Race, Postcards, and the Visual Politics of Chinese Indenture in South African Gold Mines

Abstract: This essay compares how three South African postcard publishers represented the arrival of the first indentured Chinese workers imported by the British Transvaal colony for the Witwatersrand mines following the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Given the prevailing anti-Chinese sentiment, their arrival garnered considerable attention and scrutiny within South Africa, across the British empire, and beyond. Foregrounding Golden Age postcards as mass-produced collectibles and their publishers' pursuit of profits, I argue for an ambivalent relationship between South African postcard and mining industries. While Frank A. Stauber's use of border scenes in advertisements and Braune, & Franssen; Co.'s selection and retouching of photographic images only subtly played on the controversy over the importation of Chinese laborers to South Africa, Sallo Epstein & Co. exploited the ongoing debates in a way that risked jeopardizing the public image of the Transvaal government and its so-called Chinese experiment.