Navigating the Liminal: An Archaeological Perspective on South African Industrialisation

Abstract

A Sunday morning in March, 1886 ... “The tangled threads of destiny were being detached from the spinning wheel ...” (Crisp 1974 in Ricci 1986: 24) as two gold prospectors, walking the land of the widow Oosthuizen’s farm, Langlaagte, stumbled upon an outcrop of the Main Reef Conglomerate, a banket of gold bearing ore, arcing , virtually uninterrupted, from present-day Randfontein in the west to Springs in the east (Figure 1). The world’ s greatest gold rush had been set in motion. With in months, the first settlement at Ferreira’s Camp had burst across the highveld as thousands streamed towards this newest source of wealth. As canvas tents and reed huts gave way to corrugated iron shacks and bricked structures, Johannesburg burgeoned from a tented camp of 3000 “adventurers” in 1887 to a town of over 100 000 inhabitants by 1896 (van Onselen 1982: 163; Beittel 1992: 197). While uitlanders or immigrants chased wealth and expanded opportunity, white and black farmers across the highveld faced new, often unpredictable choices. An industrial revolution had come: rural , predominantly subsistence, economies were besieged by new forms of capital as thousands were drawn or pushed into the “twilight world of labour migrancy , peri-urban space and industry” (van Onselen 1996: vii).

The South African history which is really significant is that which tells us about the everyday life of the people, how they lived, what they thought and what they worked at, when they did think and work what they produced and what and where they marketed, and the whole of their social organisation. Such a history of South Africa remains to be written. (W.H. MacMillan 1919 quoted in van Onselen 1996:10)