Chinese Indentured Mine Labour and the Dangers Associated with Early 20th Century Deep-level Mining on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Meyer ◽  
M. Steyn
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Deep Level ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Gold Mines

scholarly journals Pharmaceuticals and modern statecraft in South Africa: the cases of opium, thalidomide and contraception.

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 253-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Parle ◽  
Rebecca Hodes ◽  
Thembisa Waetjen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Pharmaceutical Regulation ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Histories ◽  
Pharmaceutical Governance

This article provides a history of three pharmaceuticals in the making of modern South Africa. Borrowing and adapting Arthur Daemmrich’s term ‘pharmacopolitics’, we examine how forms of pharmaceutical governance became integral to the creation and institutional practices of this state. Through case studies of three medicaments: opium (late 19th to early 20th century), thalidomide (late 1950s to early 1960s) and contraception (1970s to 2010s), we explore the intertwining of pharmaceutical regulation, provision and consumption. Our focus is on the modernist imperative towards the rationalisation of pharmaceutical oversight, as an extension of the state’s bureaucratic and ideological objectives, and, importantly, as its obligation. We also explore adaptive and illicit uses of medicines, both by purveyors of pharmaceuticals, and among consumers. The historical sweep of our study allows for an analysis of continuities and changes in pharmaceutical governance. The focus on South Africa highlights how the concept of pharmacopolitics can usefully be extended to transnational—as well as local—medical histories. Through the diversity of our sources, and the breadth of their chronology, we aim to historicise modern pharmaceutical practices in South Africa, from the late colonial era to the Post-Apartheid present.

2. Origins

2019 ◽  
pp. 10-29
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
South West Africa

‘Origins’ traces the concentration camp’s origins in 19th- and early 20th-century colonial settings in Australia, the United States, Cuba, South Africa, and German South-West Africa (today Namibia), and in the Armenian genocide at the end of the Ottoman Empire. By studying the early concentration camps, we can understand how and why the camps emerged when they did, and clarify the links and differences between them and the fascist and communist concentration camps of the mid-20th century. European racism, military culture, more rapid forms of communication, and increasingly available print media all contributed to the global diffusion of concentration camp concept, which by the end of World War I became accepted as a technique of rule.

Risk assessment in dolomitic terrain: a case history

1987 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-334
Author(s):  
I. S. Venter ◽  
B. J. Gregory
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Deep Level ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Gold Mines ◽  
Road Users ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Combination Of Methods ◽  
Safety Considerations ◽  
Alternative Solutions

AbstractThe dewatering of dolomitic groundwater compartments in the Far West Rand in the Transvaal Province of South Africa has, in the past, resulted in ground movements in the form of subsidences and sinkholes. These have caused damage to various structures and in some instances loss of life. Dewatering of these compartments has taken place as a result of economic and safety considerations for the continued operation and development of deep-level gold mines in these areas. The dewatering of another groundwater compartment is currently underway. Consequently, a risk assessment, primarily to evaluate the potential for sinkhole development, was prepared for the main highways crossing the compartment.Risk assessment in dolomitic terrain is a much debated subject, the main reason being the subjectivity of the various approaches. It is generally accepted, however, that a number of factors affect subsurface stability, for example, the position of the watertable, the presence of weak, dolomitic residuum, bedrock characteristics and the ponding of surface-water. A combination of methods was utilized to produce a final assessment. These included a multivariate classification system and comparison with published data collated by the Geological Survey of South Africa. The methods and results of the risk assessment are discussed together with possible alternative solutions for maintaining the traffic routes and for ensuring the safety of road users.

The “labour aristocracy” in the early 20th-century South Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ercüment Çelik
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Labour History ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Key Dimensions

Drawing on a review of key literature, this article analyses the labour aristocracy in early 20th-century South Africa, going beyond traditional conceptual and territorial boundaries created through a methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism since the emergence of labour history as an academic discipline. It identifies some key dimensions attributed to the labour aristocracy in mainstream approaches that focused on Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and attempts to illustrate how these could be considered in analysing the particular South African case. The article mainly focuses on how the understanding of labour aristocracy would be reconstructed by demonstrating an aristocracy of labour that merges with an aristocracy of colour in South Africa.

Kasi Football: an Ethnography of South African Rural Working-Class Football Traditions

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2-2020) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarminder Kaur
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Working Class ◽  
South African ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Labour Migration ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Forced Labour

Kasi football is the most popular form of informal urban football that emerged in the low-income black working-class neighbourhoods of South Africa. This football tradition took shape in the early 20th century in the context of forced labour migration in the industrializing South Africa. Autonomously organised, free-flowing, football games played for a sum of money or other stakes not only served as a way to cope with pressures of rapid urbanisation and displacement, but also as a way to reclaim ownership over their leisure space and time. In this paper, I examine how these urban football traditions are reimagined and performed among the rural working-class in contemporary South Africa. This ethnography of kasi football, games played almost every weekend, exposes the cultural robustness, adaptability to the conditions of disenfranchisement, as well as rawness of extreme inequality, which sustain these practices.

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