578
. PARTISAN REVIEW
the economic success of the white-owned mines and industries,
and to the comfort of the white-owned households. Yet the whites
dreaded the consequences of finding themselves surrounded by
uncountable and perhaps uncontrollable hordes of landless,
homeless, alien, uneducated blacks. For this reason, those mine
boys whom I described remained the model or ideal type of black
laborer within the economy of the country. True, there were hun–
dreds of thousands, and later there were to be millions, of laborers
who did not conform to that model; but it continued to be what
the government, the civil service, the mines, some sectors of man–
ufacturing industry, and the housewives wanted; it continued to
be what the elaborate and punitive battery of laws relating to such
matters was intended to produce.
In other words, white South Africa wanted to have at its dis–
posal a labor force composed of people who would be drafted into
the economy in order to fulfil specific jobs, but who would re–
main, so far as this could be made possible, outside the bounds of
the society, or of what the white South Africans could recognize as
society. The first step to achieving this end was to try to restrict
severely the period in which any particular group of laborers
would be present in the economy. They would
be
housed in bar–
racks or dormitories which by their very nature could never be–
come homes; their families would not be permitted to join them;
when they were finished with their jobs, and their contracts ran
out, they would be compelled to go back to whatever barren pla–
teau or
donga-riven
mountainside they had come from. There
they would ultimately remain out of sight, out of mind, content
(it was assumed) to resume a suitably picturesque, semi tribal
mode of life, alongside the wives and children who had never
known anything else.
All this, I was to learn as I grew older, was known as the
"migratory labor system": a term which covered not merely the
movement of black workers back and forth from the reserves, and
their sundering from their families during the periods they were
at work, but also the elaborate powers of registration, taxation,
eviction, imprisonment, and job protection (for whites) which
the state used in order to ensure that the movement in both direc–
tions continued. I learned also, as I grew older, that there were
small but vocal groups of whites, to be found for the most part in
the leftist political parties, and in places like the Institute of Race
