‘Fiery Collieries’ and Explosive Situations. Towards a History of the 1972 Hwange Colliery Disaster
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The 1972 Hwange Colliery Disaster in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) was the worst mining disaster in the country’s history and one of the worst in the world. On 6 June, 427 miners were killed by a series of devastating underground explosions. The victims came not only from Zimbabwe but also from across the region, as the mine’s African workforce was drawn from Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, as well as white workers from Britain and South Africa. The disaster occurred at a significant historical juncture in the region’s history, when nationalist movements were undertaking an armed struggle against white minority rule in Zimbabwe. Our paper is a step towards writing the first history of the Hwange Colliery Disaster. Despite the magnitude of this event, almost nothing has been written about it so far. This reflects a broader neglect of severe mining disasters in Southern Africa, despite their frequency. We argue that the magnitude of this disaster was strongly influenced by the racially divided nature of the workforce and the country, and by the fact that the workforce were predominantly migrants. The colliery had a poor safety record and was known as a ‘fiery colliery’, but the lives of African miners had little value, resulting in basic safety practices relating to coal dust being both ignored and unknown. The circulation and application of knowledge about the hazards of coal dust from other coal mining regions was inhibited by the total disregard for the workforce.
Source: Moving the Social
Authors: Clement Masakure, Duncan Money
Language: German
Topic: Industrial and Mining Safety
Subfield: Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7124424720
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: