This Year in History: The 1922 Rand Revolt

Abstract

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the most serious challenge to South Africa’s newly established settler state came not, as might be expected, from Africans displaced by the 1913 Native Land Act or corralled into compounds as cheap labour for the brutal mining industry. It came, instead, from white workers: a racially privileged but structurally vulnerable class of men – and women – living and labouring on ‘the margins of a capitalist society where charity was in short supply and social contempt abundant’. The perpetual threat of displacement with cheap black labour animated white industrial conflict throughout the first two decades of the century, with major strikes in 1907, 1913, and 1914. All centred on the mining industry, the axis of the South African economy. In each case, the state forces intervened in favour of mining interests. At least 20 strikers were killed in 1913 when troops opened fire on crowds outside the Rand Club, and in 1914 a largescale military mobilisation halted strikes. 1922, however, was of a different magnitude. Amid rampant inflation and falling gold prices, the Chamber of Mines moved to replace 2000 semi-skilled white workers with cheaper black workers. The broader white mining workforce, fearing it would soon face the same fate, reacted with outrage. In January, a major strike broke out on the gold and coal mines, escalating by early March to a general strike across the Transvaal. This took a revolutionary direction as armed strikers seized control over parts of the Rand and formed commandos to directly confront the state. This challenge took two main forms: republican strikers, animated by the memory of the Boer conflict with Britain, sought the formation of an independent republic; anti-capitalist strikers, drawing on revolutionary currents influential in the white labour movement, sought the formation of a communist state. Many strikers had military experience, and intense violence engulfed the Rand. White working-class women, too, formed commandos that attacked police and