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Child labour in South African agriculture 1940-60
| South African agriculture has always been dependent on cheap labour provided by the black and coloured population of the country. In the political economy of South Africa, the state has made sure through various laws that black and coloured people have remained poor and prohibited to move freely. Child labour has played an important part in this system and children born on a farm have had little chance of leaving it. This paper focuses on the role of child labour in agriculture in the Cape Province during the1940’s and 50’s which was a crucial period for the future of South Africa. Industrialization and urbanization posed a great threat to white farmers who saw their labourers move to the cities or the mines in search of better lives.
Previous research has indicated that one of the main reasons why farm labourers left the farms was that there was no future for their children in the rural areas of South Africa. Therefore, with aid from the state, farmers started building so called farm schools for their workers’ children in the mid 1940’s in order to stop the migration from rural to urban areas. Once the Nationalist government took office in 1948 the system with farm schools was expanded further as a part of the Bantu Education Act which aimed at creating an undereducated working class. At the same time, these farm schools were used as labour reserves by farmers who could order the children to work at any given moment. Especially during labour intensive seasons this was common procedure. However, this paper suggests that since farm schools were concentrated in certain regions of the Cape, primarily the wool farming districts, the reasons why they were established are more complex than is stated in most of the existing literature on South African child labour. What this paper highlights are the effects that the growing industrialization of the country had on child labour in agriculture. As especially the textile industry expanded between 1940-60 this had an impact on the nature of wool farming which is the primary agricultural sector in the eastern parts of the Cape. Since the wool districts of the Cape also housed the highest number of farm schools there are strong links between the growing textile industry, mechanization of wool farming and child labour.
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