The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), more popularly Wenela, was set up by the gold mines in South Africa as a recruiting agency for migrant workers.
Each depot had administrative and medical staff and a "barracks" to house recruits both before departure and on their return.
Some had clinics and even schools, where the recruits were taught Fanagalo, the lingua franca of Southern Africa (fifteen hours of tuition was enough to be useful) and then the rudiments of mining.
This author is writing of the North West then part of Northern Rhodesia: "The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) recruited systematically in the 1940s and 1950s, using permanent local agents, a system of barges which penetrated all of the major rivers of the region, and out-stations where workers were housed until they could be brought into the Boma for transportation.
It was a form of "tribal initiation" for every young man to go down to the mines for at least one tour to bring back enough money to pay the hut tax for the entire village.