In its relatively short history as a unified country, South Africa has been exposed to very few revolutionary incidents led by white citizens. The most serious such incident was undoubtedly the 1922 Rand Revolt, in which the violent protests and armed riots undertaken by 22 000 striking white miners, engineers and power utility workers brought the country to the very brink of a red revolution.

As was previously elaborated in this column, the 1922 strike began as a protest against the Chamber of Mines’ intention to remove the Status Quo Agreement, which, essentially, enforced a colour bar in the workplace so that cheaper black labour could be employed in semiskilled positions.

The strike officially began after the last shift on the night of January 9 and the next day every mine, engineering shop and power station, except one – which was allowed to keep essential services going – from Benoni in the east to Randfontein in the west came to a complete standstill.

As it was estimated that each day of the strike cost the South African economy £160 000, the Chamber of Mines seriously attempted to negotiate with the South African Industrial Federation, to which the white trade unions related to mining were affiliated, in order to resolve the dispute. However, each stakeholder was firm in its objectives and gave little way in the negotiations. Thus, although the chamber and unions engaged in daily negotiations for the next month, each discussion proved futile.

In mid-February, more than a month after the strike had started, Prime Minister Jan Smuts began to lose patience with the impasse. Until that point, government had tried to remain impartial, hoping that the impasse would be resolved by the chamber and unions without interference.

However, on February 11, the Prime Minis- ter issued a public statement urging the feder- ation to call off the strike and to let Parlia-ment deal with the dispute. The statement also appealed to the workers to return to work and gave the assurance that government would protect those who did.

The federation’s response to that appeal was to picket all the mines to prevent any employee from returning to work. It was at that point that the violence so characteristic of the Rand Revolt began, as disgruntled strikers began a long series of brutal assaults on scabs and blacks, and on people doing anything that seemed to suggest support of the mine owners. However, whereas the 1913 strikers had been a badly organised lot, the strike leaders in 1922 ordered the strikers into armed com- mandos in an attempt to instil some discip-line and direction into the strike movement.

More importantly, the unions interpreted Smuts’ appeal as collusion between govern-ment and employers. It was in that context that the extreme elements within the union movements brought a political note and whiff of revolution into the dispute by urging the workers and all sympathisers “to take the necessary steps . . . to defeat government and substitute one calculated to protect the interests of the white race in South Africa”.

For the next few weeks, the commandos, armed with heavy sticks, guns and various homemade weapons, marched through the mining towns along the reef, waving the Red Flag and bearing banners with slogans such as ‘Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa’.

As February wore on, the strikers’ tempers grew worse, marches became considerably more politically threatening and the number of unprovoked assaults directed at scabs and black mineworkers increased.

Such was the intensity of violence along the Reef that, on February 22, Smuts was com- pelled to take a hard line against the com-mandos by declaring them to be unlawful assemblies.
Inevitably, the commandos took no notice of such a decree and continued to incite violence along the Rand. On February 24, the police commissioner was compelled to ask for reinforcements and 1 000 special constables were drafted in from rural districts to confront the strikers.

Such a move proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back and it was at that point that the strike commandos went into action, their aim being to attempt to drive the police out of their districts and assume control. They attacked mines, railway stations and police stations. The police, if not forced to retire, had to barricade themselves in and return the fire. In Benoni, Brakpan, Boksburg and Krugersdorp, the commandos held the towns. In Fordsburg, they forced the police to evacuate the police station and then burned it down. There were skirmishes all along the Reef in which the strikers unquestionably showed that they had the upper hand.

On March, the Council of Action, an organ- ising body consisting of the most extreme strike leaders, declared a general strike and the conditions became more chaotic than ever.

With Rand residents living under a reign of terror, mining towns under siege and the threat of a Red Revolution in the air, Prime Minister Smuts had little choice but to declare Martial Law on March 9. Armed forces, both regular and irregular, which were already well prepared, were subsequently deployed. Fierce fighting took place all along the Reef, especially in the towns of Benoni, Brakpan and Fordsburg. Such was the level of commando resistance in Benoni that Smuts ordered the town to be attacked from the air with 20 lb bombs. (In fact, Benoni remains the only town in South Africa to have ever been bombed from the air.)

It took seven days to defeat the miners’ insurrection but, by March 15, the military operation was over and the unions were forced to declare the strike off two days later. From beginning to end, the whole disastrous episode lasted 87 days.

All told, 230 men were killed during the revolt, which was twice as many lives lost dur- ing the First World War campaign in German South West Africa.

Remarkably, many of the strikers went back to work and were reinstated by their employers and the chamber was able to report that excellent labour relations now existed between white employees and management in the months following the revolt.