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² Numerous communications from the Native Affairs Department to the Chamber of Mines stressed the need for the Chamber to improve working conditions, especially for tropical miners in the three years immediately prior to the closing of mine recruitment north of latitude 22 south. The following passage from a letter addressed to the Chairman of the Chamber of Mines from Henry Burton, Minister of Native Affairs, 12 June 1911 (Chamber of Mines Archives [CMA] N14, Native Mortality, 1911), emphasizes the seriousness of the situation: ‘I have discussed this subject of the heavy mortality of tropical Natives with my colleagues, who are in agreement with me that unless a decided improvement can be effected at an early date the Government will have no alternative to the measure of entirely prohibiting the introduction of tropical natives’.

³ See Packard, R., White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Los Angeles, 1989), 161–4Google Scholar, for a discussion of these efforts.

⁴ CMA, Health Conditions – Tropical Natives, 1911–1912Google Scholar, ‘Notes of Proceedings of a Meeting held on 13 July 1911 between the Minister of Native Affairs of the Union of South Africa, the Executive Committee of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, and the Board of Management of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, Limited’, 27.

⁵ Cartwright, A. P., Doctors on the Mines: A History of the Mines Medical Association of South Africa (Cape Town, 1971), 26.Google Scholar

⁶ The Transvaal, Report of the Coloured Labour Compound Commission (Pretoria, 1905), xv.Google Scholar

⁷ Cartwright, Doctors on the Mines.

⁸ I would like to thank Drs Cory Kratz, Alan Jeeves, Shula Marks, Barbara Rosenkratz and Joseph Miller for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. Research support for the paper was provided by grants from the Social Science Research Council and Tufts University.

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¹⁴ They have also been influenced by the broader study of the cultural construction of difference found in such works as Mudimbe's, V. Y.The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, 1988)Google Scholar; Miller, Christopher, Blank Darkness (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar; and more broadly, Said's, EdwardOrientalism (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

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²⁰ The difference in meaning is similar to that which occurs when one refers to people from the state of Georgia or Alabama in the United States as ‘people from the South’ as opposed to ‘Southerners’. The latter term clearly carries with it a series of cultural associations that are not projected by the former phase.

²¹ CMA, Health Conditions-Tropical Natives, 1911–12, ‘Notes of Proceedings of a Meeting held on 13 July, 1911 between the Minister of Native Affairs of the Union of South Africa, the Executive Committee of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, and the Board of Management of the Witwatersrand Natives Labour Association, Limited’.

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²⁷ This pattern occurred more broadly of course in the history of medical discourse on ‘tropical diseases’, a term which became a part of European medical terminology at the end of the nineteenth century. The term tended to define a wide range of health problems among colonized populations of the world in terms of climate and ecology, while directing attention away from social and economic factors which in many cases contributed to health problems in these peoples.

²⁸ Packard, , ‘The “healthy reserve” and the “dressed native”’, 80–83Google Scholar.

²⁹ Vaughan quotes the following statement by the medical superintendent of the Robben Island Asylum in Cape Town in 1890: ‘The pure native races, like the Zulu and Kaffirs, are seldom affected with leprosy; but among the Korennes and cross-breeds between native women and nomadic Boers of the coast districts are to be found a large number of cases…’. She goes on to cite similar comparisons made by European doctors working in Northern Rhodesia in 1898, between the ‘promiscuous’ and ‘insanitary’ Bisa and the ‘sanitary’ Bemba. Finally she shows how western psychiatry ascribed psychiatric characteristics to specific ethnic categories; Vaughan, , Curing their Ills, 81.Google Scholar

³⁰ By the 1920s, the only characteristic that joined the various peoples who fell under the category of ‘tropical’ was the mining industry's inability legally to recruit them.

³¹ CMA, Health Conditions – Tropical Natives, 1911–1912, G. A. Turner to C. W. Dix, Sec. WNLA, 5 Feb. 1912.

³² CMA, Health conditions-Tropical Natives, 1911–1912, President of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines to the Minister for Native Affairs, 13 03 1912.Google Scholar

³³ Quoted in Cartwright, , Doctors on the Mines, 27.Google Scholar The Chamber's efforts to present Sir Almroth's vaccine as a panacea for the problem of ‘tropical’ labor mortality would seem to suggest that they viewed the cause of this mortality as primarily biological, i.e. it was due to susceptibility to a particular pathogen. This would seem to contradict the arguments made before the Minister of Native Affairs in July in which they ascribed tropical worker mortality to cultural and behavioral differences. This is not necessarily the case. Instead Chamber officials appear to have viewed Sir Almroth's vaccine as a solution to a disease which took a higher toll among tropical workers because tropical workers were culturally different from other workers. Chamber officials would later come to view the cause of tropical susceptibility in purely biological terms. This shift, as we will see, reflected the changing economic interests of the mining industry and the professionalization of medical research on the mines.

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³⁷ See Packard, White Plague, Black Labor, ch. 6, for a discussion of the achievements and limits of mining reforms between the wars.

³⁸ Transvaal Archives Depot [TAD], Government Native Labour Bureau [GNLB] 386 33/44, Dr Culver, ‘Investigations into Health Conditions on the Mines, 1931’. Discussions within the Chamber of Mines during the 1920s suggest that Orenstein's views were respected and that he was viewed as a major figure within the mine medical community. Yet one also has the impression that the Chamber officials respected him more for the image of reform that he projected to the wider South African and international community than for the specific reforms that he proposed. To the latter their was consistent resistance.

³⁹ It is also significant that this shift in emphasis reflected, and perhaps contributed to, a broader transformation in the discourse on race and disease in South Africa at this time. As I have noted elsewhere, explanations for African susceptibility to tuberculosis shifted from behavioral (or cultural) explanations to biological ones during the teens and twenties. Packard, R., ‘Tuberculosis and the development of industrial health policies on the Witwatersrand, 1902–1932’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, XIII (1987), 187–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ The redefinition of pneumonia along narrowly medical lines resembles in many respects the shift that occurred in the definition of silicosis within public health circles in the United States between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz assert that the new breed of industrial hygienists that emerged in the US during this period were ‘primarily physicians whose training led them to see industrial disease in much narrower terms. This group emphasized personal hygiene, the laboratory and the identification of specific toxins or germs in their attempt to improve workers' health…’ (Rosner, and Markowitz, , Deadly Dust, 45–6Google Scholar). This description accurately assesses the new cadre of professional medical researchers who came to work at the South African Institute of Medical Research.

⁴¹ CMA N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, E. A. Wallers to Prime Minister Louis Botha, 7 June 1917.

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⁴⁴ CMA N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, E. A. Wallers to Prime Minister Louis Botha, 7 June 1917.

⁴⁵ CMA N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, E. A. Wallers to Prime Minister Louis Botha, 16 Nov. 1917.

⁴⁶ CMA N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, Employment of Tropical Workers, Percival Watkins to A. I. Girwood, 6 July 1917.

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⁴⁹ CMA N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, Employment of Tropical Natives, Percival Watkins to A. I. Girwood, 6 July 1917.

⁵⁰ CMA N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, E. A. Wallers to Prime Minister Louis Botha, 16 Nov. 1917.

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⁵⁴ CM A N8, Native Labour Contingent, 1916–18, Secretary for Native Affairs to Secretary, Transvaal Chamber of Mines, 8 April 1918.

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⁵⁶ Yudelman, David and Jeeves, Alan, ‘New labour frontiers for old: black migrants to the South African gold mines, 1920–1985’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, XIII (1986), 124.Google Scholar

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⁶⁰ See Packard, , White Plague, Black Labor, 185–93Google Scholar, for a more detailed discussion of the effects of the Depression on labor supplies and workers’ health on the gold mines.

⁶¹ CMA, Low Grade Ore Commission 1930–1, Exhibits 112–86, Statement by Sir Spencer Lister, Director of the South African Institute for Medical Research, Dec. 1930.

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⁶⁵ Lister's status as a Knight of the Realm certainly strengthened his ability to influence discussions of tropical mortality. One would like to know more about the role of Chamber officials and mine owners in Lister's acquisition of this honor. In this context, it should be noted that the Chamber employed Sir Lyle Cummins to serve as technical advisor to the Tuberculosis Research Committee in 1926. Cummins' opinions supporting the idea that African workers were physiologically susceptible to TB coincided with the economic interests of the mining industry. His presence insured that the Committee's report reflected those interests. See Packard, , White Plague, Black Labor, 206–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ CMA, Low Grade Ore Commission 1930–1, Exhibits 112–86, Statement by Sir Spencer Lister, Director of the South African Institute for Medical Research, Dec. 1930.

⁶⁷ The case for a centralized medical system along the lines of that established by Dr Orenstein within the Rand Mines was put forth by Dr E. N. Thornton, Acting Secretary for Public Health, in written testimony to the Low Grade Ore Commission in 1931. (CMA, 22/1931, Low Grade Ores/Tropical Natives [Central Health Administration], E. N. Thornton to The Chairman, Low Grade Ores Commission, 19 Jan. 1931.) Chamber officials pointed to higher disease rates on Rand mines as an indication of the failure of the system Orenstein had constructed. Thornton argued that the higher rates reflected better record keeping and case detection.

⁶⁸ The willingness of the Chamber and the Institute for Medical Research to risk the lives of Central African workers to prove the effectiveness of a vaccine that was of questionable value needs to be examined more closely. It is easy to explain the mine owners' support for this action in terms of their overall economic interests and their desire to believe in the efficacy of Lister's vaccine. These factors may also explain the attitude of the Institute's medical researchers. Yet the willingness of medical researchers to experiment on Central African workers also encouraged the dehumanizing practices that were an every-day part of mine medical culture. The rapid examination of long lines of naked men, the use of finger prints and numbered metal discs instead of names to identify individual African workers and the recurrent association of physical and medical traits with particular ‘tribal’ groups all worked to efface a worker's individual identity and humanity and encouraged the use of Africans as research subjects.

⁶⁹ See Packard, , White Plague, Black Labor, 230–1Google Scholar, for a more detailed description of this episode.

⁷⁰ These costs would re-emerge, however, in the 1970s and 1980s, following the withdrawal of tropical labor and the move toward labor stabilization. These costs were revealed in the sharp rise in TB rates on the mines. See Packard, , White Plague, Black Labor, 309–17.Google Scholar