from the gold mining companies collected by the historian Francis Wilson show that this decline was widespread in the South African economy as a whole. Following the Natives Land Act and other legislation, miners’ wages fell by 30 percent between 1911 and 1921. In 1961, despite relatively steady growth in the South African economy, these wages were still 12 percent lower than they had been in 1911. No wonder that over this period South Africa became the most unequal country in the world.
But even in these circumstances, couldn’ t black Africans have made their way in the European, modern economy, started a business, or have become educated and begun a career? The government made sure these things could not happen. No African was allowed to own property or start a business in the European part of the economy— the 87 percent of the land. The Apartheid regime also realized that educated Africans competed with whites rather than supplying cheap labor to the mines and to white-owned agriculture. As early as 1904 a system of job reservation for Europeans was introduced in the mining economy. No African was allowed to be an amalgamator, an assayer, a banksman, a blacksmith, a boiler maker, a brass finisher, a brassmolder, a bricklayer … and the list went on and on, all the way to woodworking machinist. At a stroke, Africans were banned from occupying any skilled job in the mining sector. This was the first incarnation of the famous“ colour bar,” one of the several racist inventions of South Africa’ s regime. The colour bar was extended to the entire economy in 1926, and lasted until the 1980s. It is not surprising that black Africans were uneducated; the South African state not only removed the possibility of Africans benefiting economically from an education but also refused to invest in black schools and discouraged black education. This policy reached its peak in the 1950s, when, under the leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of the Apartheid regime that would last until 1994, the government passed the Bantu Education Act. The philosophy behind this act was bluntly spelled out by Verwoerd himself in a speech in 1954:
The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community in all respects. There is no place