Normally each man has to clear a space four or five yards wide. While staying as a boarder in a rooming house, he had gotten to know the miners and had gone down coal mines several times to get a truer measure of the work of the miners, beyond his observations of the miner families’ living conditions.Īfter describing the appalling conditions of miners’ homes and lives above ground, Orwell had written his report about the actual mine work, saying, “Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you realise what a stupendous task the ‘fillers’ are performing. Orwell had gone north to the English Midlands – as a freelance journalist – to investigate for himself the conditions of coal miners. Walking through the compound, and then descending into the stygian depths of the mine, made it impossible not to recall George Orwell’s classic “The Road to Wigan Pier”, that 1930s masterpiece of outraged, investigative journalism, quite literally from the actual coal face.
This was in spite of the palpable sense of overcrowding, the weary, worn-out grunginess of the ablution area and those miners’ sleeping shelves – no, not beds – shelves, made out of concrete. What was weird, maybe even remarkable, was that this tour seemed designed to show off this particular mine as an example of progressive, fair treatment of its complement of migrant workers. (And, yes, visitors had to sign a waiver of indemnity over practically every possibility that might befall them.)īefore going down the shaft, the tour also included time to see the hostels for the migrant workers – as well as a stop at the mine store and even the traditional beer hall on the mining compound’s premises. Instead, this was a day-long visit to a typical gold mine, complete with a trip down the mine lift to a working gold seam where the miners were drilling the ore from out of the rock face, loading the resulting rocks onto the cocoa pans and then on to the areas where new blasting was being prepared. This was to be no quick trip down that decommissioned touristy mineshaft at Gold Reef City, a place that was only set up much later anyway. They extended an invitation to visit a working gold mine in the Johannesburg area. Then, as it happened, in 1975, the Chamber of Mines went on a kind of charm offensive (perhaps as if to say, “The mines aren’t bad places, just misunderstood ones”).
Reading about them was one thing, but even reading all those “Jim Comes to Joburg”-style novels of struggle and survival on the mines by migrants from rural areas or carefully examining a book like “On the Mines” – the one with those evocative David Goldblatt photographs paired with Nadine Gordimer’s essay (“Mines of the beloved country: Through the mind of a photographer and essayist”) – did not prepare one for the reality of it all meant that came from actually visiting working mines. Back in the mid-1970s when this writer first came to South Africa to work, one of the things that seemed mandatory to do was to visit some of the country’s famous – or infamous – diamond and gold mines.
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