2. THE HERITAGE OF STRUGGLE
SACTU owes its existence to the decades of struggle and sacrifice that preceded it. History always points the way forward. Two generations of progressive trade unionists before SACTU had grappled with the basic dilemma in South African trade unionism - the racial division of the working class within the context of a rapidly developing industrial capitalism.
Beginning in the 1920s, each decade and in certain periods different geographical areas, conceived various strategies to advance the workers' struggle according to the principles of working class unity. In the course of the struggle, many victories were won but many mistakes were made. In the earlier years especially, it was not uncommon for progressive White trade unionists to think and act within the confines of a European model of trade unionism transplanted onto South African conditions. Such an approach could only lead to White paternalism and failure. Yet these struggles were themselves part of a dialectical process that on the one hand gave impetus to African workers to forge their own structures and class consciousness, and on the other hand forced progressive Whites to rethink and reformulate trade union strategies based on the concrete conditions of racial capitalism. The result, many years later, was the emergence of SACTU as the first non-racial trade union coordinating body.
We have only a short space in which to document these early struggles and pay tribute to the individuals who led them. The emphasis in this chapter will be on the organization of the most exploited - the African workers. In terms of time, the concentration will be on the 1940s and early 1950s, the years that formed the immediate background to the emergence of SACTU.1
The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU)
Whereas the interest of the workers and those of the employers are opposed to each other, the former living by selling their labour, receiving for it only part of the wealth they produce; and the latter living by exploiting the labour of the workers; depriving the workers of a part of the product of their labour in the form of profit, no peace can be between the two classes, a struggle must always obtain about the division of the products of human labour, until the workers through their industrial organizations take from the capitalist class the means of production, to be owned and controlled by the workers for the benefit of all, instead of for the profit of a few. Under such a system he who does not work, neither shall he eat. The basis of remuneration shall be the principle from every man according to his abilities, to every man according to his needs. This is the goal for which the ICU strives along with all other organized workers throughout the world. Further, this Organization does not foster or encourage antagonism towards other established bodies, political or otherwise, of African peoples, or of organized European labour.
Preamble to 1925 revised Constitution of the ICU 2
The decade of the 1920s witnessed the rise and the fall of the ICU, the first nationally-based African workers' organization and political movement in South African history. From its initial base amongst Cape Town dock workers, the ICU extended its influence to all provinces by the mid-1920s; in the late 1920s the base shifted to Natal and by 1929-30, for a number of reasons, it had virtually collapsed into localized and weak factions that formed the basis for the more serious trade union organizing work in the 1930s. Membership figures are difficult to verify, but there is good reason to believe ICU claims of 100,000 workers during the peak year of 1927. For all of its contradictions - and they existed at every possible level - the ICU was instrumental in founding a tradition of Black workers' militancy. Yet, ironically, the structure and leadership weaknesses of the ICU rendered the movement incapable of directing that very same rank-and-file militancy.
The ICU was formed in January 1919 in Cape Town, when A. F. Batty, founder of the unsuccessful Labour Democratic Party, asked Clements Kadalie to assist in organizing a permanent organization of Black workers to give him greater electoral strength. Kadalie, an immigrant from Nyasaland (Malawi) became Secretary of the Union, which had its base primarily among Coloured dock workers and railway workers. The initial strength of the ICU came through successful strike action on the Cape Town docks in 1919; over 2,000 workers came out and despite police harassment and White workers' strike-breaking, wage increases of nearly 100 per cent were secured by 1920. This was to be one of the very few strike actions ever endorsed by the ICU throughout the next decade.
Organizing efforts in Bloemfontein (Orange Free State), were being conducted simultaneously by Selby Msimang, with the primary struggle there being around general wage increases for African workers facing cost of living increases after the First World War. Msimang's union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICWU) invited Kadalie's union to merge in 1920, but Kadalie resisted until it was agreed that he would be allowed to be the principal figure. In the interests of workers' unity and the necessity of forming a national organization, Msimang conceded the leadership position to Kadalie. Thus, in Bloemfontein, the ICWU of Africa was born on a platform of trade unionism designed to organize 'One Big Union' of Black workers throughout the country. Although explicit political activity was eliminated from the initial charter, perhaps in deference to the South African Native National Congress (to become the African National Congress in the 1920s), the ICU passed resolutions that attacked the pass laws and system of contract labour. The prohibition against involvement in political activity soon became an impossible and undesirable mandate for the ICU to follow.
Until 1923, the ICU, reflecting Kadalie's dominance, had its strength primarily in the Western Cape Province. The 1923 Conference, for example, consisted almost exclusively of delegates from the Cape; this also meant that the Coloured working class community was represented in higher proportions than would be the case when the ICU expanded to establish branches throughout the country. In 1925, although the Conference was convened in Johannesburg, the Cape accounted for ten of the fifteen branches represented. By 1927, however, each province had approximately equal representation, although the Natal branches - under the leadership of A. W. G. Champion - accounted for over 61 per cent of the ICU's revenues (as compared with the Cape's 3.6 per cent).
The temptation to explain the strengths and weaknesses of the ICU in terms of individual leaders must be guarded against. Rather, the main reason for the meteoric rise of the ICU and its popularity with the African and Coloured workers must be located in trends in the political economy following the First World War. Kadalie's description of the ICU as a '. . . beacon of light on the horizon' means essentially that it was the first mass-based movement to emerge following the consolidation of White colonialism via the formation of the Union of South Africa in 19 10. The last 'native' rebellion had been forcefully put down in 1906, and since then the conquered Africans had been searching for an organizational structure within which they could resist incorporation into the dominant capitalist economy. Despite White (English) missionary rhetoric about 'integration' and 'eventual equality', the real role of Blacks as cheap labour and oppressed citizens was firmly established by the end of the war. The war thought to end all wars' had only made their working and living conditions more precarious.
Wartime industrialization accelerated the growth of the Black proletariat. In the process, the pre-capitalist reserves were disrupted through labour migration to the cities and were increasingly incapable of providing subsistence for their inhabitants. In the cities, African labour faced a rising cost of living with poverty wages and ruling class authoritarianism with no effective counter-organization. To express their discontent, African workers carried out numerous spontaneous strikes on the mines and in the cities between 1918 and 1920. It was this working class militancy which formed the basis of the ICU rise to national prominence in the early 1920s.
The heavy-handed leadership of Kadalie and Champion, however, placed narrow parameters on the programme of the ICU. The Union became highly bureaucratic and too concerned with constitutionalism at the top, yet amongst its membership the disciplined organization of workers was almost completely non-existent. Organized along the syndicalist lines of a general workers' union. the ICU included in its ranks teachers, domestic servants, dock workers, rural agricultural workers and even small traders. In short, the ICU brought together the extremes within the oppressed community - from the rural migrants to the urban petty-bourgeois aspirants, the latter in many respects reflecting the class background of their leaders. Teachers, for example, often entered the ICU as bureaucrats with no trade union experience or interest but only in order to gain higher wages than their profession would pay. This was especially the case in Natal, where at one time the ICU was reported to have no less than 58 paid staff members.
The most glaring contradictions within the ICU came at the level of trade union politics. and particularly the leadership's inability to decide on a consistent policy towards White workers and their trade unions. This was admittedly a problem made more difficult by the fact that the majority in the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) held firmly to the belief that the White working class would lead the revolution against capitalism in South Africa. Kadalie, in his more radical moments, spoke of the necessity to struggle on both economic and political fronts and also of the desirability of working with White Communists who disagreed with the prevailing line of the party. But Kadalie's lack of political clarity extended far beyond the question of the CPSA. In the space of these short years, Kadalie worked with such diverse groups as the pro-Apartheid Nationalist Party, the SA Labour Party, the SA Trade Union Congress, the British TUC and even the Communists when all other options had been closed to him..
The major conflict between Kadalie and the CPSA was only superficially the question of race, as Coloured and African members James La Guma, Johnny Gomas and Edward Khaile, among others, were very capable CP members holding key positions in the ICU until 1926. The Communists' criticisms of the ICU leadership concerned (a) its unwillingness to organize disciplined, industrial unions (rather than the amorphous general workers' union), to introduce rank-and-file democratic control of Union funds and elections, or to pursue an active policy of strike action, and (b) 'inefficiency, dishonesty and unconstitutionalism'. The latter charge was made by La Guma following a national tour of ICU branches in 1926, whereupon he concluded that Kadalie was the 'arch pilferer' of them all and a 'dictator in embryo'.
The ultimate result of this conflict was the purge of all Communists from the ICU at an Executive Committee meeting in Cape Town and then confirmed at the 1926 Conference in Port Elizabeth. Although local branches objected to this action, the decision was upheld at the 1927 Conference held in Champion's stronghold of Natal. The CPSA could offer no serious opposition to the purge as most White Communist trade union leaders were still caught up in the 'White workers first' policy. The simple fact was that at this time the ICU, for all its weaknesses, had been the only trade union to emphasize the organization of the most exploited workers in South Africa.
Kadalie's purge of the Communists, however, was not done with any principle in mind. Instead, it was part of his larger strategy of building ICU strength through foreign support. Having given up on the White unions in South Africa, and having been predictably betrayed by the Nationalist-Labour Pact Government following the elections of 1924,3 Kadalie then turned his attention to White, liberal organizations with 'mother-country connections' back in Britain for assistance. Connections with British Labour Party persons, who warned Kadalie against any involvement with the CPSA, were pursued and greatly strengthened with the purge of the Communist members in 1926. In Kadalie's words, it 'brought immeasurable support from the liberal European public opinion' .In April 1927, Kadalie extended his European contacts by attending the International Labour Organization (ILO) meetings as an unofficial delegate from South Africa. This made Kadalie the first African trade unionist to attend an ILO Convention. After a five-month tour of Europe and lengthy discussions with trade union centres, especially in Britain, he returned to South Africa with not only a Europeanized conception of trade union structures (which had little to do with South African realities) but also a new European-drafted Constitution for the ICU.
With these new friends in Europe, Kadalie was intent on proving that the ICU was not anti-White. The National Council was persuaded to endorse his motion that the ICU apply for direct affiliation to the South African Trade Union Congress (SATUC). The thinking behind this move was that such an affiliation would strengthen and further legitimate the ICU as a trade union organization while simultaneously forcing White trade union leaders to recognize Kadalie's close ties with British trade union and political centres. To its discredit, the SATUC again responded with a racist reflex and turned down the application, suggesting instead that periodic consultations should be held between the two bodies. Kadalie responded, 'We have no intention of allowing the TUC to patronize us as inferiors. We will have full status or nothing.'
This rejection by the SATUC also showed it to be a 'narrow racialist', body, devoid of any true working class spirit'. Most disheartening for many Communists in the labour movement was the fact that veteran trade union leader, Williarn ('Bill') Andrews, helped to draft the rejection memorandum. As Simons and Simons conclude:
In yielding to white power without a protest, Andrews and Stuart isolated the ICU at a time when it desperately needed the backing of organized labour.... They admitted that the white labour policy was unjust, yet recommended in effect that it should be maintained. They claimed to lead the white workers, yet succumbed to their anti-Native prejudice. They professed faith in democratic rule, yet feared that the ICU might outvote the minority. They paid lip service to the idea of working class solidarity, but relied on racial antagonism to keep their own ranks united. The ICU had offered friendship in all sincerity and suffered a rebuff.4
Kadalie was not only to be rejected by the TUC but by his own ICU as well. During the time he was away in Europe, the ICU centre of strength had dramatically shifted to Natal. By 1927 it was under the leadership of A. W. G. Champion, whom Kadalie had recruited from his position as President of the Transvaal Mine Clerks Association in 1925. Champion, after moving to Natal in late 1925, built an ICU empire around himself in much the same fashion as Kadalie had done elsewhere.
Conditions for rural African migrants in Natal were deplorable. For instance, the ICU won an important legal case in the Supreme Court that outlawed a Durban city by-law ordering all Africans to be dipped in disinfectant tanks along with their belongings before entering the city. From this initial victory, the Natal ICU focussed attention on African squatters being removed from European-owned land. Rural Natal labourers flocked to the ICU in great numbers, and at times chiefs would deliver their entire tribes to ICU membership.
With a revolutionary political leadership and discipline, the ICU might have been capable of forging a truly mass workers' movement to challenge the ruling class. But instead, the ICU soon began to disintegrate over leadership rivalries between Kadalie and Champion. The 'cult of personality' approach characteristic of both reflected the fact that they had not developed organically out of the working class but rather came in 'from the outside'. They lacked any clear analysis of the society in which they lived, and consequently their conception of change was piecemeal, reformist and most commonly bourgeois in direction.
When Champion returned to his native Natal in 1925, he utilized his connections to bring in a large Zulu membership and then imposed a heavy financial obligation on members in the form of dues. With the large revenues that came in, Champion developed a personal network of organizations - businesses, a newspaper, social clubs - through which he provided a variety of services for members. With those monies investments were made in real estate ventures, cooperatives, purchases of grain (presumably to be resold to members) and similar operations. In other words, instead of organizing the exploited and dispossessed to fight against the bosses and the state, the ICU leaders cautioned against strike activity and tried to compensate the victims of capitalism through these petty-bourgeois schemes. Champion even tried to pass a motion at the 1927 Conference which would have levied each member £1 to subsidize land purchases, but this was defeated by the delegates. Aside from a betrayal of working class struggle, these priorities understandably led to financial corruption. The sick, old age, unemployment and death benefits offered workers upon joining the ICU were seldom, if ever, realized.
There were also many occasions where the ICU failed to support militant workers who spontaneously struck against their employers. A coal workers' strike in Natal in 1927 led the ICU officials to side with the mining company and declare the strike illegal; Durban dockers also on strike were left unassisted on two occasions. Other strike-breaking incidents were part of the ICU leadership's attempt to divert the workers' militancy away from class struggle. The ICU Workers' Herald of November 1928 proudly editorialized that the ICU was glad to say that owing to the broad outlook of the ICU administrators the strike weapon has only been used on three occasions . . .'
By 1928 an internal crisis concerning the misuse of ICU funds became public knowledge and disintegration proceeded rapidly. Two years later, the ICU consisted of nothing more than local structures with no hope of rebuilding the national organization of 100,000 members that had existed in 1927.
Despite the many weaknesses and contradictions that characterized the ICU in the 1920s, one cannot overestimate its importance in establishing a tradition of African working-class resistance to exploitation. For the first time in modern South African history, the ICU provided African and Coloured workers with the opportunity to experience trade union organization and collectivization of working-class protest. Although hindered by opportunistic leadership at the national level, many ICU local branches became the source of Black trade union leaders of the next two decades. In fact, the sons and daughters of many ICU veterans became SACTU militants in the 1950s. In this respect, Kadalie's personal assessment of the effect of the ICU is not far off the mark:
The many trade unions of the African workers which have sprung up in all big cities of the Union of South Africa owe their existence to the pioneering work of the 'mother ICU which blazed the trail in the industrial field.
Ironically, the disintegration of the ICU into more local and regional organizations created the very conditions which allowed for the elimination of the three major weaknesses of the ICU - i.e. the absence of working-class leadership, the lack of clarity in the political struggle and the failure to organize trade unions along industrial lines. The new emphasis would be on class struggle at the point of production and it is in the decade of the 1930s that we see great advances in African trade unionism throughout the country.
The 1930s: The Rise of African Industrial Unionism and Afrikaner Nationalism
The rapid disintegration of the ICU created the conditions for a reassessment of strategy and tactics in building a trade union movement amongst the African proletariat. Aside from the continuity of individual organizers, there was a qualitative break between the ICU structures of the 1920s and the new unions that were to emerge in the 1930s. The major distinguishing feature of the emerging African unions was their organization along industrial lines. Only in this way could workers directly challenge the employers as the cause of their exploitation, and only in this way could their organization reflect the overall changes in the political economy associated with industrialization.
The other significant development worthy of attention is the rise of 'Christian-Nationalist' trade unions in the latter half of the decade. As we shall see, these 'unions' were part of the political assault on the working class led by the Afrikaner proto-fascist organizations.
These two related developments on the trade union front can be understood only in relation to major changes occurring in the overall structure of South African capitalism.
Firstly, the rapid process of industrialization resulted in the manufacturing sector contributing a greater proportion to the National Income than the agricultural sector for the first time in 1930. By 1943 manufacturing had outstripped mining. This industrial expansion brought with it a dramatic growth of the urban proletariat, both White and Black. 'Poor White' Afrikaners rushed from the farms to the cities in record numbers - an estimated 11,000 per year between 1921 and 1936 were reduced to unskilled wage earners in the unfamiliar urban setting.
The African proletariat increased by even greater proportions. The urban African population trebled between 1921 and 1946; between 1933 and 1939, approximately 400,000 Africans were added to the industrial labour force, doubling previous levels. The majority of this newly 'freed' labour force, i.e. those stripped of all means of production in the reserves and hence obliged to sell their labour-power to White capital in the cities, settled in the Transvaal. Thus, by the late 1930s, the overall proletariat had greatly stabilized in comparison with the previous decade.
Secondly, the traditional categories of skilled and unskilled labour rapidly gave way to a new category of worker - the semi-skilled operative, a human appendage to the machine. Both Africans and Afrikaners (especially women) assumed these positions as they entered the urban work force. Former artisans were either displaced, or, more frequently, reduced to overseers of African workers. The state acted wherever possible to protect the racial division of labour and White supremacy, but there was no doubt that the cheaper labour of African operatives was incorporated to meet the demands of industrial capitalist production. White industrial employees accounted for 35.9 per cent of all production workers in 1933; by 1950, they represented only 24.4 per cent.
Thirdly, and closely related to this change in the racial and technical composition of labour, craft unions were losing strength to new industrial unions which, in contrast, tended to be multi-racial in membership. Registered union membership (this excluded Africans) increased by 100,000 between 1933 and 1937, and by 1942 accounted for a quarter of a million workers. Craft unions failed to organize this new proletariat which instead was mobilized by 'left' trade unionists, in particular individual Communist Party members. A large proportion of these industrial unions consisted of Afrikaans-speaking Whites.5
This shift created tension within the South African Trades & Labour Council (SAT & LC), which had replaced the SATUC in 1930 as the recognized body of organized labour. In the Cape, the Cape Federation of Labour Unions, under the leadership of Bob Stuart, refused to merge with the T & LC. Many progressive trade unionists in the T & LC fought the reactionary craft unions for over two decades and generally speaking were able to hold the Council to progressive positions. For example, T & LC affiliation was open to all bona fide unions, including African trade unions. In practice, however, the T & LC as a federation did little to further the development of African workers and consequently gained little respect from the most exploited section of the work force.
The rise of unregistered African unions in the 1930s took place within the context of these important shifts in the political economy. By 1945, an estimated 40 per cent of the African industrial labour force was 'unionized' in one form or another - in some cases as parallel unions of registered unions or more often as independent militant unions that received little assistance from organized labour. The rich history of individual dedication and sacrifice, in the face of tremendous obstacles, to build African unions is a story that can only be sketched here. It is important to realize that some of these unions and many of the organizers had direct continuity with the SACTU struggles of the 1950s.
Having chosen the path of industrial unionism, and lacking a national coordinating body, the African trade union movement of the 1930s and early 1940s defies gross generalizations. Organizers in each geographical area grappled with local conditions and developed specific strategies accordingly. What follows is a brief outline of these struggles by area.
In the Transvaal, the industrial centre of South Africa, Communists like Jimmy La Gurna, purged by Kadalie from the ICU, had begun the difficult task of organizing Black workers in 1927. By the late 1920s, Willie Kalk, Solly Sachs, Fanny Klenerman and Ben Weinbren, among others, had organized registered unions among furniture, garment, sweet, laundry, catering and distributive trade workers. The organization of African workers was occurring simultaneously in the laundry, tailoring, engineering and baking industries. These efforts coincided with political education classes run by the CPSA in its drive to bring Africans into the party and reverse the old pattern of White domination (and often White prejudice as well). Among the recruits were Africans who later played leading roles in the trade union and liberation movements - for example, Johannes Nkosi, Gana Makabeni and Moses Kotane. Some of the trade unions formed by members of the Communist Party in the late 1920s, such as the Laundry Workers Union and the Clothing Workers Union, have remained in existence to this day (although under different names). They testify to the rich experience of over half a century of Black trade unionism.
In 1928, a South African Federation of Non-European Trade Unions (SAFNETU), consisting of five African unions representing about 10,000 workers, formed on the Rand. The Federation affiliated to the Red International of Labour Unions in 1929. Also in that year, five new African unions in dairy, meat, canvas, transport and engineering became affiliates to the coordinating body. Although the Party line had called for non-racial trade unions as the ideal, the reality was that Black workers first needed to solidify their collective strength against not only capital but also White workers firmly committed to the industrial colour-bar. Despite attempts to cooperate with White unions in the same industries, and regardless of Black solidarity with White workers' struggles, the latter invariably failed to support African workers in strike situations. The Federation did, however, claim to have sponsored the first joint strike of Africans and Whites against victimization of garment workers in Germiston. A joint committee of all trade unions in the laundry industry was also heralded as a breakthrough. Demands from the Federation were not particularly radical, avoiding the colour bar issue and campaigning for a 48-hour working week and 'equal pay for equal work'.
Rising unemployment during the Depression years led to a brief but significant decline in the employment of Black, particularly African workers; the latter were in many cases forced back onto the reserves as the few jobs available went to 'poor Afrikaner Whites'. Police actions against African workers, unassisted by their White counterparts, also contributed to instability for these newly formed African unions. Finally, internal Communist Party conflicts over the acceptance of the 'Native Republic' thesis, led to purges of the very organizers who had made such a valuable beginning in 'the organizing of these unions.6 These divergent factors combined to weaken the Federation and led to its disappearance by the turn of the decade.
Another Communist-initiated body - the African Federation of Trade Unions (AFTU) - emerged on the Rand during the Depression years. The current thinking was to raise African unions to a 'higher political level' by focussing on broader issues such as unemployment and anti-pass campaigns. A successful Johannesburg May Day demonstration in 1931, which brought together Africans and Whites, shouting 'We Want Bread' and 'Work or Wages', encouraged the leaders to believe that White workers were beginning to show signs of enlightened thinking. Such was not the case, however, and the state intervened by imposing tighter curfews on Africans and arresting Communist leaders throughout the country.
Another purge within the CPSA led to the expulsion of more trade unionists in September 1931. These included Bill Andrews, Solly Sachs and Ben Weinbren. Unemployment was the main issue of the day, and despite occasional unity of poor Afrikaners and Africans, the state succeeded in driving the racial wedge between these workers. The Europeans were called the 'unemployed' and given the dole; Africans were 'loafers' and endorsed out of the urban areas.7
The AFTU had been reduced to only two African unions in early 1932. Internal disputes between the African Clothing Workers Union and African Laundry Workers Union on the one hand and the AFTU on the other added to the problems on the Rand. The eventual strategy that dominated organizing work was that of registering unions of White, Coloured and Indian workers, and then forming parallel, unregistered unions of Africans. On one point all agreed: only with strong African unions might the White and privileged labour aristocracy be forced to concede common interests were shared by all workers.
As pointed out previously, the mid- to late-1930s witnessed another period of industrial expansion. With this came a renewed effort to organize African workers. In this period Wage Board investigations were called for more frequently on behalf of the grossly underpaid African workers. With new wage determinations achieved, African trade unionists had to fight for their enforcement as employers unscrupulously evaded the law. Over £25,000 was regained from employers underpaying their African labour in 1938 alone. These tangible rewards of trade union membership gave African workers more encouragement to join together in common struggle.
In addition to the continuing work of CPSA organizers, two new forces emerged on the African trade union front. Firstly, Gana Makabeni, ex-CPSA and ICU member, led the African Clothing Workers Union and a nucleus of other unions entirely under African leadership in the broom and brush, sweet, tobacco, rope and canvas, tin, metal and iron and numerous other secondary manufacturing industries. By 1940, these unions formed a Coordinating Committee of African Trade Unions.
The second grouping centred around the work of Max Gordon, a Trotskyist who re-organized the African Laundry Workers Union in 19 3 5. In the next few years, Gordon, with financial assistance from the SA Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) rebuilt other defunct unions, created new unions in commercial and distributive trades, baking and a General Workers Union; he also trained many Africans in the basics of trade union work. By 1939, between 15 and 20,000 African workers under Gordon's direction merged into the Joint Committee for African Trade Unions. Gordon served as General Secretary of the Joint Committee and Africans acted as secretaries of affiliated unions. In 1940, Gordon was interned as a 'safety measure', and David Gosani replaced him as General Secretary as the African workers preferred not to have Whites in leadership positions any longer.
The Joint and Coordinating Committees attempted a merger in 1938 but nothing came of this as Makabeni and others insisted that Whites should not fill offices in any affiliated unions. Gordon at that time was secretary of four African unions and refused to relinquish these positions. As Makabeni pointed out in 1939, 'Must we have European leaders even in our association?8 None the less, many of the unions of both bodies came together to form the Council of Non-European Trade Unions CNETU) in 1941, the progressive Council that led the African workers' struggle throughout the 1940s.
Conditions in the Western Cape, with its large proportion of Coloured workers, differed greatly from the heavily industrial Transvaal. Also, the day-to-day organizing work of Cape Town Communists was not directly affected by the internal battles and purges in the north. The dominant trade union groupings in this area in the 1930s were the aristocratic, craft unions and the Cape Federation of Labour Unions, which although it had a large proportion of Coloured workers, was still dominated by White leaders and White supremacist ideas. In the mid- 1 930s, however, militant trade unionists such as Ray Alexander, Johnny Gomas, Jimmy La Guma, Eli Weinberg, J. Ngedlane and J. Shuba, to name only a few, began to make their presence and that of African workers felt throughout the Western Cape.
One of the most important struggles in the early 1930s centred on the garment/clothing industry, where the aim was to organize the industry on a non-racial basis and simultaneously to establish a base against the CFLU's reformist policies. Solly Sachs, leader of the Transvaal Garment Workers Union (GWU), had asked Eli Weinberg to help organize in the Cape Town area in 1932. Weinberg, along with La Guma, Gomas and Ray Alexander had formed the African GWU by 1935. With success in this key industry, other workers in the leather, rope, milling and chemical industries soon became the focal point of Black union organization.
Ray Alexander deserves special mention for the pioneering work done in Cape Town in this decade. Trained in trade union work by Bill Andrews and J. Shuba, Alexander was distinguished by her methodical organizing around the real concrete demands of the workers in each industry. Once, while working for the Commercial Workers Union, certain reactionary elements in the Union called for her resignation because she had been seen walking with a 'kaffir' (J. Shuba) down the streets of Cape Town. Unwilling to give in to White chauvinism, Alexander insisted that the workers must decide if such behaviour was grounds for dismissal. The workers responded by re-electing her as Secretary.
As Afrikaner nationalism in the trade union movement raised its ugly head in the mid- to late-1930s (see below), the struggle in the Western Cape focussed on the transport workers. Africans, Coloureds and Indians were being removed from the Spoorbond, an Afrikaner 'Christian-Nationalist' Union that by 1936 had 16,000 members. Through the efforts of H. October, W. Driver, Alexander and others, a conference was held in October of that year in the same hall where the ICU had been founded back in 1919. The conference called for a minimum wage of Is. an hour to make up for the wages lost by Black workers during the Depression, equal opportunity for skilled work and an increase in the number of Black railway workers. The SA Railways and Harbour Workers Union (SARHWU) emerged from that historic meeting, and by 1943 the union had expanded to all provinces with a membership of over 20,000 workers.
These Western Cape initiatives were boosted on the political front by the removal of CPSA headquarters from Johannesburg to Cape Town in 1936. The progressive weekly, The Guardian, also added to the political and trade union work when it began publication in Cape Town in 1937; although this paper would be forced to change its name many times in the next twenty-five years, it continued to provide an invaluable source of analysis and discussion on the political and trade union struggle in all areas of the country.
Natal was distinguished from all other areas in South Africa by its large Indian community. In fact, despite stereotypes that picture all Indians as petty-bourgeois merchants, no less than 80 per cent of the Indian community in Natal were exploited as workers in the sugar and secondary manufacturing industries and also by the municipalities. This reality led to the emergence of militant Indian trade unionists and political activists in the 1930s.
Previously, the Indian trade union movement had begun in earnest in 1917-18, with unions organized in printing, furniture, garment, leather, tobacco, liquor and catering trades. These ethnically-based unions for Indians, coupled with the anti-Communist inclinations of A. W. G. Champion's ICU legacy, made for a racially divided and conservative trade union movement in Natal throughout the 1920s. In 1930, however, the national anti-pass campaign organized by the CPSA put Durban at the centre of progressive political activity - and state repression. While other cities drew only a few hundred demonstrators, 3,000 came out in response to the call of the Durban Branch. After four hours of speeches, a protest march through the city was prevented by police who proceeded to viciously attack and stab to death the dynamic leader, Johannes Nkosi. The government then banned Party members, including trade unionist Gana Makabeni, from the province for a period of two years. Nkosi became a martyr and a symbol of the African militancy against state repression and class exploitation. SACTU activists in the 1950s frequently visited Nkosi's grave as an inspiration in their struggles.
The emergence of a radical political trade union movement amongst Indian workers is a story not yet fully appreciated in South African history. In Natal, two people - George Ponnen and H. A. Naidoo -deserve special mention for the role they played in promoting non-racial trade unionism and class consciousness amongst Indian workers. Both from working class families, they became 'inseparable comrades' at work in the clothing factories of Durban, at night school and at political meetings during the rise of the 'Grey Shirts' fascists in 1933. From attendance at Anti-Fascist League rallies in their twenties, George and H.A. (as they were known locally) were influenced by Labour Party member and trade unionist A. T. Wanless, Eddie Roux, CPSA organizer in Natal, and Errol Shanley, trade union leader in Durban. They became the first South Africans of Indian origin to join the CPSA.
Rebuilding the Party after the 1930 repression was the major priority, and the strategy was to create strong unions for African and Indian workers. Their first major struggle was, as in other centres, in the garment industry, where the majority Black workers were controlled by a White executive led by J. C. Bolton. Ponnen and Naidoo resisted the temptation to form a separate union for Black workers and instead mobilized Black workers to take control of their union by challenging Bolton and his cronies; an attempt by Bolton to purge the two from the union leadership was defeated by the Black workers' unity.
Ponnen recalls his first involvement in a strike in November 1934. An Indian worker had been caught stealing some unmade pants material. The employer responded by drilling five three-quarter inch peep-holes in the Black workers' toilet walls and set up a system of constant surveillance. Humiliation and resentment of the workers led Ponnen and Naidoo to call all workers together and organize strike action the following morning. Whites, Africans, Indians and Coloureds stood together, forcing the boss to plug up the holes and grant further concessions to demands submitted by a non-racial workers' delegation. In Ponnen's words, 'This was the first time that White women workers and Black workers struck together one-hundred per cent united.' The following day, the police charged the two organizers with leading an illegal strike; Bolton refused Union support to the defendants and also persuaded two White women workers to testify against Ponnen and Naidoo. A light fine of £2 each was assessed and workers came forward to pay the fine.
This example typifies the approach taken on the Natal trade union front. The attempt was at all times to work for non-racial workers' unity, whether in strikes or in negotiations through the industrial relations machinery of the Industrial Conciliation Act. The most important struggle in Natal in the 1930s was the strike at Falkirk Iron & Steel, where again Ponnen and Naidoo were instrumental in leading the workers to a victorious settlement.
Their involvement in this dispute began one evening when iron and steel workers came to ask for assistance in forming a union of Indian, African and Coloured workers. After many secret meetings and the drafting of a Constitution, the Iron & Steel Workers Union (Natal) was formed with H. A. Naidoo as Secretary and P. M. Harry, a factory worker, as Chairman. Harry was fired when the employer heard about the Union and Black workers downed tools and came out on strike. The young Union had to fight not only the boss but also the White unions, the police and even A. W. G. Champion, former ICU leader and by then Native Commissioner. At one mass meeting during the strike, Champion attempted to divide the unity of the workers by telling Africans to go back to work and not to join the Indians who, in Champion's words, were nothing but 'shop keepers and exploiters'. Ponnen instantly stood up and spoke to the African workers:
You know why you are on strike. You know why the African, Indian and Coloured workers who work together in the factory are united. You know why you formed the Union ... Champion tells you that Indian workers are . . . shop keepers. As far as we know none of us here own shops. The only one who owns a shop is Champion himself. He is the shop keeper and he is the exploiter.
Ponnen told African workers to make a choice, either follow Champion or stand united with their fellow Indian and Coloured workers. As Ponnen recalls, 'The African workers with some war cry started marching towards Champion and his cronies. Champion saw there was trouble and made quickly to the gate with his henchmen - half running.9
The workers stood firm in the prolonged Falkirk strike that lasted 13 weeks. Whenever 'Bantu Affairs' authorities came to seek a compromise, they were met with the workers' militant singing of freedom songs. Throughout the strike, food rations and strike funds were provided by the otherwise reactionary Natal Indian Congress (which largely represented the merchant class). A united stand proved successful as the strike ended with a reduction in working hours and wage increases.
The e1Tect of the strike was dramatic. Between 1936 and 1945, at least twenty-seven unions for Black workers were organized in Natal. The majority of these unions covered African and Indian workers. The sugar industry was also organized during the late 1930s, and will be reviewed in the next section. These union-building campaigns not only radicalized Indians as workers but also as oppressed citizens. The Natal Indian Congress would eventually be transformed into a radical grouping within the Congress Alliance of the 1950s. Indian trade unionists like Ponnen, Naidoo and M. P. Naicker would prove to be equally involved in these struggles to weld the Indian community to the liberation movement.
All of these regional campaigns to form non-racial and/or African unions in the 1930s shared the common political perspective, that is, the necessity to bring workers into the political and trade union struggle. Consequently, newly organized Black workers became involved in the Anti-Fascist campaigns and later in the decade in the Non-European United Front which challenged all forms of political oppression against the Black community. In 1935, when the Mussolini fascists invaded Abyssinia, dock workers in Port Elizabeth, Durban and Cape Town refused to service Italian ships. Such internationalism clearly demonstrated the workers' awareness that the struggle was not for economic gains alone.
Progressive trade unionists were not the only ones to organize workers in the 1930s. Beginning in 1938, the 'Christian-Nationalist' assault on White Afrikaner workers began in earnest; a decade later the Nationalist Party was able to come to power on the basis of a class alliance that included the new generation of White Afrikaner workers. Although this movement began with the formation of the Broederbond (Bond of Brothers) secret society back in 1918, only in the late 1930s did the Nationalists place priority on weaning the Afrikaner workers away from their working class organizations.
Although the appeal was put in ideological terms, the rise of Afrikaner nationalism on the trade union front resulted from the fact that Afrikaner workers had been greatly proletarianized in the cities during the Depression years. Most important, these workers had come increasingly to accept trade unionism along class, not racial lines. To arrest this process, a number of cultural-political-economic organizations emerged to counteract these effects of industrial capitalist development. In addition to the Broederbond, the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Society), or FAK, the Reddingsdaadbond, and the Blankewerkersbeskermingsbond (White Workers Protection Society) focussed their energies on the transport, garment, mining and other industries where Afrikaners worked in large numbers. These workers were reminded that they were the 'chosen people' of South Africa, destined by God to rule, and that their organization should bolster Afrikaner, not class solidarity. Communism, liberalism and especially working class solidarity in non-racial trade unions were 'foreign' and dangerous threats to the 'inherent right of the Whites to rule'.
The Christian-Nationalists' only major success on the trade union front was in the railways, where the Spoorbond claimed 16,000 members in the mid-1930s and forced the dissolution of the National Union of Railway and Harbour Servants. The railways were the single largest employer of Afrikaner labour. In 1939, one in every eleven adult male Afrikaners worked on the railways.10 The attraction of Afrikaners to the Spoorbond had little to do with the sentiments for nationalism or protection of the volk, but rather concerned the protection, reservation and increase in jobs under the 'civilized labour policy' (see Chapter 4).
Elsewhere the strategy was to take over existing unions controlled by 'foreigners' rather than form competing unions. In mining, an alternative union (Die Afrikanerbond van Mynwerkers) created in 1937 failed as the Chamber of Mines concluded a closed shop agreement with the White Mine Workers Union in exchange for industrial docility. From then on the Afrikaner organizers bored from within through what was termed the Reform Movement and after assassination, sabotage, court cases and strikes, eventually took control of the White miners' union in 1948, the year the Nationalists came to power.
In the garment industry, Afrikaner employees were production workers and mainly women. But the Garment Workers Union, led by Solly Sachs, had established a sense of non-racial class solidarity that was not easy to break. Wage increases from £1 to £7 per week, a reduction in hours from 50 to 40 per week, and an increase in paid annual leave from 2 to 28 days were secured under Sachs' secretaryship of the Union. Although Sachs was continuously maligned as 'that communist Jew Sachs', he was able to win numerous libel cases in court and in some instances bankrupt these Afrikaner societies.
In other words, only where the material class interests of Afrikaner workers could be improved was Afrikaner nationalism successful. These limited gains were also made possible by a White trade union leadership in the SAT & LC that had failed to promote a serious campaign for non-racial working class unity.
Another important factor in explaining this partial success was the class composition of the Nationalist front organizations. Very few Afrikaner workers were leaders of these groups. The organizers were for the most part petty-bourgeois in class background and ambition. The interest in mobilizing Afrikaner workers was based on the desire to control a mass base '. . . with the strongest emphasis upon the effective disciplining of "the people".11 Of more strategic interest was the accumulation of finance capital to promote an Afrikaner capitalism that could compete with English-speaking capitalists. The Spoorbond alone created its own savings banks in 1937 with a total capital of £170,000. In fact, many of the Nationalist industrial and financial groups to emerge in the 1940s and later were financed from the dues extracted from Afrikaner workers, a large proportion of whom were not engaged in productive labour but rather were salaried staff (as in the railways) or White overseers of Black labour (as in the mines).
On balance, the Afrikaner Nationalist attack on trade unions failed in its direct attempt to control the White labour force before 1948. But it did serve to manipulate the existing contradictions in the registered trade union movement and indirectly led to the breakup of the T & LC in the early 1950s. Once in power, the Nationalists used the Suppression of Communism Act to get rid of the foreign' agitators who had escaped the attacks of the previous two decades.
The War Years and the CNETU
During the war years, the geographical centre of African trade unionism returned to the industrial hub of the Transvaal province. Twenty-five years of struggle, through the various strategies discussed above, culminated in the formation of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU, or Council hereafter) in November 1941. The Council, in turn, owed its existence to the renewed militancy of rank and file Black workers, faced with increased demands on their labour to satisfy the war effort and increased attacks on their standard of living. Alex Hepple describes these years: 'The new factory workers, the emerging African proletariat, suffered all the evils of urban poverty ... but brought new vigour to African labour and political organizations.12
Again, these currents make sense only in terms of changes occurring in the society at large. Between 1940 and 1946, another 115,000 Africans entered the industrial labour force. The employment was increasingly in the manufacturing sector; the ratio of those working in mining to manufacturing, construction and electricity had dramatically shifted from 316: 87 in 1932 to 328: 321 in 1946. During these years, the unity and strength of African workers succeeded in forcing increased wages due to the state's and the employers' priority of maintaining uninterrupted production. African wages in manufacturing increased to a wartime high of 26.6 per cent of White workers wages as compared with 19.8 per cent in the late 1930s; this ratio was to decline to 18. 5 per cent again by 1957. These increases are largely explained by Wage Board investigations forced through by the initiatives of the growing African trade union movement. African workers covered by resultant minimum wage determinations increased from 1,084 to 67,632 by 1943. Real earnings also rose significantly from an average of 9.8 per cent (1931-40) to 51.8 per cent (1941-46). These aggregate indices suggest, firstly, the tremendous rate of pre-war exploitation and, secondly, the fact that gains were made only when African workers were well organized along class lines and willing to act against the system of capitalist exploitation.
In November 1941, the CNETU brought together the various strands of Transvaal African trade unions that had emerged in the previous decade. The inaugural meeting was presided over by Moses Kotane (ANC, CPSA). Discussions resolved that although the SAT & LC Constitution admitted African unions on an equal basis, the T & LC had done little to foster meaningful non-racial workers' unity. If the African and Black workers' conditions were to be properly addressed, the emphasis had to be on creating even stronger Black unions and this had to be led by a coordinating body with this as its priority. Hence, the CNETU became the new force in the Transvaal and the major industry within which to organize would be mining. At the 1941 Conference, Gana Makabeni was elected President; Dan Tloome, Vice-President; David Gosani, Secretary; and James Phillips, Trustee.
Unions large and small, strong and weak affiliated to the CNETU in the first few months. In 1944, a smaller council in Pretoria merged with the Johannesburg centre to form the Transvaal CNETU. Although there were plans to expand the CNETU on a national basis, the bulk of the affiliated membership remained on the Rand. By 1945 the Council claimed a membership of 158,000 in 119 unions; this equalled about 40 per cent of the 390,000 African workers in commerce and manufacturing.
Geographically, the CNETU affiliation broke down as follows: Johannesburg (50 unions; 80,000 members); Pretoria (15; 15,000); Bloemfontein (10; 5,000); Kimberley (5; 3,000); East London (10; 15,000); Port Elizabeth (19; 30,000) and Cape Town (10; 10,000). The following industries were represented by these workers: iron, steel and engineering; mining; commercial and distributive trades; municipal services; transport; building; laundry; timber; cement and brick and tile; food; chemicals; explosives; and tobacco.
The accuracy of these figures has often been questioned, but as always with unregistered unions in South Africa there is seldom reliable data to substantiate numerical claims. It would be fair to assume that the difficulties associated with maintaining African unions - inability to collect dues at the workplace, little finances to pay full-time organizers and officials,, and the migrant labour system, among others - would render this claim inflated if only paid-up members in good standing were considered. African unions, however, cannot be measured by such quantitative standards. The important index is the fact that at least this many African workers were at one time members of CNETU affiliates and, what is more, subjectively considered themselves a part of the working class struggle.
The CNETU had reasonably cordial relations with the T & LC during the war years. Working with T & LC progressives, the Council campaigned for government recognition of African trade unions under the IC Act. Although focussing its efforts on organizing African workers, the Council's leaders saw the body not as an end in itself but as a necessary step toward the creation of a new, truly non-racial coordinating body. James Phillips, CNETU Executive member, recalls discussions to this effect as early as 1943, but the Council on its own had no resources to initiate such an endeavour. Too many progressive trade unionists in registered unions were still committed to the belief that the T & LC could be used to realize the goal of working class unity. Another twelve years would pass before this illusion was finally shattered and SACTU could emerge to fulfil this task.
A strike wave by militant African workers between September and December 1942 brought the CNETU's attention to the immediate realities of wartime labour conditions. Often without sanction from union leaders, African workers struck for immediate wage increases after having been promised such raises in 1941. Government tactics of delaying implementation of increases, fixing minimums considered too low by workers, or actually cancelling increases led to no less than nineteen strikes in this four-month period.
State repression was not uncommon in many of these situations, although wage concessions were frequently given in the early 1940s so as not to create even greater unrest during the war effort. In September 1942, 400 Natal coal miners set fire to the company's buildings after their protests against conditions went unheeded. These included assaults by White overseers and mine policemen, overcharging in company stores, inadequate rations, concrete slabs for beds, and twelve hour periods underground without food. Although the courts agreed that the complaints were valid, thirty-five miners were imprisoned for from one to five years for public violence.
In December, the Johannesburg City Council agreed to pay its municipal workers the largest increase recommended by Wage Boards (24s. per week, a 60 per cent increase) only after 2,000 African workers staged a one-day strike. Three weeks later, Pretoria city employees demonstrated against the city's refusal to follow suit; police were called in and killed fourteen Africans and wounded over one hundred more. A Commission of Inquiry blamed the Minister of Labour for having first exempted Johannesburg from paying the increase (thus prompting the first strike), but also added that disputes would be settled more peacefully if African trade unions were recognized under the law. Strike action occurred in the sweet, dairy, brick and railway industries as well during this period in 1942.13
Even the Minister of Labour Madeley had hinted that such a solution might be in the works when he broke with racist traditions and spoke at the CNETU Conference in November 1942. Begging for confidence in the government, the Minister stated, 'Recognition of your unions will come about; but you must rely on me.' Three weeks later, Madeley introduced War Measures Act No. 145 of 1942, outlawing strikes by Africans and continuing government policy of non-recognition of African unions. The WM Act introduced the 'carrot' of more Wage Board investigations and limited wage increases rather than the 'stick' of direct repression. The latter was limited to heavy penalties against union leaders who 'incited' workers to strike action.
The CNETU urged a national minimum wage of 40s. (£2) a week for all unskilled workers, but the increases allowed were in almost all cases held to 25s. to 27s. per week for workers in some thirty industries in the Transvaal. Although illegal strikes continued, the CNETU did not actively promote strike action, particularly as it tried to promote the twin policies of improving African workers' conditions at home and supporting the war effort against fascism abroad. It seems, however, that African workers in South Africa chose the former as the more crucial struggle. Whereas in the entire decade of the 1930s, 26,254 Black workers struck, accounting for a loss of 71,078 man-days (or 2.7 per striker), between 1940-45, 52,394 strikers accounted for the loss of 220,205 man-days (or 4.2 per striker). 14
Tending towards reformist policies, which included working with the Department of Labour Officials, Gana Makabeni lost favour with the more progressive elements in the Council by 1945. In that year he was replaced as CNETU President by J. B. Marks, Chairman of the African Mine Workers Union (AMWU). Makabeni attempted to form a splinter organization - the Council of African Trade Unions - in the late 1940s, but with little lasting success. With a more politically solidified leadership, the CNETU became more directly involved in militant action as evidenced by its role in the famous Mine Workers' Strike of 1946.
Before discussing that strike, brief mention should be made of two important trade union victories elsewhere in the country. In Cape Town (and the Western Cape region), Ray Alexander and other comrades were successful in forming the Food and Canning Workers Union (FCWU) in February 1941. For the next three decades this union would serve as a model of militant trade unionism throughout South Africa as well as provide experience and leadership within SACTU in the 1950s.
In 1941, also, a long struggle in the Natal sugar industry ended successfully. In that year the first wage improvement for mill workers was granted as a result of a dispute initiated by the Natal Sugar Industry Employees Union (NSIEU). A ten shilling per month increase in that year was followed by a Wage Board determination in 1942 which with a cost of living adjustment brought the total weekly wage to 35s. (£1 15s. 0d.). These wages were still deplorable but nevertheless marked the first victory for the Union since its formation in 1937.
Sugar milling companies were scattered throughout the Natal countryside, making organization of the mixed African and Indian workers exceedingly difficult for the Union based in Durban. Even tougher was the organization of the field workers, mostly Africans, who laboured under slave conditions imposed by the sugar barons. These workers were covered by the Masters and Servants Act as agricultural workers and were not included under any trade union legislation. The NSIEU was a registered union for Indian workers with a separate African section that worked in harmony with the registered branch. The Natal Sugar Field Workers Union covered the agricultural labourers.
Early accounts of organizing vividly portray the conditions of exploitation in this industry:
When the organisers first went to Illovo they found the sugar workers living in conditions that could only be described as barbarous'. The workers were living in the most primitive corrugated iron shanties. In one section they were living in sheds that had previously been used as stables for the company's mules. Toilet facilities consisted of pit latrines and one communal tap per 150 people, often situated a quarter mile from the workers' homes.
Wages for mill workers averaged £3 per month plus rations of mealie rice, mealie meal and salt; usually only sufficient to last two people a fortnight, although the family receiving these rations often consisted of from five to eight people. The working day was from nine to ten hours with no annual leave. During the 'of-season', that is, after the cane had been cut and the mills were being repaired and put in order for the next crushing season, workers regularly worked over the week-ends without overtime (Workers Unity, November 1961-January 1962).
In addition, child labour was prevalent and companies were notorious for planting spies in the Union and victimizing workers who dared to struggle for union representation. Even though the mills were covered by the Factories Act, employers in the rural areas disregarded the law, especially in terms of hours of work.
Again, Indian leaders such as George Ponnen, H. A. Naidoo, M. P. Naicker, R. R. Pillay and L. Ramsunder were instrumental in forming the Union back in 1937. They were assisted by P. M. Harry, Mike Diamond, P. T. Cooper and Wilson Cele, who was responsible for organizing the African section of the industry. Only total dedication led to these initial successes: meetings could not be held on company property and so workers gathered on river banks or along the seashore. Ponnen recalls, 'Many a time we risked our necks because the thugs hired by the employers waited for us with cane knives in various cane fields."' For many years, these organizers spent every weekend travelling up and down the Natal coast meeting the workers; trips were even made on weekday nights in emergency situations. In 1943, when Naidoo left Durban for Cape Town, he was replaced by veteran trade unionist Errol Shanley. Shanley was on the Executive of the CPSA District Committee, Secretary of the Durban T & LC branch from 1940-47, and later a member of the South African Congress of Democrats, in addition to holding executive positions in many unions during the 1930s and 1940s.
The African Mine Workers Strike of 1946
200,000 subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar 'fall of rock' and who, at deep levels, ranging 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners' phthisis and pneumonia.16
Occasionally ... one event seems to crystallise the contradictions and conflicts of an entire stage of social development and the reactions to it point the way to the future development of a particular social formation. Despite its apparent failure, the 1946 African Miners' strike was such a milestone in South Africa's social and political development.17
The 1946 African Mine Workers' Strike was a watershed in the struggle of the people against class exploitation and oppression. The largest strike in South African history (in terms of participants), and led by migrant workers, those who are at the base of the cheap labour system, signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another. Our account must begin by giving the background to the 1946 strike and conclude by discussing implications for future trade union struggles.
Although the CPSA had tried throughout the early 1930s to organize these most oppressed workers, the migrant labour system and state employer combined resistance to any union organization rendered these efforts ineffectual. At best, leaflets were issued calling on workers to form compound committees to voice complaints against an inhuman wage structure unchanged for thirty years and intolerable working conditions. Demands for a wage increase from 1s. 8d. per shift to 4s. for an eight-hour day were ignored by the mining companies through their Chamber of Mines. Police regularly arrested anyone trying to organize the 250,000 African miners during the 1930s, thereby adding to the difficulties. The SA Mine Workers Union (SAMWU), the registered body for White workers, could have assisted greatly were it not for the fact that these privileged workers regarded Africans as 'boys' or 'kaffirs' rather than fellow workers. Wage increases for Whites gave them 19s. per shift in 1933, and their strikes usually resulted from White overseers refusing to supervise additional African workers.
African migrants from the reserves received virtually no assistance from the African National Congress during the 1930s. The ANC was at that time still concentrating its energies on liberal strategies of reform and for that reason had failed to establish strong roots in the African proletariat. By the late 1930s, however, the ANC began to realize that its strength and its future depended on overcoming this alienation from the workers' struggle.
The mining companies argued that wages were sufficient because the reserve economy adequately supplemented the total subsistence of the migrant and his family. This self-serving assertion was exploded in the early 1940s. The Lansdowne Commission Report (discussed below) on the mining industry showed that the reserves suffered from declining productivity and impoverishment. Landlessness had become acute: for example, on the Ciskei Reserve, 30 per cent of the people owned no land, 60 per cent owned five cattle or less, and another 20 per cent owned nothing at all. Other reserves followed this pattern. The Fagan Commission of 1948 concluded that, 'Reserve production is but a myth.'
This rural poverty forced vast numbers of African males to become labour recruits in the mines. Between 1933 and 1939, an estimated 135,000 peasants became proletarians in the mining industry alone -representing an increase of 50 per cent of African mine labour. Another index of this incorporation of rural Africans into the dominant capitalist relations of production is reflected by the ratio of peasants to the total economically active African population over 15 years of age: in 1921, this ratio was 50 per cent and by 1946, only 17 per cent. The reserve economy by the late 1930s simply could not support the cheap labour system under capitalism. Yet, with total unconcern for the fate of its African workforce, the mining bosses continued to argue that wage increases for Africans would destroy the industry and create unrest among the White working class. The Smuts United Party government, the political front for the Chamber of Mines, continued to implement and refine the influx control. measures that ensured the sale of labour power in its migrant form.
In August 1941, the Transvaal ANC, encouraged by Gaur Redebe and Edwin Mofutsanyana, convened a conference to discuss the formation of a mine workers' union. Eighty delegates from forty-one organizations, including the CNETU, the CPSA and the SAIRR resolved to organize mine workers in the mines and also on the reserves before recruitment. At this meeting, the African Mine Workers Union (AMWU) was born out of a committee of 15 members, with J. B. Marks and James Majoro as President and General Secretary respectively. The CPSA played a leading role in this initial effort as it had made the organizing of mine workers a major priority at its 1940 Party Conference.
The Union, prevented by the mining companies from organizing on mine property, proceeded cautiously but with determination. Night meetings in mining compounds were convened by organizers who took jobs at the mines; leaflets were distributed to mobilize workers around basic economic demands. Uriah Maleka, later a SACTU activist in the 1950s, first became involved in trade union work through the influence of J. B. Marks and he was one of the many young organizers to work in the mines during these years. CNETU leaders from other unions also assisted the AMWU campaigns. A few days prior to the 1946 strike, John Motsabi (African Building Workers Union) recalls climbing chains and ropes to throw leaflets into the mine compounds in the middle of the night. He also tells the story of how women food vendors would be allowed into the compound area and would wrap food in political leaflets before handing them to the workers. Through such persistent and creative methods the Union gained strength and members. By 1944, the AMWU claimed to represent 25,000 workers, each paying Is. enrolment fee and a monthly subscription of 6d.
Among these members were approximately 2,000 African mine clerks who decided to join the Union after the Chamber of Mines ruled that clerks, like mine labourers, would be excluded from the statutory cost-of-living allowance of 1942. Majoro was a leading member of the Native Mine Clerks Association and his AMWU secretaryship enhanced contacts with potential members.
The strike wave of late 1942 discussed in the last section also indirectly influenced the development of the Union. In January 1943, the African Gas and Power Workers Union, representing men who supplied electricity to the mines, struck against Victoria Falls Power Company. The Company refused wage increases for fear of sparking off similar demands by African mine workers. In response to the imminent crisis, the Smuts Government appointed the Witwatersrand Mine Natives' Wage Commission under Justice Lansdowne to investigate wages and working conditions of African mine workers on the Rand.
The AMWU, under J. B. Marks's able leadership, presented evidence before the Commission documenting intimidation by mining company officials against union organizers and workers and in effect demanded an end to the cheap labour system. Wages in 1942 were 2s. per shift, whereas back in 1890, they had been 2s. 6d. The Union demanded regular wage increases; a statutory minimum wage and a Wage Board investigation; COLA payments; total abolition of the compound system, the racial division of the labour force and restrictions on the freedom of movement; and recognition of the AMWU.
The Lansdowne Commission reported in December 1943, and as mentioned previously, exposed the hold that the Chamber of Mines had on the Smuts government.18 The Chamber set an 'average daily maximum wage' which no company could exceed without penalty. In 1943 over three-quarters of the 308,374 African workers received less than this daily average. Out of these starvation wages, mine workers had to subtract costs for boots, mattresses and other bare subsistence items, totalling 15 per cent of their total cash earnings. The Commission also reported an increase in first-time recruits as compared with returning recruits, again due to the deterioration of the Reserves'. In 1943, 64 per cent of the re-recruits returned to the mines after only five months, in contrast to the '12 months of idleness' claimed by the Chamber. Most startling was evidence showing that even if a worker were permanently employed in the mines, and if his family in the reserve had access to land (remember, 40 per cent did not) and with a good year, the family would experience a shortfall between income and expenditure of £10 4s. 4d. for surface workers and £9 4s. 10d. for underground workers. In other words, assuming a stay in the reserves of only five months per year, 41.2 per cent of African workers earning 2s. per shift or less would have a shortfall over a two-year period greater than their annual cash wage.
Against these so-called 'perfectly adequate' wages as the Chamber of Mines put it, the Lansdowne Commission recommended wages and other benefits equalling an annual increase of £10 4s. 0d. for surface workers and £11 14s. 7d. for underground workers. This would amount to a £2.6 million increase in the wage bill for the mining capitalists, no great burden on the £43.6 million working profit of 1942. The Commission refused, however, to recommend the recognition of the AMWU, resorting to the old paternalistic argument that African miners '. . . have not yet reached the stage of development which would enable them safely and usefully to employ trade unionism as a means of promoting their advancement'.
The recommendations were rejected by the state and the mining capitalists, with the result that surface wages increased by only 4d. per shift and underground workers' wages by 5d. The costs of these small increments were furthermore borne by the tax-payers, not the companies. The AMWU Conference of 1944 brought together 700 delegates from every mine, 1,300 rank-and-file workers, the ANC President-General, Dr Xuma, and many African CNETU trade unionists to discuss the Lansdowne Commission Report. Even the Paramount Chief of Pondoland, V. Porto, telegrammed his support. The AMWU termed the recommendations 'hopelessly inadequate and unsatisfactory', demanded a Wage Board inquiry and called on the labour movement to protest victimization of AMWU members.
Chamber of Mines' policy was to get rid of anyone trying to organize African workers. Spies were planted in the Union and the government added to War Measures Acts (which already prevented Africans from striking) Proclamation 1425, prohibiting gatherings of more than twenty persons on mine property. This made the holding of meetings virtually impossible, and also meant a great reduction in the finances of the Union as dues could not be easily collected and new members could not be recruited.
In short, the crisis was intensifying rapidly as the war came to an end. Food shortages in South Africa in 1945 made matters worse as compound rations were reduced and canned beef substituted for fresh meat. With their families starving on the reserves, a group of miners protested outside the compound kitchen at the Modderfontein East Mine in March 1946; police attacked them, resulting in the death of one worker and forty were injured. Food protests were common at other mines as well.
The April 1946 AMWU Conference of 2,000 delegates drew up a new set of demands: a minimum wage of 10s. per day; two weeks paid annual leave; a £100 gratuity after fifteen years' service; payment of repatriation fares; and the repeal of War Measure 1425. The demands were ignored and one-day protests occurred. The CNETU Annual Conference in July resolved to give support should there be an AMWU strike, and Prime Minister Smuts decided to 'let things develop'. On 4 August 1946, at a public meeting held at Newtown Market Square, Johannesburg, over 1,000 delegates resolved to take strike action on 12 August. The Chamber prepared for the strike by discussing emergency procedures with White workers rather than negotiating with African workers.
Between 12 and 17 August, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 African mine workers shut down totally or partially twenty-one mines. Reports vary considerably on the actual mines affected, but monthly production fell to its lowest level since 1937. Smuts declared himself '.not unduly concerned' because the strike was the result of agitators against whom appropriate action' was being taken. 1,600 police were placed on special duty and compounds were sealed off under armed guard.
On 13 August, the CNETU, with support from the ANC and the Transvaal and Natal branches of the Indian Passive Resistance Council, agreed to call a general strike within forty-eight hours. Police broke up the meeting, arrested J. B. Marks and proceeded to raid the Union office.19 The same day witnessed the shooting of six strikers by police at the Sub Nigel mine, while six more were trampled to death in the panic. The following day workers at the same mine staged an underground sitdown strike and were driven up 'stope by stope, level by level' to the surface by baton-wielding police who stampeded the workers back into the compounds. Another large group of strikers marched towards the Chief Native Commissioner's Office to recover their passes in order to return to the reserves. They were surrounded and attacked by the police and then forced to return to the compounds.
The conservative Native Representative Council refused to function in protest against police violence. A CNETU mass rally in Johannesburg was banned, and James Phillips (Chairman of the Strike Committee) and Gana Makabeni were given five minutes in which to disperse a crowd of 600 supporters. By the time the strike had ended (17 August), Phillips and 87 other trade unionists had been arrested. At least 12 Africans had been killed and over 1,200 injured, yet the Chamber of Mines gave the strike only six lines in its 1946 Annual Report and the government refused to appoint a commission of inquiry. The arrested were tried under the Riotous Assemblies Act and Native Labour Regulations Acts; most were given suspended sentences of nine months. In 1946, also, the entire Executive of the CPSA was charged with sedition, but the case was quashed in 1948 for lack of evidence. The newly elected Nationalist Party would soon resort to legislation instead of the courts to silence its opponents.
The strike was without doubt defeated by the combined force of the State and the employers. In 1949, another small increase of 3d. per shift was conceded, still leaving wages lower than the Lansdowne Commission had recommended. For the AMWU, the next few years brought the collapse of the Union as organizing workers was made virtually impossible by the companies and the state. This was parallelled by the decline of African trade unionism on the Rand in the second half of the decade. By 1949, an estimated 66 African unions had become defunct and the CNETU was weakened accordingly.
The overall effect of the strike, however, went far beyond the failure of the. Union to obtain the original demands. State-endorsed violence indicated the extent to which the miners' actions had shaken the system. When one realizes that these were migrant workers, the immensity of this achievement is clear. These workers held out for a week before they were overwhelmed by the superior force of a government which used machine guns and batons to drive the workers back to work.
Caught between different fractions of the bourgeoisie (the mining companies demanding a continuation of the migrant labour system and the industrial capitalists wanting a stabilized urban proletariat), the Smuts Government tried to satisfy both sections but ended up pleasing neither. This was one of the factors that led to the pro-Apartheid Nationalist Party's ascension to power in 1948 through a coalition of White Afrikaner workers, agricultural capital and the urban petty bourgeoisie.
The strike also forged a new alliance in progressive circles with greater emphasis on mass mobilization and mass action. Previous tensions between the CPSA and the ANC were largely overcome with the emergence in the latter of a Youth League committed to a more radical theory and practice. The effect was crucial: for the first time in many years African trade unionists came in touch with ANC leaders. With the repression against and decline of African trade unions following the strike, many African trade unionists moved into key positions in the ANC. Also, following the lead set by Moses Kotane and others, CPSA members became more prominent in the ANC leadership than had been the case in the early 1930s. Finally, the post-strike period saw new relationships established between the different organizations of nationally oppressed groups. The maturity of this inter-racial solidarity would be christened with the formation of the Congress Alliance in 1955.
These significant shifts were inevitably oriented towards the African working class. Mass action demanded by the ANC Youth League had to be rooted in the urban proletariat to reflect the structural changes that had characterized the political economy. It was, indeed, the African trade union movement, with its unmistakable class consciousness, that radicalized the ANC and put it at the centre of the nonracial liberation movement that has led the struggle since the early 1950s. Just as the 1922 White mine workers strike had precipitated a reactionary alliance between White capital and White labour, the 1946 strike created the conditions for a progressive alliance between all those segments of South African society that suffer both class exploitation and national oppression. For these reasons, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the African Mine Workers' Strike radically altered the course of South African history.
The Suppression of Communism Act
What the Nationalists had failed to do by means of slander, intrigue and subversion, they accomplished by an act of parliament. Although the explicit aim of the Suppression of Communism Act (SC Act) was the banning of the Communist Party of South Africa, the scope and implementation of the Act reveals the unmistakable goal of attacking the progressive trade union movement which was determined to create non-racial working class unity.
The SC Act was only one of a whole barrage of draconian legislation enacted by the Nationalists in 1949-50. The Unemployment Insurance Act (1949) excluded the majority of Africans from benefits; the Railways and Harbours Amendment Act (1949) enforced racial segregation on the trains; the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Act (1950) outlawed sexual relations in any manner between persons of different 'racial' groups; and the Group Areas Act (1950) imposed compulsory residential segregation on Whites, Coloureds, Malays, Asians and Africans. Amidst the suffering and repression resulting from these and subsequent Acts, the solidarity of all oppressed national groupings was also enhanced as an unintended consequence.
The SC Act, and as amended, had little to do with communism per se. A loosely-defined 'communism' in the Act allowed the government to ban organizations and individuals deemed to be furthering the aims of communism. In effect, one was (and still is) a 'Communist' if the government said so, and through a 1951 Amendment all ex-Communists were made subject to the Act, i.e. 'once a Communist, always a Communist'. Individuals so designated could be forced to resign from holding public office, from belonging to specified organizations, from attending gatherings, or from leaving defined areas. In 1966 the Act was extended to cover Namibia (South West Africa), and in 1976 the terms of the Act became a part of the Internal Security Amendment Act.
Let us now discover what exactly constitutes 'communism' in South Africa. According to the 1950 Act:
'Communism' means the doctrine of Marxian socialism as expounded by Lenin and Trotsky, the Third Communist International (the Comintern) or the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) or any related form of that doctrine expounded or advocated in the Union for the promotion of the fundamental principles of that doctrine and includes, in particular, any doctrines or scheme
which aims at the establishment of a despotic system of government based on the dictatorship of the proletariat under which one political organization only is recognized and all other political organizations are suppressed or eliminated; or
which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by means which include the promotion of disturbance or disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat; or
which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union in accordance with the directions or under the guidance of or in co-operation with any foreign government or any foreign or international institution whose purpose or one of whose purposes (professed or otherwise) is to promote the establishment within the Union of any political, industrial, social or economic system identical with or similar to any system in operation in any country which has adopted a system of government such as is described in paragraph (a); or
which aims at the encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and the Non-European races of the Union the consequences of which are calculated to further the achievement of any object referred to in paragraph (a) or (b).20
Those 'listed' as Communists had virtually no recourse to the courts, especially with the passage of amendments designed to cover 'loopholes' in the principal Acts. Organizations declared unlawful had to cease all their activities and property would be liquidated. Other organizations suspected of furthering the aims of communism as defined could be investigated - i.e. their premises could be searched, members interrogated and documents seized.
Attendance at gatherings was increasingly circumscribed for individuals falling under the application of the Act. An Appellate Court decided that a person must be notified in advance and given the right to show cause why such an order should not be issued, but this was overruled by the Amendment of 1954 which abolished the necessity of advance warning. The 1954 changes also prohibited the playing of recorded messages of banned persons at meetings. It also specified that a 'listed' or convicted person was prohibited from standing for election to Parliament or Provincial Councils.
The latter Amendment represented an emergency action made necessary by banned trade unionist Ray Alexander's decision to run for the elected position of Native Representative in 1954. Sam Kahn and Brian Bunting, both CPSA members, had been forced to vacate this position and despite a slander campaign against Alexander, she was elected by a large majority. She was physically prevented from taking her seat in Parliament by police who then issued notice to her prohibiting her candidacy.
The Minister of Justice was empowered to further extend prohibition on gatherings by preventing any or all gatherings in given locations for specified periods of time. In 1962, during the height of repression, the Johannesburg City Hall steps and the Grand Parade in Cape Town were so designated. In effect, many banned persons were prevented from attending social gatherings, defined in such a way as to include bioscopes (cinemas), sporting events and even funerals. Further amendments in subsequent years made it an offence to communicate with a 'listed' or banned person, and such persons were further prevented from practising as advocates, attorneys or notaries, or even from assisting other professionals in these fields.
Although the scope of the SC Act allowed the government to victimize anyone, the application of the Act in the early 1950s was primarily directed against progressive trade unionists. The original draft of the Bill had in fact included provisions for the banning of trade unions, but opposition from registered unions led the government to exempt all unions covered by the IC Act. In other words, African trade unions and all progressive unionists holding leadership positions in registered unions were outside the scope of these exemptions. With little or no recourse to the courts, these trade unionists bore the brunt of the legislation between 1951 and 1954, as the government attempted to convert the South African trade union movement into a docile preserve of 'Christian-Nationalist' ideology and control.
The first union victims of the SC Act were J. B. Marks (President, AMWU), Issy Wolfson (Tailoring) and Solly Sachs (Garment); the latter two, as Executive members of the T & LC, were removed from their elected positions. The T & LC reluctantly called a conference of registered trade unions to discuss the effects of the Act on the trade union movement. African leaders were prevented from attending the discussions, and the T & LC as an organization in the final analysis did nothing to oppose these fascist measures. Progressive unions -garment, food and canning and laundry - staged short protest strikes, but effective action was obviously limited with the lack of T & LC support.
Solly Sachs, who had thwarted efforts by the Afrikaner nationalists to take control of the union, was unable to resist this legislative attack. Ordered to resign from his position in the Garment Workers Union on 8 May 1952, Sachs defied the legislation and spoke to a large GWU protest meeting whereupon he and many workers were arrested after a baton charge by the police. A six month sentence was suspended and Sachs left South Africa a dejected man. His valiant contribution to the workers' struggle was recognized by the rank-and-file however, as they elected his understudy Johanna Cornelius by a 4-to-1 margin over the Nationalist opposition. James Phillips, Chairman of the Coloured Branch of the GWU and CNETU Executive member was also banned in June 1953.
Similar victimization against Piet Huyser, National Organizer of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers of South Africa, led Alex Hepple to speak for all such banned persons:
The convenient Suppression of Communism Act has provided the Government with the means to clear the path for the disrupters. In the process the Union suffers. It loses [men and women] with a fine record of service. [Their] achievements on behalf of [their] fellow workers are contemptuously ignored ... the [Act] will hold the workers in chains. Without their trusted and experienced leaders and cowed by the fear of persecution and tyranny, workers of all races will be completely at the mercy of those who wish to exploit them.' 21
Hepple goes on to point out that contrary to the government propaganda regarding the 'threat' these banned persons represented, each one of them had been democratically elected by rank-and-file workers. Union leaders in and of themselves could not possibly threaten the society as they, unlike the ruling class, are directly responsible to the masses and effective only if supported by that proletarian base.
Even the Minister of Labour admitted that the banned leaders 'were probably among the most competent trade union organizers in the country', and had done 'a great deal for their members', but he added that the purpose of the legislation was to preclude those persons from controlling the unions.22 The Afrikaner newspaper, Die Bouwerker, was even more explicit when it declared that trade unionists faced with banning orders could absolve themselves by stating that 'they are opposed to the full legal recognition of trade unions for Natives'."
By the end of 1955,fifty-six trade unionists had been driven out of their positions under the SC Act. These included twenty-eight Whites, seventeen Africans, seven Coloureds, and four Asians. From registered unions, nine of the twenty-six Executive members of the T & LC had been among this group. Through decades of struggle many of these persons had laid the basis for the formation of SACTU as the first nonracial trade union coordinating body, yet they were prevented, except for underground activity, from openly contributing after 1955.
Among these banned leaders, certain persons deserve special mention for the role they played in unions that became the strength of SACTU and/or their individual behind-the-scenes contribution to SACTU strategy and tactics.
Ray Alexander (see Chapter 9).
H. T. (Harry) Gwala began trade union organizing work amongst Africans in the distributive trade, chemical building and brick and tile industries in the mid- 1940s. Throughout the years, whenever he was not banned, he led the SACTU Local Committee in the Pietermaritzburg area and was also very active in the ANC. Gwala served eight years on Robben Island and after his release took up trade union work again. In 1977, he was re-arrested and imprisoned for life and remains one of the most respected militants in South African trade union history.
Becky Lan replaced Ray Alexander as General Secretary of the Food and Canning Workers Union, when the latter was banned in 1953. Although not 'listed' as a Communist under the Act, Lan received a two-year ban on attending gatherings in 1954. She was banned from all trade union activity in 1956, making her the sixth FCWU leader to be removed from office since 1950.
J. B. Marks was President of the AMWU and Chairman of the CNETU. Of the many African leaders, Marks was perhaps the most influential in bringing younger persons into the trade union and political struggle. Active in the CPSA and the ANC, Marks acted as adviser to SACTU following 1955, and frequently contributed analysis and editorial comment in Workers Unity, the SACTU
A. P. Mati was one of the veteran leaders in Port Elizabeth. He served as organizer of the Laundry Workers Union, the African Commercial and Distributive Workers Union, Secretary of the SA Railway and Harbour WU. At the time of his banning in October, 1953, he was ex-Chairman of the ANC in Port Elizabeth. Mati provided political and trade union training for the militant corps of ANC-SACTU comrades who led the Congress campaigns in the 1950s.
John Motsabi joined the union movement in 1942, as a member of the Furniture, Bedding and Mattress WU. He soon became actively involved in the Building and Allied WU in the mid-1940s until his banning orders were issued in 1953. Once an Executive member of the CNETU, Motsabi worked closely with Elias Motsoaledi, Isaac Moumakoe and George Maeka, also CNETU Executive members banned in the early 1950s. As Transvaal ANC Provincial Secretary, Motsabi often brought the workers' struggles into the national liberation movement and continued to assist SACTU following his banning.
Mike Muller served as General Secretary of the Textile Workers Industrial Union from 1950 until banned in 1953. He had previously held the same position in the Pretoria CNETU. From an Afrikaner background, Mike rejected White supremacy and assisted in organizing African workers on both trade union and political fronts. He acted as adviser to SACTU following 1955, but later deserted the movement.
George Ponnen was the first Natal trade unionist to be banned under the Act. Following his organizing work in the 1930s, Ponnen became secretary of unions in rope and mat, tea, coffee and chicory, twine and bag, brewing and mineral water industries. He was also full-time honorary secretary to the Tobacco WU and honorary adviser to Natal unions in tin, food and canning, broom and brush, hospital, railways and harbours, chemical, distributive and municipal industries and undertakings. On the political front, Ponnen and his militant wife, Vera, defied the custom of South African society and married across 'racial' lines. Both were actively involved in SACTU campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing many younger persons into the movement and providing their apartment in Durban for secret SACTU meetings.
Arnold Selby came from a White working-class background. He worked in many industries, including mining, until the early 1940s, when he joined the CPSA and subsequently devoted his energies to trade union organizing. Between 1945 and 1950, Selby was National Organizer for the Sweet, Distributive and Textile workers. An outspoken critic of Apartheid, Selby fled South Africa shortly after the State of Emergency in 1960 and continued to assist SACTU in international solidarity work.
Dan Tloome became active in trade union work in the 1930s. A CPSA member, he served as Vice-President and later as Secretary of the CNETU until he was banned in September 1953. In 1949, Tloome was elected to the ANC National Executive and was very much involved in the planning of the Defiance Campaign of 1952. Following his banning, Tloome became printer and publisher of Liberation, a theoretical journal that guided Congress Alliance, including trade union, policy in the mid-1950s. Tloome has continued to assist in SACTU work throughout the years.
Gladstone Tshume was another of the veterans of the Port Elizabeth area as organizer of the African Textile workers. Bettie du Toit has said of Tshume that he'. . . always considered the workers to be the vanguard of the democratic movement and showed towards them a spirit of humility'.24 Banned in October 1953, Tshume then used his lay preacher position to benefit as his church became the venue for numerous political speeches and organizing efforts. He died of a heart attack in 1957, and was given an ANC funeral. He remained a legend to the Port Elizabeth comrades due to his consistent challenging of the Special Branch police, whom he referred to as 'hired spies' and 'rapists of human thought'.
Bettie du Toit was an Afrikaner trade unionist who became a CPSA member and progressive NEC member of the T & LC. Du Toit was involved in textile, food and canning and laundry unions, and was one of the few Whites to participate as a volunteer in the Defiance Campaign in 1952. She was banned in 1952, and in exile has recently written Ukubamba Amadolo: Workers' Struggles in the South African Textile Industry (1978).
Eli Weinberg came to South Africa in the late 1920s as a political exile from Latvia. In Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, Weinberg organized and represented garment and sweet workers. From 1943 until his banning ten years later, Weinberg served as General Secretary of the National Union of Commercial Travellers; he also sat on the T & LC Executive during this time. Following his removal from trade union office, he played an invaluable role as a political photographer; his photos provide a visual record of the workers' and people's struggle against Apartheid and class exploitation. Weinberg also contributed his trade union experience to SACTU work in the 1950s and 1960s.
The banning of these and many other principled trade union leaders between 1951 and 1954 greatly facilitated the move to the right within the Trades and Labour Council leadership, the final episode that preceded the formation of SACTU.
The Betrayal of Principle
The registered trade union movement became a microcosm of the two contending political currents that characterized South African life between 1947 and 1954. The gap between White labour aristocrats and the African proletariat widened during these eight years, and the progressive T & LC leaders that had bridged this gap since 1930 were by 1954 forced to concede the T & LC to the right-wing. The fact that it took that many years for the White supremacists to assert their control is itself testimony to the role this progressive minority played within the T & LC and out of proportion to the rank-and-file base among registered workers. On the other hand, some would suggest that it was unrealistic to believe that the T & LC could be the united home for all workers, and that African trade unionists were anxious to create a new, non-racial coordinating body long before SACTU emerged.
Early signs of a T & LC shift from its long-standing principle of trade union unity and call for full recognition of African trade unions can be traced to September 1945. An NEC resolution calling for greater participation for African unions on Industrial Councils was opposed by White union leaders in mining, iron and steel and certain sections of the transport industry. In 1946 the NEC itself, and with no prior consultation with its affiliates, expressed its hostility and distance from African workers when it cabled the World Federation of Trade Unions to report on the Mine Workers' strike. The cable read:
Appears natives were misled by irresponsible people. Police methods controlling strike drastic but warranted. Such action was necessary to maintain law and order and prevent chaos
Although affiliates subsequently forced a retraction, this attitude of the T & LC leadership was a signal of things to come.
Until the Nationalists came to power in 1948, the T & LC principles withstood growing internal opposition from pro-Nationalist unions. At the 1947 T & LC Annual Conference, L. J. van den Berg (Secretary, Iron and Steel Trades Association) and George McCormick (Secretary, Engine Drivers and Firemen's Union) were defeated in their attempt to amend the Constitution in order to bar affiliation of African unions by a vote of 115 to 30. This prompted the first 'break-away' as six Pretoria unions left the T & LC and formed the Coordinating Council of South African Trade Unions (CCSATU) in 1948. The new body denied affiliation to any union allowing full rights of membership to African, Coloured or Indian workers. By 1954 the CCSATU represented 13,000 workers in 7 affiliated unions. Thus, on the eve of the Nationalists' rise to power, Afrikaner nationalism had scored its first, although numerically limited, success against a united trade union movement.
Following the election, the imminence of new Apartheid trade union legislation (see Chapter 4) led the T & LC Executive to embark on a campaign of self-imposed betrayals that would culminate in the dissolution of the T & LC six years later. Contrary to T & LC resolutions, President Calder opened the September 1948 CNETU conference by proposing parallelism between African and registered unions. Each segment, rather than being united in one body, would have its own coordinating body with the paternalistic proviso that European trade unions'. . . will assist you in the improvement of your conditions and see to it that you get a square deal'. J. B. Marks, President of the CNETU, was quick to respond:
We emphatically say that the right to organize into trade unions is the birthright of all workers, irrespective of their race or colour ... It is the desire of the Council to see one Powerful coordinating body that will embrace all workers ... and it is to this end that our Council is working.25
One year later, the T & LC Executive formed a Sub-Committee to 1 examine its relations with African trade unions'. In order to assess the views of affiliated unions, the 'Unity Committee' (as it was erroneously called) sent out a questionnaire to registered and African unions: only three of thirty-seven African unions bothered to respond, the rest expressing their contempt of parallelism through silence. At the April 1950 T & LC Conference, a card vote yielded a vote of 61,716 to 55,580 in favour of a resolution calling for a separate consultative committee for African trade unions under T & LC guidance. Yet, hypocritically, delegates voted unanimously in favour of inclusion of African unions under the IC Act.
The T & LC 'Unity Committee' was not really concerned with African trade unions at an. Rather, the emphasis focussed on the declining T & LC membership and what could be done to reverse that trend. From a base of 111 unions representing 184,000 workers in 1947, the numbers were reduced to 52 unions representing 82,600 by 1952. In 1949 and 1950 alone, at least twenty unions representing 25,884 workers left the fold. Led by the boilermakers, ironmoulders, woodworkers and electricians, many unions in this second massive defection formed yet another coordinating body - the S.A. Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) in 1951. SAFTU claimed sixteen unions and 80,000 workers in that year. Most of these unions disaffiliated because of the T & LC's 'African policy' and also because of their fear of being implicated with progressive trade unionists being purged under the SC Act. At the T & LC-sponsored conference of registered unions called to discuss the SC Act, fifty delegates from the CCSATU walked out in protest when a motion calling for support of the Nationalists was defeated; another group followed soon after when cooperation with the government was similarly rejected.
Progressives on the 'Unity Committee' could no longer participate in a body that concerned itself only with unity of registered unions and pandered to White prejudice. In September 1950 the NEC decided that it would support the call for exclusion of African trade unions at the 1951 conference. Seven NEC members voted against the motion, including Bettie du Toit and Eli Weinberg. Du Toit charged the T & LC with introducing Apartheid in the trade union movement at a time when the entire international community was condemning it. Weinberg resigned from the 'Unity Committee' in January 1951, stating:
It is obvious to me that if 1 remain a member of the Unity Committee, 1 shall be accepting full responsibility for the proposals and recommendations which are contrary to my own judgment and which, in my opinion, strike at the very roots of trade union unity.26
Nor were African leaders in the CNETU taken in by the T & LC's lack of principles. In response to the proposal for a parallel body, the CNETU rightly pointed out that dividing the T & LC on racial lines is a strange way of uniting it'. With political foresight, the CNETU instead for the creation of a new trade union centre that would be open to registered and unregistered unions. An amendment by Jacob Nyaose (African Bakers and Confectioners Union) calling for exclusion of White workers in such a body was soundly defeated, showing once again the advanced class consciousness of the African proletariat. Unity had also become a necessity as well as an ideal as the Urban Areas Act of 1950 was being used to remove African union offices from the Transvaal cities.
Thus, by 1954, the registered trade union movement had disintegrated into five coordinating bodies (the SAT & LC, SAFTU, CCSATU, the Western Province Federation of Trade Unions, and the Federal Consultative Committee of Railway Unions). The CNETU had maintained its strength at 22 unions representing approximately 10,000 workers.
1954 was a year of conferences that changed the course of South African trade union history. The CNETU held its annual conference in April, with the two-fold task of fighting the Native Labour Act (1953) and the retrograde actions of the T & LC. On the latter question, George Maeka (President, CNETU) outlined the Council's position:
It is high time that our Council should take the initiative to bring about a joint struggle by all unions who stand by the principle of workers' unity ... We must tell the T & LC and other trade unions quite bluntly that (creating a body for registered unions only) is an illusion. Racialism is poison to the trade union movement. It is the very weapon that the government is using to destroy the unions. You agree to exclude Africans in order to get the racialists and nationalists to come to your conference.27
The conference referred to in Maeka's statement was that called by the T & LC 'Unity Committee' for early May in which all registered unions and coordinating bodies would search for a common base (of White supremacy) in order to re-unite the many coordinating bodies in existence. Only the CNETU was refused an invitation to these May meetings in Cape Town. At this conference, progressives were defeated in their attempt to pass resolutions against Nationalist legislation and, what is more despicable, they were prevented from bringing Africans into the conference deliberations. The FCWU had refused to attend because the African FCWU had not been extended an invitation.
At another CNETU meeting in August, the Council again emphatically rejected parallelism and instead called for a mass campaign to organize the unorganized. 'Workers' Councils of were to be established throughout South Africa to realize this goal. As had been said throughout the decades of struggle, White workers would agree to unity only in the face of well-organized and strong African unions.
The Second T & LC 'Unity Conference' was held in Durban on 5 October 1954 where it was agreed to form the SA Trade Union Council (SATUC) with a colour-bar Constitution that would exclude African trade unions from affiliation. Speaker after speaker claimed that it was necessary to forsake principles in the short run for the sake of White workers' unity. Ruling out of order an amendment by the National Union of Distributive Workers that would have allowed African union affiliation, the Conference voted 184,814 to 31,977 to form the SATUC. Of the 19 unions voting against the motion, 14 issued the following statement after the vote:
We deeply regret the decision to exclude African unions from the proposed Trade Union Council.... The interests of the African workers are in the long run no different from the interests of the Coloured, European and Indian workers. It is to the advantage of the employers and their Government to divide the workers. Division is a policy directed by the bosses and not the workers' interests.... We the undersigned delegates are determined to carry on a struggle against the policy of racial discrimination and work for the achievement of a single trade union organization embracing all sections of the working class.28
The fourteen unions were as follows: FCWU and African FCWU; TWIU and African TWIU; the Food, Canning and Allied WU; Chemical WU and African C"; Twine and Bag WU; SA Canvas and Rope WU (Cape Town); NUDW; Jewellers and Goldsmiths (Jhb); and the National Baking Industrial Union. All but the last three became SACTU affiliates after 1955.
Not only were African trade unions excluded from the new TUC, but the two African representatives of T & LC affiliated unions in attendance at the October conference were prevented from addressing the delegates. B. J. Caddy, Chairman, asked any African delegates to leave the hall, but then added, 'I don't think there will be any objection to them taking seats at the back of the hall and remaining as observers.' Such was the degree of racist contempt that the White aristocracy of labour held for the exploited African workers.
Among the progressives, many of whom had fought for decades for principled working class unity in the T & LC, the responses ranged as follows:
Nancy Dick (Banned Secretary, TWIU, Cape Town)
Those who voted for these measures have done so with their eyes open. Their resolution, were it not so tragic, would be laughable Whilst accepting that unity of all workers is the true principle of trade unionism, they did not have the guts to stand by this principle. Having seen the light, they prefer the dark.
Arnold Selby (Banned TWIU leader)
It is a cowardly capitulation to the Nationalists who are out to break the trade union movement ... Posterity will judge those who have betrayed this principle (of unity).
Joey Fourie (Banned Secretary, Hairdresser Employees Union, Cape Town)
To me the formation of the new TUC is one of the most colossal sellouts of the working class in this country. The remarkable part of it is that our trade union leaders have not learned that appeasement of fascism and fascists has never yet paid dividends.
Eli Weinberg (Banned NUCT leader; ex-T & LC Executive)
The dissolution of the T & LC is an achievement of the reactionary section who have endeavoured during the past few years to appease the Malanite race theorists. It was only possible through government aid in removing many of the devoted and experienced leaders. New brave determined leaders are arising in the trade union movement. In the long run the Nationalists and their lackeys, the splitters, will be defeated.
Ray Alexander (Banned Secretary, FCWU)
There is obviously a strong section of organized workers which has not succumbed to the pressure of the Government and the racialists. To this section 1 say: 'Do not be afraid, have courage, the future lies with you. Go forward.'
African trade unions leaders in the CNETU also condemned the dissolution but placed greater emphasis on the future:
Isaac Moumakoe (Banned Secretary, African Milling WU; Vice-president, CNETU).
It is a step towards the transformation of the present trade unions into government-controlled bodies under police supervision. It is urgent that workers establish a trade union movement reaffirming the basic trade union principle which fundamentally conflicts with Apartheid
John Motsabi (Ex-Executive Member, CNETU)
Parallelism is basically equivalent to apartheid ... It is imperative that the Non-European Trade Unions come together with the democratic progressive White trade unions to form a militant workers' federation, free from the opportunism which has hitherto crippled the struggle.29
The banning of the T & LC progressives under the SC Act had eliminated the largest obstacle to introducing the colour bar within the registered coordinating bodies. But for the reactionaries this victory only hastened the advancement of workers' unity. In a word, the dissolution of the T & LC created the last of the necessary conditions for the emergence of the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
NOTES
. Many books have been written detailing early South African trade unionism, although most focus undue attention on White unions and workers - e.g. B. Weinbren and I. Walker, 2,000 Casualties, Natal Witness, 1961. More comprehensive treatments can be found in E. Roux, Time Longer than Rope, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1964, and E. S. Sachs, The Anatomy of Apartheid, Collet's (Publishers) Ltd, London, 1965. The one book that incorporates trade union and political history and is essential reading is H. J. and R. E. Simons (Ray Alexander), Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969.
. Quoted in South African Labour Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 6 (September-October 1974), p. 21. The following discussion on the ICU draws heavily from this issue of SALB and Sheridan W. Johns III, 'Trade Union, Political Pressure Group or Mass Movement? The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa', Protest and Power in Black Africa, Ed., R. I. Rotberg and A. A. Mazrui, Oxford University Press, New York, 1970. An autobiographical account of the ICU is provided by Clements Kadalie in his My Life and the ICU, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, London, 1970.
. Kadalie assisted the Pact Government to come to power in 1924 by working against the re-election of the Smuts United Party. When the new Government quickly put into effect the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924, which excluded African workers from the definition of 'employees' under the Act, Kadalie realized that he had been duped by the Hertzog Government. His support for the Labour Party component of the Pact Government, with its slogan 'Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa' reflects Kadalie's political confusion.
. This information draws heavily on Dan O'Meara, 'Analysing Afrikaner Nationalism: The "Christian-National" Assault on White Trade Unionism in South Africa, 1934-1948', African Affairs, vol. 77, no. 306 (January 1978) and O'Meara, 'The African Mine Workers' Strike and the Political Economy of South Africa', Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. XIII, no. 2 (July 1975).
. The 'Native Republic' thesis refers to the change in the CPSA political programme for South Africa, wherein the goal was shifted from that of an immediate transformation to socialism led by the White working class to the creation of a democratic, independent Native Republic led by the African majority. In this context, the struggle was to be directed against the imperialism of the Boers and the British.
. quoted in A. Hepple, Trade Unions in Travail, Unity Publications (Pty.) Ltd, Johannesburg, 1954.
. A Hepple in South Africa: A Political and Economic History, Pall Mall Press, London,1966.
. A detailed analysis of the 1942 strike wave is found in M. Stein, 'Black Trade Unionism During the Second World War', unpublished article. Warwick University.
. Statement by Sol Plaatje, first General-Secretary of the ANC, 1914.
. For example, revenues from the gold mining companies paid for approximately 50 per cent of raw materials imported for South African industry. Hence, the Chamber of Mines argued that the migrant, cheap labour system was essential for the maintenance of economic stability and growth.
. Eli Weinberg an adviser to the AMWU, says that the 'nerve centre' of the Union was in a secret location during the strike. Interview, Eli Weinberg.
. Laws affecting Race Relations in South Africa, 1948-1976, compiled by M.. Horrell, SAIRR, Natal Witness, Pietermaritzburg, 1978.
. Betty du Toit, Ukubamba Amadolo: Workers' Struggles in the South African Textile Industry, Onyx Press, London, 1978, p. 133.
. Both quotations are from the Guardian (Cape Town), 9 September 1948.
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