John Chinaman on the Rand

by Anonymous

The ease with which men were recruited and shipped to the Transvaal seemed to confirm the Rand lords in their delusion that at last they had got hold of people who would increase their dividends for them without demanding rights and privileges.

The Times had called them masculine machinery. Lord Selborne had said that they would be crammed in loose-boxes and taken over. When at first the long procession of pigtails and blue shirts appeared at Johannesburg they certainly seemed to be so much masculine machinery, so much cattle to be crammed into cattle-trucks at one port and unshipped at another.

But all delusions or illusions were soon destroyed.

It was found that the Chinaman actually thought for himself; that he had a sense of fair play, and that he was not prepared to work like a horse for a shilling or so a day.

The compounds in which these yellow slaves were herded together are pieces of land in close proximity to the mine, surrounded by a high fence, guarded by armed police. They look exactly what in fact they are—prisons, and nothing else. Hospitals have been erected in each of the compounds, and an ample supply of gods have been procured for the Chinamen, possibly as a set-off to the evangelistical zeal of the Rector of St. Mary's, for there is no knowing what a Chinaman might do if he became thoroughly inculcated with the doctrines of love and mercy which were preached in the Sermon on the Mount.

The compound in other respects is very like a village. No one can go into this village unless he has got some special business or has obtained a permit. These restrictions serve a double purpose. They prevent the possibility of a white man or a white woman being insulted by the slaves, and also put a check upon that inquiry into the treatment of the yellow men which the Rand lords are moving heaven and earth to baulk.

The huts in which labourers live are identical with those made for Kaffirs. They hold one or two, as the case may be.

The labourers have to work day and night in shifts of eight hours. When it is time for a batch of labourers to begin their shift, they are herded together and marched off to the mine, care being taken to keep them quite apart from the Kaffirs and whites.

At the pit mouth they are driven into the cage and dropped down into the bowels of the earth. When the cage is opened the Chinaman is driven out, and if he show some hesitation about leaving the cage, he is kicked out as if he were an animal. At least, that is the treatment to which they were at first subjected. Now, however, their treatment in the mine is hardly so severe. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the Chinaman now does his share of the "kicking." For example, on September 23 last, the Chinese at the Lancaster Mine attempted to murder the skipman by placing a beam in the path of the descending skip—a collision with which, as a writer in the Daily Mail lately pointed out, "would have sent the skip a drop of a thousand feet." The obstruction was noticed. When the skipman got out he was assaulted, but managed to escape.

The white overseer at first felt that instinctive fear of and dislike for the Chinaman that is peculiar to all Englishmen. He was one man against hundreds. In the majority of cases he had been bitterly opposed to the introduction of Chinese labour. He realized by the restrictions that had been placed by the Ordinance on the Chinamen that they were feared, and, in turn, he feared them himself. It was his duty to see that they worked. It was his duty to make them work. Unable to speak their language, instinctively disliking them, he used the only means of asserting his authority which came to his hands: that was generally a boot or a crowbar. Physical fear is the power by which nearly all primitive communities are ruled. The white races look upon the Chinamen as belonging to a primitive community, forgetting that they are the children of a civilization thousands of years older than any that exists in Europe.