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Fighting for a White South Africa: White Working-Class Racism and the 1922 Rand Revolt

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02582470709464719

1726-1686

Keith Breckenridge,

African cultural and philosophical studies

I realized only quite recently—although I suppose I must have known it in an unconscious way for a long time—that all of the most recent generations of my ancestors are descended from members of the Witwatersrand white working class. My greatgrandparents make up a strangely representative ethnic sample of the white working class in 1920. My maternal great-grandparents on my father’s side came from Lithuania to the ‘Rand after the South African war. Their daughter lived with a degenerate Scottish artisan who was himself the child of a Glaswegian family who came to take up work at Luiperdsvlei gold mine before the South African War. On my mother’s side, my greatgreat-grandfather was a Cousin Jack – one of the first batch of Cornish miners who came out to the ‘Rand in the 1890s. His daughter married another Cornishman who worked at Crown Mines. Their son married one of the six daughters of Steyn Greyling, a former Boer prisoner at St Helena who came to the same mine from a farm near the Free State town of Bethlehem during the First World War. This ethnic jigsaw mirrors the major waves of white immigration to the Witwatersrand before the 1922 strike but I mention this genealogy for two different reasons. I think that my family history nicely captures the ways in which ethnicity, after the trauma of the 1922 strike, ceased to be an important part of white working class life. I, also, want my readers to know that I approach the history of that strike, and of the workers who were caught up in it, without, at least, an attitude of contempt for the white working class. The clinical destruction of the armed uprising of white workers that followed the 1922 strike marks the coming of age of the unified South African state; it was, as David Yudelman showed twenty-five years ago, the moment of the establishment of an unambiguous Smutsian hegemony. In the events on the 10 – 13 of March, 1922, the central government deployed a relatively small professional army, bomber aircraft, tanks and artillery against the pockets of armed revolution in the towns along the Reef. The rapid collapse of working class resistance marked the end of a string of revolts that had rocked the foundations of the new South African state over the previous two decades. Beginning with the events of the Bhambatha tax revolt in 1906, the settler state that Smuts and Merriman fashioned faced a string of violent protests. In 1907, under the pall of truly frightening silicosis fatalities, the white mineworkers initiated a bitter fifteen year struggle for control over the arrangement and rewards of underground work. Initially, in the absence of a properly organized police power, the conflict carried in their direction. In 1913 the syndicalist leaders of the mine workers were able to humiliate the two key figures of the Union government, Botha and Smuts, forcing them to accept the white workers’ terms of settlement or face the sacking of the city of Johannesburg. When the strike season began again a year later Smuts was, famously, better prepared. He drew upon his republican political allegiances to mobilize the newly reconstituted rural commandos, bringing a force of 70,000 Afrikaner burghers to the city. With this overwhelming force at his back, Smuts declared martial law, arrested and deported-without trial--the key syndicalist leaders.