On Langston Hughes's ‘Johannesburg Mines’

In ‘Johannesburg Mines’ (1925) the African American poet Langston Hughes poses a question about the challenge of representing the experience of African labour in the subterranean world of South Africa’s mining industry:

In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.

What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?

240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines.1

The question that forms the second verse of this short poem might be taken to imply that the poem itself is unfinished; this question may, in other words, be interpreted as a challenge to readers to make a poem out of the numerical figure cited in the second and seventh lines. On the other hand, this second verse might be understood as a rhetorical question, which implies that the scale and magnitude of African labour in the Johannesburg mines cannot be represented within the literary form of a poem. The number 240,000 could be read as ‘faceless statistics’,2 or an abstract figure of such magnitude that it is difficult to comprehend let alone to convey in the language of poetry. For this reason, it is perhaps tempting to read the poem and its central question as a meta-poetic comment on the limits of poetry as a rhetorical vehicle for promoting political change. And yet by framing the figure of 240,000 Africans working in South Africa’s mines, Hughes’ speaker also suggests that poetry offers a particular rhetorical form that can interrupt the allegorical machinery of abstraction that underpins the smooth functioning of capital accumulation. Such a reading is hinted at in Mark Whalan’s claim that the poem’s ‘very simplicity registers less as aesthetic failure than as a principled refusal to smooth the brutal statistics of the racial order of imperial capital into the euphonious or metaphorical registers of beauty or complexity’.3 By repeating this numerical figure, the speaker questions the use of statistics to naturalise economic inequality and race-labour exploitation in mainstream print journalism and political discourse.

The ‘specific’ number of 240,000 workers may not be ‘precise’, and it may seem ‘less at home in a poem than in a newspaper or magazine article about the South African economy and labour conditions’, as Jonathan Flatley argues.4 But fidelity to the empirical details of official historical sources is not the main concern of ‘Johannesburg Mines’. Against the depersonalizing logic of the demographic data one might encounter in the annual reports of South Africa’s Chamber of Mines, the poem invites readers to consider the singular historical experience of gold mining that these statistics denote. Anne Boyer makes a similar point when she asserts that the poem ‘does not sentimentalize the suffering of colonized workers in the name of politics and likewise does not aestheticize this suffering in the name of art’; for Boyer, Hughes ‘resolutely does not forget these workers or allow them to be forgotten’.5 As a condensed poetic mediation of race-labour history, ‘Johannesburg Mines’ offers a counterpoint to the representation of gold as a magical substance with a fixed value in relation to which the value of other international currencies are defined.

The numerical figure of 240,000 Africans working in the Johannesburg mines foregrounds how the systemic exploitation, suffering, and dehumanisation of African mining workers, which enabled the extraction of gold on an unprecedented scale,6 is erased by the allegorical transformation of South Africa’s gold into what was, at the time of the poem’s first publication, the abstract form of a universal equivalent. In the act of reversing the syntax of the first verse, the final verse creates a chiasmus. This poetic device may on a first reading appear to point to the poem’s ‘failure to change the situation’ of the African workers in the mines.7 And yet the inverted syntax of the final verse also foregrounds the collective subject and activity of working rather than the urban location of this subterranean commodity frontier. By highlighting the number of African labourers working in South Africa’s mines, Hughes’ speaker begins to demystify the fetishization of South African gold, and the abstraction of mining capital from the dangerous and exhausting physical labour that was necessary to extract gold-ore deposits from the deep-level mines of the Witwatersrand gold reef.

If Hughes’ injunction to imagine the scale of race-labour exploitation in South Africa’s gold mines is articulated in the form of a short poem, it also raises wider questions about politics and aesthetics that are particularly germane to the concerns of this chapter. What ‘kind’ of literary or artistic forms are appropriate to address the specific historical experience of racial capitalism in the commodity frontier of South Africa’s gold mines? How might we read the particular formal and generic combinations at work in specific cultural representations of South African gold mining as complex allegories of racial extractivism that make the relationship between settler-colonial policies of dispossession, race-labour exploitation in South Africa’s commodity frontiers, and the socio-economic history of gold intelligible?8 And how might these representations of the disenchanted world of gold mining express a utopian desire for an alternative world that is not subordinated to these socio-economic forces? Through a series of readings of cultural texts including the poetry of Langston Hughes, B.W. Vilakazi and Ingrid de Kok, the mixed media visual art of William Kentridge, and the fiction of Peter Abrahams, Jayne Bauling, and Imraan Coovadia, this chapter traces a vacillation between allegory and counter-allegory across the work of these writers and artists, which serves to register and to contest the underground world of extractivism that is covered over in the fetishisation of gold as both a transcendental signifier of value and a medium of economic exchange.9 By doing so, it suggests that these texts and artworks illuminate the racial-extractivist unconscious of a modern political economy that was mediated through the valorisation of gold as a general equivalent.

Studies in the political economy and economic history of South Africa’s gold mining industry emphasise how the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand coincided with the transition of the world economy to a global monetary system based on the gold standard. Russell Ally examines how a special relationship developed between the Bank of England, the City of London, and South Africa’s gold producers from 1886 until 1926. For Ally, the Bank of England’s disposal of South African gold was key to its hegemonic position in the world economy during this period: the ‘interchangeability of sterling and gold placed the Bank of England […] in the unique position of being “the regulator of the gold standard and the international payments system’”.10 That ‘all the leading mining houses were registered on the London stock exchange, raised most of their capital in the London money market, and had their head offices […] in London’11 certainly helped to consolidate the Bank of England’s power over the gold standard during this period. Of these mining houses, the refiner and bullion broker N.M. Rothschild and Sons ‘dealt with the bulk of South Africa’s gold’, which ‘consisted in delivering refined bars of gold to the Bank of England, and receiving from the Bank the fixed statutory price’.12

After the First World War, a weakened Sterling, the declining position of the City of London, and the establishment of a refinery, a mint, and a central reserve bank in South Africa signalled the end of Britain’s imperial control over South African gold. This account of the relationship between the Bank of England and South Africa’s mining houses certainly helps to illuminate the importance of South African gold mining to the vicissitudes of Britain’s imperial hegemony in the world economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing exclusively on the relationship between the Bank of England and the gold producers and exporters in the Transvaal, however, Ally overlooks the importance of cheap African labour power to the extraction of South African gold, both during and after this period. The fixed price of gold on the international market limited the ability of South Africa’s gold producers to cover the costs of development and overheads, which had increased with the shift from placer mining (the process of sifting gold deposits from sand or gravel in a prospector’s pan) to lode or hard-rock gold mining (the process of extracting gold from gold-bearing ore in underground mines).13 Pyrite crystals, which bound gold ore to conglomerate rock at depths below 120 metres, presented a further obstacle to mining. This ostensibly insurmountable technological challenge affected investor confidence in South African gold, until the development of two new mining techniques: first, the use of gelatine-based explosives to extract gold-ore from deep underground; second, the introduction of a cyanide-based leeching process to separate the gold from the ore.

Despite these short-term technological challenges, and the relatively low concentrations of gold found in South Africa’s mines, the importance of gold to the international financial market during the era of the gold standard meant that there was an unlimited demand for gold.14 To meet this international demand for gold while keeping production costs low in order to maximise profits, South African mining companies exploited a cheap labour force constituted of indentured workers, Chinese migrants, and displaced Africans that it gradually proletarianized through disciplinary measures such as the dispossession of rural land, taxation, the use of pass laws, and mining compound housing. The Gold Law of the South African Republic (1886) made the racialized logic of mining capitalism explicitly clear. Section 76 of this act declared that, ‘No coloured person, Coolie, or Chinese can hold a licence or be in any capacity engaged in working the goldfields, other than in the service of white men [sic]’.15 By criminalizing people of colour found to be ‘selling, bartering, receiving or disposing of rough precious metals or uncut precious stones’, and threatening anyone found transgressing this law with a punishment of flogging and a minimum prison term of twelve months, with or without hard labour,16 this statute formalized a coercive race-labour system in the gold mines of Witwatersrand. This relationship between mining capital and the exploitation of cheap racialized labour in South Africa may have been contingent upon the specific social history and geography of Southern Africa, as many commentators have argued.17 Yet the number of African workers forced into the gold mines of Transvaal illustrates how South Africa’s mining companies increasingly came to depend on this coercive system of race-labour, in order to continue exporting gold on the international market.

In the face of this increasingly coercive and discriminatory system, the central question in Langston Hughes’ poem raises a further question about the public use of language as a medium for political representation in organised labour struggles. The publication of ‘Johannesburg Mines’ in the February 1925 issue of the African-American magazine, The Messenger, offers some insights into the specific political conjuncture of the poem. As well as being the organ of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, a labour union that campaigned to improve the working conditions of African-American railroad workers employed by Pullman, the Messenger employed its own Southern African correspondent, the Malawian founder of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) Clements Kadalie.18 Kadalie had written articles on the history of the formation of the ICU during the Cape Town dock strike of 1919 and the Port Elizabeth strike of 1920, as well as the refusal of white miners to recognise the rights and dignity of African workers during the Rand Revolt of 1922. In an article published in the September 1923 issue of The Messenger, Kadalie declared:

We are steadily marching on day by day. Branches are being opened in all the industrial and agricultural centers, but the great mines of the Transvaal are still unorganized. We shall have to penetrate to these mines. We shall continue to agitate until the last black worker of Africa has been admitted into the solid bond of unity. Then the millions of the African proletariat shall produce no more for a few shillings per day, but they shall have a strong voice in the management of all industries.19

This transnational network of labour organising shows how Hughes’ poem intervened in a Pan-African discourse of international solidarity that raised public consciousness about the challenges of African labour organising against racial capitalism in the settler-colonial context of South Africa. If Kadalie’s article defined the unionisation of African mineworkers in Transvaal as an urgent political task for the ICU, Hughes’ poem implies without explicitly stating that the power of organised race-labour struggles against South African mining capitalism lies in the number of African workers employed in the Johannesburg mines. By insisting that the labour power of 240,000 Africans cannot be transcoded into monetary value (and thereby forgotten), the poem refuses the allegorical logic that underpins capitalist abstraction. By repeating this statistical figure, the speaker also enjoins readers to imagine the harsh physical labour and dangerous conditions that each individual worker has to endure. This act of repeating the allegorical logic of abstraction that is codified in the registers of mining company account books and the published reports of the Chamber of Mines does not only foreground the conjuncture of racial capitalism and extractivism in South Africa’s mines; it also invites readers to consider the possibility of coordinated political action by the African miners themselves. On this reading, ‘the kind of poem’ that Hughes’ speaker calls for may not be a poem in the conventional sense, but rather a political slogan or a rallying cry for African miners to mobilise against their increasingly oppressive and dangerous working conditions.