traditional
policy of the use of migrant labour on the gold-mines, accommodated in
compounds, which has been advocated consistently by the Gold Producers'
Committee, has the approval of the Department of Native Affairs.
But, as the official letter of September 1953 continues:
As
a special concession, Native personnel, who are employed on a permanent
basis because of specialized training and experience and who arc
required to be continuously on the mine property, may be accommodated
in a limited number of married quarters on each mine. No foreign
Natives may be permitted this privilege and they may under no
circumstances be allowed to import their families.
The
general principle laid down in this and subsequent correspondence was
an absolute limit of 3 per cent of the total Native labour complement
of any mine and it 'must be clearly understood that the department
will only agree to additional married quarters up to the said 3 per
cent when it is satisfied that the extension of the concession is fully
justified by the circumstances of each case'.
Though
the opposition of Government thwarted the efforts of Ernest Oppenheimer
and Anglo American Corporation to create rnining villages for the
married Native labour force in the Orange Free State, Ernest
Oppenheimer was yet able, in the penultimate year of his life, to
assist powerfully in an effort to improve housing conditions for the
Native population in the Johannesburg area. Living conditions in
certain Native areas were admittedly appallingly bad, and it was the
reading of Father Trevor Huddleston's Naught for your comfort—a
brilliant piece of propaganda, which Ernest Oppenheimer, 'like most
South Africans. . . considered biased and unfair and . . . gave an
untrue impression of conditions in South Africa'—which nevertheless
'led him to wish to come and see again for himself the conditions under
which our urban African population was living',101 and
indirectly led to a scheme by which the mining houses placed a sum of
-£3 million at the disposal of the Johannesburg City Council for slum
clearance. Dr. Boris Wilson, M.P.C., first proposed the scheme, but the
part played by Ernest Oppenheimer can be gathered from a letter sent to
him by Dr. Wilson on 17 August 1956:
It
is impossible to really put down in print my thanks to you for the
wonderful way in which you reacted to my proposal to you for a loan of
-£3 million to remove the slums. What makes it even more remarkable is
101
All these citations are from a speech delivered by Harry Oppenheimer on
11 March 1958, when a memorial tower, a tribute to his father, was
unveiled by him.
