DAN JACOBSON
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the "Native reserves"; now, though their function and nature re–
main in many respects unaltered, they are known as the "home–
lands," or even as the "independent republics" of Transkei,
Ciskei, Bophuta Tswana, and other such exotic-sounding titles
cobbled up
ad hoc
by the South African government.
Most of the returning mine boys did not, of course, go back
to the reserves for good. There were no jobs in such places, no
money, no food, no excitement. Some after a few months, or a
year or two, would renew their contracts with the mining com–
panies; some would try to get similarly contracted employment
with major users of unskilled labor, like the railways or the pro–
vincial and municipal councils; most, perhaps, would filter back
individually to the cities and seek employment either as domestic
servants (house boys) or in manufacturing. Mining aside, South
Africa was not a highly industrialized country forty years ago; but
the process of full-scale industrialization was well underway, and
the manufacturers of bricks and car batteries, furniture and
canned foods were eager to get more hands. Those among the
blacks who were successful in finding work, and many who were
not, would settle down in the "locations" or "townships" which
surrounded every city like some random, ragged shadow of sack–
ing, corrugated iron, and pressed mud bricks. Once they were
settled, or as settled as they ever would be, they would send for
their wives and children from the reserves; or they would start up
wholly new families with women who were in domestic service in
the city, or who had come to town in search of missing husbands
and fathers, and who had themselves gone astray.
In
order to prevent just such a state of affairs from develop–
ing, in order to prevent a vast shift of black population from the
reserves to the periphery of the white cities, successive South
African governments had put on the statute books a host of laws
which went under a variety of names; influx control laws, pass
laws, residence laws, master and servant laws, and so forth. (All
this was before the word
apartheid
had entered the political vo–
cabulary of the country. What the
apartheid
policies of the Afri–
kaner Nationalists have amounted to is an attempt to ideologize, to
formalize, to intensify, and-by means of the establishment of
those independent black republics within the boundaries of
South Africa-to aggrandize policies that were traditional before
they came to power.) The labor of the blacks was indispensable to
