1946+Mineworkers+Strike,+ANC+Today

ANC Today,** **Vol.6, No.31 • 11-17 August 2006
=1946 Mineworkers Strike=


 * //Celebrating a milestone in the struggle against exploitation//**

Note from the Editor: This week marks the 60th anniversary of the African mine workers' strike of 1946, a seismic event in the country's history that had a profound effect both on the struggles of South Africa's workers and on the broader struggle for national liberation. In paying tribute to the heroic contribution of workers to the national democratic struggle, we publish below an edited excerpt from 'Notes and Documents', No. 21/76, September 1976, written by the late ANC and SACP stalwart MP Naicker.

On 12 August 1946, the African mine workers of the Witwatersrand came out on strike in support of a demand for higher wages. They continued the strike for a week in the face of the most savage police terror, in which officially 1,248 workers were wounded and a very large number were killed. Lawless police and army violence smashed the strike. The resources of the racist state were mobilised, almost on a war footing, against the unarmed workmen.

But the miners` strike had profound repercussions which are felt until this day. The intense persecution of workers` organisations which began during the strike, when trade union and political offices and homes of officials were raided throughout the country, has not ceased.

The most profound result of the strike, however, was to be the impact it had on the political thinking within the national liberation movement; almost immediately it shifted significantly from a policy of concession to more dynamic and militant forms of struggle.

In 1941, when the decision to launch the Mine Workers` Union was first mooted, the wage rate for African workers was R70 per year, while white workers received R848.

In 1946, the year of the great strike the wages were: Africans R87 and whites R1,106. In both cases the wage gap between the white worker and the black worker was 12:1.

With the formal establishment of the union, organisational work began in earnest in the face of increased harassment, arrests, dismissals, and deportation of workers by the police and the mine management. Nevertheless, the union grew in strength and influence. The Chamber of Mines, however, refused even to acknowledge the existence of the African Mine Workers` Union, much less to negotiate with its representatives.

With the rising cost of living, starvation of families in the reserves and increasing pressure by the mine management and white workers, the demands of the workers became more incessant.

On 19 May 1946, the biggest conference yet held of representatives of the workers instructed the executive of the union to make yet one more approach to the Chamber of Mines to place before them the workers` demands for a ten shillings (one Rand) a day wage and other improvements. Failing agreement, decided the Conference, the workers would take strike action.

From May till July the union redoubled its efforts to get the Chamber to see reason. To all their repeated communications they received one reply - a printed postcard stating that the matter was receiving attention.


 * Decision to strike**

On Sunday, 4 August 1946, over one thousand delegates assembled at an open air conference held in the Newtown Market Square. The conference carried the following resolution unanimously: "Because of the intransigent attitude of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines towards the legitimate demands of the workers for a minimum wage of 10 shillings per day and better conditions of work, this meeting of African miners resolves to embark upon a general strike of all Africans employed on the gold mines, as from August 12, 1946."

After the decision to strike was adopted, the union's president, JB Marks, stressed the gravity of the strike decision and said that the workers must be prepared for repression by possible violence. "You are challenging the very basis of the cheap labour system" he told them, "and must be ready to sacrifice in the struggle for the right to live as human beings."

A letter conveying the decision of the meeting to the Chamber, and adding a desperate last-minute appeal for negotiations, was ignored. The press and mass media, except the Guardian, did not print any news of the decision until the morning of Monday, 12 August, when the Rand Daily Mail came out with a front page story that the strike was a "complete failure".

The Star that evening, however, had a different tale to tell: tens of thousands of workers were out on strike from the East to the West Rand; the Smuts regime had formed a special committee of Cabinet Ministers to "deal with" the situation; and thousands of police were being mobilised and drafted to the area.

They dealt with it by means of bloody violence. The police batoned, bayoneted and fired on the striking workers to force them down the mine shafts. The full extent of police repression is not known but reports from miners and some newspapers reveal intense persecution and terror during the following week.

A peaceful procession of workers began to march to Johannesburg on what became known as Bloody Tuesday, 13 August, from the East Rand. They wanted to get their passes and go back home. Police opened fire on the procession and a number of workers were killed. At one mine workers, forced to go down the mine, started a sit-down strike underground. The police drove the workers up - according to The Star - "stope by stope, level by level" to the surface. They then started beating them up, chasing them into the veld with baton charges. Then the workers were "re-assembled" in the compound yard and, said the Star, "volunteered to go back to work".

By Friday, 16 August, all the striking workers - 75,000 according to the government 'Director of Native Labour' but probably nearer 100,000 - were bludgeoned back to work.

Throughout the week hundreds of workers were arrested, tried, imprisoned or deported. Leaders of the African trade unions and the entire executive committee of the African Mine Workers` Union, the whole of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and scores of provincial and local leaders of the African National Congress were arrested and charged in a series of abortive "treason and sedition" trials.

Innumerable police raids were carried out across the country on the offices of trade unions, the Congresses and the Communist Party. The homes of leaders of the ANC, the Communist Party, the Indian and Coloured Congresses and the trade unions were also raided simultaneously. The white South African state was rampant in defence of its cheap labour policy and big dividends for the mining magnates and big business. This marked the opening of a phase of intense repression by the racist regime of the day, led by Field Marshal Smuts, against the forces for change in South Africa.

The African Mine Workers` Union, mainly because of the very difficult circumstances under which it operated, was never a closely-organised well-knit body. During the strike the central strike committee was effectively cut off from the workers at each mine by massive police action and the workers had to struggle in isolation. They were continually told that all the other workers had gone back to work, and apart from union leaflets hazardously brought into the compounds by gallant volunteers there was no system of interchanging information.

Nevertheless, thousands of miners defied terror, arrest and enemy propaganda and stood out for five days, from 12 to 16 August. During the strike 32 of the 45 mines on the Rand were affected. The regime called the strike a failure.

The brave miners of 1946 gave birth to the ANC Youth League's Programme of Action adopted in 1949; they were the forerunners of the freedom strikers of 1 May 1950, against the Suppression of Communism Act, and the tens of thousands who joined the 26 June nation-wide protest strike that followed the killing of sixteen people during the May Day strike. They gave the impetus for the 1952 Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws when thousands of African, Indian and Coloured people went to jail; they inspired the mood that led to the upsurge in 1960 and to the emergence of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress.


 * From: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2006/at31.htm#art1**

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