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Art: Wikipedia.org
Contemporary depiction of South Africa’s 1922 Rand Revolt from Le Petit Journal newspaper.
Trevor G rundy
When workers battled profit-hungry mine owners March 1922: The month that Communists joined hands with Afrikaners to fight profit-hungry mine owners in South Africa 1922 was quite a year. In India, Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison for sedition. In Egypt, Tutankhamun saw daylight for the first time in a few thousand years. Mussolini and 24,000 of his blackshirt followers marched on Rome and in England a little-known poet called TS Eliot wrote The Wasteland. Not to be outdone, South Africa had the Rand Revolt.
T
he 1922 Rand Revolt has its origin in events that took place thousands of miles away from South Africa in the years that followed the end of the First World War in 1918. In his book South Africa – A Modern History, the historian T.R.H. Davenport tells us that at the end of
1921 deflationary policies in Britain, the USA, and other countries including South Africa, restored the relative value of their currencies at the expense of gold. As a result, the South African mine-owners found it difficult to face the fall of the gold price because of a marked increase in costs since 1914, and in May 1920 21 mines, about half of the Rand gold industry, employing 10,000 whites and more than 80,000 Africans, were in danger of becoming unprofitable. The post -war situation was made worse because during the world war, wages for white miners rose in step with the cost of living, while wages for blacks remained static. In February 1920 a strike broke out after the arrest of two black miners who had the temerity to agitate for a pay increase. Twenty-
one of the country’s 35 mines and around 71,000 African workers were involved. Says Davenport: “It was led mainly by Shangaan and Pedi elements, a number of whom lived outside the compounds and thus had political contact. But despite its widespread nature, and the fact that it was the climax of several years’ unrest, the strike was quickly put down”. It is important to remember that this was just three years after the 1917 Russian Revolution. In South Africa and many other parts of the world, long-ignored workers and a growing number of intellectuals believed they wouldn’t have to wait long to see the reality of the Biblical and Marxian prophecies about the first coming last and the last coming first. Communists in South Africa – ColdType | March 2022 | www.coldtype.net
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