“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”: “Tropical Africans” on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1903–1904
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In May 1903, 380 Africans were recruited from British Central Africa (modern Malawi) by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association on one-year contracts to work in the gold mines. It was an experiment designed to test the potential for recruiting cheap black labor for the mines from the region north of the Zambesi. By the end of the contract period, more than a quarter of the men were either dead or permanently disabled. Their struggles to adapt to the harsh working conditions in the mines fueled a racist discourse among white South Africans about “Tropical Africans,” which focused on their supposed susceptibility to disease on the one hand, and their supposed “natural indolence” on the other. Notwithstanding these issues, the mine owners considered the experiment a success and moved rapidly to expand recruitment from the region in the years that followed. This article tells the story of this pioneering group of migrant workers, detailing their grim encounter with modernity and the power of capital in South Africa. It also suggests ways in which their experiences helped to determine the conditions of employment for the generations of migrant mineworkers that followed them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it