The notorious syndicalist

Just for a moment, one week in 1919, JT Bain was the ‘dictator of Johannesburg’. Would he plunge the city into a Russian-style revolution? How had his past prepared him for this moment? Would it give him the strength to seize power, or would it fail him at the last? Unknown to modern memory, James Thompson Bain led such an extraordinary life that it is strange he is now forgotten. Born into poverty in Scotland, he educated himself in the radical philosophies of William Morris and Thomas Carlyle. He fought for the British against the Zulus in 1879 and for the Boers against the British in 1899. On the Rand he struggled against the mineowners and was a spy for Paul Kruger’s government. JT Bain was a pioneer of socialist ideas in South Africa. He played a leading part in the great Rand strike of 1913. His deportation along with eight other strike leaders in 1914 rocked the governments of South Africa and Britain and for a while he was the sensation of London. Then in the last year of his life, he held the fate of Johannesburg, and perhaps South Africa, in his hands …