Mobilization on the South African Gold Mines

Abstract

Abstract In August 1982, Cyril Ramaphosa announced the formation of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in South Africa. South African mining is an industry composed largely of migrant workers, barracked in large concentrated compounds. Black miners typically live at mines located far from large cities, insulated from workers in secondary industry, moving from bed to heavy work to mass feeding to bed in a cycle that John Rex (1973) once called the most effective form of labor control ever invented. Conventional wisdom in South Africa was that such workers were “unorganizable.” In 1987, however, only five years after the launching of the NUM, more than 300,000 black South African mine workers embarked on a legal wage strike. It was the largest black strike ever in South Africa. Black miners stayed out for three weeks before being forced back by mass dismissals. Even the failure of the strike could not conceal the colossal organizational achievement of the NUM, which has become the largest of what Eddie Webster (1988) called “social movement unions” in South Africa. When I began to study the rise of the NUM, I turned eagerly to social movement theory, hoping for a perspective to guide my understanding of actors and events. Although certain monographs were helpful, social movement theory itself was a disappointment. I turned to other, more dialectical, theoretical traditions. In this chapter, I shall use social movement theory to analyze the making of the NUM while challenging and modifying basic assumptions that haunt (and, I believe, hamper) sociological efforts to understand social movements. Three general questions set the focus here. First, what should social movement theory (or any other social theory for that matter) do? Second, what does social movement theory actually do? Third, what is it possible for social movement theory to do?