Making Mincemeat out of Mutton-Eaters: Social Origins of the NUM Decline on Platinum

An earlier version of this article was delivered as the 2014 JSAS Annual Lecture. It represents part of a larger work in progress, an account of the rise and decline of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) at platinum mines on the western (Rustenburg) limb of the Bushveld igneous complex. While the police massacre of striking workers at Marikana in August 2013 drew public attention to the union’s distress, this account traces problems that arose in a series of events occurring since the end of apartheid in 1994. There were, no doubt, internal institutional reasons for the union’s collapse, but this article focuses on external social structural and historical factors that have haunted the union’s efforts to retain members’ support on the platinum belt. While a final decisive break came at Impala platinum mine in early 2012, the seeds of worker disaffection had been planted almost two decades earlier on the Anglo-American mines in Rustenburg and Northam in the middle and late 1990s. That is the story that this article attempts to tell.