Hammer and Sickle
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 14 The Alliance, At Last The strike brought together in a working partnership the three main forces of that national movement - the ANC, the black trade unions and the Communist Party. It was a working partnership which had not been seen, or tried perhaps, since the great days of the ICU under Clements Kadalie before 1930. Such a partnership existed at the time of the ICU, smashed to pieces in bitter factional disputes and internecine war. The miners' strike provided a new type of partnership, based on mutual respect for each other's special ideology, and mutual trust. That new partnership has grown steadily, uninterrupted from that time on. It has become the stable foundation stone for the united alliance which today dominates the political scene in our country, and which heads the entire nationwide struggle for liberation forty years on. The Communist Party and the ANC had entered the period of the strike from a long experience of legal operation. They had formerly been slightly harassed from time to time, but had been able to rely on 'legal rights' in their own defence. The open police-state atmosphere of the strike period marked the beginning of the end of all that. During the strike members of both organisations who had joined the corps of volunteers to support the strike, had been driven into improvising new, non-legal ways of political work - clandestine meetings, evading the police, disguise. Thus began the process of discarding illusions of a guaranteed 'legality' and of preparing members - though they did not then know it - for the period of total illegality which lay ahead of them. The learning period was vital to their political survival only a few years later, when the Suppression of Communism Act drove the Communist Party underground and prepared the way for the outlawing also of the ANC. So too was the experience of how to behave in a mass political trial, which began with the Mines Strike case in Johannesburg and continued through a still unended series of trials - the 1956 Treason Trial, the Rivonia Trial, and many more recent trials of militants and leader of the UDF throughout the country. In the Mines Strike case, the accused pleaded guilty, so unwittingly opening the way for a following prosecution of the Party's Central Committee on a charge of Sedition. It was a mistake, made from inexperience, to allow political decisions to be overruled by legal advisers. It was a mistake the movement never repeated. That, too, was a gain. All that, and much more, must be put down to the credit account of the miners' strike. The accounting can go on and on. It had been a strike with small beginnings. But it had boomed out through the whole country, shaking much, changing much. Looked at from where our country stands today, it might seem but a distant clap of thunder which has passed into silence. It often happens in the build up to a major storm that the first single clap of thunder is followed only by a long silence. And then, long afterwards, the reverberations begin to echo back from distant places, rumbling on and on to mark a storm spreading outwards from its first origins, to cover the whole country. So too in politics. Perhaps in the great rolling storm of the Passive Resistance Campaign of 1946 we were hearing the echoes of Gandhi's first act of defiance, his clap of thunder of the 1908 march across the forbidden provincial boundary. And in today's powerful and spreading consumer boycott of white owned shops, do we perhaps hear the reverberating echoes of the Alexandra bus boycotts of 1943 and the potato boycott against the Bethal farm labour savagery of the late 1950's? Today - everywhere in South Africa - we are living through a wild and growing storm, which can no longer be ignored. All the old landmarks of white supremacy are being washed away, and the old groundwork of black subjection and silence is being overturned. It is a new age, heady with new people's confidence that every obstacle in their way can be climbed, and overcome. It is a new age, in which the trade unions of the black workers - miners and industrial workers alike - rise in strength under the united, uniting banners of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It is a new age, in which the armed forces of the state no longer rampage at will against a stick-wielding but otherwise unarmed population; but one in which the armed units of Umkhonto we Sizwe join forces with those who resist heroically with only stones and petrol bombs. It is a new age, in which a firm alliance of the illegal ANC and Communist Party unites with the mainstream legal mass movement of the United Democratic Front to challenge the whole age-encrusted racial supremacy and contempt of the old ruling class - the Chamber of Mines no less than its state apparatus. Today we stand at the threshold of the final struggles to dismember the old order. Everywhere about us there rumbles the storm which was first signalled by that clap of thunder of August 1946. It was a small beginning forty years ago. And its end is not yet in sight. But it will be! With the coming of freedom and of people's victory in our lifetime! _____ Notes: 1. From the evidence of Detective Sergeant Boy at the Miners' Strike Trial, September 1946 2. The strike started at 3am, when the shifts changed over 3. On this day the Rand Daily Mail changed the spelling of Marks to Marx - and continued to do so throughout the strike. 'A spectre is haunting...'? 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. 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