Becoming a Social Movement Union: Cyril Ramaphosa and the National Union of Mineworkers (Report‪)‬

In 1984, black African townships in South Africa exploded into popular revolt. The ANC called on township residents to 'destroy the enemy organs of government', rendering them 'ineffective and inoperative'. Militant township youth seized on this principle of 'ungovernability' to impose 'discipline', often violent, on ordinary people trying to go about their everyday lives. Similar forms of disruption eventually spread from residential areas into factories in militant opposition to the apartheid work-place regime (Von Holdt 2003). 'Ungovernability' became a rallying cry for popular forces in the face of repressive violence from the South African state. Although resistance movements such as the UDF invoked the need for democratic order under a rubric of 'people's power', the solidarities and liminalities of millenarian ungovernability and violence always lurked close to the surface in practices of confrontation during this period. (1) This paper uses a single case to address the social origins of millenarian ungovernability on the South African gold mines in 1985. It also seeks to understand the potentials and pitfalls for union leadership of such enthusiasm and to outline union strategies to institutionalise and control it. The National Union of Mineworkers in South Africa was avowedly not millenarian. Its leaders all--especially Cyril Ramaphosa--eschewed any claim to prophetic charisma. Nevertheless, I know of two relatively clear cases in the 1980s when NUM leaders arose who directly and militantly challenged management control, claiming charismatic power with supernatural assistance. (2) One was at Cooke shaft on Randfontein Estates. (3) The other was at Vaal Reefs gold mine--at the time the largest gold mine in the world with more than 40,000 workers, three divisions (South, West and East), and nine deep shafts (about a mile and a half down). (4) Events at Vaal Reefs South constitute the case study I shall deal with in this paper.