The industrial Panopticon: Mining and the medical construction of migrant African labour in South Africa, 1900–1950

Derived from a marxist/liberal humanist view of power, conventional critiques of the South African gold mining industryʹs medical apparatus see only its power to repress and negate the true bodily attributes and authentic person of the African mine worker. In so doing, they ignore the productive capacity of medical practice as a manifestation of what Foucault termed “disciplinary” power, by which the human body is manufactured and made manageable as an object of medical knowledge and industrial utilization. Accordingly, this paper offers just such a Foucaultian reading of South African mining medicine to demonstrate how it has operated to fabricate the bodies of African miners as visible objects possessed of distinct attributes that provoked particular strategies for their surveillance in health and disease.