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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 29, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The great South African mine strike of 1946

By Monica Moorehead

The time was half a century ago. The place was the gold-laden mines in South Africa. The event would become known as the "great mine workers' strike of 1946."

The 1946 mine workers' strike was led by the African Mine Workers Union, whose president, J.B. Marks, was also a leader in the South African Communist Party.

This Aug. 16, a march in Johannesburg organized by the present-day National Union of Mineworkers commemorated that heroic workers' struggle. According to a Reuter report, 8,000 mineworkers walked through the streets demanding a 13-percent pay increase. Speakers called attention to the continuing deplorable conditions for much of the population.

Conditions 10 times worse 50 years ago

If economic conditions for the oppressed masses are deplorable today in South Africa, 50 years ago they were 10 times worse. This was especially true for the African migrant worker in the mines.

Gold mining, the backbone of the South African economy today, still depended on migrant slave labor in the 1940s. These workers were forced to travel hundreds of miles to work for months and even years at a time, leaving their families behind to barely exist on the barren strips of land known as bantustans.

While a small minority of extremely privileged white mine workers were making a living wage, the unorganized African mine workers were paid what amounted to a few dollars a day while working under unsafe conditions. This resulted in the deaths of thousands of miners annually as they made the racist mine owners filthy rich.

These super-exploited workers decided that enough was enough. With the help of the African National Congress, they formed the AMWU in 1941. J.B. Marks, a leader of the South African Communist Party, became the AMWU's first president.

The period between 1933 and 1946 was marked by rapid growth of capitalist industrial development in South Africa. Apartheid was the country's unofficial policy. By 1946, one out of four Black South Africans lived in the urban areas seeking jobs.

As capitalism expanded, so did the South African working class. More and more Black African workers were becoming organized. They then became more empowered, carrying out work stoppages in key industries.

Conditions at Witwatersrand gold mines

There were an estimated 309,000 African workers in the Witwatersrand gold mines in 1946. They were forced to work a six-day week; the average wage was two shillings one penny per shift among surface workers.

They didn't receive overtime, sick pay or holiday pay.

These workers also had to pay about 15 percent of their earnings for bedding and work clothes.

The AMWU put forth some demands to the Lansdowne Commission of Inquiry-including regular wage increases, cost-of-living allowance, a legal minimum wage, total abolition of the "tribal" division of the work force, and formal recognition of the AMWU.

When these demands were turned down, the AMWU voted at a conference on Aug. 12, 1946 to strike. Some 60,000 miners walked off their jobs in the Witwatersrand mine.

Eventually 100,000 miners joined the strike. Total monthly gold production dropped by 169,000 tons to the lowest level since 1937.

The response from the brutal apartheid state was stepped-up repression. Police fired on the miners, killing scores and injuring hundreds. The leaders of the strike were eventually arrested and tried for "acts of treason."

Despite the state's violent response, workers viewed the strike as a turning point in the struggle against apartheid. Many anti-apartheid activists were heartened by the largest single strike carried out by migrant workers.

The strikers received donations from Indian activists in Durban. The ANC and CP took on leadership roles in the strike and distributed leaflets in the various mine shafts after the AMWU leadership was arrested.

The ANC Youth League issued its own leaflet in support of the strike entitled "The African Mine Workers' Strike-A National Struggle."

Though the strike did not immediately bring better working conditions, its historic impact helped lay the basis for the powerful unionization and politicization of the South African working class. Today the Congress of South African Trade Unions leads the workers. COSATU's secretary-general, Sam Shilowa, has called for a socialist transformation of the South African economy.

In her book, "South Africa Belongs to Us-A History of the ANC," Francis Meli quotes Michael Harmel, who has drawn the lessons of this strike using V.I. Lenin's great book, "State and Revolution."

Harmel states: "The miners' strike of 1946 was one of those great social events which at once illuminate and accelerate history brilliantly showing us and hastening the main conflicts. ... The strike destroyed, once and for all, the myth of the state as a `neutral' body, standing aside from the conflict between employer and employed, rich and poor. ...

"The courage and class consciousness of the miners inspired and awakened tens of thousands of oppressed African workers; the miners of '46 were the forerunners of protest strikers of May Day and the 26^th of June, the defiance volunteers, the brave men and women who have stood by the Congress movement through the grim days of Nationalist repression."

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