Dan Jacobson
ON MIGRATORY WORKERS
In
the South Africa of my childhood one often saw
them waiting in groups on the railway stations of mining towns:
the mine boys arriving, or the mine boys departing. When they
came they wore blankets thrown toga style over their shoulders
and hanging down to their waists; they had on their heads coni–
cal, homemade hats of plaited straw; on their feet were sandals
whose soles were cut out of old motor car tires; in their earlobes
were heavy, ornamented, circular plugs of wood or bone. How–
ever, it was not so much their dress as their demeanor that revealed
them to be new arrivals. Even as a child I could recognize how
apprehensive and expectant they were, and with what excitement
and misgiving they looked around them at the wonders of some
suburban station, with its brick and iron booking hall, concrete
platform, and solitary nameboard painted in large block letters.
Almost invariably such groups would have a fellow black set in
authority over them: a big-bellied, brass-bulloned, pith-helmeted,
knobkierie-brandishing figure, one of the mining company's
own police corps.
It
was his job to form his charges into rows, two
by two; to count them a few times; to thwack them a few times in
jocular fashion on the shoulders and legs with his
knobkierie;
and then to march them off, through dusty, poverty stricken
streets overlooked by mine dumps, to the "hostels" or barracks in
the shadow of the mine's headgear, where they would serve out
the twelve months or more of their contracts.
When the mine boys left they were clearly recognizable again,
though for different reasons from before. They now wore khaki
trousers, sports jackets, and zooty, wide-brimmed hats; they had
guitars slung over their shoulders and shiny tin trunks at their
feet; some carried portable windup gramaphones; their wrists
were encircled, for ornament and protection, by wide leather
straps bristling with rows of brass studs. They laughed and gazed
boldly abou t them, and whistled at any black girls within range.
They were on their way home, back to their womenfolk and chil–
dren in various desertlike, overpopulated areas in the remoter
corners of the country.
In
those days such territories were called
