The “heroic and cruel, ambiguous and doomed” revolt of white mineworkers in Johannesburg in 1922 has been the subject of numerous books, memoirs, articles and analyses. Seen as a defining moment in South African history, it has probably never been as thoroughly examined as in The Rand Revolt: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (Jonathan Ball Publishers) by historian Jeremy Krikler, who links it not only to shifts in the mining industry and white labour militancy after World War I, but also to nationalism, class, socialism, race and gender.
Much of the story is familiar. After World War I, the mining companies backtracked on the preferential white labour Status Quo Agreement over employment of semi-skilled workers on the gold mines of Johannesburg. The reasons were mainly economic: during the war, gold production declined while extraction costs increased, with the result that post-war cost-cutting was deemed necessary.
The white miners’ unions were furious at this. Negotiations with mining companies failed, the latter backed by the Union government. In early 1922, a strike was called and miners, some of them war veterans, organised themselves into strike commandos for self-defence. After fights between these commandos and the police began, the strike organisers launched a revolt, a white working-class insurrection, in March 1922. The government called in the army, artillery and air force to crush the strike and re-take mining towns seized by the insurgents. Within a week, by March 17 1922, the revolt was crushed.
Beneath this story, Krikler argues, were a number of ideological forces. Nationalism was integral to the strike. During the war, many Afrikaners had joined the mines and, facing reduced wages and the loss of job privileges after 1921, they joined the strike, seeing it as part of a wider nationalist struggle against British domination. Socialism, too, played a major role. The socialist movement in South Africa was, at the time, almost exclusively white, often centred on foreign-born workers, among whom were many of the skilled workers of the gold mines.
Although tiny in size (300 nationwide, and a handful among mineworkers), the Communist Party, formed in 1921, enjoyed considerable prestige among the strikers, as did a number of socialist groups and trade unions. Working-class consciousness was both raised and racialised — which, as Krikler and others have shown, was by no means simply a South African phenomenon at the time. Thus it was common at mineworkers’ rallies during the strike and revolt to hear the socialist anthem The Red Flag sung together with the Volkslied.
Little-researched till now, women also played a significant role in the Rand Revolt. The wives of the striking miners supported their husbands and joined in marches, often placing themselves between the strikers and the police during demonstrations. As the insurrection began, many women supported what was, in effect, an attempted (though objectively, hopeless) revolution against the government and capital.
Racial killing is a focus of Krikler’s book, as the title says. Here he points out that we have to approach the subject with sophistication. Racism was part of South African life — whether one was a Randlord or rebel, as it was a part of life throughout the British Empire and the world. Admitting blacks to semi-skilled jobs on the mines was effectively a challenge to the status quo, however financially expedient it was for the mining companies.
As the strike progressed, violence against blacks increased, particularly in the days running up to the insurrection. This was not simply as revenge against black “scab” labour, it was against whites who took over strikers’ jobs. The majority of the (roughly 40) blacks killed in February and March 1922 were not mineworkers at all, but innocent bystanders who the strikers found in town.
Krikler also draws out the military dimensions of the insurrection with skill, showing how much World War I experience influenced the strikers. The commandos, though poorly armed, were well-disciplined and, initially, successful in seizing key sites in mining towns on the Rand, defeating and driving out the police and army. They fought well, despite being outnumbered by the better-equipped Union Defence Force; the latter was combined with artillery shelling of commando positions, and the bombing and strafing runs of military aircraft were the cause of their inevitable defeat.
In defeat too, the suicide notes of insurrection leaders Fisher and Spendiff (both war veterans) contain echoes of the defiantly cheerful songs of the trenches of the Western Front. The ferocity of the insurrection (on both sides) and the ruthlessness of its suppression are recounted in detail. Descriptions of the conditions — curfews, raids, search and seizures, mass arrests, military and police patrols — echo the conditions in black townships during the 1980s, a point the author notes with irony.
Apart from showing the racial constitution of mineworker consciousness, indeed the racial construction of organised labour of the time, Krikler shows us, in his account of the 1922 revolt, the demise of white working-class militancy. He describes the revolt as “a struggle for dignity and security on the battleground of race, a moral quicksand” — a revolt that failed.
The white left was resolutely defeated as the insurrection ended.
Soon after 1922, the Communist Party moved its focus to include a non-racial, though predominantly black, constituency. Unlike some historians, who see the 1924 Pact Government as a sign that the strikers “really” won, Krikler points out that the extension of semi-skilled jobs to black mineworkers was never rescinded. Henceforth, radical unionism on the mines would come from black mineworkers, and the white working class would, as a whole, turn to nationalist and segregationist parties to preserve their social privilege.
This complex, and to some perhaps controversial, analytical narrative of 1922 is impeccably researched, illustrated with an impressive series of contemporary photographs and written with the right combination of sympathy and critical distance. Krikler has succeeded in understanding his subjects, while not passing over the moral gaps in their vision. The book is well produced, though a bibliography would have been welcome. In short, it is an excellent work of history that deserves attention beyond the realms of academe.