White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (review)

With South Africa now in its second post-apartheid decade, readers might be surprised to learn that in the early twentieth century some of the greatest challenges to the regime came not from black rebels, forerunners of today’s African National Congress, but from disaffected white workers urging their fellow colonialists to ‘fight and unite for a White South Africa’. The 1922 Rand Revolt was the last and most momentous of these upheavals. Beginning in January as a strike to defend racially exclusive privileges in the mining industry, the conflict escalated in February when Prime Minister Smuts promised protection to miners willing to resume work. Workers’ commandos, formed in the strike’s earliest days, adopted a more menacing posture in response to police provocation. In the second week of March, following violent attacks on white strikebreakers, Africans and mining property, the government proclaimed martial law as the workers’ commandos seized control of the Witwatersrand. Smuts hurried north to lead 20,000 armed men in suppressing the rising, assisted by heavy artillery, armoured transport and aircraft.

Historians have treated the revolt extensively already, focusing particularly on its longer-term contexts and consequences, including the profitability constraints of South African gold mining, the gradual deskilling and displacement of white miners, the growth of the state’s repressive capabilities, and the eventual incorporation of alienated whites within settler parliamentary politics. Those familiar with such themes might legitimately ask if Krikler’s account adds anything genuinely original. Krikler knows that these readers could be disappointed, for although he expertly elucidates the historiography’s conventional preoccupations, he insists that his own emphasis is ‘on the manifold experiences of the strike and the rebellion’ (p. 292). As this suggests, the book is an intricately detailed consideration of what happened, particularly in the days immediately surrounding the strikers’ taking of the Rand on 10 March 1922. Nonetheless, Krikler does confront some entrenched positions on issues like the origins of the workers’ commandos and the challenge to the state that the insurgency potentially posed.

Krikler’s main primary sources – evidence given to the judicial commission that investigated the revolt, and the voluminous records of the special criminal court established to try the rebels – reflect his ‘phenomenological’ emphasis and have not previously been researched systematically. The result is a uniquely textured exploration of the sensibilities and contradictory elements of consciousness, and of the social and psychological compulsions, that moulded the rhetoric and actions of white working-class men and women during these months of intense conflict with employers and the state. Krikler’s concerns here, whether in assessing the strikers’ anti-capitalist resentment, or in excavating the logic of their murderous racial violence in the days preceding the insurrection, are not parochially descriptive but consistently comparative and conceptually stimulating. Thus he discusses the insurrectionary potential of his South African protagonists’ Great War experience of mass militarization alongside the similar effects of such experience on revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements in post-1918 Europe. In analysing white women’s tactics in confronting the state’s forces, he draws inspiration from an account of a comparable mobilization of women against armed attackers in New Delhi in 1984. His evaluation of the strengths and limitations of the rising itself rests likewise on an impressive understanding of rebellions in other times and places.

Most controversial, perhaps, is Krikler’s explanation of the pogrom-like violence that white crowds directed at Africans (including women and children) in the three days before 10 March. They did this not because they viewed Africans as ‘scabs’; indeed, they did not consider Africans, despite their centrality in the production process, to be part of the working class at all. They did it because – psychologically traumatized by their rulers’ and employers’ treatment of them, and by the enormity of their imminent declaration of war on the rest of the white community – they frenziedly deceived themselves that it was not they but rather Africans, into...