Company town, company estate: Pilgrim's Rest, 1910-1932

• Published in: Journal of southern African studies 1993-06, Vol.19 (2), p.171-200
• Main Authors: Bonner, Philip, Shapiro, Karin A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African studies; Annual reports; Business structures; Coal mining; Explosive mines; Gold mines; Gold mining; Historiography (Pilgrim's Rest); Labor; Labor Relations; Labour relations; Miners; Principal place of business; South Africa; South Africa, Republic of; Tenants; Workforce
• ISSN: 0305-7070; 1465-3893
• DOI: 10.1080/03057079308708356

This study of Pilgrim's Rest seeks to fill an historiographical gap by exploring labour relations on the periphery of the gold mining industry. The experience of Pilgrim's Rest presents a distinctive South African wrinkle to the international phenomenon of companies' trying to order and control the lives of their employees outside of work. The dominant gold-mining company in the eastern Transvaal, Transvaal Gold Mining Estates, faced intense competition for labour from the Witwatersrand. To secure a stable and compliant workforce, Transvaal Gold Mining Estates established a company town for its white workers, and more notably, a company estate for its black labour force. Neither mechanism provided Transvaal Gold Mining Estates with complete control over its employees. White workers, as citizens of South Africa, found they could appeal to high-ranking state officials to intervene in local matters. Unlike the whites, who tried to secure their position as industrial workers, black employees strove to maintain their positions as independent tenant farmers. By creating a company estate and relying on chiefly authority to ensure their black labour supply, Transvaal Gold Mining Estates reinforced non-capitalist relations of production in the eastern Transvaal. Access to land and the absence of tight controls in either compounds or workplace provided these employees with a crucial buffer to the mandates of mine managers. The relative harmony of interest that existed between Transvaal Gold Mining Estates and its black worker/tenants could only survive while company earnings remained high - roughly from 1900 to 1918. When profits fell away, so did the conditions for a mutually acceptable agreement between Pilgrim's Rest mine-owners and their African employees. With the passing of this era, individual acts of evasion gave way to more collective forms of resistance, seen particularly in the 1920 strike and the brief flowering of the ICU.