Cash hut and poll taxes forced rural Africans into wage labor

Evidence

Local and not so local labor poured forth, keen to cash in on working opportunities and secreted gold, helped along by the introduction of cash taxes on rural huts and polls that forced them to seek wage work. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1452

By the outbreak of World War I, the Rand mines were producing fully 40 percent of the world’s gold output. Heterogeneity and perhaps with it heterodoxy were the city’s mark. The glitter of gold reeled in wealth seekers from across the country and all across Europe. Local and not so local labor poured forth, keen to cash in on working opportunities and secreted gold, helped along by the introduction of cash taxes on rural huts and polls that forced them to seek wage work. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1452

Categorization

• XREF: Classic colonial/labor coercion mechanism, echoes of the enclosure movements and other tax-to-wage-labor compulsion cases.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1452