Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

African Mineworkers Strike 1946

African Mineworkers Strike

1946

"It is better to die than go back with empty hands."

The largest labor strike in South Africa since 1922.

70 000 Miners on strike.

12 Miners killed.

In the hundred years since gold was discovered in South Africa, class battles have raged continually between those who own nothing but their power to labour and those who exploit their labour because they own everything.

Over fifty thousand dead. More than a million permanently disabled. Hundreds of thousands diseased through inhaling the poison dust. Millions displaced from their homes, separated from their families and locked into a chain of guarded, high-walled labour camps. These are not the casualty figures for a major war; they are the price already paid by black miners for digging gold and coal from the bowels of South Africa's earth.

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 - not even how to get around or find one's way within them. Unlike the urban industrialised workers, these were men deeply steeped in tribal lore and cultures. They brought to the mines many old tribal animosities and rivalries, which were assiduously fostered by employers who lived by the 'divide and rule' maxim. Most of the miners were not South Africans but Mozambicans, Tanganyikans, Angolans, Nyasas, recruited from afar, or Basotho, Bechuana or Swazis recruited from what were then still 'British Protectorates' - sharing neither a single language nor a single political creed. Building a miners trade union required the welding of this divided and basically rural 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 - the underground tunnels which led, on the surface, only to closed compound encampments in a life apart from the rest of the country.

Certainly, the immediate demands of the miners were lost, and the strikers were driven back to work on precisely the same conditions over which they had come out. And their Union, built with such difficulty over several years was almost, if not completely, smashed and lost. The gains were less tangible, longer term, and to be found mainly in the consciousness and understanding of the miners themselves. They had gained - even in defeat - the knowledge that their unity could be established despite all the language, cultural and tribal divides; that unity was the first condition for any successful challenge to the conditions of their lives, and to the combine of state and employers which fixed them. They had gained, too, the understanding that where state and bosses combine together against them, there could be no way forward without the miners too uniting with their natural allies outside - the black trade unions and the movement for political liberation of the whole country which lived beyond the compound walls. But above all, they had learnt the power to shake the social order which is in the hands of a working class once it is determined and ready to use it.

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On August 4, 1946 over one thousand miners assembled in Market Square in Johannesburg, South Africa. No hall in the town was big enough to hold them, and no one would have rented one to them anyway. The miners were members of the African Mine Worker's Union (AMWU), a non-European union which was formed five years earlier in order to address the 12 to 1 pay differential between white and black mineworkers. The gathering carried forward just one unanimous resolution: African miners would demand a minimum wage of ten shillings (about 1 Rand) per day. If the Transvaal Chamber of Mines did not meet this demand, all African mine workers would embark on a general strike immediately. Workers mounted the platform one after the other to testify: "When I think of how we left our homes in the reserves, our children naked and starving, we have nothing more to say. Every man must agree to strike on 12 August. It is better to die than go back with empty hands."