Tribal recreation and recreating tribalism: culture, leisure and social control on South Africa's gold mines, 1940–1950

This paper is about the links between culture, leisure and social control on South Africa's gold mines. Based on a series of reports commissioned by the Chamber of Mines in the 1940s, it explores attempts by the industry to retribalise migrant workers using sport and leisure and thus forms one chapter in the broader attempts by the state and capital to shape the culture of Africans in twentieth century South Africa. The paper also makes a contribution to an under‐researched area of inquiry: the relationship between culture, social control and sport in urban South Africa. The first section of this paper sets the scene of recreation on the mines by examining the early efforts of WNLA and a few mines in recreation. The second section explores the emergence of a new phase in the Chamber of Mines’ policy on sport and leisure following the Lansdown Commission and the 1946 strike. In the final section of the paper, a series of reports which were produced in the aftermath of the 1946 strike are considered. Here, we focus on the way in which these reports reflected the links between culture and social control in the gold mining industry's cultural strategy of controlling and ‘retribalising’ migrant workers.