Cutting Edge: The Colour of Gold
SBS Television
Screening Tuesday August 17, 7.30 p.m. (7 p.m. in Adelaide)
Reviewed by Norm Dixon
"We dig out the gold but we have never seen it with our own eyes. So if you tell us about the glitter of gold that would not interest us..." — so explains Mookameli Nyakama, a migrant worker from Lesotho who works at a giant gold mine in South Africa.
This revealing documentary about lives of black migrant workers employed in South Africa's most important industry should not be missed. It starkly illustrates why, despite legal apartheid's pending demise, it is only when the wealth and power of South Africa's white capitalist class is challenged will oppression based on race domination begin to be eliminated.
Apartheid is much more than a system of intense racial discrimination, it is a system of economic, social and political relations designed to produce a cheap and controlled labour force and so generate high rates of profits.
The development of the mining industry in the 1880s was a turning point in South Africa's history. Capitalism arrived with a vengeance. Large numbers of black workers were drawn into the wage labour system for the first time.
Wealthy Boer farmers and the mineowners joined in alliance to maximise the supply of cheap black labour and swell their profits. The Land Act of 1913 ended African land ownership or tenancy except in the tiny, arid reserves (which later formed the basis of the bantustans).
These were deliberately designed to be insufficient to support the population and thus force peasants from the land and into wage labour in the mines, on the farms and in the factories.
The state developed the contract system of migrant labour, separating the wage-earner from his/her family, so that the employer would not have to pay for the maintenance of the worker's dependents. Together with these measures, black people were systematically denied democratic and political rights.
Thus, by the 1920s all the essential ingredients of South Africa's apartheid system, as the institutionalised racism became officially- known with the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948, were in place.
The Colour of Gold shows us that those essentials of apartheid remain in place to this day.
Mookameli Nyakama, Letsema Maphuti, Mothonyana Poli and Kaoli Mapupa come from the tiny independent country of Lesotho. They live in huge concentration camp-like single sex hostels at the President Steyn Gold Mine. They only see their families two or three times a year. They live 16 to a room and the only privacy they can find is in the toilet
They suffer harsh and dangerous working conditions for the miserable pay of 550 rand a year (A$275). Their white supervisors think nothing of physically abusing black workers and ordering them to work in potentially deadly areas.
The 7000 miners dig out US$1 million worth of gold every day from the deepest and most dangerous gold mines in the world for the supposedly "enlightened" Anglo-American Corporation. Three kilometres below the surface, workers toil for nine hours a day at temperatures in excess of 60 Celsius.
Once at the surface, the workers only entertainment is drinking an over-priced, evil-looking beer served in plastic buckets. Life is the hostels severely distorts the workers relationships with their families. Unsafe sex with women from the townships nearby and other miners led to the threat of a major AIDS epidemic.
The program gives us an insight to the reasons why single-sex hostels have become a grave source of violence and destabilisation in township moves towards non-racial democracy. The workers' isolation, frustration and insecurity are easily manipulated by sections of the security forces and apartheid puppets like Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.