NEIL MACVICAR (? - ?)

The great majority of able-bodied men in the reserves leave their homes for long periods of work at the mines, docks and elsewhere. Many return in good health. Some return with scurvy, some with developing tuberculous disease, a few---not many in my experience---with venereal disease. Others do not return; they stay on at the labour centre, usually Johannesburg , and their families are left without support. This labour system is inevitable as the people cannot exist upon their small land holdings. But an absentee father cannot establish a firm home, and both morals and health suffer from the resulting social disorganization and lack of parental discipline. Native girls who go to domestic service in towns often return to their homes with venereal disease. Native parents have good reason for the dread they feel about allowing their daughters to go to work in towns. In some cases poverty compels them to go; in other cases the girls run away from their homes to seek the excitements of town life. On their return with disease they are liable to infect their families. Those Natives---now a large number---who have no land are in an exceedingly difficult position, because in a town their expenditure (rent, food, clothing) are on one scale, whereas their income, their wage, is on an entirely different and much lower scale. They are paid as Natives but they have to buy as White people. It is only when several members of a family are able to work that the household expenses can be met. Economy in rent leads to overcrowding; economy in food to malnutrition and a heavy death-rate; mothers going out to work means children neglected. It does not seem possible, except perhaps in the case of housing as already indicated, to reduce the cost of living for Natives. The only remedy would seem to be to increase the wages. At present, speaking generally, the Native labourer is not getting a subsistence wage. Health conditions are depressed by poverty.

-Neil Macvicar, “Health Conditions among the South African Natives”, in Christianity and the Natives of South Africa , compiled and edited by James Dexter Taylor, Lovedale Press, 1928.