Once Upon a Time

Gordimer depicts the white characters who focus on their personal possessions as parallel to the South African government, which exploited generations of workers through the mining industry. The lucrative diamond and gold mining industries fueled practices that disenfranchised Indigenous and other Black workers. In the early 1900s, when South Africa was primarily agricultural, the government imposed poll taxes and hut taxes on the rural population that compelled men to seek work in the mines. Laws prohibited Black workers from moving to the growing cities and they therefore became a migrant labor force. The Urban Areas Native Pass Act (1909) issued passes to Black workers, allowing them up to six days in the cities to seek work before they had to return to their villages. Day-long commutes and difficulty finding work often led workers to overstay their allotted six days outside the village, leading to many of them being arrested.

Members of the white apartheid government created laws and policies to ensure a permanent underclass of mine workers. Mine work was low-paying and dangerous but abandoning one’s job was a criminal offense. The Native Lands Act of 1913 excluded Indigenous people from buying or renting land outside of areas delineated by the government, which became known as homelands. The available lands were less than 10% of the country’s territory, though Black South Africans comprised over 70% of the population and many were indigenous to the lands European-descended Afrikaners colonized. The Mines and Works Act of 1911 and its 1926 amendments restricted Black people’s job mobility further by limiting skilled trade positions to white workers and, in some cases, to those considered “Coloured.”

Mine work kept male heads of households away from their farms, families, and communities for weeks at a time, which led to rural underdevelopment. The mining industry undermined the Black population, withholding social security from them by designating mine workers as ineligible part-time laborers. The dangerous work environment, unhealthy living conditions, high mortality rates, and brutal security created the vast system of inequality necessary for the South African government to consolidate its wealth and political control by keeping its Black population impoverished and often literally underground.

The white characters’ constant fear of robbery in “Once Upon a Time” acts as commentary on the relationship between white personal wealth and exploitative labor performed by Black workers. The narrator’s house is built over an old mine. The noises it causes below her house lead her to fear that someone—implicitly a member of the Black working class that included miners—will intrude into her home to steal from her. The irony in this scenario is that the mining system and government limitations on Black work, mobility, and income have already robbed the Black population of the personal wealth and security that the narrator and the family in her fairy tale still possess.