were "tribal" chiefs. Moreover, the material gap between employed Af-
ricans and employed Whites increased significantly between 1948 and
1970, by which time white manufacturing and construction workers were
earning six times as much as Africans and white mineworkers were earning
no less than twenty-one times as much as Africans. In 1971 the real wages
of African mineworkers were less than they had been in 1911. During the
1970s, African wages began to rise in response to· competition among
employers for experienced workers and vigorous African trade union ac-
tivity-even
though African trade unionism was illegal. The gap was down
to 4.4 in manufacturing and construction and 5.5 in mining by 1982.16 But
wage rates do not provide a complete picture of the condition of the Af-
ricans". Unemployment,
always high among black South Africans, in-
creased during the-1970s. South African economist Charles Simkins esti-
mated that African unemployment almost doubled from 1.2 million to 2.3
million between 1960 and 1977, by which time perhaps 26 percent of
Africans were unemployed."? Consequently, Blacks experienced high lev-
els of poverty, undernutrition,
and disease, especially tuberculosis.
The government also intensified its control of the educational system.