Over 17 million Africans were arrested or prosecuted under pass laws between 1916 and 1984.
The control of African labor in South Africa began in 1834, after the abolition of slavery created new demands for cheap workers on colonial farms.1 The discovery of diamonds near Kimberley in 1867 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 transformed that demand into an industrial system. By 1899, the gold mines employed 100,000 Black migrant workers.2
Pass laws, first introduced in the Cape Colony in 1797, required Black men to carry documents identifying where they could work and live.3 The system tied workers to their employers and restricted movement between rural reserves and mining areas. Migrant miners spent nine to eleven months of the year underground while their wives and children remained in the countryside.4 They lived in closed compounds, single-sex barracks operated by the mining companies, where sleeping space was so limited that miners sometimes slept sitting up.
The formal apartheid system, legislated from 1948, codified these arrangements into national policy. Between 1916 and 1984, over 17,745,000 Africans were arrested or prosecuted under the pass laws.3 The Group Areas Act assigned specific residential locations to racial groups. The Bantu Authorities Act created "homelands" that effectively made Black South Africans foreigners in their own country.5 Foreign mine workers from Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland made up at least 40 percent of the mining labor force, and in the 1960s, foreigners represented 80 percent of all mine workers.6
A color bar prevented Black workers from holding skilled positions or earning promotions. White workers occupied supervisory roles at wages two to seven times higher than their Black counterparts in comparable positions.1 The death rate among Black mine workers in 1903 was eighty per thousand, and physical assault by white supervisors was common.1 Pass laws remained in effect until 1986, two years after the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and four years before Nelson Mandela's release from prison.3