The white miners’ strike of 1922. Following the fall in the gold price on the world market, the mining companies were confonted with mounting production costs and declining profi ts. A number of mines faced imminent closure. In November 1921, the Chamber of Mines announced the elimination of the colour bar in semi-skilled work. Blacks would take jobs previously reserved for whites, thus replacing expensive white labour with cheap black labour and saving the mines a lot of money. This policy, which was to be implemented on 1 February 1922, would mean the loss of jobs of over 15 000 white miners. In January 1922, having formed their own armed commandos, the white miners took action. Not only did they go on strike, they also plotted to topple the Smuts government, which used the army to break the strike by force.
Post-war inflation and inadequate wage increases between 1918 and 1920 accounted for widespread labour unrest. In 1918 poorly paid Johannesburg sanitary workers agitated for higher wages; in 1919 Bloemfontein municipal and other workers struck for higher wages; and in 1920 there was a similar strike in Port Elizabeth, in which nineteen blacks were shot dead, and the Witwatersrand experienced the biggest strike in the history of the mining industry, with more than 70 000 workers demanding higher pay. The strike was put down forcibly and eleven miners were killed and 120 injured. In a way it was a portent of what was to follow.
Earlier, in 1913 another strike by whites on the gold mines had occurred over union recognition, with riots, arson, looting and near anarchy across the Rand. The police and the army were unable to contain the disturbances and the new Active Citizen Force (ACF) was still too poorly organised to be effective. The stability of the state itself would be at risk if strike leaders linked up with disaffected rural Afrikaners. Soldiers shot and killed 100 strikers and bystanders before the strike ended. The government had to sign a humiliating accord with the strike leaders, only to be challenged again six months later. A 1914 strike on the coal mines spread to the railways and harbours and culminated in a general strike. This time the government was ready. It declared martial law and sent in units of the newly formed Permanent Force and ACF commandos. The English-speaking leaders of the trade union federation were arrested; Smuts deported nine of them summarily and illegally. To break the strike, Smuts relied on the support of men with whom he had fought the South African War. Rural Afrikaners called up for commando duty enthusiastically took up their weapons ‘to shoot Englishmen’ in Johannesburg.
The strike which erupted on 1 January 1922 on the Witwatersrand led to many deaths and enormous destruction. The picture of Market Square in Fordsburg, taken on 14 March after government forces had captured it, shows some of the damage done. In the second half of March, the government succeeded in suppressing the unrest. The strikers were tried for their role in the violence, and though 18 were sentenced to death, only four were eventually executed: C.C. Stassen, S.A. Long, H.K. Hull and J.D. Lewis.
In 1922 the most violent white miners’ strike followed, leaving far-reaching political consequences in its wake. The strike began in January 1922 and lasted intermittently till March. It had its roots in rising production costs, a gold price that could not compensate for this, and ultimately in radical steps taken by the gold mining industry to try to remain profitable. Wages for certain categories of workers had been decreased and underground jobs reorganised so that blacks could be employed in semi-skilled positions. The colour bar would apply only to skilled jobs.
The strike leaders were mainly English speakers, but a fair percentage of Afrikaners were also involved. Committees, made up for the most part of Afrikaners, organised the so-called ‘strike commandos’, which gradually began to stray from their role as keepers of the peace and started instead to mete out violent treatment towards ‘scabs’.
Although the class radicalism of the white miners cannot be doubted, it had firm racial boundaries. In the early twentieth century there was a marked fusion of class and white consciousness across the British Empire. The seemingly contradictory slogan emblazoned on the banners of the white militants – who marched under the slogan ‘Workers of the world fight and unite for a white South Africa’ – was therefore in keeping with the general trend at the time. Smuts was on the horns of a dilemma. He could not afford to alienate the Rand white working force from the government, but the gold mines were a vast source of income for the state. He did not wish to antagonise either party. Even so, on the day that the strike began he had already created the impression that he was unsympathetic towards the strikers by declaring: ‘If a strike were to take place, the Government would draw a ring round both parties, do its best to maintain law and order, and let the two parties fight it out.’ Although this was his official position, there were suspicions that he failed to put substantial pressure on the mine owners to negotiate.
Matters came to a head at the beginning of March. On 7 March all workers without exception went on strike, but a disruptive element took the law into its own hands. During the next week the Witwatersrand experienced unprecedented violence. People were assaulted in the streets while innocent and defenceless black miners were attacked because of rumours of a black uprising. Blatant sabotage and vandalism were rampant. Telephone lines were cut, cars overturned and a railway line was blown up. On 10 March Smuts declared martial law and rushed in government forces, supplemented by air support, bombs and artillery, machine guns and tanks. The Benoni strikers’ position was machine-gunned from the air and the mine hall bombed. On 17 March the trade unions called off the strike.
The strike had exacted a high toll: 43 members of the army, 29 policemen and 81 civilians were killed, while more than 650 people had been injured. No fewer than 853 people were tried on various charges, 46 of them on murder charges. Eighteen were sentenced to death but the public outcry that followed was of such a nature that fourteen were reprieved and only C.C. Stassen, S.A. Long, H.K. Hull and J.D. Lewis were eventually hanged.
In an intriguing comparison, historian Jeremy Krikler argues that the white working class communities of the Witwatersrand in 1922 ‘did not look that different from black working class communities who participated in the anti-apartheid insurrections of the 1980s’. Both were alienated from the established order, both were determined to make themselves heard and both suffered at the hands of the state.
After the strike the wages of semi-skilled white workers were decreased and mine owners were free to allocate underground work as they saw fit. This meant that semiskilled whites were replaced at an accelerated pace by cheaper black labourers. As a result the black-white ratio on the mines changed from eight blacks per white in 1918–1921 to nearly ten per white in 1923–1926. This position remained more or less constant until the late 1930s. Politically the strike was damaging for Smuts; his handling of the strike was widely criticised and cost him the 1924 election.
