A Distant Clap of Thunder Book issued to mark the Fortieth Anniversary of the 1946 Mine Strike <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4727> A Salute by the South African Communist Party to South Africa's Black Mine Workers Published by the South African Communist Party, 1986 Part 1 Big Events Have Small Beginnings The beginning of the first real mass trade union for South Africa's black miners was a small event - so small that history records very little about it, save that the initiative came from a meeting of the Transvaal African National Congress Executive in 1941. The records state that a proposal to sponsor the organisation of such a union was put, and carried. Its proposers were Gaur Radebe, a well known trade unionist and public speaker, long time member of the ANC and a communist in the process of drifting out of the Party, and Edwin Mofutsanyana, a studious and intellectual figure, former mine clerk, and also a veteran ANC and Communist Party member. History does not record the reason for the proposal at that precise time, or the views of Executive Committee members in the debate. The decision was scarcely in keeping with the ANC character of that time, an organisation with only a small membership, steeped in a tradition of quasi-parliamentary type politics, without a great impact on the national political scene, and certainly with little direct connection with working class or trade union affairs. Perhaps it can be explained by a combination of two factors - the general political atmosphere of the times, and the internal politics of the ANC. It was war-time. Everywhere the rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'democratic rights' was being used to whip up support for the war; declarations by statesmen at home and abroad spoke of war aims of an undefined 'freedom from want' and 'freedom of opinion'; some of the heady atmosphere of hope and the anticipation of a better world a-coming rubbed off, even in South Africa, remote though it was from the centre of the war and bitterly internally divided into pro and anti-war factions. In that atmosphere of rising expectation, a new surge of life was rising in the ANC itself. A young generation, deeply committed to national liberation, had grown up under the leadership of Anton Lembede. Of that new generation, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Duma Nokwe, Govan Mbeki and others had burst their way into the leading ranks of the organisation, particularly in the Transvaal; it displaced an old generation which had failed to move with the new times and tides of feeling. On the Transvaal Executive of the ANC, the militants of the ANC youth league formed a natural working partnership with the militant veterans of an earlier period, particularly the communists like Radebe, Kotane, Mofutsanyana and Marks, who were already in the leadership ranks. Perhaps it was the natural consequence of such a partnership that the small decision - lost in the records as just one decision amongst so many - was taken to sponsor a mine workers' trade union. It may be assumed that those who took this decision had some forebodings or doubts about their abilities to carry out that task successfully. They had chosen for themselves the most formidable political and organisational task the country presented; and men deeply engaged in politics as these must have known just how formidable it was. There were two massive mountains to climb in building a mass union of black miners. The first lay in the nature of the miners themselves. These men, some 340,000 at the time, were not the stable urbanised workers with which the black trade unions of the time were familiar - men in regular jobs, living in urban townships with families and with deep roots in all the aspects of black urban life. These miners, on the contrary, were rural men, recruited from rural areas and reserves for a limited contract period of less than a year, and who returned to those rural areas and agricultural pursuits at the end of their contracts. Even those who came back to the mines for a second contract, did so on average only after some years away. Leaving behind their families and dependants to scratch the soil as best they could, the families would look to the men on the mines to help sustain and supplement their incomes. On the Witwatersrand, the black miners lived not as part of the black community, but a life apart, closely corralled within their compounds, with only the sleazy eating-house cum 'native store' complexes around the compounds as an alternative to compound life. They were, in the main, men who understood nothing of the cities, which lay like foreign territory well away from the mine shafts - not even how to get around or find one's way within them. Unlike the urban industrialised workers, these were men deeply steeped in tribal lore and cultures. They brought to the mines many old tribal animosities and rivalries, which were assiduously fostered by employers who lived by the 'divide and rule' maxim. Few of them could have heard of the new ideas of African nationalism, still less have been influenced by them. And wider ideas of Africanism even could hold little currency in a community most of whom were not South Africans but Mozambicans, Tanganyikans, Angolans, Nyasas, recruited from afar, or Basotho, Bechuana or Swazis recruited from what were then still 'British Protectorates' - sharing neither a single language, nor a single political creed. From: http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2626 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. 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