A century ago, on Monday, 6 March 1922, a general strike was declared in Johannesburg, setting off a rebellion that left the young city’s streets drenched in blood. During the few ferocious days that followed, gangs of armed white workers carried out pogroms against their African counterparts until martial law was declared.
Johannesburg in 1922, by then the beating heart of global gold production, was at the eye of a world-historical storm that left it vulnerable to change. The socialist overthrow of the empire in Russia five years earlier had set off a wave of revolution at the same time as an inflationary crisis at the end of World War 1 had impoverished workers the world over.
The first of these cables was sent on 22 February explaining to Van Eyssen that the proposed cuts to the wages of white colliery workers in the Lowveld would save three pence per ton of coal, a considerable annual saving of £35,000. Five days later, the cables claimed that the position of Johannesburg’s striking gold miners had been considerably weakened by the “stronger attitude of police”.
By the next day, when Van Eyssen had received reports of a “very great increase in attempted intimidation”, gangs of workers were preventing the delivery of bread, shutting down businesses and stopping buses and taxis transporting scabs to the mines. Dozens of armed white men stalked working-class neighbourhoods like Ferreirastown and Vrededorp, shooting at African people on the street. In the dead of night, the rebels bombed a mine in Primrose with dynamite.