Mineral revolution and British imperialism in South Africa (Notes)

The peak of British Imperialism of the 19th century South Africa was marked by three significant influences as follows

a) The discovery of diamonds

b) Gold and British imperial policies 

c) Economic reconstruction and political reconciliation. These events shaped its political, demographic, social, and economic future of South Africa.                      

Diamond and Gold discoveries 

South Africa's modern history has often been dated from the first commercial mining of diamonds and gold in the 1870s and the 1880s, when the region became a magnet for European investment.

Mining in the region predated European arrivals by several centuries.

Iron mining and smelting sites in the northeast were used as much as 1,700 years ago; copper was mined south of the Limpopo River more than 1,000 years ago and historians describe early mining activities in the Witwatersrand (literally, "Ridge of White Waters" in Afrikaans, commonly shortened to Rand) area, which attracted miners from elsewhere in Africa as early as the thirteenth century.

The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 was a turning point in South African history. Far more than diamonds, this changed South Africa from an agricultural society to become the largest gold producer in the world.

Many people from all over southern Africa, and from America, Europe and Australia rushed to the sites in order to find these valuable minerals.

They hoped to become wealthy or to find work. The discovery of minerals brought enormous social, economic and political changes that shaped the entire southern Africa.

These transformations makes 1870 a turning point in southern African history 

Discovery of Diamond and open mining

As we have seen earlier, Africans had worked outcrops of copper, iron, and gold in various parts of southern Africa for over a millennium.

By 1860s, whites, too, had been extracting small outcrops of copper in the northwestern Cape Colony and of gold in the eastern Transvaal.

There was outbreak of excitement in 1867 when alluvial diamonds were found near the confluence of the Vaal and the Harts river in the Bloemfontein in the barren land of Boer farmer, De Beer.

Open mining

He soon sold his land and the diamond rush was on. Sailors deserted their ships, soldiers their regiments, merchants their shops, clerks their offices, farmers their land, and the weirdest crowd ever seen in South Africa, good and bad, came over the mountains on horseback, on foot, in Cape carts, ox wagons, stage coaches anything that would take them to the biggest lucky dip in history.

Kimberley became the world's diamond capital. The place was named after the first earl of Kimberley (1826-1902), who was a British statesman and colonial secretary. The early years at Kimberley were a chaos of individual miners. 

The thousands of men who had rushed there from all parts of the world each bought little claims and began to sink shafts

By late 1870s, five thousand people were there, whites and blacks, using picks and shovels to extract promising soil and hand sieves to sift it. 

Not God, the “Rock of Ages’, but the new source of hope became the rock "diamond."

A Few were lucky ones finding diamonds and sold to local representatives of European merchants. 

When the newly discovered 83 carat diamond, which would subsequently be known as the "Star of Africa," was held up before the House of Assembly in Cape Town, the colonial secretary declared, "Gentlemen, this is the rock upon which the future success of South Africa will be built.“

Irrespective of the presence of diamond deposits in the area, profound technical problems had to be overcome before those resources could be fully exploited.

Initially, diggers acquired small claims and worked the surface with pick and shovel with help of few assistants. Most diggers were whites and African assistants.

As their excavations deepened, the miners erected an elaborate haulage system with pulleys and wires and wooden staging to remove the excavated ground. 

Flood waters, collapsed mines, mounds of earth, etc. made mining unworkable. 

Deep level mining

Concentration and mechanization gradually overcame these problems

Steam traction replaced man and animal power, and underground shafts and tunnels eventually replaced open mining

As advanced technology  took over, small properties and claims of small holders were replaced by large holdings and highly capitalized organizations. 

This led to fierce cutthroat competition among big mining prospectors

As competition developed, a few individuals, most of them youthful immigrants from Europe, struggled to the top and accumulated great wealth. 

These include Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit and Cecil Rhodes entered into a joint venture to form De Beers Consolidated Mines which later acquired a monopoly of diamond production of the area. This domination of diamond fields involved political and technical advantages 

Politically, four authorities claimed the sovereignty over the diamond fileds, the two Boer republics (OFS and Transvaal), Tswana Chiefdoms and Griqua chiefdom of Nicholaus Waterboer. 

The dispute over the ownership of the diamond fields degenerated into a political feud between Afrikaner and British statesmen.

The Afrikaner approach appeared to be informed by a desire for a fair share, with both the Transvaal and the Orange Free State republics laying claim to parts of the diamond fields. 

The British also claimed them for their own. The approach of the British seemed to be motivated more by a desire to absorb everything. British colonial officials in London and in Cape Town skilfully guided Waterboer into seeking British protection.

In 1871, the British claimed the annexation of Griqualand

Throughout these years financial basis of diamond industry was insecure, particularly the issue of marketing.

The viability of industry thus came to depend largely on control of the marketing of the diamonds.

This led to stabilization of market after merger between a monopoly producer (De Beers) and a monopoly marketer (London merchants)

Labour management was another determinant of viability of the industry. During the early years, there were intense struggles between workers and companies and among different classes.

Individual white ‘claim holders’ hired black labour to perform semi skilled jobs with low pay.

Racial division now clear cut African role, manual labourer, six month contracts in fenced compounds. This was officially implemented under colour bar job in which in 1872, all white diggers committee drew up a set of rules to establish racial order eliminating black diggers and making blacks liable to be searched without warrant.

By late 1870s deeper mines machinery and capital formation of companies. In this phase mining personnel became structured into a complex hierarchy. Machines were worked by skilled immigrants from overseas while mass of people recruited to do manual labour.

This gave a new momentum precedent of the structure of urban life and industry in south Africa and later refinement of urban segregation, labour control and male hostels for migrant workers

Discovery of Gold at Witwatersrand

In 1886, at a time when the diamond industry was approaching to its mature form, gold was discovered at Transvaal Republic. 

The world’s largest gold deposits discovered on ‘Witwatersrand’ (the ‘Rand’), central Transvaal

The gold that was mined was very near to the surface of the ground.

As with the diamond mining in Kimberley, the first stage of gold mining took the form of outcrop harvesting

Reef gold was buried in veins in the rock. 

At first, these veins (the reef) were close to the surface and men with picks and shovels could reach the gold. 

Very soon, though, it was clear that the reef went deep underground and, worse, that it was not very rich it took tons of rock to get a decent amount of gold. 

These two factors the depth and the low grade of the ore meant that small, independent miners could not survive for long. 

It took a lot of money to pay for the machinery and the labour that was needed to mine this kind of gold. 

The men who had made money on the diamond mines moved in and used their capital to develop the new gold mines.

Before long it became necessary to dig a lot deeper to reach the gold, even as much as a kilometre beneath the ground. This became known as deep-level mining.

Deep level mining required new and expensive machines.

Machines were used to sink shafts hundreds of metres beneath the ground.

By 1906 the Robinson Deep Mine just off Eloff Street in Johannesburg had become, at 800 metres, the deepest producing mine in the world.

Because of the heat and the gases underground, ventilation was necessary for people working at such depths. 

Also, the deeper the line was, the more water was encountered. Special pumps had to be imported to remove the rater.

Low grade ore, the rock from which the gold is extracted is called ore. The gold can be described as being 'trapped' in ore.

A characteristic of the ore in the Witwatersrand is that it is low grade. 

This means that a very large amount of ore always has to be dug up and crushed in order to get a small amount of gold.

Who invested money in the gold mines?

The amount of money needed to develop a mine was very large. 

Most mines were owned initially by investors who brought money in from other countries, hoping to profit from the new mining industry.

This money was spent on things like importing special machines for sinking shafts in order to reach the gold bearing org in the depths of the earth.

In addition, the mines needed people who were skilled at deep level mining.

These people were mainly immigrants and their labour was expensive.

Deep mining therefore need people with enough capital.

This prompted J. B. Robinson, a mining speculator, to travel straight to the Rand where he bought Langlaagte Farm.

Robinson headed the rush of wealthy mine operators northward. He was soon followed by Cecil John Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit, Hans Sauer, C. B. Rudd, Julius Porges and others. 

These mining magnates often called Rand lords acquired farms for very little, and made huge profits from them.

From the very beginning, mining on the Witwatersrand was a predominantly capitalist venture for joint stock companies

The individual digger was soon eliminated and small claim holders were bought including purchasing land from Afrikaners.

In 1899, mining industrialists formed the Witwatersrand Chamber of Mines to advance their common interests.

The gold mining industry maintained the racially split labour force.

Skilled workers came from Australia, America, Eastern Europe and especially Britain. 

In Britain the tin mines in Cornwall were closing down the same time as the gold mines in South Africa were starting up

So many skilled miners from Cornwall came to work on the Witwatersrand.

Because of the gold standard, the price of gold was internationally controlled and remained fixed for long periods of time. 

This meant that an increase in working costs could not be passed on to the buyers by increasing the price of gold. 

It soon became clear that the only way of mining profitably on the Witwatersrand was to secure a very large supply cheap, unskilled labour

How the mines got their labour?

In order to be profitable, the mines needed an ongoing supply of cheap labour. 

The mine owners therefore had to think very carefully about when they would get labour from and how they would make it cheap.

The mining industry without labour is as it would be to imagine that you could get milk without cows. 

The mine owners exercised considerable political power and subsidized the governments in various ways because they needed its co-operation to provide sympathetic policing and anti worker laws. E.g. 1895 the Transvaal legislature, enacted Pass Law that gave employers greater control over the movement of African labourers. In this context, it was important to create a regular labour supply and to channel it to the mining centres. 

To induce men to go to work on the mines, the government introduced various taxes which were payable in cash.

Migrant labourers helped to build the economy and prosperity of South Africa by their contribution to the gold mining industry.

Migrant labourers were neither here nor there. At work, where they spent most of their time, they were treated as sojourners whose only purpose was to market their labour to provide comfort for the townspeople.

Compounds enabled mine owners to keep wages low. 

The capitalists were only too happy to have a workforce without the full cost of supporting workers and their families in town. 

The mine owners were not concerned about the domestic life of migrant labourers; neither were they interested in increasing the purchasing power of their workforce. 

At home, migrant workers were strangers to their families. Worse still, the household had the responsibility of shouldering the social costs of caring for the children and giving them what education they could.

The gold mining industry was a capitalist system of production based upon a capitalist social structure. And it was the first really large scale capitalist industry in South Africa.

Its social structure comprised two classes differentially related to the means of production (notably in the form of financial and industrial capital) and a class of workers who, not owning means of production, were thereby compelled to subsist through selling their labour power to the owners in exchange for wages

By the mid 1890s most Afrikaner and African entrepreneurs were being crushed out of business by industrial enterprises run by the mining companies.

Why discovery of diamond and gold is termed a Mineral revolution?

Historians of South Africa refer to the major economic advance of the late nineteenth century as the mineral revolution because the discovery of first diamonds and then gold transformed the country from an essentially agricultural to an industrial one and fueled massive economic growth. 

The Mineral Revolution is a term used by to refer to the rapid industrialisation and economic changes which occurred in South Africa from the 1870s onwards. 

Though the period from 1870 to1910 was one of expansion and prosperity in many countries, as well as of the scramble for territory by the colonial powers, those trends were nowhere more spectacularly witnessed than in South Africa.

The Mineral Revolution was largely driven by the need to create a permanent workforce to work in the mining industry, and saw South Africa transformed from a patchwork of agrarian states to a unified, industrial nation. 

In political terms, the Mineral Revolution had a significant impact on diplomacy and military affairs. 

Finally, the policies and events of the Mineral Revolution had an increasingly negative impact on race relations in South Africa, and formed the basis of the apartheid system, which dominated South African society for a century.

In laying the basis for the creation of modern South Africa, the discovery and exploitation of minerals in the last decades of the nineteenth century represented a massive discontinuity from what had gone before, and so was a truly revolutionary development.

South Africa before the Mineral Revolution

By the mid nineteenth century, South Africa was not a unified state, but was divided between provinces of the British Empire, states formed by Afrikaner settlers, and various native African states.

The British provinces, Cape Colony and Natal, were both fairly prosperous colonies, with the majority of black and white settlers living in rural areas and employed in sharecropping or the production of cash crops. 

To the north, the two Afrikaner states of Orange Free State and Transvaal were less densely populated and in a state of constant economic rivalry with the wealthier British provinces

Surrounding the British and Afrikaner states were a number of native African polities such as Zululand. 

These states were independent of white control and their populations were largely involved in animal husbandry. 

The overall population of the South Africa region was predominantly employed in agricultural occupations, either tending cattle, or as in the British colonies, cultivating cash crops such as sugar and coffee. 

Urban areas were small in number and size, and provided only a small contribution to the Afrikaner and British economies, mainly via the production of consumer goods and wine.

Regional economies differed while the Afrikaner and native African states were concerned with developing and maintaining self-sufficiency, Cape Colony was more focused on Britain's colonial economy, fulfilling a role as a producer of raw agricultural produce and a few luxury goods such as wine, and as a consumer of manufactured goods from Britain.

Impact of mineral revolution in South Africa

Rapid economic transformation, as a result of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, the Transvaal, which had been the poorest white ruled state in southern Africa, became the wealthiest within a decade. Increased state revenues, by 1896, gold accounted for 96 percent of its exports. Gold long remained the backbone of the South African economy, contributing massively to state revenue and earning large quantities of foreign exchange. The diamond industry also became the key to the economic fortunes of the south Africa providing the single largest source of export earnings, as well as by fueling development throughout the country. 

Industrialization, at the same time the mineral revolution laid the foundations for the development of manufacturing industry on a large scale and was responsible for great advances in technology in order to excavate deep deposits of diamonds, diggers needed machinery (particularly steam engines), credit, and a large labour force. These were unavailable to ordinary diggers, and the diamond mines were quickly taken over by the "mining capitalists" large corporations with access to credit, machinery, and labour. 

The production of money capital facilitated and extended industrial production in both department I and II industries. Influx of capital invested in South Africa ripened super profit and home market also expanded, thus stimulated more production and capital accumulation

Urbanization and demographic changes, there was also substantial growth in population, much of it from immigration subsequently led to the growth of cities and demographic changes(e.g. Johannesburg being only the most spectacular example in which by 1960s with over 1 million people had grown to be the third largest city in Africa. Other cities: Kimberly, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, etc.

People with diverse racial origins met in south Africa mining industries and towns as migrant workers, mineral prospectors, skilled workers, administrators, investors, petty traders, etc.

In summary you can say that it led to polarization of people in South Africa in terms of richness, colour and nationality

Increased internal and international labour migration. The most obvious effect of gold, diamond and coal mining can be seen in the tremendous growth of African migrant labour, the rapid break-up of the tribal system, and the emergence of a poor white class. While unskilled African migrants received a fraction of the wage of a skilled white worker, semi skilled whites could barely survive on an unskilled wage. Cheap African migrant labour was available in large quantities. 

This was an important factor in the early and rapid development of the Rand gold mines. By making capital in the mining industry, African labourers put South Africa on the world map 

South Africa acted as a magnate whose active force drew men from remotest part of the world, Europe, America, Asia and Australia and Canada. Some of them came as far north as Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.

Agriculture, the growth of towns and cities across South Africa prompted changes in rural areas, as farms lost labourers to the mines and demand for food and agricultural produce increased. By the 1870s, "agrarian capitalism" had emerged, with large commercial farms buying up smallholdings and producing commercial goods for sale in the towns. This resulted in tens of thousands of black and white farmers losing their jobs, and being forced to work as wage labourers on commercial farms or migrate to the cities in search of work. These changes greatly increased South Africa's agricultural output as commercial farms were more efficient and had greater access to farming machinery than small farms, and saw social changes in rural areas. The peasantry effectively disappeared, and a new class, the "rural gentry", emerged. 

These middle class farmers, midway between the large commercial farms and smallholdings, were able to significantly increase their earnings by producing cash crops such as coffee, tobacco, sugar, and grapes, which were not labour intensive and which fetched high prices at urban markets.

Animal husbandry also increased, with increasingly large swathes of land being turned over to sheep and cattle farming.

Infrastructure, Mass migration to towns, urban growth, and the increasing urban demand for rural produce prompted the development of South Africa's transport and communications infrastructure.

Railways were greatly expanded to link mining towns to each other and to the countryside, and ports such as Durban and Cape Town were expanded to cope with increasing immigration and commercial activity.

In 1870s railway construction commenced from Cape town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban all lines heading for diamond fields, and after 1886 they were pushed on to the Witwatersrand as rapidly as possible. By 1899, there were 2046 miles of railways 

Politics, the Mineral Revolution had a major impact on political developments in South Africa. Cape Colony required armies of workers for the mines and support industries, and in order to secure a regular flow of workers to the mines, the colonial government began a series of annexations of neighbouring African states, such as Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Pediland. 

The 1879 Anglo Zulu War also had roots in the Mineral Revolution, specifically as Cape Colony wished to neutralize any potential threats to the mines.

In the aftermath of the war, thousands of young Zulu men migrated to the mines in search of work, driving down wages and exacerbating the already cramped conditions in the compounds

The 1899-1902 Second Anglo Boer War can be traced to the Mineral Revolution.

Britain's desire to control the entire Rand region (which overlapped neighbouring Transvaal), remove potential threats to the mines, and encourage industrial expansion by replacing the slow and inexperienced Afrikaner bureaucracy with British laws and regulations led to increasing tension between the British colonies and the Afrikaner states, resulting in the outbreak of war in 1899. 

The Second Anglo Boer War united South Africa as a single state (initially British, but granted independence in 1910) and marked the beginning of the British Empire's decline.

Race relations

The mining corporations' desire to create a fixed labour force resulted in the creation of a large pool of predominantly black workers, as white labourers could use their political power to avoid having to live in the same conditions as their black colleagues.

Increasing white immigration from Europe resulted in skilled jobs being granted to white immigrant workers, while black workers were increasingly left in unskilled jobs

In the towns, black businesses were increasingly forced out of the market by immigrating white businesses. 

By 1900, a distinct pattern had developed in the industrial cities, in which white workers and inhabitants held positions of authority and power, while their black neighbours languished in unskilled, badly paid menial jobs.

In rural areas, race relations worsened with the advent of commercial farming. As farmland was bought up by large commercial enterprises, black farmers were increasingly forced to seek employment in the mines

On the mining compounds, the companies increasingly separated workers from their families on the reserves by abolishing vacation time and restricting mail contact. 

Additionally, black workers found themselves forced to send their wages home to support their families, making the men reliant on company issued food and accommodation.

The government's desire to free up farmland resulted in the passing of various acts, such as the Glen Grey Act of 1893, the Natal Land Act of 1903, and ultimately the Natives' Land Act of 1913, which legally forbade black citizens from owning land. 

These combined policies, and increasing white hostility to black South Africans, formed the basis of the apartheid system of twentieth century South Africa

Environmental Impact, mining operations at the Rand and at Kimberley caused severe environmental damage.

Open pit mining was not only dangerous for the workers, but created deep pits which grew wider during rainfall. 

Urban growth placed increasing strains on water supplies and led to increasing pollution of rivers. 

In rural areas, commercial farming led to a steady degradation in soil quality, while increasing animal husbandry led to severe soil erosion in many places, as cattle drank scarce water supplies and pulled up the grass holding the soil together. 

Mineral revolution also increased British capitalism in the Southern Africa and exposed the region for integration into capitalist economy. It changed south Africa agrarian economy to industrial one.