22/06/2026
Most South Africans πΏπ¦ Don't Want To Hear This but, This Is How Empty Johannesburg Was Before Foreigners Came ! It Was Like A Desert then Our Forefathers Came and build it " ("Wenala"),
When gold was discovered in Johannesburg in 1886, it triggered a labor demand that the local South African population alone couldn't meet (due to low wages and dangerous conditions).
The Chamber of Mines established the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) widely known as Wenela to cast a massive recruitment net across the subcontinent.
Men were recruited by the hundreds of thousands from Mozambique π²πΏ , Lesotho π±πΈ , Malawi π²πΌ (then Nyasaland), Zimbabwe πΏπΌ (then Southern Rhodesia) and Botswana π§πΌ .This system kept men away from their families for 12 to 18 month contracts, housing them in single-sex mine compounds.
The wealth of Johannesburg was quite literally built on the cheap, exploited labor of these regional neighbors.
Basotho men from Lesotho became legendary for their highly specialized, incredibly dangerous skill in shaft-sinking blasting and digging the vertical tunnels thousands of meters into the earth before the main mining teams could even begin.
This migration issue started almost 150 years ago.