As Chief Albert Luthuli said, a nation that does not know its history is like a tree without roots. Anyone claiming that the NUM was a creation of the Anglo American Corporation needs to learn the history of the resistance Struggle in our country.
I must defend my contribution and that of the generations of mineworkers who built the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). This is about more than just setting the record straight and not allowing distortions of history; it is also about honouring the hard work and sacrifices of those who have contributed to the union’s history.
The NUM was built through the sweat, toil, and blood of mineworkers, not the funds of mining houses’ bosses. Anyone who has evidence to the contrary must provide that for public scrutiny.
There has been much discussion in Parliament and on social media about NUM’s origins, often amounting to idle gossip that discounts the early organisers’ bravery and militancy.
Some, like Gayton McKenzie in his 2017 book, Kill Zuma by Any Means Necessary, allege a conspiracy in which Urban Foundation leaders and other prominent white capitalists had manipulated the establishment of the 1979 Wiehahn Commission and engineered the rise of Cyril Ramaphosa throughout his career until he became the secretary-general of the ANC and now the President of the Republic.
To the conspiracy theorists, no 1973 Durban strikes and the rise of the black unions forced the regime to establish the Wiehahn Commission. There were and will always be divisions between the verkrampte (conservatives) and verligte (liberal) within the whites-only establishment.
Bobby Godsell, for example, has always been seen as the leading figure of the verligte camp and argued that the rise of black trade unions was a reality that must be engaged with.
Uncontested repeated statements, even lacking any factual basis, do settle as the truth in the minds of the unsuspecting public. Adolf Hitler’s minister of information, Joseph Goebbels, effectively utilised this propaganda strategy to make the Germans believe that the Jews were born inferior to the naturally superior Germans, hence the need to wipe them off the face of the earth. The result is that up to this day, the world mourns a Holocaust that killed six million Jews.
James Molatsi
I wanted clarity on the union’s early days, which I was not involved in because I was still at school when the NUM was launched in Klerksdorp on 4 December 1982. Recently, I met the founding president of the NUM, James Motlatsi, and the founding deputy president of Cosatu, Makhulu Ledwaba.
I asked both to explain how we suffered like we did when the union received money from the biggest, most verligte of the capitalist mining houses: Anglo American. Could it be true that the seed money to establish this union came from the mining bosses, against whom the union had waged countless battles?
In the early days, the NUM had no money to hire venues. Its meetings were held under the trees without a sound system. Central committee meetings were held overnight to avoid paying for delegates’ accommodation, often without food.
Motlatsi, known for his elephant-like memory, explained how he became involved with recruiting mineworkers as a masiza (personnel assistant) working underground at the Western Deep Levels mine outside Carletonville.
In September 1982, while on leave, Motlatsi was approached by Alfred Mphahlele. Alfred Mphahlele stayed in Soweto but had originated from Hamphahlele, Limpopo. Mphahlele told Motlatsi that he had met a comrade going up and down in the mines recruiting workers to join a mineworkers’ union.
Cyril Ramaphosa
Both would have read in the newspaper that the Council of Unions of South Africa (Cusa) had tasked their young legal officer to establish a mineworker’s union. This young man Mphahlele referred to was Cyril Ramaphosa who also gave him membership forms and asked for contact information for other mineworkers he could talk to.
In response to this discussion, they organised a meeting between all three at the Western Deep Levels mine. It was the first time Motlatsi and Ramaphosa had met.
Motlatsi had serious doubts about Ramaphosa. The first reason was that he was from Soweto. In those years, there needed to be more comfort between mineworkers and guys from the townships. Mineworkers were seen as a second class, even among the other working-class communities.
The second was that Ramaphosa was Venda-speaking. There were no Venda-speaking workers, and Lesotho nationals dominated the gold mines. But there were also loads of mineworkers from Mozambique and Botswana. Those backgrounds determined the languages spoken by the mineworkers.
Mphahlele and Ramaphosa pushed to get more contacts and circulate the membership forms. From this meeting, Ramaphosa was asked to be introduced to other black personnel assistants who had attended training at Western Deep Level, which used to be a training centre for black senior officials of Anglo American. It was during the meeting that they met people like director Matlala.
Seed money
From these meetings, a meeting was organised with the General Secretary of Cusa, the late Piroshaw Camay. In this meeting, he learnt that the seed money to establish the mineworkers’ union had come from the FNV of the Netherlands.
Cusa was an affiliate of the International Council of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Cusa approached the ICFTU for funding to establish a mineworkers’ union. The ICFTU rejected the request, citing that it had wasted money assisting the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in a failed project to establish a mineworkers’ union. They had given up because, in their view, the migrant workers from rural and neighbouring countries were too conservative and would not join the union.
The FNV decided to respond to Cusa’s pleas for assistance and donated 285,000 Dutch guilders. At today’s valuation, that would be roughly R2,877,613. We all know the rand was much stronger then. This FNV donation sustained Ramaphosa until the launching of Congress on 4 December 1982, which elected Motlatsi as president, Elijah Barayi as deputy president, Ishmael Thulo as treasurer, and Ramaphosa as general secretary. Ramaphosa had an old car from his father that he was using, but the union could afford to buy a small VW Passat from the donation.
Motlatsi acknowledges that he knew little about the trade union movement. Ramaphosa educated him about the new union’s needs, such as resources to train shop stewards, employ officials, have health and safety committees, etc.
Swedish LO-TCO
In August 1983, the two of them flew to Harare, where they met the education officer of the International Miners Federation, Stig Blomquist (see interview here). After being convinced to support the newly formed NUM, he called Anders Stendalen of the Swedish Mine Workers Union, affiliated with the Swedish LO-TCO.
Ramaphosa was asked to submit a written proposal, which he did overnight, but by hand. The proposal was faxed the next day. In two to three months, the Swedish LO-TCO financed the training of shaft stewards, health and safety officers, and provided legal funds. After this, the LO-TCO mobilised other Scandinavian countries to support the NUM. From that cooperation, the NUM president and general secretary visited Sweden and other Scandinavian countries to motivate a year’s budget until after 1994.
The ANC initially was nervous about the creation of the NUM for two main reasons. First, the ANC did not trust Ramaphosa because of his background in the Black Consciousness Movement, or Motlatsi, a Basotho National from the Basotho Congress Party.
Second, the NUM and Fosatu had registered under the Labour Relations Act, enacted by the apartheid regime after the Wiehahn Commission. This was seen as a sell-out arrangement in the raging debate of the early 1980s as to whether unions should register to take advantage of the space opened by the new Labour Relations Act or should instead refuse to register because it would legitimise apartheid legislation. In terms of the divisions of those times, the registered unions were potentially co-opted into apartheid’s management of the class struggle.
Even some international trade unions, such as the British NUM who had good relationships with the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), were very nervous. Motlatsi recounted that Arthur Scargill refused to meet him and sent international relations secretary Vernon Jones.
Only after the NUM had become the fastest-growing union in the world did the British NUM invite the NUM leadership to attend their congress at the end of 1984. From those discussions, the NUM started to receive donations from Britain, Germany, Canada, etc.
In those days, hard money was collected through Sactu, and it would come through foreign currency, needing the union to send it to Sweden to go through the banks. On occasion, hard money would be brought to the border of Lesotho or through the late General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Dr Beyers Naude, and others like Curnick Muzuvukile Ndlovu and Billy Nair.
It is the ultimate insult to suggest that the NUM, which was formed to change the situation facing mineworkers and fight all mining companies, was funded by capitalists. One of the primary targets of the NUM’s militant actions was Anglo American, which, like other mining houses, responded with brutality, leading to the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of mineworkers after the NUM was created in 1985.
Joining the NUM
I joined the mining industry at the end of 1984 following my father’s death in April of that same year. The NUM was already more than one year old. I was a militant activist of the Congress of South Students (Cosas), having played a role in mass mobilisation and creating structures, including rebuilding the union movement between 1980 and 1983. By then, I had been in and out of detention and suffered severe torture at the hands of both the Ciskei and Queenstown police.
I was elected a shaft steward in February/March 1984, a branch secretary later in the same year, and a branch chairperson later. The union had 13,000 members of the 15,000 workers employed by Vaal Reefs South, owned by Anglo American.
The union wasted no time. It led battle after battle through work stoppages, mostly wildcat strikes that were illegal in those days. Through these strikes, we forced management to improve the quality of food, forcefully integrated workers in the hostels, put the tribal-based allocation of blocks to an end, destroyed the induna system and replaced it with democratically elected block committees, etc.
We negotiated our recognition agreements and trained the shaft stewards accordingly. The union never had offices from which it could service workers through representation in disciplinary hearings and so on.
At the Chamber of Mines level, the union, through militant actions and negotiations, improved the lot of mineworkers. You must have worked in the mines throughout its foundations until today to know how big a difference the NUM made to the lives of mineworkers.
In 1987, the historic 21-day strike rocked the Chamber of Mines, with over 360,000 mineworkers participating in the biggest strike in the history of the mining industry. The response of the state and mining bosses was brutal.
I was arrested for murder and for destroying mine property underground, yet we could not have been underground during a strike that was observed 100% by mineworkers. We sued the state for wrongful arrest but only received a settlement of R300 each.
At least 50,000 mineworkers were dismissed, and Anglo American dismissed 20,000 in Vaal Reefs mines alone. I was among those who were fired. It was directly due to my dismissal that my mother suffered a stroke and died in November 1987.
The mass dismissal nearly obliterated the union, devastating mineworkers’ morale. They refused any association with the NUM. Eventually, it took serious efforts to get them to agree to be elected as shaft stewards and serve in other union leadership structures.
Rebuilding
The union initially hired me as an organiser after volunteering without pay to rebuild the NUM in the Klerksdorp region. Every mine manager knew the young and militant Zwelinzima Vavi, so I had to change my name to Simphiwe Nanise. Comrade Nanise was one of the national organisers at NUM’s head office. Assimilating his name would not be the greatest challenge, even though he was the opposite of me regarding looks. He was short and had a light complexion.
In those days, there was no television coverage or social media. I could go from mine to mine, avoiding only the Vaal Reefs number 8 and 9, and the Vaal Reefs South, where I had direct relationships with mine managers.
As an organiser of the NUM, I was elected as the Cosatu regional secretary for the Western Transvaal, covering the Vaal Triangle, northern Free State and the bigger part of today’s North West. I stayed in Sharpeville in a back room – a garage. From this position, we spearheaded the revival of the mass democratic movement weakened by banning orders on critical Vaal Triangle activists.
My Cosas background grounded us in the slogan, “Build the organisation wherever you are.” I had experiences assisting with establishing civic and youth structures in Orkney and Klerskdorp. We wasted no time rebuilding the youth and civic movements in the Vaal Triangle area. We defied the banning orders, and almost every month, we marched to the Vereeniging police station, leading to shootings that killed and maimed many activists.
The NUM, having broken away from Cusa and having agreed to join 33 other unions that adopted the principles of Cosatu (including non-racialism), had become the most feared union by the bosses, but also the most respected and revered by the allies of the working class.
Freedom Charter
The NUM adopted the Freedom Charter first in 1987. Through its shaft stewards, the NUM formed structures of the youth, students, and civic associations in nearly all mining towns. The NUM formed a link with the underground structures of the ANC. The NUM was seen as the biggest ally of the liberation movement.
After all, the president of Cosatu, Barayi, was also deputy president of the NUM. It is he who called on PW Botha, one of the most verkrampte leaders of the apartheid regime, to do away with the pass laws, which happened just three months later.
It was Barayi who demanded that the Bantustans be done away with. He called for the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation movements. Barayi was an ANC Youth League firebrand from Cradock. More than anyone else, he is accredited for shifting the NUM from black consciousness into Congress movement politics.
The mineworkers had moved from being looked down upon by township residents to being revered. The union had become the most important ally of the masses. This period coincided with historic battles such as the 1984 uprisings in the Vaal Triangle and resistance against the Tricameral Parliament that the regime had thought it would use to divide black people by creating a buffer (co-opting the Indian and coloured communities into the whites-only Parliament as second-class citizens).
ANC leadership
During the wave of this mass resistance, the Cosatu leadership visited the ANC and met the leadership in 1986, which consisted of OR Tambo, Dan Tloome, and Thomas Nkobi. The Cosatu leadership also included Jay Naidoo, Sydney Mufamadi, Cyril Ramaphosa, James Motlatsi and Daniel Dube.
It was in this meeting that OR Tambo gave the longest and most emotional hug to Ramaphosa to demonstrate his deep appreciation of the revolutionary role the union was playing in the country.
This is contrary to lies and misinformation you may have seen on social media, namely that Tambo saw Ramaphosa for the first time at the first post-unbanning conference of the ANC in 1991, held in Durban. The lie is that Tambo asked who this guy was when seeing Ramaphosa for the first time. What a lie!
The NUM was a pacesetter. The militant union played an unparalleled role after its formation in 1982. It united workers and community struggles into a single movement for resistance. Apartheid security forces continually targeted it, and hundreds of its shaft stewards were detained without trial through three successive states of emergencies.
The NUM was the face of a defiance campaign that anchored the United Democratic Front in the mines and mining towns. Unsurprisingly, the shaft stewards of the NUM also led many township civic associations and youth structures.
Further, it was no surprise that so many shaft stewards of the union led the ANC and SACP branches after their unbanning. The first three secretary-generals of the ANC came from this union after the unbanning: Ramaphosa, Kgalema Motlanthe and Gwede Mantashe.
No Cosatu leadership core was without someone from the NUM from its inception. Being a member or having an association with the NUM was a badge of honour that hundreds of thousands of mineworkers wore with pride.
A nation that does not know its history is like a tree without roots. Chief Albert Luthuli became famous through this quote, among others. Anyone claiming that the NUM was a creation of the Anglo American Corporation needs to learn the history of the resistance Struggle in our country.
If we do not tell this history, it will be lost, and because of doomsayers and distorters of the country’s Struggle history who know little about this history of martyrs, millions of our people will be misled. In the process, the heroes and heroines will become the hated villains, while political charlatans will become the new heroes of the ahistorical army of the politically blindfolded.
Those of us who shaped this history are incredibly proud of our contributions to building a trade union movement that later became the hope of the masses.
We are proud that we responded to the call to make South Africa ungovernable and apartheid unworkable.
Through these humble contributions, we laid the foundations for the political parties’ unbanning and scored a historic victory against the system declared a crime against humanity. DM