Working Papers in Southern African Studies
D. O'Meara
On Monday August 12th 1946, in response to call by the African Mine Workers Union, over 60,000 African miners on the Witwatersrand Mines struck work. The following day, the Transvaal Council of Non-European Trade Unions called for a General Strike of Black worker. Police were used to break the Strike, and by Saturday 17 th the last of the strikers were back at work. As a result of police action, 12 Africans were reported killed and over 1,000 injured. None of the strikers' demands were met, and fizzled out an apparent failure.
Politics is an opaque field of human activity. The causes and significance of single events are, more often than not, both obscure and open to varying interpretations. Occasionally however, one event seems to crystallise the contradictions and conflicts of an entire stage of social development, and the reactions to it point the way to the future development of a particular social formation. Despite its apparent failure, the 1946 African Miners' strike was such a milestone in South Africa's social and political development. Occurring at the end of a particular phase of development, it highlighted the contradictions and alignment of forces in the social formation, and forced all groups into a re-examination of their position and responses, producting important political shifts. Most obviously it profoundly affected the directly the direction and thrust of African opposition; patient constitutional protest by an elite rapidly gave way to mass action and passive resistance. In the white political arena, it focused attention on important shifts in the class structure produced by rapid economic growth 1933-45, of which the strike - was the direct result. These provoked political realignments ending in the slim victory of the Nationalist/Afrikaner Party coalition over Smuts' ruling United Party coalition over Smuts' ruling United Party in the 1948 General Election.
In a sense, the policies of the Nationalist Government since 1948 have been a reply to questions about the nature of the South African social formation posed by the strike.
Given my interpretation of the strike as a relatively unexamined watershed event, this paper operates at two levels of analysis. The first is concerned to establish a theory about the dynamic of South African politics; about changes in the structure of production and the composition of the labour force, and the relationship between these facts and forms of political struggle in the Thirties - in other words, a theory which reveals what I take to be the true significance of the strike. This is as spare as possible. The second level of analysis concentrates on the effects of the strike in terms of its contribution to changes in the class basis of African opposition and the ideology of Nationalism in the late Forties, and in terms of the reassessment and conflicts it highlighted and precipitated within "white" politics.
