This type of migrant labour system with attendant overcrowded single-sex hostel accommodation exposes many workers to HIV.
10 With high levels of population migration, Region F is particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS given the existence of single sex hostels, marginalised communities living in informal settlements, overcrowding, poverty and income inequality.
Miners were often migrants who lived in single-sex hostels surrounded by prostitutes.
A project called Places of Change replaced older dormitories with smaller, more supportive, single-room hostels.
Mr. Oppenheimer built a world-class racecar track, gardens, parks, Olympic-length pools and broad avenues for white miners, while black miners languished in single-sex hostels.
Black migrant workers, long the backbone of South Africa's industrial labour force, are lodged in massive, single-sex hostels located close to the workplace or on the edge of black townships.
It has what Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of former president Thabo Mbeki, described to me as "a very warped society" born in part of big mining, with its single-sex hostels for laborers torn from their families and thrust into those incubators of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
They had to be in townships reserved for them - or in their servants quarters and single-sex hostels.
With his moving portraits of male intimacy in a single-sex migrant hostel, Sabelo Mlangeni might insist that he is documenting beauty in poverty rather than poverty itself, but the marginality of these men's lives is unmistakeable.
Also from Ken's programme notes last week – how to stop riots: "corporal and capital punishment, slash benefits, put single mothers in hostels … chuck out all the asylum seekers... Kids think the world owes them a living … Human rights?
