Responding to Reform and (Re)Negotiating Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Case of the Mine Workers' Union

Abstract

In July 1997 Flip Buys was appointed General Secretary of the notoriously racist Mine Workers’ Union in South Africa. Over the next few years, he instituted a number of important changes at the union, central to which was a decision to move away from racial solidarity as the basis of union organisation, and to embrace ethnic solidarity instead. Given the small size of the Afrikaner ethnic community, however, this seems to be an odd decision for the union to have made, and it was also very different from what most comparable organisations were doing at the same time. This paper therefore asks why the Mine Workers’ Union decided to reorganise in this way, particularly given that several other organisational options were possible. Drawing on in-depth interviews with members of the union, along with archival research, and a close examination of newspaper reports and other contemporary sources, it explores the options that were available to the leadership at the time, and argues that the decision can best be understood as the result of an interaction between reforms and pressures in the present, and a strong historical narrative that framed how these were understood and reacted to.