The SACP, the Coalbrook Disaster and Marikana

                                              Joe Slovo

The SACP, the Coalbrook Disaster and Marikana

Gillian Slovo makes a reference to a court action Joe had pending on behalf of Coalbrook victims. She notes that the action would be for the families of the 430 miners buries alive with the collapse of Coal North mine. At the time Joe became involved with the court case he was among the first to be detained under the State of Emergency called as the Apartheid Government’s response to a potential popular uprising following the Sharpeville massacre.

“The (Coalbrook) tragedy was the worst mine disaster in South African history and Ruth sent her colleague Joe Gqabi to cover the story. Gqabi worked on the story for almost a month and his article facilitated the ANC’s call for political action.  When Joe Slovo tried the Case, he asked for and was granted a temporary adjournment in order to meet another defense obligation in Ladysmith”. So the case was postponed to March 31. Joe was arrested and the Coalbrook trial was never reopened.  

Gillian’s comment made and published in in the oral history Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the war against Apartheid (page 113, Alan Wieder, Jacana 2013) lifts the veil on a dark chapter of history which to this day is a mysterious cover-up of culpable and gross mismanagement of Coalbrook mine at that time managed and owned by Federale Mynbou, today integrated in the giant BHP-Billiton.

Indeed with the Gillian comment we have a handle of a number of concrete questions for which there are either no answers or which should be further elaborated on.  To a certain extent this is done by Ruth First, the superb journalist who left no stone unturned to establish the fact and certainly to build an evidential case for Joe Slovo to push a case on the Coalbrook mine managers for mass murder. It is also interesting that the verdict of the coroner looking into the disaster drew the conclusion that the deaths of 437 miners, seven of whom were white, were caused by “violence”. A rather oblique judgment, probably made to cover his position should the inquiry have been taken on a broader and deeper investigation.

Interesting is that to this day the general perception is that the list of names of victims is nowhere to be found. If Joe Gqabi was covering the case for one month and Joe Slovo in a position to take legal action on behalf of victims’ families, then we can only assume that the list has gone missing with the loss of institutional memory with the many mergers and acquisitions that took place in the wake of the disaster. In fact it may even be that this process may have started almost immediately after the disaster as reference to Federale Mynbou as culpable owners are seldom to be found.

The political action referred to probably would have prefigured and played a vital role in ANC plans prior to the Sharpeville massacre. The ANC planned a memorial meeting for the victims and their families on February 7^th 1960, in the Trades Hall in Johannesburg, a few days after the disaster. SACTU not only took on the issue for compensation, but the event would have provided a critical kick-start for organizing trade union rights for miners way back in 1960.    

Today history repeats itself in an uncanny way. The Coalbrook disaster certainly was fuel for widespread indignation in the run-up of peaceful defiance action which was shipwrecked by the untimely action of the PAC resulting in the Sharpeville massacre provoking the Apartheid Regime's disruption of all resistance with the calling out of a state of national emergency. With Marikana we find the ANC on the wrong foot and denouncing the massacre of miners as the work of “vigilantes”. The political aftershock of Marikana is yet to shake up the topography of post-Apartheid politics.

Berend Schuitema