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 2 Obstacles Building a miners' trade union required the welding of this divided and basically rural corps of men into a single united body, and to create that unity out of a group of whom perhaps one in every ten left each month for far-off places, to be replaced in turn by new recruits, totally without industrial experience, strangers in that strangest of worlds - the underground tunnels which led, on the surface, only to closed compound encampments in a life apart from the rest of the country. It was like trying to build a solid structure on shifting sands. The second mountain to be faced was the Transvaal Chamber of Mines - the employers' cartel. Here was concentrated the greatest single combine of economic, industrial and financial power in the country. Though nominally composed of a considerable number of different mining companies, it was in essence a closely knit and tiny cartel of a handful - perhaps five really separate - distinct mining 'groups'; each of these groups managed and controlled a stable of subordinate companies through a heavily intertwined network of interlocked finances and share-holdings, and incestuous cross-relations through financial and technical exchanges and shared directorships. What was in essence the tiny closed shop of a handful of multi-millionaire monopoly corporations was the direct employer of the largest body of black and white labour in any single South African industry (308,000 black and 36,000 white). It was the heaviest contributor by way of taxes and mining royalties to the state revenue (contributing £27, 500,000 in direct payments to the state), and to the gross national product (16% of the total national income). It was the main supplier of foreign revenue through gold exports (60% of the total), the largest single purchaser and consumer of the country's agricultural and industrial products. It controlled directly the operations and policies of a train of subsidiary industries - coal, platinum and diamond mining - supply and service industries, engineering, cement, newspapers publishing, breweries and many more. It controlled directly the two organisations with a total monopoly to the legal right to recruit black labour both inside South Africa and abroad - the Native Recruiting Company (NRC) and the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA); and through them it controlled the labour contract system, maintained a closely monitored wage control system, and suppressed all competition for black mining labour. It was said in South Africa - with good reason - that when the Chamber of Mines sneezed, the government caught cold. Though it no longer entered directly into the political seats of power - as its forerunners had done in the days of Cecil John Rhodes, Abe Bailey and others - it remained the grey eminence behind the government, the true economic power and the true arbiter of the nation's destiny. Some would call it a 'state within the state' and others 'the reality of state' with the government and administration representing the Chamber of Mines at politics. Perhaps, in this context, there was a third consideration which must have weighed on those who took on the task of organising the black miners - the character of the Prime Minister Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts. This grey haired, goatee-bearded man enjoyed a reverence and respect in the world outside which was somewhat different from that within South Africa - especially within black and working class South Africa. To the world outside he was the major Boer statesman who had been big enough to pass from successful guerrilla commander against the British in the Boer War, to ally and father figure of the British Empire - he was the deep and venerable philosopher wrapped in the arcane mysteries of 'holism'. To South Africans, on the other hand, he was remembered as the tough, relentless militarist who had used martial law to crush the 1913 white miners' strike and deport its leaders without trial; he was the imposer of martial law again in 1922, and drowned the white miners' strike again in blood both in pitched military assault and later on the gallows; and he had been the instigator of the Bulhoek Massacre, in which 190 black men, women and children had been mown down by troops in 1921 after they refused to leave some land to which they had been guided by a prophetic religious visionary. That incident, Smuts told Parliament, would teach every part of the population that '... the law of the land will be carried out in the last resort as fearlessly against black as against white'. 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. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
