The 1946 black miners' strike, which took place 60 years ago this month, was an heroic confrontation between the most exploited worker in the country and the most powerful of employers allied to the state machine. In this extract from the South African Communist Party's 'A Distant Clap of Thunder', we explore the background and significance of the strike.
The beginning of the first real mass trade union for South Africa's black miners was a small event - so small that history records very little about it, save that the initiative came from a meeting of the African National Congress (ANC) Transvaal Executive in 1941. The records state that a proposal to sponsor the organisation of such a union was put, and carried.
Its proposers were Gaur Radebe, a well known trade unionist and public speaker, long time member of the ANC and a communist in the process of drifting out of the Party, and Edwin Mofutsanyana, a studious and intellectual figure, former mine clerk, and also a veteran ANC and Communist Party member.
History does not record the reason for the proposal at that precise time, or the views of Executive Committee members in the debate. The decision was scarcely in keeping with the ANC character of that time, an organisation with only a small membership, steeped in a tradition of quasi-parliamentary type politics, without a great impact on the national political scene, and certainly with little direct connection with working class or trade union affairs.
Perhaps it can be explained by a combination of two factors - the general political atmosphere of the times, and the internal politics of the ANC. It was wartime. Everywhere the rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'democratic rights' was being used to whip up support for the war; declarations by statesmen at home and abroad spoke of war aims of an undefined 'freedom from want' and 'freedom of opinion'; some of the heady atmosphere of hope and the anticipation of a better world acoming rubbed off, even in South Africa, remote though it was from the centre of the war and bitterly internally divided into pro and anti-war factions.
In that atmosphere of rising expectation, a new surge of life was rising in the ANC itself. A young generation, deeply committed to national liberation, had grown up under the leadership of Anton Lembede. That new generation -Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Duma Nokwe, Govan Mbeki and others - had burst their way into the leading ranks of the organisation, particularly in the Transvaal. It displaced an old generation which had failed to move with the new times and tides of feeling. On the Transvaal Executive of the ANC, the militants of the ANC youth league formed a natural working partnership with the militant veterans of an earlier period, particularly communists like Radebe, Moses Kotane, Mofutsanyana and JB Marks, who were already in the leadership ranks. Perhaps it was the natural consequence of such a partnership that the small decision was taken to sponsor a mineworkers' trade union.
There were two massive mountains to climb in building a mass union of black miners. The first lay in the nature of the miners themselves. These men, some 340,000 at the time, were not the stable urbanised workers with which the black trade unions of the time were familiar - men in regular jobs, living in urban townships with families and with deep roots in all the aspects of black urban life. These miners, on the contrary, were rural men, recruited from rural areas and reserves for a limited contract period of less than a year, and who returned to those rural areas and agricultural pursuits at the end of their contracts. Even those who came back to the mines for a second contract, did so on average only after some years away.
On the Witwatersrand, the black miners lived not as part of the black community, but a life apart, closely corralled within their compounds, with only the sleazy eating-house cum 'native store' complexes around the compounds as an alternative to compound life. They were, in the main, men who understood nothing of the cities, which lay like foreign territory well away from the mine shafts.
Building a miners trade union required the welding of this divided corps of men into a single united body, and to create that unity out of a group of whom perhaps one in every ten left each month for far-off places, to be replaced in turn by new recruits, totally without industrial experience, strangers in that strangest of worlds. It was like trying to build a solid structure on shifting sands.
The second mountain to be faced was the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, the employers' cartel. Here was concentrated the greatest single combine of economic, industrial and financial power in the country. Though nominally composed of a considerable number of different mining companies, it was in essence a closely knit and tiny cartel of a handful of distinct mining 'groups'; each of these groups managed and controlled a stable of subordinate companies through a heavily intertwined network of interlocked finances and share-holdings, and incestuous cross-relations through financial and technical exchanges and shared directorships.
It was said in South Africa - with good reason - that when the Chamber of Mines sneezed, the government caught cold. Though it no longer entered directly into the political seats of power - as its forerunners had done in the days of Cecil John Rhodes, Abe Bailey and others - it remained the grey eminence behind the government, the true economic power and the true arbiter of the nation's destiny. Some would call it a 'state within the state' and others 'the reality of state' with the government and administration representing the Chamber of Mines at politics.
The union emerges In the face of these formidable obstacles, the ANC pressed ahead. On 3 August 194l, 81 elected delegates of organisations met in Johannesburg; they came mainly from trade unions, Communist Party branches, and social and political organisations on the Witwatersrand. There were few miners present, and the few there were mainly surface workers and clerks - the men with longer experience of urban and industrial life who were outside the compound and repatriation procedures which applied rigorously to underground workers.
Some of these had been members of incipient trade unions that had been started in earlier years; some were members of the small African Mine Clerks Association, which still survived.
The conference set up a working committee to bring the union to a reality.
The committee included James Majoro, a leading member of the Mine Clerks Association; TW Thibedi, a founder and survivor of a 1936 attempt to build a union and the first black member of the Communist Party; JB Marks, a veteran member of both the ANC and the Communist Party; and Gaur Radebe.
The union grew painfully slowly. It needed to break through the barbed-wire curtain that cut the miners off from the world outside; it could do so only by means of painstaking contact with individuals and small groups of miners during their off-duty hours in the recreational areas around the compounds.
Meetings of more than a handful could only be held secretly. Organisers were harried and harassed by the private mining company police, who ran the mining properties with an ubiquitous authority without defined limits, almost like an army in occupation of foreign territory. Union contacts themselves, when identified or suspected, were victimised by having their contracts terminated and being deported back to the territories from whence they came. Secrecy and word of mouth were the main organising techniques.
And yet the union grew. By 1944 it could count its members in thousands, perhaps as much as four thousand - yet little enough in a sea of over 340,000.
It was war time. Social and economic conditions in the country were getting worse; everywhere there were steeply rising prices of goods in the shops, and growing shortages of commodities - especially some foodstuffs. Companies increased the pressure on their workers, intensifying the rate of exploitation, reducing rations, and allowing standards of services, recreation and welfare to fall. In the industrial world outside the closed encampment of the mines, workers' struggles against falling standards and rising costs had forced some government action. From 1943 automatic 'cost of living allowances' had become standard for all industrial workers, compensating them in part for rising shop prices. But agricultural workers and black miners had been excluded from the legislation, on the specious grounds that their cost of living was met by employers who provided their accommodation and rations. On the same specious reasoning, the Chamber of Mines refused to pay any such allowances even to those mine clerks who were not contracted labour. The bitterness of feeling among the clerks became a source of support and strength for the union.
The Union tried repeatedly to meet the Chamber of Mines to discuss its members' grievances. But the chamber, characteristically, had taken a policy decision to ignore the union's very existence. Letters from the Union went deliberately unanswered; attempts at intervention by go-betweens, such as the then existing Native Representatives in Parliament and the Senate, were given a brusque brush-off.
When the union turned to government for intervention, the response was much the same. Union demands for a Wage Board investigation into the industry -pressed on the government in Parliament - were just as summarily turned down, although the Wage Board had been set up by statute specifically for the purpose of making such investigations in industry, and of recommending minimum standards of wages and conditions.
Against the background of government and employers' resistance to any change, discontent built up on the mines and began to spill over in sporadic action. On several mines, disputes over treatment by mine officials and over food and conditions sparked off a growing wave of minor, unorganised strikes and stoppages; demonstrations in compounds and dining halls erupted into riots, with the vandalising or burning of kitchens and other mine buildings.
Police and company reprisals against the offenders failed to stem the tide of miners' anger. The pressure either had to be headed off, or an explosion on the Reef would almost certainly erupt.
The government chose to try and head it off. Probably on the initiative of the Chamber of Mines - though this was never admitted - the government announced the appointment of a commission of inquiry into the wages and conditions of the black miners. It was hoped that this would signal to the miners that their grievances were going to be remedied if only they would be patient and go quietly on with the work in the old conditions. By the time the commission reported it was thought the 'troublesome' generation of miners would have ended their contracts and been sent home; and a new, hopefully more tractable, group would be installed to replace them.
History and the mine workers' union frustrated those hopes. As soon as the appointment of the commission under the chairpersonship of Justice Landsdowne was announced, the union seized the opportunity it presented.
Meetings of miners were held up and down the Reef to tell the miners of the inquiry, and to ask them to collect and formulate grievances and demands which the union would take to the commission. As the idea spread, meetings of miners grew from small group affairs to mass gatherings at which the men 'spoke bitterness' - as the Chinese say of public denunciations of conditions of life. Every weekend in central Johannesburg, large gatherings of articulate miners from every Witwatersrand shaft gathered to give the union organisers the day-to-day detail of life and conditions of work on every part of the Reef. From these meetings came a massive, detailed and fully documented memorandum from the African Mine Workers' Union (AMWU) to the commission.
The miners unions turned the Lansdowne Commission on its head. What had been designed to be a full justification of the policy of the Chamber of Mines became instead a massive public denunciation. Against the chamber's claim of its inability to afford anything more than the existing rate of between 2 shillings/ld and 2 shillings/3d per shift, the union demanded a minimum wage of ten shillings (one rand) per day, and sweeping improvements in conditions generally, including paid holidays and overtime working, clothing and boot allowances, and improved feeding.
The demand for ten shillings a day minimum wage was treated by the chamber and its supportive national press and parliament as a fantastic and irresponsible dream. The men's wages, the chamber argued repeatedly, were really only part of the family income; the main part of that income was derived from family crop and livestock production in the reserves. The union challenge to the chamber thus had to deal not only with the conditions on the mines themselves, but also with the alleged farming incomes of the miners families in the reserves. Prompted by the union, other organisations and experts came forward to testify about the conditions of the people in the reserves; and a formidable body of health and social researchers exposed the reality of starvation and near-starvation in almost all areas; of soil erosion and falling productivity which had made the reserves net importers of food from outside; of large and growing numbers of totally landless families; and of alarming levels of malnutrition and infant mortality rates.
The Commission took a year to digest all its evidence. Its report, when finally issued, conceded much criticism of the industry, but little substance for the miners.
While government dithered and delayed its decisions, the union carried on with mass meetings of miners, telling them of the concessions already proposed by the commission, and organising them to carry the campaign for a minimum wage still further. Late in l944, the government made its decision.
The recommendations of the Lansdowne Commission would not be implemented. In place of the recommended improvements, only a small wage increase 'in lieu of all other recommendations' would be introduced, giving the princely rise of four pence per shift for surface workers and five pence for underground.
The bitterness on the mines grew worse.
The miners had reached a watershed. There was no further way forward through any process of conciliation, argument, debate or bargaining. They would have to go forward using the withdrawal of their labour as their weapon.
It was in this mood that the annual conference of the African Mine Workers' Union met in August 1944. There were 700 delegates from the mines, l,300 other miners without delegate credentials 'observing'; and a large turn-out of political leaders and trade unionists from other industries, plus the ANC President General, members of the Natives Representative Council, and chiefs from several areas from which miners were recruited. Delegates demanded strike action; the union leaders advised caution. The union leadership carried the day - but the miners remained angry and rebellious, and sporadic clashes and disturbances began all along the Reef.
On their part, the chamber and the government acted in concert to try and destroy the union. The chamber declared the mining areas no-go areas for the union, and advised compound managers that no union organising whatsoever was to be allowed on mining property, either during working hours or when the men were off duty; meetings were to be totally prohibited regardless of the size, and union activists singled out and repatriated regardless of any uncompleted contracts.
For its part, the government stepped in with a new War Measure, promulgated under special war emergency powers - Measure 1425 of August 1944 - which banned any gathering of any sort by more than twenty people anywhere along the 'proclaimed' mining area of the Witwatersrand.
By 1945 the Chamber of Mines felt confident enough to seize advantage of the food shortages developing in the country, and cut the already unacceptable level of rations in the mine canteens. In protest food demonstrations, riots and violent attacks on the mine kitchens began to flare up all along the Reef.
The following year, 1946, opened with the union general meeting in Johannesburg, with some 2,000 members present. They again drew up a list of demands - ten shillings a day minimum wage, family housing in place of compounds, long service gratuities, and the repeal of War Measure 1425. The tone was angry; again there were rank and file calls for strike action; again the Union leadership held back. Letters containing the demands were sent to the chamber. No response.
On 19 May the union called an open-air meeting at the Newtown Market Square, to report back to the miners what had - and what had not - happened to their demands. JB Marks took the chair and reported. Calls for strike action were made loud and clear by miners in the audience. Finally, a miner stepped up to the platform, and formally moved that a general strike be called on all mines. The proposal was put to the vote and carried almost without dissent.
No date was set. The union executive was to make one final attempt to meet the chamber. The Native Commissioner and the Director of Labour were both at the meeting, together with uniformed and plain clothes police.
On 4 August, again at the Market Square, a much larger audience of miners gathered to hear the executive's report. They had nothing to report, save that the chamber had blankly refused to speak to them or answer their letters. At once, from the audience, came a call for immediate strike action. This time a date was set - one week ahead, Monday, 12 August. Marks cautioned all present against provocateurs, and warned that violence would achieve none of their objectives. What was needed was unity, discipline and determination. All present were to go back to their mines and use the next week to prepare their fellow workers for a Monday morning stoppage throughout the industry.
There had never been an attempt at an organised industry-wide strike before.
There had never been such a frontal confrontation between the worst paid, compounded and contracted black workers and the most powerful bosses cartel with major influences in the state. It was a step into the unknown.
The great strike The union spent the week after the last mass meeting spreading the word about the strike to its contacts all along the Reef. It was a task far beyond the real capacity of the four or five union organisers. The shafts and compounds - all now policed, patrolled and wire-enclosed like concentration camps - were scattered along fifty miles of the Witwatersrand, generally in isolated areas of veld surrounded by a no man's land of unused scrubland, difficult to approach by road except along the company's own private roadways, inaccessible by passenger rail.
The word spread - but how far, and how many miners had heard nothing of the strike before it actually started has never been clear. The union office, which should have been a hub of activity during the week, was generally quiet, often deserted, as all hands left headquarters for the task in the field. By the end of the week of preparation, there was little real organised preparation for headquarters operations once the strike had started. The strike would stand or fall, finally, on the self-initiative and self-direction of the miners, concentrated in a multitude of separate and isolated compounds. The union would be less a general staff of the strike than a reporting centre and observation post.
The separation of union offices and officials from the closed world of the compound was to remain throughout the strike, despite many clandestine operations by which organisers penetrated the compounds, and made isolated contact. The separation grew more serious as union officials were arrested and locked up within the first few days of the strike. As a result, there has never been an 'official' account of the strike - of how the strike actually developed, written by anyone on the inside. The participants and strikers had an intimate knowledge only of that tiny segment in which they participated personally; none had an overall view, which could provide a comprehensive picture.
The atmosphere was not that of a labour dispute, as the term is understood elsewhere in the civilised world. It was rather that of a civil war; it was a war fought by police equipped like an army, with rifles and fixed bayonets; its operations conducted like military offensives against an enemy, ending in 'surrender' signified by raising of weaponless hands; the surrenders followed up by the 'rounding up' of stragglers in hiding.
How many were killed and injured in this war against the black miners has never been established. The figures are contradictorily reported, and have never been carefully investigated. On their part, the only seemingly hostile act reported of the miners are attempts to 'march on Johannesburg', with flesh-curdling stories of armaments, like choppers and iron bars, none of which have ever been alleged to have been used. Even the foreboding dread inspired by the lurid treatment of these 'marches' served only to obscure the reality admitted obliquely in some reports - that the marchers were on their way to the offices of the recruiting corporations who held their contracts, and thus held the apparent custody of their conditions and rights. Whether the marchers were for the purpose of negotiating on conditions, or to seek the ending of their contracts and their repatriation, has also never been made clear.
The total failure of the press to investigate deeply into anything connected with the strike reflected the total bias of their owners against the miners and all their demands.
By that Saturday the strike was over. It had been - by any reckoning - an heroic confrontation between the most exploited black workers in the country, and the most powerful of employers allied to the state machine. In the course of it, the miners had pioneered a course which would serve the whole working class in the future; they had forged and maintained an inter-tribal and international unity in the face of tremendous provocation; they had discovered for themselves new weapons of struggle, the sit down strike and the stay at-home; and the protest march to the seats of the power which controlled them. If in the end they were beaten back to work with none of their demands won, they had made one fact clear to the Chamber of Mines and government alike - a fact which they and their press still failed to take on board - that here, in the mines and compounds, there were men who had grown to the consciousness and organisational capacity of the most advanced sections of the country's working class - a real proletariat which had felt the strength of its muscle, and could never again be disregarded or contemptuously ignored.
The strike had been fought and lost. But much had been proved for the future. It had been a dramatic clap of thunder, which should have told South Africa that storms of a new kind lay ahead.
This is an edited extract from 'A Distant Clap of Thunder', published by the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1986.
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