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CHAPTER 2

WHITE WORKERS AND THEIR STRUGGLES 1907-1924

Cornish miners

In the 1910s and 1920s Ekurhuleni, and more specifically the Far East Rand, was the fulcrum of white working-class politics in South Africa. It was home to more white mine workers than any other part of the Rand; it was the first site of a remarkable synthesis of white immigrant and white Afrikaner working-class cultures which blossomed briefly in the 1922 white workers’ rebellion on the Rand; it provided the impetus for the first two major white workers’ strikes in 1907 and 1913; it was the major centre of the 1922 Rand rebellion; it was the principal and most durable stronghold of the South African Labour Party and to the now largely forgotten but then immensely important political tradition that it represented; and within that it was the principal focus of the two major competing, ideological and political orientations among white workers in South Africa. In short, it condensed the politics of white labour.

THE EMERGENCE OF A SOUTH AFRICAN WHITE WORKING CLASS

Until the late 1910s and well beyond in most cases, the white population of Ekurhuleni’s towns were overwhelmingly foreign and predominantly English-speaking. This was mainly because the initial skilled labour complement of the gold mines on the Rand was drawn from English-speaking miners from Cornwall, Wales, Northern England, Australia and the United States of America.¹ Internationally these miners formed a mobile floating global population and have been appropriately described by Jan Hyslop as ‘the imperial working class’.² Thus by 1907 a full 83% of the men working on the mines were foreign born.³ For Afrikaners, towns were foreign places, the abode of the uitlander whose moral contamination was to be avoided at all costs.⁴ English speakers dominated all aspects of life in the Ekurhuleni towns. They ran the businesses (until complemented by a large Jewish infusion); they staffed the professions and municipal service; and they owned the small workshops that helped serve the mines.⁵ Not only was the occupational structure of Ekurhuleni dominated by the British, but so was its cultural and social life. Up to World War II, Benoni’s social world, for example, revolved around its Caledonian Society, Cornish Association, Irish Association and Royal Society of St George, together with the mainly mine-based sporting clubs.⁶ Afrikaners gradually infiltrated the semi-skilled ranks of the mines after the turn of the 20th century, but their entry, as Elaine Katz has put it was ‘silent’ and ‘unobtrusive’.⁷ Afrikaner learner miners were at pains to conceal their origins, not to flaunt them, not even daring, for example, to address a mining official in Afrikaans, for fear of losing their job.⁸

While English-speaking mine managers openly disparaged the capacities of what they termed ‘backvelder’ or ‘bywoner’ Afrikaner miners, they entered the industry in steadily increasing numbers in the late 1900s and 1910s.⁹ Two events are usually associated with the process: the 1907 general strike on the Rand, and the outbreak of World War I. By the early 20th century most of Germiston’s highly productive mines, as well as others in Ekurhuleni, were controlled by George Farrar. In 1907, when the first general strike on the gold mines broke out, triggered by the decision by Knight’s Deep mine management to compel their white miners to supervise three rather than two black drillers, Tommy Heldzinger, George Farrar’s undercover agent, describes in his diary how he was sent to Pretoria by his management to recruit impoverished whites to act as mine guards or strikebreakers. For him this was the start of the poor Afrikaners’ move to the mines.¹⁰ A second surge is associated with World War I. Then, across the Rand, an exodus of 20% of skilled British artisan miners, who joined up to serve the British army on the Western Front, were replaced by Afrikaner ‘farmer-miners’ who were fleeing catastrophic agricultural distress in the Orange Free State and the Cape.¹¹ In Benoni alone, 2 300 men out of a total mine white labour force of 3 500 joined up. By 1917, 70–80% of underground miners were Afrikaners.¹²

These two pivotal events, however, concealed deeper processes at work. One was the ravages of the miners’ lung disease known as silicosis or phthisis. This incapacitated and then quickly killed thousands of white miners on the mines after a few years underground. One chilling statistic reveals the misery this entailed: in 1910 the average age of death of white miners was 33 years and the most common age was 29.¹³ Hence, when the famous Scots trade union leader James Bain visited the Witwatersrand in 1913, he found that out of 18 men serving on the 1907 miners’ strike committee, ten were dead of silicosis,¹⁴ three were suffering from it and only one remained in good health. Such mortality opened up the ranks of the white working class to Afrikaners in a way no strike could ever have done.

A second force promoting the movement of Afrikaner workers onto the mines was simple destitution. Afrikaners, as noted earlier, regarded the towns as an alien imposition: they clung on to their niches in the countryside for as long as they could. The scorched earth policy pursued by the British army in the guerrilla stages of the South African War of 1899–1902 obliterated many rural livelihoods and proved to be the first step in the rural Afrikaners’ undoing, driving scores of impoverished farmers to the towns.¹⁵ The gradual extinction of the white bywoner farmer (tenant farmer, share cropper) was the second. This proceeded apace as land values rose, as land was sub-divided among heirs, and as fencing in of large tracts of the eastern and northern Cape and the western Orange Free State began around 1910 and accelerated in the early mid-1920s, forcing many footloose trekboer herders to the brink of collapse.¹⁶ Droughts which struck South Africa and especially the Orange Free State/Cape interior in the late 1910s and 1920s often provided the final blow. As the Drought Commission reported in 1922:

1907 Miners’ Strike at New Kleinfontein

Since the white man has been in South Africa enormous tracts of country have been entirely or partially denuded of their original vegetation, with the result that rivers, vleis and water holes … have dried up.

That drying up ‘was still continuing’. The report then continued in doom-laden terms:

The simple unadorned truth is sufficiently terrifying without the assistance of rhetoric. The logical outcome of it all is ‘The Great South African Desert’, uninhabitable by man.¹⁷

POOR WHITES (ARME BLANKES)

These forces led to the emergence of a new category in South African society – poor whites. The Carnegie Commission into Poor Whites published in 1929 painted a stark picture of how desperate their conditions were. One such graphic case history was that of Mrs Van Wyk:

Born in the Little Karoo her family hired pasture but were too poor to hire labour to work it. She and her three sisters therefore worked alongside five brothers to help earn the family living. After marriage, Mrs Van Wyk led the migratory life of a poor bywoner. Over several years they prospered and their stock grew to number a respectable 500.¹⁸ Then the 1916 drought struck. Only 20 animals survived. She and her family took refuge in Knysna where they cleared forests. Her husband then died and the family thereafter survived on Poor Relief.¹⁹

First-generation, social engineer, white supremacists recognised that other short-term, stop-gap solutions also had to be employed in the meantime, such as poor white road relief work, agricultural settlement, forestry projects, railway employment, but as Berger observes, policy makers saw education as the long-term solution which would bridge the gap between rural poverty and the labour aristocracy.²⁰

Many such individuals flooded into Ekurhuleni. There the first Afrikaner immigrants/migrants to arrive hailed from the Transvaal (Gauteng). Their movement occurred mainly between 1903 and 1914. Thereafter a second and much larger wave engulfed Ekurhuleni – made up of bywoners arriving from the interior regions of the southern Orange Free State and the northern Cape. Comprising families who had been poor for many years, they flooded in from the late 1910s through the 1920s. A Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister’s survey in Benoni conducted in the 1920s recorded 56% of Afrikaners coming from the Cape, 17% from the Orange Free State and 27% from the Transvaal (Gauteng) and Natal (KwaZulu-Natal). Many paid their last coins for a rail ticket to Ekurhuleni, arriving destitute and without any safety net of friends. Since Germiston was the railway hub of the Witwatersrand it was there that they first alighted. Frequently the local Dutch Reformed Church minister and church was their sole refuge – and only available port of call. Such families were accustomed to an extremely simple way of life – a single-roomed dwelling, no furniture save a riempie bed, earth-dung smoothed floor on which the children slept, one meal a day.²¹ This they reproduced where they could do it, on the East Rand. Often a long-term life goal was to occupy and invest in small holdings (or part thereof) which surrounded the main towns of Ekurhuleni, once legislated in existence in 1919. One such example was the Putfontein Small Holdings, eight kilometres east of Benoni. This was dotted with ‘hundreds of huts’, a full third of them deemed by social workers ‘unsuitable for civilised life’. One family here was described as being made up of a mother, father, eight children all living in a single-roomed shack, with an earth floor and consuming one mealie pap meal a day.²² Others were Norton and other small holdings outside Germiston where large numbers of Afrikaner women garment workers lived.²³ Otherwise such arme blankes concentrated in slum areas in each of the towns of Ekurhuleni – in Georgetown in inner-city Germiston and in the east side of Benoni, where again social workers reported ‘34 people living in a pair of semi-detached houses void of furniture or comfort of any sort’. Some years later up to four Afrikaner women garment workers were recorded as sharing a single room and a single bed there, and as enjoying a daily diet of ‘dry bread and coffee’. ²⁴ These families comprised the bulk of the substantial number of poor white unemployed in Ekurhuleni. Those who had jobs were overwhelmingly miners until the Civilised Labour Policy of the Pact government in the 1920s, which opened up railway and other government jobs, began to develop and secondary industry employed large numbers of Afrikaner women. ²⁵

THE WHITE MINERS STRIKES OF 1913 AND 1914

Mines dominated the economic, social and political life of Ekurhuleni until well into the 1930s. The white population was divided along rigid class lines largely dictated by the mines. The upper stratum consisted of educated men, the administrators, the mines’ professional men – doctors, engineers, surveyors, accountants. Between them and the miners and commercial people there existed a rigid social division. Each enjoyed entirely different and segregated social facilities, geographical spaces and schools. Mine officials maintained a demeanour of cold superiority when dealing with workmen, often more pronounced in the case of Afrikaners and Jews. If any working miner on a mine asserted himself too much socially he was liable to suffer for his precocity by being dismissed. Captain Hoffman, Manager of Chimes Mine was merely at one end of this behavioural spectrum when he insisted that his entire staff salute him when they first met in the morning.²⁶

1913 Miners’ Strike

In this authoritarian milieu jobs and futures were extremely insecure. As the Small Holdings Commission reported to Parliament in 1913 about 13.3% of the entire white mine force had changed jobs each month two years earlier in 1911. Most of this ‘shifting’ occurred among underground men. Mine managers attributed this to the bywoner/backvelder mental universe of Afrikaner miners. However, all the evidence points to the managers themselves being heavily implicated in this situation. As the Small Holdings Commission again reported:

A change of Manager on the mines of the Witwatersrand is, more often than not, accompanied by an entire change of staff; a change of even Engineers, Mine Captains and others at lower positions, means a change in the staff of those immediately under their control.

The Commission also reproduced an illuminating extract from a Report of the Inspector of White Labour Johannesburg for the year ending 1911 in which he quoted the words of a mine employee:

‘I have been lucky’, he told the Inspector, ‘I have been here about ten years and am about the oldest hand on the property. The changes during my time here have been constant. I have never felt at ease although I know I can do my work. When you see so many men as good or better than yourself get shifted on the change of a boss how can you feel secure.’²⁷

Such wholesale changes of personnel had moreover become increasingly common in the years after Union. Of the 50 mine managers working in August 1913, O. Quigley tells us, one had been appointed in 1901, one in 1903, one in 1907, five in 1909, fifteen in 1910, seven in 1911, eighteen in 1912 and ten in 1913 (O’Quigley, Section 5, p.18).²⁸ As a result, numerous witnesses informed the Commission, ‘It is a well-known and accepted fact that the industrial community is a roving one.’²⁹ As trade union and 1913 strike leader James Bain later informed the Commission, the average white miner was likely to work for only eight months a year, while many worked on the mines simply with a view to maintaining a toehold on the land.³⁰

It was precisely this kind of situation which triggered the second miners’/general strike to grip the Rand in May 1913, which shook the post-Union South African state to its foundation. The trigger for the strike at face value was ‘trifling’ (quoted from the South African Typographical Journal, June 1913 p. 9),³¹ but in fact went to the core of miners’ grievances and conditions on the mines. It began on New Doornfontein Mine in Benoni after a new mine manager, Edward Bulman, was appointed. Upon his arrival 60 underground employees of the mine left of their own accord and Bulman discharged 15 others. Bulman immediately set about re-organising the work of underground mechanics. Apart from dismissing two, he also increased the hours of work of the rest. The five remaining mechanics refused to comply and so the strike began. This change in the conditions of work of a minuscule number of five mechanics ultimately brought 19 000 white miners on all mines on the Rand out on strike. Clearly Bulman’s new policy had struck several raw nerves. One of the most exposed of these was autocratic and arbitrary management. The New Kleinfontein mine had earned a reputation for being ‘a hotbed of labour’ and more miners signed up there to the Miners’ Union than at any other single mine. The mine management therefore appointed Bulman, who had an anti-labour reputation ‘to cleanse the stable’.³² Bulman also arrived with his own mine captain and other men; hence the immediate departure of 50 former employees. What his arrival clearly underscored was the insecurity of employment of practically all white miners on the mines, managements’ deep aversion to unions, and their determination both not to offer them any recognition, and to re-impose management autocracy.³³ These were problems shared by all miners on the Rand, and with the added instigation of militant, socialist white union leaders like James Bain, and management intransigence, the strike soon spread to other neighbouring mines until a general strike was called on 4 July 1913.³⁴

Both the mine managements and the State were more unready to meet a challenge of this kind than at any time before or after in the history of the gold mining industry on the Rand. For some weeks the government dithered. They considered, but were ultimately unwilling to press the mines to the negotiating table, yet in a less than even-handed manner, provided police protection for strikebreakers employed by the mines. It was these actions that encouraged the strike to spread. Once the strike became general, the government found it did not possess the resources necessary to restore law and order. The number of police was inadequate, and the defence force, only just created in 1912, was in the process of re-organisation. After a mass meeting in Benoni on 29 June, which degenerated into violence, the government secured permission to use 3 000 Imperial troops still remaining in South Africa, and they were rushed to the Rand. Even these were not enough. On 2 July, 20 gold mines were on strike, and a general strike was called two days later by the Transvaal Miners’ Association (TMA), when 19 000 white miners downed tools. On 4 July miners streamed from all over the Reef to attend a mass meeting in Johannesburg’s Market Square. Indecisive to the last, Smuts finally banned the meeting. Violence then erupted, though no one was subsequently able to identify what exactly had set it off. Twenty-one civilians were killed and 166 police injured over the following two days. Rioters thronged the streets of central Johannesburg on the evening of the 4th. The offices of the pro-magnate The Star newspaper and Park Station were burnt down. Rioting and looting became widespread. After consultation with the Chamber of Mines, General Smuts and Prime Minister Botha met with the strike committee at the Carlton Hotel in an effort to broker a truce. For the government and the mines this was a moment of profound humiliation. Persistent rumours thereafter claimed that the two generals had been forced to negotiate with the Federation’s leaders at revolver-point. Smuts denied the allegation, but subsequently acknowledged that it had been ‘one of the hardest things’ in his life to place his signature on a document together with that of Federation leader James Bain.³⁵ He also subsequently remarked of Benoni, ‘Some of the most difficult passages of my life have been due to the turbulent people of this little place’.³⁶ The terms of the truce that was reached were full reinstatement, compensation for the victims of rioting and strikebreakers, no victimisation and the submission to the government of a list of grievances by the trade unions.³⁷

In 1914 the Government more or less contrived a second general strike, which started on the railways and from which organised white labour emerged weakened and with a severely bloodied nose. Again Benoni – dubbed the ‘Poor White Mecca’ by the East Rand Express – lay at its centre.³⁸ Hundreds were arrested there under the new Sedition Law, as was the entire Federation of Trades executive in Johannesburg. On this occasion 10 000 government troops literally occupied the Rand in a huge display of force and the strike crumbled humiliatingly in days.³⁹

WHITE WORKER POLITICS, 1910–1924

Meanwhile, during the second decade of the 20th century an entirely new political tradition was also beginning to stir, that of white labourism, committed to a racialised version of the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange – in other words a form of socialism. The first sign of this development can be glimpsed in Pretoria where, in April 1906, the Transvaal Independent Labour Party (TILP) modelled on the British Labour Party, was formed. Somewhat bizarrely, given its socialist credentials, the dominant trade union bloc in the TILP was fiercely committed to a racially supremacist, white protectionist, segregationist viewpoint, which saw migrant African workers as a threat to white labour privileges and security.⁴⁰ This position never went uncontested within the South African Labour Party (SALP). At its very first annual conference of the TILP, for example, held in Germiston in October 1907 an acrimonious debate took place over the admission of all races into the party which left the conference split down the middle.⁴¹ It did nevertheless ultimately dominate.

Two years later, with a view to gaining some political purchase in the newly forming Union of South Africa, a nationwide South African Labour Party was formed, which the bulk of white labourites and unionists joined. This combined in the same curious blend as before: white labour protectionism and segregation along with a commitment to socialism.⁴² The new South African Labour Party contested national parliamentary, Provincial Assembly, and local municipal elections. Although it won a respectable number of parliamentary seats in the 1914 election its main successes were garnered at provincial and local level. Following the suppression of the railway workers’/general strike of 1914 by the Smuts government, and the arrest and deportation of a long list of strike leaders, a major political backlash occurred, and the SALP won 23 seats in the Transvaal Provincial election, one more than all the other parties combined. The mining towns of East and West Rand (as well as central Johannesburg) were the SALP’s principal bases of support.⁴³ During this period the SALP also gained a significant Afrikaner following largely because of the suppression of the 1914 strike. Ekurhuleni in particular lay at the centre of this surge, where an astonishing five women SALP candidates were also elected in municipal elections, two for Germiston, one for Benoni and one for Springs.⁴⁴

These successes, if anything, amplified the political contradictions within the party. On the one hand it remained committed to socialism, and began the implementation, again mainly in Ekurhuleni, of a long-lost programme of municipal socialism (which meant the municipal ownership and provision of strategic services, e.g. electricity and gas generation, along with a more expensive white labour policy in these plants). On the other, its not unfounded fears of black labour substitution on the mines drew it ever more insistently into a white labour protectionist and segregationist position. Ironically, the white female franchise helped sharpen this division. In 1911 the SALP-connected Women’s Reform League was formed with the objective of campaigning for the female municipal franchise which was achieved in 1912. The granting of the franchise to women at a municipal level in 1913 almost certainly helped advance the SALP’s political fortunes, especially on the Rand. White women were overwhelmingly supportive of the prohibition of liquor production and sales, both to abusive white and black males and for a brief moment in World War I, along with white clergymen, put together a highly effective prohibitionist lobby. This had the further effect of precluding the municipal production of sorghum beer for sale to African customers, which denied municipalities a major source of income that could have been used to build African housing and so ‘demigrantise’ part of the African urban population.⁴⁵ At the same time a series of ‘Black Peril’ scares swept the Witwatersrand over this period, triggered by the rape of white women by African male domestics, which heightened especially white women’s racial paranoia, and reinforced the rampant racialism in SALP politics.⁴⁶ Once again this trend did not occur uncontested. In 1914, at the peak of the SALP’s success, a small but significant left-wing opposition was developing within the Party. It was centred on Johannesburg and especially Ekurhuleni, where a group of SALP members in the Boksburg/ Benoni area began publishing a new more radical (and anti-SALP racism) newspaper, The Eastern Record.⁴⁷ This minority tendency would ultimately crystallise and find an ideological home in the South African Communist Party (formed in 1921).

One final, highly racialist political current which further added to the volatile mix of white Ekurhuleni politics in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century, was the phenomenon of the ‘white leagues’. These emerged in various centres on the Rand, but most strongly by far in the Ekurhuleni area. As noted earlier rigid class divisions structured political and social life in white Ekurhuleni. The upper stratum consisted of the mines’ managers and professionals. The middle stratum consisted of commercial people, while at the bottom stood the miners. The population of Benoni, to take one example, consisted of about 9 000 whites mainly from mining and small business families.⁴⁸ The middle stratum of traders evinced possibly the most pernicious racism of any section of the Rand’s white population and they were the principal drivers and supporters of the white leagues. Their chief targets were Indian trading rivals but they also mobilised around a range of other supposed black perils.⁴⁹ Culturally and socially they had most in common with white miners, with whom their fortunes were intimately tied. They thus gravitated politically towards the SALP, significantly reinforcing its segregationist wing. These White Leagues flowered relatively briefly in Ekurhuleni and the Rand, enjoying their heyday between 1906 and 1914.⁵⁰

In 1923 the SALP entered into an electoral pact with the National Party led by J.M.B. Hertzog, and capitalised on the prevailing alienation among workers and Afrikaners, which the Smuts government had generated by the brutal suppression of the 1922 Rand Revolt (discussed below). Together they won a majority of parliamentary seats in the 1924 general election, including all five Ekurhuleni parliamentary seats, and went on to form the so-called Pact government. This once again had a contradictory effect. It unquestionably reinforced the racial wing or racial current within the SALP. At the same time, for the same reason, the SALP began to lose its rationale for existence and steadily began to dissipate its strength. In 1929 it split and entered a precipitous decline losing all seats in the region except Benoni. To look forward to Chapter 5, Benoni remained the last bastion of the SALP, but in an ideologically reconfigured form. As the old labour segregationist leaders of the SALP such as Cresswell and Madeley fell away in the 1930s, a new generation of racially egalitarian SALP activists led by Leo Lovell, who held the Benoni parliamentary seat through most of the 1950s, emerged.⁵¹

THE RAND REVOLT OF 1922

Once World War I broke out the entire situation on the volatile Ekurhuleni mines was transformed. ‘Before the war’, Evelyn Waller, President of the Chamber of Mines, remarked in 1917, ‘both employer and employed were preparing themselves in every possible way for a struggle of very great magnitude.’⁵² The outbreak of war in August 1914 meant collision would be postponed until 1922. Both sides now committed themselves to preserving industrial peace, a goal which was eased by a significant rise in the gold price (and hence profit) immediately after the war. This allowed a status quo agreement to be reached which prohibited any new semi-skilled jobs being opened to blacks; for shaft stewards to win a raft of rights and encroach on managerial prerogatives on a host of mines; and for wages to climb steadily in parallel with inflation. By 1920 white wage costs stood a massive 60% higher than in 1914. To compound the problem faced by the mine managers the price that gold fetched on the international markets slid steadily down in the course of 1921.⁵³

After protracted negotiations and some union concessions the Chamber decided at the end of 1921 that the time had come ‘to face them’. On 8 December it threw down the gauntlet demanding a reduction of wages for the highest paid white workers, the abolition of the status quo agreement, the withdrawal of recognition of shaft stewards, and the retrenchment of 2 000 semi-skilled white workers whose jobs would be allocated to lower-paid African labour. Throughout the ensuing discussions the Chamber insisted that it had no intention of displacing skilled labour – the target was thus semi-skilled Afrikaners. On 10 January 1922 white workers on the gold mines, the power stations and the engineering shops came out on strike.⁵⁴

Benoni was one of the main centres of the 1922 strike

The strike, which was summoned on 10 January, lasted for a remarkable eight weeks. During that period it underwent several changes of personality which confound both of its main schools of interpretation. To begin with 22 000 white miners along with workers from two ancillary industries went on strike. Strike committees were set up across the Rand, representatives of which sat on an augmented South African Industrial Federation (SAIF) executive strike committee. While the Chamber of Mines remained obdurate and at times provocative, the Government adopted a posture of relative neutrality and made several efforts to broker an agreement between the parties to the dispute. At the very opening of the strike it nevertheless despatched a large force of South African Mounted Rifles from other centres in the Transvaal to the Rand. Fears about the potential role of such a force, and the need to create bodies which would prevent scabbing or strikebreaking led to the formation of a unique institution of the strike – the commando – about two weeks into the strike. These represented a formidable defensive and coercive force, without whose existence the slide into outright rebellion would have been totally unthinkable. Strike commandos sprang up all across the Reef – Johannesburg alone probably had ten commandos, their membership ranging from 100 in Fordsburg to a massive 1 000 in Langlaagte. Ekurhuleni, in Krikler’s words, was ‘thick with commandos’, Germiston being the hub of at least six. The Boksburg district likewise mounted another half dozen. Far out on the East the fearsome Brakpan commando could muster 900–1 500 men more.⁵⁵

The commando, as Krikler demonstrates in one of the most interesting chapters of his book, was sired as much by ex-South African soldiers’ experiences on the front in World War I, as by republican yearnings. These ex-combatants, a significant number of whom were poor-white Afrikaners, infused the strike with ‘the idioms and modes of organisation of the strikers of an army’ thereby ‘creating something different from a traditional strike organisation’. These idioms and forms Krikler designates as ‘cultural contributions’ and took the form of roll calls on parade grounds, marching in formation and drilling, military rank and insignia, communication based on an organised system of despatch riders, discipline through court martials, and the issuing of rations.⁵⁶

Within these formations Afrikaner miners comprised the principal component. A large percentage of those tried in military tribunals after the rebellion, for instance, gave their place of origin as the Orange Free State. Krikler also maintains that while the strikers’ programme was disfigured by its racial agenda, it did not for the most part seek out racial targets. While tens of thousands of black miners continued to toil underground in the course of the strike, they were rarely viewed as enemies of the striking miners. For the first six weeks of the strike, which was surprisingly disciplined and peaceful, it was white miner scabs and white management who were targeted, not blacks. Only on 7–8 March were black communities targeted, in what Krikler calls a ‘pogrom’ in which grisly episodes 44 people were killed. As Krikler once again points out, few of these were African miners and the reasons for the attack lay in factors outside of the strike.⁵⁷ These will be examined later on in the next chapter.

The denouement of the strike followed shortly after the racial killings. A month earlier Smuts had openly sided with the mine owners and urged the miners to return to work. Later in February the government stepped up the pressure and police violently dispersed a commando in Boksburg in which three strikers were killed and others injured.⁵⁸ With this a crossroads was reached. The SAIF now requested a round-table conference with the Chamber of Mines, which the Chamber contemptuously rejected. As some strikers trickled back to work, a meeting of the joint executives of the striking unions deliberated what to do (even considering the possibility of calling off the strike). A mass meeting of workers outside the Trades Hall, however, forced them to take the decision to call a general strike, which was very patchily heeded. Both sides then drew up battle lines. On the morning of 10 March, commandos attacked police across the length and breadth of the Witwatersrand. The strike had entered the final phase: an attempted revolution had begun.⁵⁹

Active engagement in the insurrection was curiously uneven in different parts of Ekurhuleni. When fighting broke out, an organised network to orchestrate military action did not exist for the strikers and the rebellion immediately descended into a series of local rebellions. According to Krikler:

… the fuse of rebellion moved along the railway line from Johannesburg spluttering around Germiston, briefly flaring in Boksburg, detonating spectacularly in Benoni and Brakpan and fizzling out in Springs.⁶⁰

The nerve centre of the rebellion from which the activities of the Council of Action emanated was Fordsburg in Johannesburg. It was from there, for example, that the initial call from the revolutionary leaders to attack the police was made on the morning of Wednesday 9 March. Smuts’ old adversary, Benoni, did not trail far behind. Passions had been building among the strikers since mid-February when the government and the Chamber had offered deep provocation through a systematic attempt to organise strikebreakers. In the last week of February meetings took place in Boksburg, Benoni and Fordsburg to consider revolution. The killing of strikers at Boksburg on 28 February tilted the balance among the organisers of the strike away from Constitutionalism and towards Direct Action. A policeman reporting on developments in Benoni talked of ‘a change’ of atmosphere on 7 March when fights broke out in Benoni Workers’ Hall, and the Constitutionalist chairman of the strike committee was rudely kicked out.⁶¹ Edwin Gibbs, chair of the strike committee in Brakpan, decided to quit the Brakpan command early in March because of the growing influence of Direct Actionists who wanted violent action.⁶² Clear evidence of a change of gear came on the evening of 10 March when nine boxes of rifles and ammunition were opened in Workers’ Hall in Benoni and distributed to the local commando, with the men of the Putfontein commando being prominent.

On 10 March the Benoni commando seized control of the town pinning down the police and soldiers in the police camp on the west side of town.⁶³ Brakpan’s commando was the next most successful, when it launched a ferocious attack aimed at crushing the authority of management at Brakpan Mines. Once the mine headquarters had been captured on the morning of 11 March, however, this soon degenerated into mindless brutality, as the surrendered defenders were beaten to a pulp by bicycle chains, rifle butts and iron bars, and then, unconscious and defenceless, shot where they lay. This was a moment of pure barbarity, which spoke volumes of the intense hatred which had been generated for management among a minority of the men.⁶⁴

Elsewhere in Ekurhuleni the Germiston commandos were almost immediately scattered by aerial bombardment on 10 March, while in Boksburg its numerous mobilised commandos ambushed a police contingent but then faded away. Their lack of revolutionary commitment and divisions among strikers (possibly along English/Afrikaans lines) meant that only 75 of a potential 500 commando members assembled at Workers’ Hall on the morning of 10 March. Thereafter resistance melted away, and the revolt, as one historian has written, ‘was over almost before it began’.⁶⁵ Likewise in Springs no concerted onslaught occurred and the same lack of commitment or bravado was displayed as in Boksburg.⁶⁶ It was thus in Benoni that the most sustained and successful uprising occurred. Not only were the police pinned down and isolated in their camp on the west of town, but a large troop of Transvaal Scottish who boarded trains in Johannesburg to relieve the embattled police and mine management of Benoni were ambushed by striking workers at Dunswart junction. Eleven of them were killed and 30 wounded, compelling the remainder of the troop to retreat through Benoni’s African location.⁶⁷ It was evidently this incident and the days that followed which led African residents of the location to rename it ‘Twatwa’ after the sound of guns which rang out through that day. In Benoni the rebellion ultimately collapsed after the arrival of burgher commandos led by General Japie van Deventer from Standerton and the south-west, and the bombing and strafing of the strikers and their headquarters from aeroplanes, which prompted an internal collapse of discipline as one part of the rebels degenerated into looting and burning.⁶⁸ In a state of extreme inebriation these were in no state to continue the fight. The use of aircraft, in particular, not only intimidated the strikers, but also profoundly embittered the residents of the town. ‘The bombs that fell on Benoni … caused panic … it was a pitiful procession’ as the local newspaper reported.⁶⁹ The unhappy event made Benoni one of the first towns in history to be subjected to aerial bombardment. Robert Barnet, who was living at the Hotel Cecil in the middle of the town, leaves an eye-witness record of what transpired. The diary begins on Wednesday 8 when the general strike was called:

Wednesday, 8 March 1922. An uneventful day as far as Benoni is concerned. No papers. No news. Rumours from Johannesburg of further shooting … No one knows the truth. The strikers talk of dark happenings tonight and tomorrow. A Scotch Evangelist is here and is conducting meetings outside the Cecil and in the Hall. He is roaring, as I write this, that he is saved.

Thursday, 9 March 1922. This morning no news, only rumours – Mine Manager shot in town, Commando coming from Free State, etc.

Defence Force called. No trains to Benoni. Big parade, 500 strikers in military formation, preceded by pipe band.

Probable attack on Post Office. Special force of Police with fixed bayonets guarding.

Rautenbach, leader of Mounted Commando, tried for something yesterday and acquitted. Enormous crowds inside and outside Court ready to rescue him if convicted.

The Scotch Evangelist is appealing to Scotchmen to come and get salvation ‘without money and without price’. That ought to appeal to Scotchmen, he says, ‘something for nothing’.

Friday, 7 a.m. A battle is raging in Benoni. Shooting started at daybreak and police are all around the Hotel – under the verandas and in doorways. Three bodies are lying in Market Avenue in front of my gate (policemen), one quite dead, the other two twitching.

The young swanky officer who patrolled the streets yesterday was bowled over by a bullet just now.

8.30 a.m. Still shooting. James, the butcher, said to be shot dead. Ambulances and doctors arrive. Republican flag on Trades Hall.

9.30 a.m. Aeroplanes have arrived. Armed with machine guns. Fired on Trades Hall. Returned to Johannesburg, one apparently winged.

Friday, 5 p.m. Firing re-started 3 p.m. Been going on intermittently ever since. Police awaiting reinforcements. Hotel established as headquarters. Aeroplanes returned and bombed the Trades Hall. No lights to be allowed to-night. Outside rooms to be vacated.

Saturday, 7 a.m. Firing re-started at daybreak. Transvaal Scottish arrived last night. Aeroplanes again. Bombing Trades Hall. Said to be women and children there.

1 p.m. Sniping. Trades Hall said to be evacuated. Rennie’s house said to be burnt, also Murphy’s.

3 p.m. Barricades across street above Bunyan Street. News has arrived of the Transvaal Scottish arrival last night. Disembarked near Dunswart and advanced in skirmishing order. They were met by a body of strikers and sustained 60 casualties. Mostly inexperienced young lads from offices. Two officers killed.

Sunday, 7 a.m. ‘... to keep it holy’. Firing re-started at daybreak. Body of strikers entrenched in plantation behind dam. Finally attacking Police Station. General van Deventer advancing from Pretoria. (Was there ever such a strike!)

11 a.m. Quiet just now. Just been trying to cheer up the women. How they cling to their husbands and are afraid to let them out of their sights.

1 p.m. Continuous firing. Sound of heavy guns near Boksburg. Deventer said to be engaging strikers in their rear.

6 p.m. Getting dark. Possible attempts to fire the Hotel tonight. Arrangements made for the transfer of women and children if necessary. Banks, Chemist and Bottle Store blazing.

Sunday, 6 p.m. Daring sortie by strikers. Kuper’s office and Benoni Arcade burnt to the ground. Heavy bombardment all afternoon.

Monday, 13th 9 a.m. Aeroplane overhead. Desultory sniping.

10.30 a.m. Rumours that Johannesburg is also in revolt. What’s that? Horses. Van Deventer has arrived in front of the Hotel with a huge commando. The siege is raised!

10 p.m. Trades Hall ablaze!’⁷⁰

Accurate figures of casualties of the strike do not exist, but it is likely that between 150 and 250 were killed, and 500–600 wounded. Five thousand were arrested, about 1 000 of whom appeared in court.⁷¹ In the subsequent Martial Law Court sittings 72 strikers were convicted (35 English, 37 Afrikaners). Eighteen were sentenced to death; four were hanged. In the aftermath of the strike 3 000 white mine workers were left unemployed. The spectre of poor whiteism again became acute, and gangs of unemployed white miners were conscripted into relief gangs to help build the Hartbeespoort Dam and the greater part of the railway system around Benoni.⁷²

Following the suppression of the strike the militant white labour tradition became diluted and co-opted by the 1924 Pact Government’s policies of civilised labour and of industrial conciliation, only surviving among Afrikaner women worker trade unions (discussed in Chapter 4). The politics of white labour and white Ekurhuleni would be forever transformed. Henceforth a much more sedate and conservative political tradition held sway, until the rise of a militant Afrikaner nationalism during and after World War II, which is the subject of Chapter 8.

Ekurhuleni was a principal, if not the principal home of white labourism and white worker militancy in South Africa. It stood at the centre of the 1913, 1914 and 1922 strikes, the first and last of which represented massive threats to capitalist political hegemony. It was also a prime focal point of white labourers’ policies of job reservation and segregationism both powerfully articulated by the South African Labour Party, who commanded massive support in this area. Finally, it was perhaps the principal site of fusion and interaction between the Afrikaner- and English-speaking sections of the white working class, a place where a broader working class unity seemed a real possibility until 1922, after which it was lost.