Compound is the term used for an enclosure in which native employes are kept. As many as 3,000 to 4,000 kafirs work in some of the mines. From the mine they go to the compound, where a bunk is provided, a place to make a fire, and food is furnished. They are not allowed outside the enclosure at night, but on Sundays and holidays most of them are free. Tact has to be exercised when assigning kafirs to their quarters and to working mates, as a hostile feeling exists between certain tribes. If members of unfriendly clans be not kept apart, fights and murders often occur.
Weasel-eyed, idle, easy living Europeans are found in considerable numbers in mining districts. Were the natives allowed their liberty in the evening, it would result in their complete demoralization, for the crafty gentry would succeed in getting bad whisky or vicious rum into the compounds, receiving a big price for the poison, in addition to offering inducements to the "boys" to pilfer nuggets or heavy-bearing gold quartz.
"Scarcity of help, scarcity of help," is the cry of mine owners in South Africa. Sharp competition prevails between mining companies for "boys," and it is a scarcity of this class of labor to which they allude. A European trader may have the confidence of natives in the district in which his store is located, and when help is wanted labor agents call on the merchant. When a trader induces natives to go to the mines, the firm to which they have been sent will pay him $15 for each "boy" as a bonus. If the company failed to pay the bonus, it would thereafter get very few "boys" from that trader's district. In thickly populated centers like Kaffraria a dealer may control as many as 1,000 natives. In such instances companies pay him an income of from $100 to $125 a month, in addition to the $15 a head, in order to keep in his good graces. If a "boy" should engage to work for the shorter term—six months—and rehire at the end of the term, the trader from whose district the kafir originally came would be sent an additional sum of $15. Where labor agents deal with native chiefs for mine "boys," the chief expects a "bonsella" of $2.50 for every "boy" leaving his district to work in the mines. With bonuses, clothes, car fare and other incidentals, it costs the mine company from $25 to $30 to get a "boy" from the kraal to the works. Mine owners claim they pay out a quarter of a million dollars a year in bonuses for native help. It is also claimed that the mining industry could not be conducted at a profit with all white labor.
Twenty-one thousand graves in Braamfontein Cemetery, a great many of these containing two corpses, strongly emphasizes the terrible toll of human life paid to King Gold in the Transvaal mines. This is but one European graveyard, as there are several smaller burying places in the Johannesburg district. Besides those in which only Dutch and English are buried, there are Jewish, Malay and Mohammedan graveyards scattered about the city. Braamfontein Cemetery is filled, and a new one is filling fast. This appalling mortality has taken place during the past 30 years.
Eighty-nine open graves—mound after mound in as regular order as are boards in a floor—is a gruesome setting that forces one to cast a sad glance at the clouds of black smoke pouring out of the hundreds of smokestacks on the great Gold Reef, and at the gray-colored cyanide banks that half encircle the city of Johannesburg. These unbroken rows of freshly dug graves were in the European section of Brixton graveyard, and at the other end of the large burying ground—the native section—eighty freshly dug graves presented a grim foreground.
"Bubonic plague?" the reader may ask. No, phthisis.
Eighty in a thousand of ordinary miners, and 140 in a thousand of workers using underground drilling machines, are affected with phthisis. As gold-bearing rock is being blasted all the time, miners inhale the fine dust during working hours. Respirators, a device covering the nose and mouth, having a sponge at the mouth, and two openings at the side covered with a fine wire screen to admit of air, are worn by some of the workers, but, as it proves cumbersome, a great many miners discard that life-extending invention. Phthisis here signifies the drying up of the lungs. The dust inhaled settles in the cells of the lungs, with the appalling result mentioned.
Seven years is the average lifetime of the Rand miner. On the headstones in Braamfontein Cemetery, carved in granite, most of the ages are found to be in the twenties and thirties. Few stones observed bore ages of 40 years and over.
The average number of burials in Johannesburg is ten a day; Europeans average four and natives six. People not engaged in underground work, and not connected with the mines in any capacity, also become affected with phthisis. As on American prairies, the wind blows on the veld nearly all the time, and generally with considerable force; hence the air is full of dust from the powder-crushed cyanide banks.
Priest, preacher and missionary may be seen at cemetery gates all the time, more particularly in the afternoons.