with some success to protect their skilled positions and their rights to
organize and to have some control over their working conditions, and in
the I 890S the state created color bars for particular mining tasks, setting a
limit to the upgrading of African workers. By cpntrast, in 1890, when
African workers resorted to violence they were ruthlessly suppressed.
Moreover, in 1895 the Transvaal legislature, the Volksraad, enacted a Pass
Law, drafted by the leaders of the mining industry, that gave employers
greater control over the movements of their African laborers. On entering
the Witwatersrand, an African had to get a pass authorizing him to seek
employment for three days, and when he found work his employer took
possession of the pass and kept it until he was discharged. If he was found
without a pass, he was liable to be arrested. In practice, the Transvaal
government lacked the means to enforce such a law consistently, but it was
an ominous harbinger for the future.
In a set of stimulating essays, the historian Charles van Onselen has
shown how, on the Witwatersrand, Africans were not the only people who
were trying "to find a place of dignity and security within a capitalist world
that encroached on them all too quickly." In the early years of the gold-