Hut and poll taxes drove black South African men into migrant mine labor
Evidence
The promotion of migrant labor flows by the colonial state in South Africa in the late nineteenth century, through the imposition of hut and poll cash taxes, drove black men from the land to seek work in mining, secondary industry, and urban domestic settings. Rural women were left to tend for children, agriculture, and the rural homestead, with devastating effects on family units. Urban black women were driven mainly into domestic labor, menial manufacturing jobs, managing shebeens (illegal home bars), or prostitution, reduced almost invariably to servicing whites and men. The statutory restriction of mixed marriages throughout the southern United States until 1968 principally affected black women, effectively restricting them from claiming paternity support for the children fathered by white men as a result of rape and coercion. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1662
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: The tax-driven migrant labor system parallels the enclosure-driven English peasant dispossession and the later pass system described in apartheid histories.
- CANDY: The anti-miscegenation law detail — black women barred from claiming paternity support for children fathered by white rapists — is a sharp, quotable illustration of how racist law operated.