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special medical examination, but they were all right. They had a very rapid rate of turnover from sickness and death. They sickened and died, sickened and died. That put the managers in the business to saying, “What's the matter?” It wasn't that there wasn't an adequate labor supply of Kafirs, but they would just get a man trained, making an investment in him, and he would get ill. It was a serious matter having a trained person get ill. They got ill quite quickly - sometime not more than a few months afterwards.

They began to suspect that there was something in this and they had special physicians, medical men and physiologists come out. They made an analysis of the dust and looked into it. They decided that it was the precipitation of this dust in the lungs. These were primitive people. They didn't have tuberculosis and there was no history of tuberculosis among the Kafirs. They were a primitive people, however, who had never been exposed to any kind of shut-in work, used to the open air and living in the open, thus perhaps they succumbed more quickly. Also it was almost a pure silica precipitation.

After the first few years they had taken considerable precautions, to the extent of not allowing a man to work more than a certain length of time in the mine. They developed a rotating scheme, whereby they had a large body of workers.