“When I think of how we left our homes in the reserves, our children naked and starving, we have nothing more to say. Every man must agree to strike on 12 August. It is better to die than go back with empty hands.”

unnamed worker

On August 4, 1946, over 1,000 delegates united in Newtown Market Square, Johannesburg. This meeting place was chosen because no hall in the city was large enough to hold them, since no hall was open to Black Africans. The conference brought speaker after speaker to the podium, advocating for a general strike of all African workers within the Witwatersrand gold mines, beginning August 12, in demand of a minimum wage of 10 shillings a day. After years of attempted negotiations with the Chamber of Mines, the African Mine Workers’ Union was dismissed, and met with silence from the Chamber’s secretary, who had also instructed staff to ignore all Union communications. Between 75,000 and 100,000 workers walked off the job, which the state responded to with mass arrests, baton charges, and bayonets, transporting workers back underground in mass numbers. Policy brutality reached a bloody climax on a peaceful march from the East Rand to Johannesburg on Tuesday, 13 August. Police opened fire on the procession, and a number of workers were killed, collapsing the movement as a whole. Even though the mine workers did not achieve their set goal, they still disrupted South African political life by destroying its credibility and publicly questioning its authority. The apartheid states consultative body for Black South Africans never met again, but within 3 years, the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League adopted the “Programme of Action”, following the mineworkers’ lead through turning toward mass struggle. Although the 1946 strikers did not exactly achieve their desired outcome, they paved the way for the 1952 Defiance Campaign, the 1960 uprisings, and the eventual emergence of Umkhonto we Sizwe.