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