LMT #148: The Workers’ Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa – Alex Lichtenstein

Alex Lichtenstein
Professor of History, Indiana University, Bloomington (USA)

Built in 1913 as a compound for African municipal electrical workers, Johannesburg’s “Workers’ Museum” sits on the south side of the historic Mary Fitzgerald Square, long a site of labor mobilization in the gentrifying—yet still gritty–central city precinct of Newtown. The museum’s origins lie in a “workers’ library” established by trade unionists and anti-apartheid activists in the late 1980s, closely associated with the efforts of radical university faculty to work closely with unions through workers’ education programs. The space persisted as a cultural center for Black workers and their allies into the post-apartheid period after 1994, although it struggled financially. In 2010, as part of a concerted effort on the part of the city of Johannesburg to redevelop the Newtown precinct, the historians, architects, and curators helped transform the compound into the museum that stands on the site today. Both the original compound structure and the interpretive material now housed there together examine the history of the migrant workers whose labor powered southern Africa’s richest urban area.

Although small and rather shabby—the city’s support for cultural institutions has waned over the years–the museum does an excellent job of telling the story of the hundreds of thousands of “unknown migrant workers from all over southern Africa” who built the city and its enormous wealth. As the museum text points out, in 1936, for example, the mines ringing Johannesburg alone employed 300,000 African workers, hailing from Mozambique (25%), Lesotho (15%), and the distance South African regions of Transkei and Ciskei (40%). The generations of municipal workers who stayed in this compound until the 1980s helped service the growing metropolis, the engine of South Africa’s economy. When the compound was established, 90 per cent of the Africans residing in Johannesburg were male migrants; yet, even 60 years later under apartheid, half the African labor force remained in this precarious status.

The restored compound is laid out the way it appeared in 1913, with hostel blocs for African workers, a compound manager’s house, a room for an Induna (an African supervisor), and staff houses for skilled white workers. The museum itself consists of three rooms, as well as a large, raised platform inside the relatively spacious staff housing offering a full chronology of South Africa’s migrant labor system, from 1800s to the present. The first two rooms are laid out as sleeping quarters for two dozen or so men (the hostel was all male), with two layers of concrete bunks—slabs really—on which workers might lay a blanket. Johannesburg winters can be chilly, and one can only imagine how uncomfortable such sleeping accommodations must have been.

In the first room, the bunks are interspersed with words derived from oral histories conducted with African migrants themselves, as well as expressions of the thinly disguised racism of the white compound managers who oversaw daily life in the hostel. Photographs of migrant life, especially conditions inside the hostels that once dotted all of Johannesburg’s urban landscape, provide the visual correlative to some of the more heartbreaking quotes. “We lived like prisoners,” one migrant recalls. Another notes the diverse ethnic mix in a single room, “from Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape,” a deliberate policy that “made things hard to get along with one another.” One wall replicates a 1940s pamphlet exposing conditions inside Johannesburg’s municipal compounds, written by the only Communist Party member on the city council, Hilda Watts. Others illustrate leisure activities that defined the hours when workers, locked up when not at work, used to wile away the time.

The second room has much the same layout, although in this case each bunk is crowned with one of the many regulations that governed daily life in the compound: “no African shall have foodstuffs in his room”; “no African shall bring liquor into Compound without a permit”; “no African shall crush, by hammering, any roots, tobacco, muti etc. other than at the place provided.” This last regulation suggests the significance of traditional healing as a part of compound daily life.

With these restrictive conditions in mind, visitors then pass into a larger room that displays the material culture that sustained migrant life, both on the long journey from the rural hinterland to eGoli—the City of Gold—and inside the hostel itself. This includes beer bottles, gum boots, and the ubiquitous passbook—the so-called “dompass”– that subordinated the lives and work of African laborers to the whim of officials, police, and white authority alike in twentieth-century South Africa. African workers who made the journey to the city had to carry this internal passport at all times and had no right to remain in Johannesburg unless they could provide registered proof of employment whenever asked. This was, by the way, the case long before the imposition of apartheid after 1948, when Afrikaner nationalists came to power on a platform of hardline white supremacy. While apartheid certainly regularized and tightened the migrant labor system, nearly all whites had long agreed that as temporary sojourners in the city destined only to provide their labor, African workers must carry a pass and retained no right of permanent residence. Another striking artifact is a dress, something a male migrant might purchase in the city to bring back to his wife or daughter during the month he might spend at his home in the African reserves, or ‘Bantustans’, where African families would remain.

If the lower floor of the compound provides a compelling if rather synchronic and undifferentiated chronology of the compound dwellers’ lives, the raised platform to which one ascends offers a short course in South African history, from the discovery of gold in the 1880s to the election of Mandela in 1994, with workers at the center of the narrative. By the end, however, the story becomes a bit more diffuse, as it occasionally abandons its focus on migrant workers to present a more general account of the antiapartheid movement. Thus, while the emergent Black trade union movement of the 1970s and 1980s receives some attention, the focus shifts to the African National Congress (ANC) and events like the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), Mandela’s imprisonment (1964) and release (1990), the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement (1960s-1970s), and the Soweto Uprising (1976). Nevertheless, visitors can find many of the key markers of South African working-class history, including the colonial pressures that drove dispossessed Africans to seek wage work, the introduction of Chinese indentured labor on the mines in 1902, the numerous miners’ strikes (1919, 1920, 1922, 1946), the privileged status of white workers, the formation of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (1919) and the Communist Party of South Africa (1921), the 1973 Durban Strikes and the eventual emergence of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the mid-1980s, and more.

The historical narrative concludes with a panel describing the ‘legacy of migrant labour’, noting that this signal aspect of apartheid’s political economy has left its residues of deep poverty, social divisions between city and countryside, urban informal settlements housing millions of work-seekers, xenophobia, gender-based violence, and the long-lasting scars of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, so readily spread by long-distance migrancy. All of these social ills continue to plague South African life three decades after the achievement of democracy, much as the poisonous mine-tailings surrounding the city continue to define Johannesburg’s ecology.

Most visitors to Johannesburg will likely visit the Apartheid Museum, Soweto, and perhaps Constitution Hill—all important venues for contemplating South Africa’s difficult racial past and its people’s inspiring triumph over apartheid. Nevertheless, it is a shame that this important yet neglected historic site and the story it tells don’t play a more prominent part in Johannesburg’s vibrant memoryscape.

_{Worker’s Museum in Johannesburg. Source: Museum’s website}

Luli Callinicos, Gold and Workers (1981), Working Life: Factories, Townships and Popular Culture (1987), and A Place in the City: the Rand on the Eve of Apartheid (1993), all by Ravan Press.

Gay Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985 (University of California Press, 1994).

Charles van Onselen, The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Workers to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, 1902-1955 (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Cover image credit: Migrant miners workers at the closed compound in Johannesburg. Photo: Margaret Bourke-White.Source: https://bourkewhite.wordpress.com/galleries/on-the-mines/migrant-workers/