omy. Gold sales still account for roughly one-third of export earnings, even more when the world price is high. There are fifty or so working mines, controlled by seven gigantic mining houses. The gold industry is South Africa’s major employer, with 575,000 workers, all but 40,000 of whom are black. Each year, South Africa mines about half of the world’s gold. Klerksdorp is a small town in the western Transvaal that is situated on the edge of the prehistoric sea. Outside the town is the Hartebeestfontein gold mine, known simply as Harties. Aboveground, it seems insignificant: a small group of shedlike structures surrounded by heaps of whitish debris, and two towers, each less than one hundred feet high. There is nothing to suggest that the green wheels atop the towers lower elevator cages more than one and one-half miles down into the earth, into a vast underground city that employs twenty thousand people and uses 1,600 large scraper units, 225 small locomotives, 109 mechanical loaders, 1,800 hoppers, and 1,487 deafening rock drills. The Chamber of Mines, the coordinating body for the industry, sponsors guided tours of certain mines—partly to respond to public curiosity and partly to present its controversial labor policies in the best possible light. At Harties, we began the tour with a trip underground. The visitors—all of us were white—donned protective clothing, hard hats, and lamps. Elevator cages, clanking in the rush of air, relayed us down through the darkness to one of the working levels. The descent only took a few minutes. A series of guides, all of them white mining officials, directed us through the dimly lit tunnels to one of the “work-places,” where the “reef,” or gold ore, was barely visible as a thin, jagged line, faintly brownish. The Chamber’s publicists have produced a vivid and often quoted description: “Imagine a solid mass of rock tilted ... like a fat, 1,200-page dictionary, lying at an angle. The gold-bearing reef would be thinner than a single page, and the amount of gold contained therein would hardly cover a couple of commas in the entire book. . . . The ‘page’ has been twisted and torn by nature’s forces, and pieces of it may have been thrust between other leaves of the book.” The miners, working miles underground, have to trace the elusive reef and remove it with close to surgical precision. Our guide indicated a workplace where several black miners were drilling deep holes next to the reef, following markings in red paint. The workplace was low, which forced the miners to lie flat on their backs, aiming the drill slightly upward. They were impassive despite the ferocious noise. The guide reassured us that the drill was not particularly taxing to operate. The guide explained that later a white miner, who had a “blasting ticket,” a certificate that only whites are allowed to earn, would fill the holes with explosive charges. The mine would be cleared, and blasting would start at the deepest working level and continue upward. Then, more black miners would shovel the bro- ken-up reef into a linked network of mechanical scrapers and narrow-gauge railroad hoppers. It would then be transported to one of the elevator shafts to be hoisted to the extraction plant on the surface. The gold content is surprisingly low; one metric ton of ore yields only eleven to twelve grams, or just over four tenths of an ounce. As the supervisor guided us through the network of tunnels, groups of black miners, wearing hard hats with headlamps, white overalls, and heavy boots, glanced sideways impassively. Their faces glistened in the faint light from the naked bulbs. The supervisor arrived at two pressure doors, which were part of the ventilation system that keeps air circulating through the mine. “Vula," he grunted at the black doorkeeper, speaking in Fanakalo, the pidgin language of mining. “Open.” The door hissed slowly, emitting a strong gust of wind. Our touring party passed through. "Vala.” It started to close. The doorkeeper turned, revealing that he had stencilled across the back of his white overalls: “Vula- Vala.” Back on the surface, we visited the training school, which was under the aegis of de Villiers, a middle-aged man who talked almost as rapidly as an auctioneer. “First, I teach all the new men Fanakalo,” he said. “They come from all over southern Africa. They are Mozam- biques, Rhodesians, there are all the ethnic groups of our own Republic people. They speak more than 10 different lanThe gold industry is South Africa’s major employer, with 575,000 workers, all but 40,000 of whom are black. Each year, South Africa mines about half of the world’s gold. guages, We have to communicate with them, and they have to be able to talk to each other. With my methods, I can teach them in three or four days.” De Villiers verbally rushed ahead, not pausing to mention that only an extravagant definition would include Fanakalo as a “language.” It is a pidgin, suited only for rudimentary commands. You cannot imagine someone using it to discuss, for instance, the subtleties of trade unionism or politics. He described how he gives tests to divide black recruits into “the leaders, the mechanicals, and the lower class.” He vigorously shepherded us over to a “leader” identification test that he had invented himself. A half-dozen black men, each wearing a different colored hard hat, stood around a jumble of large wooden slabs, which de Villiers explained were the pieces of a gigantic puzzle. “There is a way to do this,” de Villiers said conspiratorially to us. “But I’m not interested in whether they finish it. I’m going to watch their leadership qualities. I want to see who takes charge. We need good leaders to bring obedience into the others.” He signalled the men to begin. They rushed around attempting with partial success to fit the unwieldly wooden pieces together. After five minutes, he merrily called time and invited us to comment. There followed a brief discussion about the relative degrees of initiative displayed by “red hat,” “green hat,” and the others. De Villiers said he was proud of this particular group. “They carried on,” he explained happily. "Others sometimes give up and say, ‘Let’s go ask the baas.”’ As the tourists talked and gestured, the black men waited, well within earshot. A couple of them gave brief, flickering glares of resentment. Their sidelong glances were just barely detectable. We continued on to one of the hostels, the single-sex compounds where virtually all black miners live for ten or eleven months a year. This, the newest of four at the mine, was an octagonal complex housing four thousand men, with twenty to a room. The place had the masculine, regimented feel of an army base. Hundreds of men moved along the paths between the various buildings; the day shift had apparently just completed work. There was not a single woman in sight. The hostel superintendent was a flinty white man caller Verster. One of his favorite words was “traditional.” He sounded like an amateur anthropologist as he used it frequently in reference to the habits of his charges. Verster first led us to one of the hostel rooms. It was clean and bright, with ten double bunk-beds lined up along the brick walls. A few curtains had been placed strategically, evidently to provide a little privacy. “All the men in each room are from the same tri—er, ethnic group,” Verster caught himself. “They like stay- ing together that way—it’s their tradition.” We arrived at the immense dining hall just as a section of the day shift poured in. The men moved through the serving line at a dogtrot, stretching out their enamel plates for the food. They were almost all between eighteen and thirty- five years old. Verster, with a tone of concern like the manager of a livestock feedlot, encouraged the visitors to inspect the provisions. “There’s the mielie meal,” he said, gesturing toward a metal vat that was big enough to pour molten steel. “That’s their traditional food. Further along are vegetables and fruits. They get meat twice a week. We make sure they have two thousand, eight-hundred and fifty calories a day. The kitchen is open twenty-four hours, so they come when they want.” The long line of miners continued jogging along. Servers ladled the food into plates like fast-paced robots. Most of the men ignored the visitors; a couple of older ones genuflected slightly toward Verster. One woman tourist approved eagerly of the cleanliness. “I’ve seen dirtier boarding schools,” she said. Verster nodded in happy agreement. He led the way to the beer hall. “They get one and one-quarter liters of sorghum beer a day for free. That’s their traditional drink. They can of course buy more, at a subsidized price.” Then, the medical clinic. “We insist they go, even with just a little scratch,” he explained. His solicitude for the men’s health is no doubt strengthened by the desire of his superiors to avoid lost man-days and injury compensation payments. He next indicated an open-air cinema. “They have films four times a week. They have several TV sets. They have soccer, athletics. On weekends, they do their tribal dancing—that's traditional to the blacks.” A huge, uniformed black man was stationed at the hostel gate, checking the documents and the parcels of the miners as they entered. “They come and go as they like,” Verster emphasized. “The policeboy is just there to protect them, to keep out weapons and unauthorized people.” At the gate, Verster gestured back toward the mammoth complex with a proud, proprietary air. “They like it here,” he assured us. “When they come back, or go to work on another mine, the setup isn’t strange. It’s traditional for them.” Verster had unwittingly used the word properly for the first time. A system of work that requires most of the workers to be away from their families for most of the year may sound unnatural. But after nearly a century in southern Africa, it is, in fact, traditional. The mine supervisors hosted a luncheon at the nearby Klerksdorp Club. No workers, black or white, were present. One of the tourists, a stockbroker from Britain, apologetically ventured a question about a report he had seen in the morning Johannesburg newspaper. Some ten thousand black workers at the President Steyn mine further south in the Free State had stopped work and rioted against the introduction of a new pension plan. Police had killed at least one miner when they stormed into the compounds to quell the uprising. The Harties officials had been stupefied by the news. One of them said, in a wounded tone: “The new pension plan is an improvement. I don’t see how they can possible object to this benefit we’re giving them.” Som e months later, I described my tour to my friend Eric McCabe, a white former miner in his late thirties. He grinned happily at my descriptions: “You were probably on the doctored level for visitors. Nicely painted. Well lit. Plenty of fresh air. Not too hot or cold. On the next level, okes [guys] might be working at a hundred degrees, with dry ice packs strapped to their bodies to keep them cool.” Eric laughed. “We used to trick the tourists, when they were going underground in the lift cage. The guy running it in the control room throws it into fast forward. The emergency brakes lock. But there’s give in the cable, so it doesn’t snap. It stretches. The miners in the cage expect it to kick up and down, but the tourists don’t know what’s happening. The cage bounces there in the shaft like a yo-yo for a while. The tourists are as confused as chameleons in a Smartie box [a type of candy that comes in many colors]. They’re all sick. They’re really fucked. 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