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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Changing determinants of African mineworker mortality: Witwatersrand and the Copperbelt, 1911-1940
Author:Fetter, BruceISNI
Year:1993
Periodical:Civilisations
Volume:41
Issue:1-2
Pages:347-359
Language:English
Geographic terms:Congo (Democratic Republic of)
South Africa
Subjects:mortality
miners
External link:https://journals.openedition.org/civilisations/1721
Abstract:Comparison of the changing causes of death in two of Africa's largest mining companies can indicate both characteristics of the protean work forces and differences in company medical policies. Both the Corner House Group on the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the Union Minière in what was then Katanga (present-day Zaire) were reticent in reporting both the mortality levels among their African workers and the causes of death. This essay explores statistical data between 1911 and 1940 which throw additional light on the health consequences of early stages of the industrialization process in Africa. Mining operations were begun on the Witwatersrand in 1886, some 25 years before the beginning of copper mining in Katanga. In both companies, pneumonia was the single most important cause of death both in the early years and around 1930. For the first twenty years of their existence, crude death rates were far higher in the Union Minière camps than in the Corner House Group camps. Both companies made considerable advances in the care of their workers between the early 1910s and the 1930s, but mortality rates remained high. The failure was not so much one of medical technology as the unwillingness to spend sums necessary to clean up the mines as microenvironments. Reducing African mortality was not the highest priority of mining managers. Ref., sum. in French.
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