On the morning of January 21, 1960, 431 black and six white coal miners were entombed in a sudden collapse at Clydesdale Collieries near Coalbrook in Sasolburg, Free State Province.[1] The first rockfall took place at about 4:30 p.m. No one was killed or severely injured. While the rock still creaked and split, many of the African workers rushed from the underground shaft to the surface. They were ordered back to work. Those who protested were given the South African Masters and Servants Act alternatives—obey or be arrested. Two miners who still refused steadily to return underground were arrested and locked up only to survive the catastrophe. The rest were driven underground. At 6:30 the mine collapsed and buried all of them. Four hundred and thirty-seven miners were trapped and killed 600 feet underground at Coalbrook—the worst disaster in the history of South African or African mining, and a painful reminder of the hardship and suffering endured by the black workers in return for a beggarly pittance. The rockfall that sealed them in was officially described as an “accident.”[2]
Of the 431 African dead, nearly half came from Lesotho, the rest from Mozambique. For several days, neither the exact numbers of those trapped underground nor their names were known, even to the mine owners themselves. The apartheid South African regime, together with regimes of Portuguese colony of Mozambique and British Protectorate of Lesotho, by which this human trafficking was controlled, provided no details of the working conditions to which these men were subjected. Two weeks after the disaster, a list of the dead was finally published, but no surnames were deemed necessary.[3] The mine authority later released the names of black South Africans, namely: Boy Thekiso from Zeerust and Maphuthuza Seba from Engcobo.[4] The mine had in fact been closed for some years, but with the increased world price of coal, it became profitable once again to bring it up. As the Coalbrook disaster showed, the drive for profits can reduce the margin of safety in other ways. It was alleged in the inquiry that the management had caused the coal pillars supporting the roof to be thinned down to such an extent that the roof caved in. It was against regulations to make the pillars smaller than the size shown in the plan; but according to the evidence, the management had done just that in order to “prolong the life of the section.” The Commission found that “the subsidence of the mine was due to the negligence and omission of the present consulting engineer, the general managers, the managers and assistant managers.” [5]
The Coalbrook Collieries, opened in 1905, supplied their entire production of coal to two ESKOM Power Stations whereby all coal mined was transported directly from the mines to the Taaibos Power Station. Coalbrook North was producing 40,000 tons of coal each week, and to do this required an enormous labor force of unskilled African workers who were hired and contracted through another part of the South African General Mining and Investment Company (SAGIT) and sourced both locally and from other nearby African countries. The emergence of Taaibosch Power Station and Sasolburg development gave the Colliery a new lease on life. This new lease on life is believed to have also resulted in increased demand for coal beyond what was historically produced by this mine.[6] The state-owned entity, ESKOM, was established in 1923 as the Electricity Supply Commission (ESCOM), to develop national capacity for the generation of electricity. An abundant, reliable and cheap supply of electricity was fundamentally important to the mining industry, on which South Africa’s industrial economy was based; it was also a prerequisite for the expansion of the railway network controlled by another parastatal, the South African Railways and Harbours Board, and of secondary manufacturing.[7] Since South Africa had no significant oil reserves of its own, a new state-owned company was formed in 1950 called the South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation (SASOL), to produce the oil South Africa needed from coal. The SASOL 1 Plant, opened in 1954, was the first in South Africa to produce oil from coal, and was located less than ten kilometers north-west of Coalbrook, in the industrial town of Sasolburg.[8]
In 1949, plans were approved for the construction of 10 new thermal power stations, to be located in or near the coalfields in the Transvaal and Northern Free State. Two of them were to be built at Coalbrook. Construction of Taaibos power station began in April 1951, and it commenced commercial operations in December 1954. By 1958, Taaibos had eight turbo-generators in service, and a total electrical capacity of 480,000 kilowatts. In that year, it set a record for output for a single power station in South Africa of 2,807 million units. The coal to fire the station came exclusively from Coalbrook: the boilers were designed specifically to burn the coal found locally, which had a high sulphurous content. An overland conveyor belt that was 5600 feet long delivered up to 650 tons of coal an hour directly from the mine to the station. Such was the success of Taaibos that work quickly began on a twin station with similar capacity less than a kilometer away, to be called Highveld. It began commercial operation in 1959. A second mine was opened at Coalbrook on ground to the south of the original mine to supply the new station with coal. Henceforth, the two mines were known as Clydesdale North and Clydesdale South. South Africa’s voracious appetite for energy after the Second World War saw coal production in the industry as a whole rise from under 20 million tons per annum in 1939 to over 50 million tons by 1966.[9]
Simons observed that mining was carried out at greater pressure on the Witwatersrand and Free State goldfields than elsewhere in the country. “Forcing the output” and “increasing the monthly production” have been given as reasons for high death rates in gold and coal mines. Managers were responsible for speed-up, but were rarely brought to book for accidents caused by inadequate supervision and hurry.[10] Albert Nzula and others wrote that the imperialists used African workers in the mines and on the plantations in the form of contract labor. They argued convincingly that this labor, though formally contractual, is in fact forced, slave labor. The methods used by the imperialists to make black laborers sign contracts for mine or farm work were the confiscation of land and enslavement of the peasantry by the capital of traders and moneylenders, extortionate taxes, and finally direct coercion. By no means could this be considered the free hire or sale of labor.[11]
Similarly, Rumyantsev and others emphasized that under capitalism, the producer was coerced to labor mainly by economic means. Wage workers were free of any personal dependence. But being deprived of the means of production and the means of subsistence, they were forced to sell their capacity for labor to the capitalists. In this way, the wage worker, while not being the property of individual capitalists, belonged to the whole class of capitalists and his labor was, in effect, coercive. The wage labor system was a system of wage slavery. The veiled character of coercive labor was the distinctive feature of capitalist exploitation.[12] Condemning the super exploitation of workers under capitalism, Karl Marx wrote in the preface to first German edition of Capital that “alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.”[13] Lenin asserted that capitalism is the system in which the growth of poverty—not only “social,” but also the most horrible physical poverty, to the extent of starvation and death from starvation—assumes a mass scale.[14]
According to Engels, the coalmine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The hydrocarbon gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact with a flame, and kills everyone within its reach.[15] Entrepreneurs have introduced contractual recruiting of labor on an organized basis in South Africa itself. Several special companies with a large staff of special agents were created for this purpose. The Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (WENELA) had 75 stations in Mozambique, and employed thirty whites and 250 African recruiting agents. WENELA also had its own agents throughout South Africa, while local and travelling commissioners were on permanent salary. The Department of Native Affairs issued recruiting licenses at a cost of between £1 and £50. Many recruiting agents were traders in the reserves. Thus they had two sources of profits: trading and recruiting. An agent received £2 for every man recruited.[16] Ruth First wrote that of a labor force of 432,234 African workers recruited in 1959 by the Chamber of Mines, only 182,561 came from South Africa. 58 percent (a total of 249,673 men) came from territories over which South Africa had no direct political control.[17] The Native Recruiting Corporation of the Chamber of Mines had head offices in Maseru and branch offices throughout Lesotho, which had labor contracts attested by government officials.[18]
Apartheid was an attempt of the capitalist class to meet the expanding demand for cheap African labor in the era of industrial manufacturing capital at the same time it was the realization of the white workers for protection against the resulting increased competition from black workers.[19] The development of the mining industry—the cornerstone of South African capitalism—consisted of a rapid process of concentration and centralization of capital. This capital was accumulated on the basis of a system of migrant labor drawn from the wider Southern African region. The early monopolization of the mining industry created the conditions for the setting up of a carefully planned and institutionalized monopoly control of the recruitment of migrant labor. This monopoly was strengthened by state-to-state agreements with supplier states to guarantee the stability and continued reproduction of this labor force. Thus, the migrant labor system constituted and continued to be the foundation of capital accumulation in the mining industry.[20] One of the factors helped consolidate the oscillating migration system was stringently enforced apartheid pass laws, enacted by the state at the behest of the Chamber of Mines, which limited the number of African residents in urban areas.[21] The Chamber of Mines spearheaded the introduction of the pass laws, which stipulated that “African miners must wear a metal plate or a badge on the arm.” The Glen Grey Act of 1894 was also employed as a tool to execute the process of African enslavement through the introduction of tax.[22]
The cheap black labor system in South Africa, which had its origins in slavery and the colonial agrarian economy going back to the arrival of the first white settlers in the seventeenth century, was eventually enshrined in law during the segregationist era by the Mines and Works Acts (the “Colour Bar” acts) of 1911 and 1926, as the major organizing principle of the South African industrial labor system. In the mines, this “industrial color bar” meant that the small minority of white miners were divided from the much larger majority of black miners on racial lines, in part by a system of “job reservation” defining them respectively as “skilled” or “unskilled,” and “supervisor” or “supervised.” Under segregation and apartheid, an effective alliance between white mine workers, mine capital and the state ensured that white miners would enjoy a privileged position in the industry, specifically at the expense of black miners. This privileged position included much higher wages than their black coworkers and a wide range of benefits from the mine companies and from the State, such as pensions, insurance coverage, health care, and compensation in the event of accident or death. These benefits were either paid at much lower rates to black miners, or denied altogether.[23]
As Africans gained experience in the mines, whites looked to a statutory color bar for security. The British administration in the Transvaal extended the discriminations introduced by the regime, and General Jan Smuts made a further addition in regulations issued under the Mines and Works Act of 1911. African and other workers of color were excluded from skilled work by three sets of provisions. In the Transvaal and Orange Free State, they could not obtain nor use the certificates of competency that were required for the performance of various specified operations. Secondly, only white persons were permitted to hold the positions of shiftmen, gangers, banks men and onsetters, or to blast, lock and unlock lamps underground, attend boilers, and operate electric machines in a fiery mine. Thirdly, certain kinds of work, such as removing props in a colliery, could be carried out only under white supervision.[24] The Gold Law prohibited the holding of meetings on any land proclaimed for mining purposes—inside or outside the companies’ private boundaries. The Bantu Labor Act made striking a criminal offence for African workers. The Masters and Servants Act made it a crime to refuse to carry out any order from a boss. Under the Native Labor Regulation Act, any breach of contract between an indentured laborer and his boss—including failure to complete the full contract of 270 shifts a year—was a criminal offence. In addition, African miners were exempted from any compulsory determination of minimum wages by the Wages Board which operated in other industries. And they were exempted, specifically, from even the minimal unemployment insurance of other industries.[25]
In response to the Coalbrook disaster, the South African Communist Party (SACP) called on the African leaders and liberation movements to press for an end to the recruitment of labor to South Africa, without a convention which guaranteed those workers rights and liberties and conditions in keeping with a democratic, modern age. It called for the cut-off of the flow of indentured labor entirely. The Party demanded for the publication of all agreements by which this trade was regulated and guaranteed civilized standards of work and wages, and fundamental rights to trade-union organization and collective bargaining. The Party further called for the conscious and organized trade-unionists of Africa to set out to instill a militant trade-union spirit in all their countrymen who were headed for Africa, so that this annual flood of men to the gold and coal mines of South Africa would come as a source of strength and vigor to the people of South Africa, and not—as then—as a means for continuing their enslavement and holding their wages down to inhuman levels.[26] Expressing the deepest concern and sympathy of the African National Congress (ANC) at the tragic disaster of Coalbrook, Chief Albert Luthuli, then President-General of the ANC and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, stated that the Congress “in the fullest measure share and bear with the families of the entombed men, agony and grief which this tragedy has brought on them.” He added that “the occasion is appropriate to call attention to the extremely low, starvation wages paid to the mine workers generally and to reiterate the demand of the Congress Alliance for legislation enforcing a national minimum wage…. and for adequate and equitable compensation for the dependents of the miners who died.”[27]
The Coalbrook disaster had brought the African people closer than before. Business, church workers, peasant came together to mourn. South African Congress of Trade Union (SACTU) and ANC organized memorial services in different parts of the country. In Sasolburg, more than 15,000 mourners were addressed by dignitaries like Basotho Paramount Chief Bereng Seeiso, President of the Interdenominational Ministers’ Federation Rev. Z. R. Mahabane, and Canon A. J. Calata from Eastern Cape.[28] In one of the memorial services, Communist Party and trade union stalwart Moses Mabhida told mourners: “These workers have built the wealth they never earned. They have made South Africa glitter with gold, but they have not a rag to cover their bodies.” More than 400 people attended memorial meeting organized by ANC Women’s League in Alexandra. SACTU launched a National Co-ordinating Fund for the Coalbrook Mine Disaster dependents. The Miners’ Trade Union International, with more than 5 million members, wrote to the International Labor Organization (ILO) and apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd urging that miners’ safety and health must be put before profits and productivity.[29] Coal miners at a little colliery in South Wales took a collection for the families of the dead Clydesdale miners when they heard of the Coalbrook mine disaster. Their letter, handwritten on the back of a collection sheet, and signed by Tom Hopkins on behalf of the Bedwas Pit Miners, read that the amount was “not a big sum, but just a token of our solidarity and sympathy with the miners of Africa.” The Lodge Committee of these Welsh miners stated that the money must be divided equally between the African and white miners’ relatives.[30]
The scale of the disaster was the result of the apartheid colonial system of race oppression and class exploitation. Without apartheid and capitalism, things could not have happened as they did.[31] Widows of the African miners were represented by Joe Slovo at the inquest. The British Mineworkers’ Union had sent an experienced mining engineer to assist workers’ legal team. Slovo realized that they were dealing with “a classic example of social murder.”[32] The concept of social murder was coined by Engels in 1845 his seminal work The Conditions of the Working Class in England to describe murder committed by the political and social elite where they knowingly permit conditions to exist where the poorest and most vulnerable in society are deprived of the necessities of life and are placed in a position in which they cannot reasonably be expected to live and will inevitably meet an early and unnatural death. He stressed that the crime of social murder has been perpetrated perpetually.[33] Engels was a major contributor to the development of social epidemiology. He took a concept of social murder from the literature of the Chartist movement.[34] John Bellamy Foster emphasizes that Engels’ work remains unique in its powerful indictment of the “social murder” inflicted by capitalism on the underlying population at the time of the Industrial Revolution.[35]
Mining, more than any other industry, provides the greatest material explanation for South Africa’s trajectory since the 1880s, and for its place in the global imperialist system. The establishment of the Vaal Triangle area was directly linked with the scale of migrant labor, coupled with mining and industrialization. There is no doubt as to the centrality of mining to South Africa’s industrial heritage, even as it remains understated and under recognized. Embedded within this is the legacy of mineworkers, most of whom were migrants from different parts of Southern Africa. South Africa’s industrial heritage is grossly underrecognized, and when it is recognized it is often from a technical rather than human point of view.[36] The African miner was cheap in death as in life, and hardly worth the cost of safety measures that would curb the drive to step up production.[37] The families of African miners who perished at Coalbrook were not entitled to receive a pension under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, or a death benefit under the Unemployment Insurance Act. Instead, they were compensated with a single lump sum calculated based on a formula developed by the Rand Mutual Assurance Company, which provided insurance coverage for the mines. Many of the families could not prove their legal status as dependents, for example by producing a marriage certificate, and so received nothing. In addition, this calculation did not apply to the miners from Mozambique, since they were not covered by the scheme.[38]
Elsewhere, we submitted that revisiting the work of the commissions that were convened after the disaster could be an exercise that would help a great deal to heal the painful reality for many families. Mining is subject to the law of diminishing returns—symbolic recognition is not enough. The various calls for reparations and continued support to the families of direct victims have to be supported. The mining industry must continue to be part of the physical healing of South African society and land—environmentally, physically, economically, and financially. There is a need for increased contribution of mining sector in healing society, the communities immediately around current and former mines and the former labor sending communities.[39]
Sixty-five years after the Coalbrook catastrophe and thirty-one years after the democratic breakthrough in South Africa, there is still no justice for the families of the victims of Coalbrook catastrophe. It is a stark reminder that class exploitation and national oppression were inextricably intertwined in the South African Revolution. The abolishing of the apartheid laws did not necessarily end racism and inequality, because capitalism thrives on the racial segregation and special types of colonialism.
Notes
[1] Joe Slovo, Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography (Randburg: Ravan, 1995), 116.[2] South African Communist Party (SACP), “Avenge the Martyrs of Coalbrook,” African Communist 2 (1960): 2.
[3] SACP, “Avenge the Martyrs of Coalbrook,” 5.
[4] “Names of Two South African Victims Released,” New Age, March 3, 1960.
[5] Slovo, Slovo, 116, H. J. Simons, “Death in South African Mines,” Africa South 5, no. 4 (1961): 50.
[6] Lehlohonolo Kennedy Mahlatsi and Khwezi Ka Mpumlwana “Coalbrook Mine Disaster: A Case for National Heritage Site (Part 1),” Re Betla Tsela 10, (2020): 7.
[7] Alan Cobley, “Powering Apartheid: The Coalbrook Mine Disaster of 1960,” South African Historical Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 88.
[8] Cobley, “Powering Apartheid,” 89.
[9] Cobley, “Powering Apartheid,” 90.
[10] Simons, “Death in South African Mines,” 48.
[11] A. T. Nzula, I. I. Potekhin and A. Z. Zusmanovich, Forced Labor in Colonial Africa (London: Zed, 1979), 82. The authors submitted that the difference between forced labor and straightforward slavery comes down to the fact that, in this instance, enslavement is masked by a legal transaction: the agreement between the slave owner, designated in the contract as the hirer, and the slave, designated in the contract as the seller of labor. But this is a legal deal in which one party thereto, the black worker, is deprived of all rights, and forced into the bargain by administrative means. The bargain is a mere fiction, a fig leaf concealing actual slavery. A further difference between forced labor and slavery is that the slave, the black African, is not the property of an individual. Imperialism, represented by its colonial governments, confronts as slave owner the toiling masses of Black Africa as slaves. The final difference between forced labor and slavery is that the depersonalized slave owner of imperialism takes no responsibility for looking after the black workers when it has no need of their labor. According to A. Leontiev, Political Economy: A Beginner’s Course (Calcutta: Girin Chakravati, 1942), 50: in gold and other mining and on roadwork in colonial countries, forced labor was employed on a broader scale.
[12] A. M. Rumyantsev et al, Political Economy: Guide to the Social Sciences (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 91. Leontiev, Political Economy, 125, distinguishes surplus labor under different class societies. He writes that under capitalism, the thirst for surplus labor assumes a more insatiable character than under any previous form of class society. Under slavery and serfdom, while natural production predominated, there were definite limits to the amount surplus labor appropriated. The slave owner or feudal lords squeezed as much labor out of the masses exploited by them as was necessary to satisfy their needs or desires. Under capitalism, by contrast, there are no limits to the thirst for surplus labor.
[13] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), 20.
[14] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 234.
[15] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), 252.
[16] Nzula et al, “Forced Labor,” 78. According to L. Bernstein, all recruits from outside South Africa had a portion of their pay “deferred”; this deferred pay was not drawn when earned, but was only paid out in their country after their contract expired and were repatriated. “The African Mineworkers: Some Facts and Figures,” Fighting Talks 14, no. 2, (1960): 6.
[17] Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labor,” Africa South 5, no. 3 (1961): 7.
[18] Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labor,” 15.
[19] Harold Wolpe, Capitalism and Cheap Labor-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid (London: Routledge, 1972), 127.
[20] Ruth First, Selected Writings (Johannesburg: International Union of Left Publishers, 2023), 62. Ruth First argues that the colonial structure of the Mozambican economy was accordingly the outcome of a double dependence. On the one hand, it was the product of dependence on a relatively backward capitalist economy constituted by the Portuguese colonial power. At the same time, it was subordinated to the needs of the Southern African economic complex. This latter integration became the predominant aspect of the structure of the Mozambican colonial economy increasingly (59).
[21] Jock McCulloch and Pavla Miller, Mining Gold and Manufacturing Ignorance: Occupational Lung Disease and the Buying and Selling of Labor in Southern Africa (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 39.
[22] Motsane Seabela, “A Brief History of Black Labor Control in South Africa: Migrant Labor and Recruitment,” Ditsong: Museums of South Africa, June 5, 2021, http://ditsong.org.za.
[23] Alan Cobley, “Powering Apartheid,” 87.
[24] Simons, “Death in South African Mines,” 45.
[25] SACP, “Avenge the Martyrs of Coalbrook,” 3.
[26] SACP, “Avenge the Martyrs of Coalbrook,” 6.
[27] “Luthuli on Coalbrook,” New Age, February 11, 1960.
[28] “Farewell to Miners of Coalbrook,” New Age, March 3, 1960.
[29] “Coalbrook Memorial Meeting in Alex,” New Age, February 25, 1960.
[30] “Welsh Workers’ Collection for Coalbrook Dependants,” New Age, February 25, 1960. In the letter addressed to the SACTU, Tom Hopkins on behalf of Welsh mineworkers stated: “We were shocked at this little colliery in Wales when we heard of the terrible disaster that had taken the lives of so many miners at the Clydesdale Colliery. We sincerely express our deepest sympathy with the families of the men who were lost. We cannot help to think that there must have been a very serious neglect of safety precautions at the Clydesdale Colliery. We hope there will be a demand for an investigation, so that it does not happen again. The miners working at Bedwas Colliery have asked me to express their anger against any kind of colour bar (apartheid)”.
[31] Lehlohonolo Kennedy Mahlatsi, “Homage to Honour Coalbrook Victims Long Overdue,” Sunday Independent, March, 8, 2020.
[32] Slovo, Slovo, 116.
[33] Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 61.
[34] “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 72, no. 11 (2021). The editors opined that examining the higher mortality, morbidity, disability, and disease in working-class districts, and the causes of this in the environmental and epidemiological conditions of the working class, Engels observed that when a ruling class knows “that…thousands of victims must perish” due to such dire conditions, “and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than commission.”
[35] John Bellamy Foster, “Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (2020).
[36] Mahlatsi and Mpumlwana, “Coalbrook Mine Disaster: A Case for National Heritage Site (Part 1).”
[37] Simons, “Death in South African Mines,” 50.
[38] Cobley, “Powering Apartheid,” 95.
[39] Mahlatsi and Mpumlwana, “Coalbrook Mine Disaster: A Case for National Heritage Site (Part 2),” Re Betla Tsela 11 (2020). Alan Cobley remarked that there were four separate inquiries into the Coalbrook disaster. The first was a statutory requirement under Section 5 of the Mines and Works Act, No. 27 of 1956. The second was an inquest that took place jointly with the Mine Inspector’s inquiry, which was chaired by a magistrate from Johannesburg, P. J. van Heerden. The black miners were represented at the hearings by Joe Slovo, until he was detained at the beginning of the State of Emergency at the end of March 1960. The third inquiry was conducted by an ad hoc safety committee appointed by the Minister of Mines. Finally, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry was appointed under the chairpersonship of Mr. Justice J. F. Marais (“Powering Apartheid,” 92).