1930 - Continued turmoil

Overcrowding in the reserves made it necessary for many men to work for wages elsewhere—on white farms or in the towns, where they lived in a hostile world. Black and Coloured farm labourers, scattered in small groups throughout the agricultural areas, were isolated, and in the towns life was insecure and wages low. In the gold-mining industry, Blacks’ real wages declined by about one-seventh between 1911 and 1941; white miners received 12 times the salary of Blacks. 

In the poverty-stricken rural areas, the wives and children of these migrant labourers had to survive mainly on the limited remittances sent back by their absent menfolk. Foreshadowing the Apartheid-era and many of its discriminatory features; pass laws, urban ghettos, impoverished rural homelands, and African migrant labour, were first established in the course of South Africa’s industrial revolution.