he also increased the hours of work of the rest. The five remaining mechanics refused to comply and so the strike began. This change in the conditions of work of a minuscule number of five mechanics ultimately brought 19 000 white miners on all mines on the Rand out on strike. Clearly Bulman’s new policy had struck several raw nerves. One of the most exposed of these was autocratic and arbitrary management. The New Kleinfontein mine had earned a reputation for being ‘a hotbed of labour’ and more miners signed up there to the Miners’ Union than at any other single mine. The mine management therefore appointed Bulman, who had an anti-labour reputation ‘to cleanse the stable’.32 Bulman also arrived with his own mine captain and other men; hence the immediate departure of 50 former employees. What his arrival clearly underscored was the insecurity of employment of practically all white miners on the mines, managements’ deep aversion to unions, and their determination both not to offer them any recognition, and to re-impose management autocracy.33 These were problems shared by all miners on the Rand, and with the added instigation of militant, socialist white union leaders like James Bain, and management intransigence, the strike soon spread to other neighbouring mines until a general strike was called on 4 July 1913.34
Both the mine managements and the State were more unready to meet a challenge of this kind than at any time before or after in the history of the gold mining industry on the Rand. For some weeks the government dithered. They considered, but were ultimately unwilling to press the mines to the negotiating table, yet in a less than even-handed manner, provided police protection for strikebreakers employed by the mines. It was these actions that encouraged the strike to spread. Once the strike became general, the government found it did not possess the resources necessary to restore law and order. The number of police was inadequate, and the defence force, only just created in 1912, was in the process of re-organisation. After a mass meeting in Benoni on 29 June, which degenerated into violence, the government secured permission to use 3 000 Imperial troops still remaining in South Africa, and they were rushed to the Rand. Even these were not enough. On 2 July, 20 gold mines were on strike, and a general strike was called two days later by the Transvaal Miners’ Association (TMA), when 19 000 white miners downed tools. On 4 July miners streamed from all over the Reef to attend a mass meeting in Johannesburg’s Market Square. Indecisive to the last, Smuts finally banned the meeting. Violence then erupted, though no one was subsequently able to identify what exactly had set it off. Twenty-one civilians were killed and 166 police injured over the following two days. Rioters thronged the streets of central Johannesburg on the evening of the 4th. The offices of the pro-magnate The Star newspaper and Park Station were burnt down. Rioting and looting became widespread. After consultation with the Chamber of Mines, General Smuts and Prime Minister Botha met with the strike committee at the Carlton Hotel in an effort to broker a truce. For the government and the mines this was a moment of profound humiliation. Persistent rumours thereafter claimed that the two generals had been forced to negotiate with the Federation’s leaders at revolver-point. Smuts denied the allegation, but subsequently acknowledged that it had been ‘one of the hardest things’ in his life to place his signature on a document together with that of Federation leader James Bain.35 He also subsequently remarked of Benoni, ‘Some of the most difficult passages of my life have been due to the turbulent people of this little place’.36 The terms of the truce that was reached were full reinstatement, compensation for the victims of rioting and strikebreakers, no victimisation and the submission to the government of a list of grievances by the trade unions.37
In 1914 the Government more or less contrived a second general strike, which started on the railways and from which organised white labour emerged weakened and with a severely bloodied nose. Again Benoni – dubbed the ‘Poor White Mecca’ by the East Rand Express – lay at its centre.38 Hundreds were arrested there under the new Sedition Law, as was the entire Federation of Trades executive in Johannesburg. On this occasion 10 000 government troops literally occupied the Rand in a huge display of force and the strike crumbled humiliatingly in days.39
WHITE WORKER POLITICS, 1910–1924
Meanwhile, during the second decade of the 20th century an entirely new political tradition was also beginning to stir, that of white labourism, committed to a racialised version of the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange – in other words a form of socialism. The first sign of this development can be glimpsed in Pretoria where, in April 1906, the Transvaal Independent Labour Party (TILP) modelled on the British Labour Party, was formed. Somewhat bizarrely, given its socialist credentials, the dominant trade union bloc in the TILP was fiercely committed to a racially supremacist, white protectionist, segregationist viewpoint, which saw migrant African workers as a threat to white labour privileges and security.40 This position never went uncontested within the South African Labour Party (SALP). At its very first annual conference of the TILP, for example, held in Germiston in October 1907 an acrimonious debate took place over the admission of all races into the party which left the conference split down the middle.41 It did nevertheless ultimately dominate.
Two years later, with a view to gaining some political purchase in the newly forming Union of South Africa, a nationwide South African Labour Party was formed, which the bulk of white labourites and unionists joined. This combined in the same curious blend as before: white labour protectionism and segregation along with a commitment to socialism.42 The new South African Labour Party contested national parliamentary, Provincial Assembly, and local municipal elections. Although it won a respectable number of parliamentary seats in the 1914 election its main successes were garnered at provincial and local level. Following the suppression of the railway workers’/general strike of 1914 by the Smuts government, and the arrest and deportation of a long list of strike leaders, a major political backlash occurred, and the SALP won 23 seats in the Transvaal Provincial election, one more than all the other parties combined. The mining towns of East and West Rand (as well as central Johannesburg) were the SALP’s principal bases of support.43 During this period the SALP also gained a significant Afrikaner following largely because of the suppression of the 1914 strike. Ekurhuleni in particular lay at the centre of this surge, where an astonishing five women SALP candidates were also elected in municipal elections, two for Germiston, one for Benoni and one for Springs.44
These successes, if anything, amplified the political contradictions within the party. On the one hand it remained committed to socialism, and began the implementation, again mainly in Ekurhuleni, of a long-lost programme of municipal socialism (which meant the municipal ownership and provision of strategic services, e.g. electricity and gas generation, along with a more expensive white labour policy in these plants). On the other, its not unfounded fears of black labour substitution on the mines drew it ever more insistently into a white labour protectionist and segregationist position. Ironically, the white female franchise helped sharpen this division. In 1911 the SALP-connected Women’s Reform League was formed with the objective of campaigning for the female municipal franchise which was achieved in 1912. The granting of the franchise to women at a municipal level in 1913 almost certainly helped advance the SALP’s political fortunes, especially on the Rand. White women were overwhelmingly supportive of the prohibition of liquor production and sales, both to abusive white and black males and for a brief moment in World War I, along with white clergymen, put together a highly effective prohibitionist lobby. This had the further effect of precluding the municipal production of sorghum beer for sale to African customers, which denied municipalities a major source of income that could have been used to build African housing and so ‘demigrantise’ part of the African urban population.45 At the same time a series of ‘Black Peril’ scares swept the Witwatersrand over this period, triggered by the rape of white women by African male domestics, which heightened especially white women’s racial paranoia, and reinforced the rampant racialism in SALP politics.46 Once again this trend did not occur uncontested. In 1914, at the peak of the SALP’s success, a small but significant left-wing opposition was developing within the Party. It was centred on Johannesburg and especially Ekurhuleni, where a group of SALP members in the Boksburg/ Benoni area began publishing a new more radical (and anti-SALP racism) newspaper, The Eastern Record.47 This minority tendency would ultimately crystallise and find an ideological home in the South African Communist Party (formed in 1921).