Scripting the Compound: Power and Space in the South African Mining Industry

Abstract

In this paper the discursive construction of South Africa's quintessential institution of labour coercion and control—the mine compound—is explored. Popular and academic narratives of the origins, spread, and role of the compound are traced, with particular attention to the scripts of marxists, social historians, and poststructuralists. I argue that underlying each is a set of spatial images which powerfully constrains what is admissible to the narrative. Recent attempts to resituate the compound as a fluid ensemble of power geometries are highlighted through a review of the interior spatiality and cultural life of the compound and its connections to its immediate surrounds and the distant countryside. The aim is an empowering narrative which centres migrant cultural resistance and helps to explain the dramatic reordering of the mine landscape since the mid-1980s.