It’s been a while, in fact since September 2025, that I have posted anything on my website. Despite the long pause I am still here and thinking about many things although mostly not related to health! In the interim, my daughter and her family spent almost a month with us on a visit from Scotland where they have settled and lived for the past 6 years since emigrating to that country. I have Scottish ancestry as my grandfather, who was coal miner, left Scotland for South Africa after his father and elder brother died in a coal mine accident at the Kinnedar Colliery in Dunfermline in 1895. He told me as a young boy that he felt compelled to leave Scotland before he too “died in a pit”, the Scottish name for a mine. The mine accident left his mother and sisters destitute as there was no subsequent compensation from the mine owners. A reflection of the reality of the harsh conditions that faced the working classes in Scotland and elsewhere in the United Kingdom at the time and indeed which persisted for decades thereafter. My grandfather supported them financially, in addition to his own family, from South Africa until their passing years later.
My daughter lives in the Scottish Highlands where in the 18th and 19th century there were brutal “land clearances” when hundreds of thousand of people were violently displaced by land owners to make way for more profitable large scale sheep farming. The result was the destruction many crofts, small rented farms with rights to common pasturage, the ruins of many which remain visible today. As a result many crofters were forced to emigrate resulting in Scottish communities in countries as distant as New Zealand and Canada. The alternative was destitution and starvation, the latter exacerbated by a failure of potato crops due to potato blight from 1846 to 1856. My daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons own one such croft in the Scottish Highlands, which escaped the destruction of the land clearances. Sparsely populated, the Highlands attract thousands of tourists every year many of whom are unaware of the dark past hidden by its beauty. Strikingly what occurred in the Scottish Highlands in the 18th and 19th century has echoes of the forced resettlement of communities in South Africa under the 1950 Group Areas Act.
The Lowlands, further South, were the centre of coal mining in Scotland and communities developed around the mines with generations of men working in the mines. In the 17th and 18th century coal miners and their families in Scotland were “bound” in a form of slavery to the colliery in which they worked. This was only abolished in 1799 when miners were declared by an Act of Parliament “to be free of their servitude”. Despite the “freedom” granted by this Act, communities around coal mines developed individual identities with many families having a multi-generational association with coal mining and a particular mine. The work was arduous and conditions in the coal mines were such that accidents often occurred. A royal commission reported on the harsh treatment of women and children in Scottish coal mines and as a result the Mines and Collieries Act 1842 forbade women of any age and boys under the age of 10 years working underground. Coal mining finally ceased in Scotland in 2002 ending an industry that was a major source of employment, but also exploitation, for centuries.
My grandfather worked in coal mines in the then Transvaal until he retired in his late sixties with a prominent chronic cough which I now know to be a symptom typical of “miners lung or black lung disease” (pneumoconiosis) due to the long term exposure to coal dust. A disease that was suffered, in many cases undiagnosed, by thousands of black migrant miners in South Africa over the last century and before. Coal mining remains a significant industry in South Africa with the majority of electricity still generated by coal fired power stations.
Coal miners remain at risk for pneumoconiosis with a recent estimate that globally around 16% of coal workers develop this occupational disease. In the United Kingdom workers may be able to claim compensation under the Coal Industry Pneumoconiosis Compensation Scheme (CIPCS) while in South Africa most mineworkers are covered by the 100 hundred year old Occupational Diseases in Mines and Works Act (ODMWA), last amended in 1994, to which mining companies make contributions. The National Institute for Occupational Health (NIOH), which is currently a division of the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS), has existed in various forms since the 1950’s. It was founded to study diseases in mine workers. A statutory function of the NIOH is the post mortem examination of the cardiorespiratory organs of deceased miners and ex-miners for compensation and research purposes. The ODMWA provides for monetary compensation depending on the degree of disability but sadly the administration of the Act has deteriorated over recent years. The OLD (Occupational Lung Disease) Working Group representing gold mining companies has attempted more recently to address compensation issues related miners with silicosis and tuberculosis related to gold mining. Nevertheless, the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) has initiated a class action suit on behalf of miners seeking compensation from the mining houses.
By what I think is a touch of irony, I am currently a board member of the NHLS returning me to an issue close to coal mining and my Scottish ancestry. I am struck in my reflections that social injustice experienced in the South Africa mining industry in the past and today and as a consequence of the Group Areas Act, is similar to what was experienced in another context by the coal miners and crofters of Scotland. My daughter’s emigration to Scotland, although sad, has allowed me to reconnect with my Scottish heritage and further stimulated my reflections on the nature of social injustice across time and place.
