Making Mincemeat out of Mutton-Eaters: Social Origins of the NUM Decline on Platinum

Abstract

An earlier version of this article was delivered as the 2014 JSAS Annual Lecture. It represents part of a larger work in progress, an account of the rise and decline of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) at platinum mines on the western (Rustenburg) limb of the Bushveld igneous complex. While the police massacre of striking workers at Marikana in August 2013 drew public attention to the union’s distress, this account traces problems that arose in a series of events occurring since the end of apartheid in 1994. There were, no doubt, internal institutional reasons for the union’s collapse, but this article focuses on external social structural and historical factors that have haunted the union’s efforts to retain members’ support on the platinum belt. While a final decisive break came at Impala platinum mine in early 2012, the seeds of worker disaffection had been planted almost two decades earlier on the Anglo-American mines in Rustenburg and Northam in the middle and late 1990s. That is the story that this article attempts to tell.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was made possible by periods of extended leave from Hobart and William Smith (where the author is now Emeritus Professor of Sociology), funded by the Mellon Foundation, and with the assistance of the South African National Research Foundation (NRF Grant Number 78662), administered by the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP), where the author is currently Honorary Research Associate.

Notes

¹ For an intensive analysis of the contemporary relationship between independent worker committees and the AMCU, see L. Sinwell, ‘“AMCU by Day, Workers’ Committee by Night”: Insurgent Trade Unionism at Anglo Platinum (Amplats) Mine, 2012–2014, Review of African Political Economy, 42, 146 (2015), pp. 591–605.

² For an easily accessible account of compound conversion in contemporary Rustenburg, see A. Bezuidenhout and S. Buhlungu, ‘Enclave Rustenburg: Platinum Mining and the Apartheid Social Order’, Review of African Political Economy, 42,146 (2015), pp. 535–7.

³ I rely for these initial paragraphs on C. Chinguno, ‘The Unmaking and Making of Industrial Relations: The Case of Impala Platinum and the 2012–2013 Platinum Strike Wave’, Review of African Political Economy, 42,146 (2015), pp. 577–90, and on conversations with Chinguno himself. Chinguno’s ‘The Shifting Dynamics of the Relations between Institutionalisation and Strike Violence: A Case Study of Impala Platinum, Rustenburg (1982–2012)’, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2015, is now available at http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/20034, retrieved 6 June 2016.

⁴ Paul Stewart has kindly shared with me a copy of his 2004 report to Frank shaft management.

⁵ SWOP is the abbreviation for the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.

⁶ An earlier SWOP service delivery report, in 1998, found similar dissatisfaction in Rustenburg then. Much of this article addresses the cause of this earlier unease with NUM service delivery.

⁷ See NUM Secretariat Report for 2013 for an overview of comparative wage scales for the 2000s.

⁸ For more detail on this process, see Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu, ‘Enclave Rustenburg’, pp. 526–44.

⁹ In 1997, NUM commissioned the Network of Independent Monitors (NIM) to look into the turmoil at Anglo Platinum mines in 1996 and 1997. This quote was drawn from that report, which is not properly paginated. For a copy of the report and supporting documents, see NUM Documents 1997. In this article, ‘NUM Documents’ refers to documents available at the NUM Head Office Resource Centre, boxed by year.

¹⁰ For an early account of what he calls ‘local moral orders’, see K. von Holdt, ‘Institutionalisation, Strike Violence and Local Moral Orders’, Transformation, 72/73 (2010), pp. 127–51.

¹¹ The wide-ranging work of Raphael Botiveau, ‘Negotiating Union: South Africa’s NUM and the End of the Post-Apartheid Consensus’ (PhD thesis, Science-Po, Paris and the University of Rome, 2014), addresses at length many of these internal tensions within the union.

¹² NUM News, November 1992, the union newspaper consulted at the NUM Resource Centre.

¹³ JCI was a small mining house essentially under the control of Anglo-American. It was unbundled soon after the 1994 elections.

¹⁴ For an account of events at Impala, where management and the NUM eventually formed an alliance against the Bophutatswana regime, see T. Dunbar Moodie, ‘“Igneous” Means Fire From Below: The Tumultuous History of the National Union of Mineworkers on the South African Platinum Mines’, Review of African Political Economy, 42, 146 (2015), pp. 563–9.

¹⁵ I draw here on a summary of a confidential meeting in October 2000 between Amplats management and a CRC Conflict Stabilisation project team, set up by the North West provincial government to investigate trouble in the platinum mines. Gavin Capps gave me a copy of this document, which is repetitive and not very helpful overall, but contains occasional useful nuggets of information, including an account of a session with Amplats managers, who insisted that their story did not represent a position taken by the company itself. The quotation is from p. 44 of this report (hereafter CRC).

¹⁶ I cite here a 2001 report for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation by David Bruce, ‘The Operation of the Criminal Justice System in Dealing with the Violence at Amplats’, available at http://www.csvr.org.za/docs/policing/operationofthecriminal.pdf, retrieved 6 June 2016. Bruce’s report does not contain page numbers. Hence, for convenience of reference, I have paginated it myself. By my reckoning, this quote appears on p. 15. Future references to this source – as ‘Bruce’ – will contain my own page numbers.

¹⁷ Interview conducted by Siphwe Mbatha with two men (unnamed) in Northam, 9 October 2013. Transcript provided to me by Luke Sinwell.

¹⁸ The union had indeed, relatively recently, set up a scheme subsidising the purchase of vehicles for officials, who travelled many miles on NUM business. See ‘Revised Motor Vehicle Scheme (August 1990)’, reproduced in documents for National Staff Seminar, March 1993 (NUM documents, 1993).

¹⁹ Informants whom I interviewed in 2015 in Rustenburg, Northam and Mqanduli tended to mention the name change as the precipitating factor for the strike. They did, however, recall the Bophuthatswana Fund payouts when asked about them.

²⁰ CRC, p. 44.

²¹ NUM documents, 1997.

²² MECs are, essentially, the provincial cabinet.

²³ Cited in the NIM Report, Addendum 1.

²⁴ ‘Amplats: An Avoidable Tragedy?’, South African Labour Bulletin (hereafter SALB), 20, 5 (1996), p. 49.

²⁵ Cited in the NIM Report, Addendum 1. In the SALB report, the name is spelled ‘Kuscuc’.

²⁶ SALB, ‘Amplats’, p. 51.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 50.

²⁸ The Federated Mining Union, a post-Wiehahn rival to the NUM. It had virtually no support in the gold mines, so it is something of a surprise to find that it had support at Amplats. According to an Amplats manager: ‘[p]rior to 1996, FMU and NUM were two unions of equal strength, FMU had a longer history with Anglo Platinum, and represented the Black offshoot at the Mine and they maintained a fairly stable and calm relationship with the Mine and enjoyed a 43% membership. In 1989, NUM entered a recognition agreement with the Mine whereby they gained a lot of support. NUM was more political and aggressive than FMU and attracted a particular kind of member’ (CRC, p. 43). Perhaps the reference here is to the NUM’s more confrontational style.

²⁹ CRC Report, p. 45.

³⁰ I interviewed Thabo in Northam in 2014. His mother was Xhosa-speaking and his family had housed some of the Five Madoda. Moi Toi, the Tswana-speaking nyatsi (girlfriend) of Kaiser Mpiyakhe, the leader of the Five Madoda, was a next-door neighbor, and catered for her lover and his most important lieutenants. When I interviewed her in 2015, she spoke of Mpiyakhe, killed in a motor accident in 2001, with reverence. She had visited his home village in Lusikisiki and met his family.

³¹ Virtually everyone I interviewed at Swartklip had stories of these events, but I was unable to find another direct eyewitness.

³² Ex-mineworkers whom I interviewed in 2015, even those who could not recall McLeod’s name, remembered that he ‘drove a white Cressida’.

³³ Mentioned in ‘Notes on interviews with NUM members at Amandelbult’, attached to the NIM report (NUM Documents, 1997).

³⁴ According to an NIM interview with the police superintendent at Northam, attached to the NUM report, Diale was to have been a witness in a case at Swartklip.

³⁵ I myself sought the original police records but was unable to obtain them.

³⁶ Bruce, ‘Operation’, p. 73. See also Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 14 July 1997. The Mail and Guardian (10 October 1997) provided an extensive ‘hit-list’.

³⁷ Bruce, ‘Operation’, pp. 73–4. One should note, however, that Bruce (p. 39) believes that some of the murders of MPWU workers were committed by their own fellow unionists.

³⁸ The quotation is from CRC report, p. 46.

³⁹ I cite here a fascinating History Workshop paper, ‘Secrecy and Violence in Rural Tsolo’, unpaginated extracts from which were sent to me by Jeff Peires upon his reading an early draft of this article. See also D. Kohnert, ‘Witchcraft and Transnational Social Spaces: Witchcraft Violence, Reconciliation and Development in South Africa’s Transition Process’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41, 2 (2003), pp. 217–45.

⁴⁰ For a detailed historical account of the origins in Herschel of the Amafeldawonye and Iliso Lomzi, see William Beinart’s chapter on the subject in W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (London, James Currey, 1987), Chapter 7.

⁴¹ All quotes from the CRC here are to be found on p. 18 of the report.

⁴² CRC, p. 37.

⁴³ Rather random union statistics for the period are filed in a separate box on the shelf with NUM documents at the union head office Resource Centre.

⁴⁴ Palane has not responded to my request for an interview. I rely in this section largely on a transcript of his story as told to Kally Forrest in January 2013, and on union statistics and scattered press reports.

⁴⁵ Archie Palane, interviewed by Kally Forrest, 20 January 2013.

⁴⁶ ‘NUM statistics’, filed with NUM Documents.

⁴⁷ Mbatha, interview with two unnamed men, Northam, 9 October 2013. Perhaps this explains the rather substantial minority support for the Building Motor and Allied Workers Union (BMAWU) at Amplats. Based in Braamfontein, it was insignificant elsewhere, as far as I can make out.

⁴⁸ His conviction was overturned in 2000, but he was killed in a motor accident shortly thereafter. Two ex-mineworkers whom I interviewed in the Mqanduli district in May 2015 insisted that the accident had been engineered by Mpiyakhe’s enemies. He had ‘become careless’, they said.

⁴⁹ Bruce, ‘Operation’, p. 20.

⁵⁰ The most careful account of these events is to be found in S. Buhlungu and A. Bezuidenhout, ‘Union Solidarity Under Stress’, Labour Studies Journal, 33, 3 (2003).

⁵¹ I rely here on findings in Chinguno, ‘The Unmaking’. For the NUM’s point of view on these events, see the union’s Secretariat Report for their annual congress in 2012.

⁵² A ‘50 per cent plus 1 agreement’ is an agreement between union and management that, since the union represents more than half of the workforce, it has the right to be sole representative of the workers until another ballot is held.

⁵³ For a brief account of events at Amplats, see Sinwell, ‘“AMCU by Day, Workers’ Committee by Night”’.

⁵⁴ The current doctoral research of Melusi Nkomo, a Swiss-based SWOP PhD associate, promises to enrich our knowledge of contemporary migrant cultures. We should look forward to publication of his findings.