Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

The August 1946 miners’ strikes were the most dramatic links in this chain of events. Between sixty and one hundred thousand migrant laborers stopped work, bringing at least seventeen mines to “a virtual standstill.”23 The strikes were centered on compounds, tightly controlled worker hostels inhabited exclusively by male migrant laborers while at their jobsites. The strikes were countered by massive shows of force. Compounds were sealed off under armed guard as 1,600 police were called in. Twelve miners were killed and more than a thousand injured. The strikes lasted just five days, but they proved to be “a milestone in South Africa’s social and political development.”24 Labor uprisings were essential to the crisis that the state solved with apartheid, and the legacy of 1940s labor action helped to inspire the movement that eventually brought the state to the negotiating table in the 1990s.