enjoyed a much higher standard of living. In 1913 the South African
government passed the Natives Land Act which made sharecropping illegal
and prohibited Blacks from renting land on White-owned farms. As a result,
thousands of Black tenants and sharecroppers were forced to become
wage labourers. Thousands of Blacks moved to reserves where they could
not get sufficient good land to survive from farming, and as a result became
migrant labourers in mines and elsewhere.
In addition to land deprivation, another way in which Blacks were forced into
the migrant labour system was through taxation. Because most Blacks were
subsistence farmers and did not participate in the money economy, taxation
was introduced and imposed on them as a means of forcing them to
303