THESEGREGATIONERA
cost of white labor by reducing the proportion
of white workers from
1
White to 8.2 Africans to 1 to 11.4. But, although the Smuts government
used military force to overcome white resistance, the votes of white work-
ers brought Hertzog's Afrikaner Nationalist party into power in alliance
with white labor in 1924. The proportion of white workers employed in
the gold mines increased thereafter, reaching
1 white to 7.5 Africans in
1939, even though the wage gap gave the companies a strong inducement
to decrease the proportion of Whites. The mineowners had learned that in
a country where Whites had votes and (except to a limited extent in the
Cape Province) Blacks had none, it was not politically possible to replace
some of its expensive white labor with Africans.f-
Labor in the South African gold mines is arduous, unhealthy, and dan-
gerous. The heat is intense. The stopes are so narrow that men work at the
rock-face in a crouching position. Between 1933 and 1966, 19,000 gold-
miners, 93 percent of them Africans, died as a result of accidents.v' Many
Africans miners contracted
diseases on the mines. During
1931, the
Miners' Pthisis Medical Bureau classified 1,370 African miners as suffering
from tuberculosis or lung diseases, or both, caused by mining.v" Living