A “Labour War” in South Africa: the 1922 Rand Revolution in Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought

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This article discusses an episode in South African history remembered as the 1922 “Rand Revolution”. The strike, involving 25,000 white miners opposed to the removal of the “colour bar”, was eventually crushed by a military operation in which 200 people were killed. Though there has been a wealth of publications on the events, little has been written on their coverage in the British metropolitan labour press. To shed new light on the rising, this study concentrates on the case of the Workers’ Dreadnought, the paper edited by Sylvia Pankhurst from 1917 to 1924. The weekly, printed in London but circulated around the Empire and notably in the Union of South Africa, was able, thanks to its numerous correspondents “on the spot”, to provide its readers with extensive, and often provocative, information about the rebellion. Its representation of the revolt was characterised by three major features: its promotion of white–black solidarity among miners, its suspicion towards Afrikaner nationalists as allies in the struggle, and its denunciation of the South African Labour Party and South African Industrial Federation as temporisers and dividers. However, the original and courageous vision defended by the periodical had a very limited impact on the direction of the struggle, as the Dreadnought sympathisers in the Dominion formed only a small group, on the outskirts of a Communist Party that was itself marginal.