UKZN Professor Emeritus Raises Unanswered Questions

BY: .

Shortly after delivering a paper at the Art, Materiality and Representation Conferencein London on 2 June, Professor Dennis Schauffer flew to Warsaw to present a paper entitled Clydesdale – The Unanswered Questions at the E-Leader Conference held at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics.

The rusting piece of mining equipment and a small plaque is the only monument ever raised in honour of the 435 miners who lost their lives in the Coalbrook coal mine in the Clydesdale Colliery on 21 January 1960.

The small inscription reads ‘After all these years you are still in our hearts and thoughts’ which is deeply ironic as you would be hard-pressed to find anyone today who can recall the names of a single one of these miners whose bodies remain more than 157 metres underground where they were trapped in a tunnel that slowly filled with water that seeped in through the rocks and was filled with methane gas as the air conditioning fan system had been disabled in the rock fall (Industry News: Minerals Council of South Africa. 21 Jan 2016 p.1).

The paper attempted to answer seven key questions:

1) Why was Colebrook required to step up coal production by an output that represented a 17-fold increase in the normal rate of production?

2) Why were some miners prevented from leaving the mine when they feared for their safety?

3) Why were the widows or families of Black miners paid such a poor rate of compensation in comparison to that paid out to families of the five White miners who lost their lives?

4) Why were miners not involved with the disaster confined to their workers’ dormitories and not allowed to speak to any reporters?

5) What were members of the * Special Branch doing at the mine?

6) Why was a serious rock fall and collapse of the roof in a mining tunnel in an older part of the mine just two weeks prior to the major disaster not reported to the Government mining inspector who visited the mine on a routine inspection?

7) Why did the labour Unions and relevant government departments not want to have anything to do with the 50^th-year commemoration of this major event in our history?

The paper came to the conclusion that although a lack of suitable equipment, lack of geological research and seismic activity all played their role; the elephant in the room that nobody, to this day, wants to address is the socio-political climate that sustained the apartheid system and which kept up the profit returns to wealthy investors in London and New York. From this perspective, the disaster of Coalbrook and other related mining fatalities that persist, becomes a case of placing profits before people in a demonstration of the dark side of capitalism.

* During the Apartheid era the Security Branch of the South African Police was commonly known as the Special Branch.

Words: Kriben Pillay