The Transvaal Labour ‘Problem’ and the Chinese Solution

Abstract

Why then were 63,695 Chinese labourers imported into the Transvaal when the other ‘white’ colonies were in the process of restricting Asian migration? To answer this question it is necessary to examine how the transnational issues played out in the previous chapter developed within the local context of the Transvaal just after Britain had won the South African War. The whole issue reflected southern Africa’s position at the crossroads of African and settler colony policies and beliefs. On the one hand there was the ‘civilising mission’ to Africans and a need to promote colonial financial interests through encouraging African labour. On the other hand there was a concern about whether southern Africa could ever be a ‘white colony’, with such a large African population. ‘It is nonsense to speak of South Africa as a white man’s country at present in the same sense that Australia is. She has millions of aborigines, while the white number only as many hundred thousands’, wrote one worried British South African.¹ Even if ‘whites’ were more united, they only made up a small fraction of the overall population, and yet British colonial policies specifically focused on turning the region into a ‘white’ colony.