Serialised in honour of the memory of the late Cde J B Marks _____
A Distant Clap of Thunder Issued on the Fortieth Anniversary of the 1946 Mine Strike <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4727> A Salute by the South African Communist Party to South Africa's Black Mine Workers Published by the South African Communist Party, 1986 INTRODUCTION Over fifty thousand dead. More than a million permanently disabled. Hundreds of thousands diseased through inhaling the poison dust. Millions displaced from their homes, separated from their families and locked into a chain of guarded, high-walled labour camps. These are not the casualty figures for a major war; they are the price already paid by black miners for digging gold and coal from the bowels of South Africa's earth. Sol Plaatje, the first Secretary General of the African National Congress, paid a passionate tribute in 1914 to the "two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who by day and night, for a mere pittance, lay down their lives to the familiar 'fall of rock' and who, at deep levels ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust". No monument has yet been built to these fallen heroes of labour. The fruits of their sacrifice can still only be seen in the massive wealth accumulated by a tiny minority who came from foreign parts and enslaved the whole nation. In the hundred years since gold was discovered in our land, class battles have raged continually between those who own nothing but their power to labour and those who exploit their labour because they own everything - our mines, our factories and our land. And in the story of these class battles there is no chapter more inspiring than the 1946 Mine Strike which Toussaint has so graphically and excitingly described in the following pages. We South African Communists can be truly proud of the role our members played in this great event. It is a role which once again illustrates our Party's unrivalled contribution to the building of the black trade union movement as a vital instrument of struggle against the bosses and their racist state. As far back as 1930 communists like TW Thibedi and SP Bunting made a pioneering attempt to set up committees in the mine compounds. In 1941, when the Mine Workers' Union was revived on the initiative of the SACP and the Transvaal ANC, our late Chairman, JB Marks, became the President and led the 1946 battle. Today, our black working class, the creator and owner of all our country's wealth, is in the forefront of the mass forces which are poised to deal a deathblow to the tyranny of race rule and its roots in capitalist exploitation. And within this working class, the mines undoubtedly constitute the backbone of a rapidly growing Trade Union movement which has already demonstrated its massive potential in the liberation upsurge. A Distant Clap of Thunder is a salute by our Party, the vanguard of our proletariat, to the heroes of the 1946 Mine Strike. <http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/misc/miners.html> Their courage must serve as an inspiration to all our workers to unite and to march shoulder to shoulder towards a liberated South Africa which can begin to lay the foundations for a society free of all exploitation of man by man. Joe Slovo Chairman, South African Communist Party _____ To be continued. From: http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2626 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
