Originally published as a Congress Militant booklet in 1990.
by David Hemson
David Hemson was a leading organiser of black workers in Natal in the early 1970s, involved in the formation of the trade unions after the Durban strikes. He was banned in March 1974 and went into exile in 1976.
He spent his years in exile In Zimbabwe and England, helping to build the workers’ movement in these countries, and to build direct-links with the workers’ organisations in South Africa. In exile he joined Sactu and the ANC.
In 1979, together with Paula Ensor, Martin Legassick and Robert Petersen, David was unconstitutionally suspended from the ANC and in 1985 expelled by the ANC leaders for putting forward Marxist ideas in the ANC and Sactu. These comrades have consistently demanded their reinstatement, to help in building a mass ANC under the control of the working class to achieve majority rule and socialism.
In 1985 David was among eight comrades detained by the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe for helping to build democratic unions free of state control and to advance the struggle for socialism.
In this pamphlet we publish an account given by David in 1988 of the 1973 Natal strike wave, the building of the trade unions at that time, and his own experiences in this.
Things really changed in Durban in 1973. The revolution really began then, as tens of thousands of workers poured out from the factories onto the streets on strike demanding double or treble their existing wages. I can remember in January and February it was pure joy to be alive and to be young!
Workers would grab sticks and bang on the factory gates shouting “Out! Out! Out!” There were marches up and down in Mobeni and even in the centre of Durban. Construction workers marched through the town and Coronation Brick workers, who started the whole upsurge, were marching. Everywhere there was movement.
Dockworkers then were transported around in open trucks rather than buses. This became a factor against the bosses because from the back of the trucks they would see workers on strike and greet them. As they were driven further, they would shout the news of the strike to other workers across the street and so on. Eventually workers were coming out everywhere.
It is significant that the dockworkers played this role. They had a long tradition of militant struggle. Also it was they who anticipated the new period of mass struggle which started with the 1973 strike wave when they went out on strike in Durban in 1969. This strike was brutally repressed. The police rounded up the workers with machine guns. The 2,000 dockers were all dismissed, and physically escorted by police onto trains and sent to the rural areas. But the dockworkers never forgot that strike. Years later they were demanding that workers who were fired then should be re-hired.
This strike in 1969 had an enormous effect on me. I remember having arguments with some of the left-liberal types at the University of Natal, who were agonising about the need for “new ways of thinking” about “change in the country”, and so on. I said that the strike showed the workers were prepared to move, and if only the working class could be organised you would see an end to the monstrous granite-like system of apartheid.
Even though this strike was a defeat, it showed that the workers were prepared to struggle. In the late 1960s I used to organise a lot of the Durban student protests, but I came to feel it was a complete waste of time. If only it was possible get in touch with this massive power of the African working class and link up with that, then we would see that all this joke protest would be in the past and SA would be completely transformed. This line of thinking led myself and other white students to became involved in organising Wages’ Commissions to link up with African workers.
The Wages’ Commissions were launched in 1971. Soon newspapers were being produced with names like Abasebenzi, lsisebenzi, though not Umsebenzi because that was the paper of the Communist Party of the 1920s and there was great fear of acting illegally. Some of the material in these papers was very confused, particularly in relation to the history of the unions. But many of the interviews with workers were marvellous.
I remember going with Halton Cheadle – then a fellow-organiser, now a lawyer – to discuss with abattoir workers in Durban at this time. As white students we had had sharp rebuffs from the black-consciousness-oriented black students, so when we approached the black workers we thought we might get some of the same treatment. But the atmosphere was entirely different. We were immediately welcomed. The workers grabbed us with their very strong hands and said “Come and sit down here, pass the beer pot around, and write this down.” And they started listing their grievances. “When we cut our hand, when we lose a finger, when we are working in the abattoir, which happens quite frequently, the knives are very sharp, they say we get no compensation. But you cut through the animal’s skin just once and you’re immediately fired.” That was the workers’ attitude.
When it was written-up, we took down something like 5,000 copies of that issue of Isisebenzi to the abattoir. It swept through like wildfire! The 5,000 were distributed literally within eight minutes! Even African policemen were queueing up for it and I said, “No let me give it to someone else”, but they pleaded, “Please can I have one”!
It only needed certain additional factors to get the whole movement on the go. In 1972 there was another dock strike. Many of those who took part in it were those who had been hired in 1969 by the bosses as scabs to take over the jobs of those dismissed. The bosses’ strategy had backfired! There was a new sense of confidence. This strike also revealed to me the kind of underground organisation that existed among the workers. The Wages Commission produced a leaflet in support of the demand for R18 a week which the dockworkers had put forward. Immediately a three-page letter arrived at the university, neatly written by workers, adding to this the demand that the strikers of 1969 should be re-hired, and a number of other detailed industrial demands which showed a very high level of organisation indeed.
That strike in 1972 was a success. In fact it marked the beginning of the wave of upsurge. Then a mass meeting was called in 1972 to protest against the unskilled wage determination which set starvation wages. Some 2,000 workers attended. The next day, three strikes took place, using the pamphlets that had been produced, demanding R18 a week. And immediately the police were active everywhere, overseeing the firing of the workers and trying to keep the clamps on. Things were on the move.
Benefit Fund
It was clear from what the workers were saying in discussions and meetings that they were a bit hesitant about launching a general trade union at that point. So some of us in the Wages Commission, including myself and Cheadle, with the Secretary of the Garment Union, Harriet Bolton, who was sympathetic, decided we should launch a general workers’ benefit fund. We felt that unions could emerge from that.
In fact the “benefit fund” had all the features of a general union, except being actually called that. It was established in May 1972, and caught on very rapidly. And it shook things up. We had premises in Bolton Hall, the home of the registered unions. I remember we put up a poster from the British miners’ strike at the time with a slogan: “All we want is a living wage”. None of the registered union leaders (except Harriet Bolton) liked this at all! But, such was the mood, these leaders felt they could not stand in the way of what was going on. “Let the African workers come in to our Indian garment workers hall”, they said. There was a feeling that things had to change.
Every Saturday morning there would be 5-800 workers in the hall to pay their subs or join the fund. It was such a gathering point for Africans that you would even find the sangomas present! I remember one woman who used to arrive on a motorbike and give advice, and encourage her patients to join this benefit fund. She would come and chat to us. Even small African shopkeepers were saying, “This is something new, we should join this”. Domestic servants, too, wanted to join.
By the time the 1973 strikes took place, the benefit fund had about 2,000 paid-up members. Just about every big factory in Durban had some members. It was a colossal development. The benefit fund was well-known by that time. In the midst of the strike wave you could go to Mobeni industrial area and the workers on the streets would greet you because they had seen you at the benefit fund. They would shout the rallying cry of the Zulu royal house, which for them was a call to resistance.
1973 Strikes: The Police Paralysed
Before the strike wave, the rumour had gone around that workers were going to boycott the trains. So the police were all concentrated in the townships making sure that the workers were getting on the trains. Sure enough, they got on the trains but when they arrived at the factories, it was a virtual general strike!
The police, caught on the wrong foot, rushed in very late. And suddenly you could see that the police were far too few to crush this mass resistance. To cover their weakness, they eventually ended up saying, “We’ve got nothing against strikes”! Strikes were prohibited under the Bantu Settlement of Disputes Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Riotous Assembly Act etc. But Brigadier Boshoff who was flown in from Pretoria to deal with the situation had to say: “the police have nothing whatsoever against people demanding higher wages, provided they do not break the law”!
In some areas the police managed to take sticks away from the workers. But they were only able to succeed in this by telling the workers, “Don’t worry. After your meeting you can have your sticks back again”! They even tried to argue, “We’re reaching an understanding with the workers, something new is happening, we’re not a repressive force, we’re just here to make sure that things are going nicely between the employers and the workers.”
Although you could have expected massive repression, quite frankly it was a holiday. The police were definitely affected. I remember one incident when the Indian boss of a furniture factory called the police in because he definitely wanted the strike suppressed. I went over there, because I was assistant secretary of the Furniture Union, with Harriet Bolton.
The police arrived, stood inside the factory, and said: “We must get these workers back to work”. Harriet Bolton said the grievances of the workers should be met first, that this was a peaceful strike and the police were not wanted. At first the police insisted on occupying the factory. “They wanted to see what was going on”, they said. “They didn’t want machines destroyed”. Then one after the other, they started coughing and their eyes started streaming and they said, “What’s going on here?” They were really in quite a bad shape. Harriet Bolton explained: “These are the conditions these workers live under. They are doing spray painting, completely unprotected.” There was varnish and thinner, and other combustible material all over the place. The police eventually left the factory. “We never knew it was like this”, they said.
So the police learnt a couple of hard lessons. In fact we heard rumours at the time that the security police were given a real shake-up, and it may well be that the 1973 strikes were responsible for the formation of BOSS. There was a fellow who started coming round to the unions at this time. He was known by the workers as “Mole” because he had a big mole on his neck. He used to ask things like “Are you quite sure that the state is doing the right thing? Is the Department of Labour up to scratch?” Harriet Bolton had quite a novel approach to him. She said “Go and spy on them if you want… Out you go, mole or not!”
Concessions
As a result of the strikes, astonishingly for the first time in decades a concession was made to the workers. The Bantu Labour Settlements and Disputes Act was amended. It was a frivolous amendment, but in some cases it was made legal for strikes to take place. I could not believe the headlines. Workers were dancing. In a sense it was a recognition that there was no way that the state could really stand against the workers, if they were really united in their struggle.
A good example of the conditions which sparked the strikes was the Frame textile factories. Many of the workers there were working on automatic looms, equipment only beginning to be used in Britain now. These workers came from Pondoland, with no shoes, almost in rags. They moved through a brief training period on to these looms. But they were paid only R6-7 a week. The majority of the women were paid R3.50 – which was just the consolidated cost of living allowance of the previous period. These wages were astonishing. The workers were just not prepared to accept it.
Another amazing thing was that, when the workers went on strike, even the white bosses of Durban were virtually unanimous that change just had to come. There were interviews with workers on the front page of the Natal Mercury, the most reactionary paper in SA, about how long they had worked for a company, the pittances they had for pensions, the shocking conditions etc. Overnight the Natal Mercury and the Daily News reports were very good. African students were employed to interview the workers on their grievances. We would try and get them to print the demands in the Daily News the afternoon before a strike was planned! It showed that nothing could be quite the same.
Between 1960 and 1970 there had been in Natal, altogether, about 30,000 workers on strike. Between January and March 1973, in Durban alone, there were 65,000 workers on strike. It just showed that once the conditions are ripe, the working class can move very quickly.
When the strike wave erupted, I had the idea that once the workers moved, all the traditions of struggle would return overnight. I thought that there must be a latent cadre the working class created by the ANC or Sactu in the past which would suddenly emerge. But things did not work out quite like that. In fact, in building the unions the workers had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But, after the strikes, the situation was quite transformed. Three-quarters of the workers said they had had an improvement in wages and conditions. Very few workers were actually dismissed. But 75% were not satisfied with the conditions they had achieved, and said they were prepared to strike again. This shows what a change in consciousness had taken place.
The workers started to talk about Congress. If you went to their homes at night, they would dig-up the floorboards and bring out old ANC pamphlets. Political life started-up. The Indian petit bourgeois then revived the Natal Indian Congress, though this organisation on an ethnic basis did not really help to unite the Indian and African workers who were uniting on the shop-floor.
The Registered Unions
My formal job was an official of the Indian trade unions. The main registered unions were the Natal Clothing Union, the Furniture Union, the Hotel, Liquor and Catering Union, etc. which were almost exclusively Indian, though with a few white and coloured members. But they had large assets: the Garment Workers Industrial Union, for example, had R3-4 million. They carried a lot of weight in that sense, and had a considerable apparatus.
These unions were bureaucratised, smug and racially-restrictive. But there was a certain tradition that they had built-up. In 1972, for example, Harriet Bolton called the Garment Union members to a mass meeting. Every worker in the industry turned up, Indian and African except for eight workers who gave their apologies. They had been locked up by the boss in the factory and couldn’t get out even through the windows!
Another problem with these unions was that the leadership was anti-Congress. Leaders like Jimmy Bolton, who was an out-and-out right-winger, bad acted to break any Congress presence in the union since Sactu in the 1950s. They managed to achieve this because of the tradition of loyalty to the union among the members.
Many of the officials of these unions were the types that would be seconded onto Indian Advisory Boards and other state puppet bodies. They were using the union as a stepping stone. I remember that every time that Harriet Bolton went abroad, the executive committee would have more meetings than ever – six to eight a month. They would set up sub-committees. They would call more and more industrial council meetings. This big flurry of activity was for the simple reason that the attendance allowance was about R20 to R30 a time! They were getting more from the union than from their job. (Incidentally, the employers too would insist on all these meetings, just so that they could get their pocket money – a ridiculous situation!)
Then Harriet would come back and rap them over the knuckles, to which they would reply, “No, it was a democratic decision”! The only response she had was to go to the Department of Inland Revenue and report this additional income, and soon enough the officials would have someone knocking on their door, and they would have long faces because they all had to pay more in tax!
Harriet used to instruct the organisers: if you go to a factory, you see the workers first. And, come what may, you do not at any time accept garments, jeans, jerseys or anything of that kind from the bosses. But you would see the organisers go to the factory with their handbags, dodging past the workers, finding a back door to get in and see the employer, have a cup of tea, and some other perks! That was what the union was. The only time I ever saw those organisers upset was when one of them was ill and no one had visited them. They thought the chief purpose of a union was to visit people in hospital!
These bureaucrats were of course not at all sympathetic to African workers on the march. When Bolton Hall was packed with African workers shouting Usuthu, Amandla and singing Nkosi Sikhelele… these bureaucrats would come in and tip-toe uncomfortably past the emerging African revolution!
Differences of Strategy
The chief of the Security Police, Colonel Steenkamp, put out messages via this union bureaucracy which eventually reached my ears. Certain areas were “out of bounds”, he was saying. “The unions could go ahead, but if you touch the docks, you will be in deep trouble and everything will be clamped down in no time.”
There were some differences of opinion over what to do about this, but in fact we never submitted. But it meant that all the dock work had to be underground. Some of the meetings were held in the hall – mass meetings of abattoir workers every Saturday, for example – but more of the meetings were held away from it.
Steenkamp’s warning, however, reinforced the idea in our minds that there were only so many months to go before there would be a clampdown. There was never the thought then that the unions could become permanent open organisations. We thought they would have to continue to have a certain underground component, something “more” than the open framework, if they were to survive at all. We thought of it something along the lines of underground industrial locals, groupings of factory leaders in the industrial areas. We thought there would be an inevitable clampdown on offices and other such centres of activity but that the local could continue organising.
The employers were highly organised, by the way. The Natal Employers Association included not just the Natal employers but leading national and multi-national bosses like BTR, Dunlop, Van Leer. It was like a very centralised union for them. Any demand put to any employer was sent to Mr Thorn, whose job was to repress it and set it back. Thorn would have regular meetings with the security police. This wasn’t even hidden. The apparatus of the ruling class was very highly centralised indeed.
There were tremendous difficulties in building the unions: a complete lack of experience, few organising skills among the workers, the implacable hostility of the bosses, and the police watching like hawks. There was a desperate urgency to train shop stewards and union leaders. There were no dormant Sactu cadres who could be called on to play a key role. Most union leaders then were victimised activists who often had only two to three years education. The factory activists were not recognised shop stewards as in British unions, for example – they had to work secretly. There were no handbooks on how this should be done!
Also there was no clear strategy among the union activists. Differences emerged which soon set into two different approaches: one accepting the revolutionary nature of the struggle for trade union rights, the other more cautious and reformist.
I did not realise how sharply the lines had become drawn until I recently read the book by Steve Friedmann on the unions at that time, Building Tomorrow Today. The view I had was that the struggle for trade union rights for African workers was revolutionary because the state could never concede rights to the mass of oppressed migrant workers. The only way you could break down the implacable resistance of the state and the employers was on the basis of another organised strike movement which would insist on the recognition of the emerging unions.
But now it seems the attitude of other people involved in the unions was different from mine. Halton Cheadle is quoted as saying “the whole thing was totally out of control” at that time. The upsurge had led to the formation of a textile union, chemical union, furniture union, Mawu, a union for African garment workers – almost a union a month. And the response of those like Cheadle was that this was out of control, it was too “general”. Their attitude was that we should drop the dock workers, and that we should avoid strikes if we were to avoid a clampdown. Their attitude was that we should look to people like Gatsha Buthelezi to encourage workers to join unions and consider linking the unions to the KwaZulu bureaucracy. There was a feeling that we could use British methods in a sense, methods of trade union bureaucracy, and apply them in SA. Unfortunately this approach was continued by the leadership of Fosatu when it was formed later on, in 1979.
My view, that the only way we could move forward was by a new strike wave, with demands for union recognition as well as wages, was entirely in keeping with the mood of the workers incidentally. It was a question of hammering away on the basis of mass action until we could force a breakthrough.
The first breakthrough to union recognition at a plant was the historic agreement with Smith & Nephew. This did not come out of the blue. It was a result of the strike in February 1973. Even at that stage a certain recognition was accorded to the union, and that was built on in the next period. Management had the security police coining round to ask management why they had made this agreement and to try and stiffen them up to renege on it. But with workers’ organisation we held on. This could have been achieved at other factories if a more militant strategy had been pursued. But the conventional wisdom of the Fosatu leaders was that only the Wiehahn Commission made this possible.
Clampdown
In 1974 there was a big clampdown on the unions. I and others were banned on 1 March 1974. The unions were quite disorganised. They had relied too much on the existing open structures, and too heavily on people like myself. We had only had about seven months or so to really start developing the unions, and there wasn’t a strong layer of organisers to take that forward.
There was a strong mood for struggle in the factories, but without thorough organisation. That led to certain setbacks. Friedman says the unions in Natal at the time were like a “sickly infant” not growing at all. That is not true. They were surviving and growing. There was still a movement of the workers into the unions. There were still a number of important industrial battles which carried on. But it was true that the tidal wave wasn’t there. The workers were realising that, unless they could link up with the Transvaal and the Cape, they wouldn’t be able to take the struggle forward entirely on their own.
The Women at Prilla Mills
The struggle in Prilla Mills in Pietermaritzburg is an example of the atmosphere that existed. It was owned by Indians who all donated to the Nationalist Party and were part of the local ruling establishment. It employed mainly Indian women, some Indian men, and some African workers.
In 1973 that factory became organised virtually overnight. There was an activist of the Muslim youth organisation that was a bit left. We discussed with him how the union could be organised by a worker in the factory, and he organised it within two or three days. A meeting was held; shopstewards were elected – as it turned out, all men. It looked as though the position would be held.
Then there were strikes after strikes in Durban on which the unions were concentrating. Maritzburg seemed far away. Praia Mills seemed fairly well-organised, and could be tied up a bit later. But, within a few weeks, the employers counter-attacked. They promoted every shopsteward to foreman. They gave them permission to be free with the women. There were seductions and rapes taking place in the factory, a very ugly situation. The women were becoming quite demoralised.
We heard overnight that everyone was going to resign from the union. We decided to turn back the situation. We had a mass meeting. Some marvellous young women stood up. (Incidentally it was Indian women workers who were in the forefront of the struggle at Smith & Nephew also. This is a marvellous tradition because Indian women were much more dominated by their menfolk, generally, than African women.)
One of the women, Princess Osman, took up the battle and went door-to-door with the union organisers to persuade every worker to stand fast and withdraw their resignation. She tried to organise with the men who were prepared to stand with the union to fight against these foremen, fix them up, because the way they were handling the women could not be tolerated. There was a campaign against child-labour. Children of ten years old were employed to do night-shift. That was exposed in the Sunday Tribune.
The tide was beginning to turn. But then the security police visited every single worker to try to persuade them to resign. Then one night when Princess Osman was walking home some thugs beat her up and poured acid all over her face. She was a marvellous fighter and a beautiful woman. But her personality changed completely after that, and she had terrible nightmares. She refused to speak to anybody. The union was effectively broken at Prilla Mills.
The conservative tendency including some of the people who were later the leading lights in Fosatu said: “You see. We’re not properly organised. We should concentrate on those factories where we can deal with the employers. We must pull our horns in and not over-extend. The union must just adopt a factory-to-factory approach, nibble away at the problem and eventually deal with these questions.” Because of that we found the unions in a sense turning inward, and the ideas of the early period, which the workers had put into the union, that they should be fighting organisations, was rejected by these leaders.
Everybody in Maritzburg then knew that the unions had lost the struggle at Prilla Mills. But the workers at Scottish Cables still walked into the union. BTR, Howick Rubber as it was then, marched into the union. Workers recognised there was a force here, and this force was probably going to link up with the Congress tradition. Here were Indian workers prepared to struggle shoulder-to-shoulder with African workers. Here were Indian women prepared to struggle. It was almost a challenge to African workers to get organised.
Further Struggles – Repression Countered
After that there was the organisation of the Frame factories. The textile union was based in the cotton factories. There was ALCAN aluminium in Maritzburg which was 100% with Mawu.
There was also BTR which was becoming well-organised at that time. In fact the present BTR dispute actually dates from 1973. I remember making a call to Howick Rubber at that time, putting forward Mawu’s demand for recognition. The attitude of the manager, by the way, just to emphasise the point that there was no difference between foreign capital and local capital was, “I don’t know who you are. If you’re not an Oxford or Cambridge man, I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
The bosses didn’t take the situation lightly. They started repressing the workers, trying to stiffen up a layer of black foremen against the workers. One foreman at the Pinetex Frame factory used to do what the Prilla Mills foremen were doing. He handled the women and also marked out the organisers.
A meeting was held in the textile union. Workers said something had to be done. A death sentence was called for. I said, “Are you sure there won’t be a huge reaction to this? The state’s going to clamp down. Have we built a strong enough foundation to be able to take the attack.”
The workers said that it would look as though he had many lovers, that he fought with one of the lovers’ boyfriends. Sunday he was dead. Monday the police started to pick up our organisers. Instead of it breaking the union, the police did not take it very far because they were not as enthusiastic about following up allegations of murder of a black person as of a white person. But they beat the hell out of one of the leading organisers who was from Pondoland. When they knocked out a lot of his teeth, they said to him, “Aren’t you scared of us?”, and he said, “Scared? You’re paid to hit me. If I was going to do this, I’d do it for nothing.”
Incidentally, when the wave of repression came down, and you saw police at the big mass meetings, this worker would say to them from the platform, “We’re getting ready to deal with you. You can stand there with your cameras but we’re marking time.” And there would be roars of applause from the audience and the police disappearing out through the gate!
The KwaZulu Government and Barney Dladla
Barney Dladla, Minister of Labour in the KwaZulu government, appeared at this time. No-one had heard of him before the Durban strikes. But by March 1973 he was on the front pages almost every day.
He turned up at a strike at the ALUSAF factory in Richards Bay, where the army was sent in to keep up production. He stood in the rain on the picket line with the workers and said that we should be prepared to fight even if we all go to jail. No-one had ever seen this before, a petit-bourgeois on a picket line in the rain – when he was quite sick actually. After it, in fact, he went into hospital in Maritzburg with pneumonia.
No-one knew how to respond to Dladla. The workers were very cautious about Gatsha Buthelezi. The dockers knew his uncle J.B. Buthelezi, who was a ‘compound induna’ and one of their chief oppressors. But here was Dladla, apparently prepared to stand by the workers, at a time when important struggles were taking place.
Dladla’s attitude accelerated links of the unions with the KwaZulu government – it seemed that here was a short-cut to building the unions. A decision was reached that Dladla would be asked to come to strikes to try and rally the workers, to widen the demands, to be able to force the employers back. In a number of cases where defeats were in the offing he was called in.
This was the case, for example, at Frame in Pinetown in 1974, when dismissal notices had been handed out. A mass rally was held at which Dladla spoke, and the mood changed. Workers started pouring out of the factories to come to the meeting, and tore up the dismissal notices. Then the workers marched on the factory. The police arrived with machine-guns. Dogs were going to be let loose but the workers stood firm. Eventually out of that, not only did the workers all get re-employed but those charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act had the charges withdrawn. The workers even got two days strike pay, which was unheard of by any company, let alone the Frame group.
Of course the Natal employers did not like this. Big business put pressure on its puppet Buthelezi. Finally Dladla was dismissed as a Minister. He came to the unions in Durban and asked for a job. He wanted to build an ICU-like organisation based on the unions but with the support of chiefs, to sweep through the rural areas. This idea was turned down. It was utopian to think that mass democratic organisation could be built with the support of the reactionary chiefs.
After this, despite continuing strikes and struggles, increasingly Buthelezi was able to tap the mood. He formed Inkatha for this purpose, to channel workers into Inkatha in order to try to defuse the militant mood and break it up. I can remember distinctly that at the launch of Inkatha in 1975 the first resolution was for a general strike. Buthelezi didn’t oppose this. What he said was: “we must just wait for the right time”. Of course the time was never right for Gatsha!
The union officials were taken aback by the large meetings Buthelezi held in the townships. They argued that here was someone else who could provide a short-cut to mass trade unions. They asked that he should call on all the workers to join trade unions, as Chief Luthuli had done in the 1950s. But instead Buthelezi used these rallies to get the workers to put their money then and there into the Black Bank, now riddled with corruption and mismanagement!
But instead of drawing the lessons from this experience the conservative union officials felt they should go further with Buthelezi – even make the unions an industrial wing of Inkatha. There were ‘co-ordinating’ meetings with Buthelezi held at the Bantu Administration Department offices in Pietermaritzburg. But he was intensely suspicious and never lifted a finger to support the unions. Instead you would often see Buthelezi touring the factories in his KwaZulu government limousine at the invitation of the bosses.
All this should have made it clear to these conservative union leaders – at least by 1980 when Inkatha brutally attacked students boycotting classes – that Buthelezi and Inkatha were part of the bosses’ state, and that their strategy towards him was entirely wrong. Instead of struggling to break Inkatha’s influence over the workers, they continued to justify themselves on the basis that some workers supported Inkatha.
Buthelezi used to bring ANC veterans released from Robben Island and make them guests of honour at Inkatha rallies. This caused quite a lot of confusion among political layers as to what was going on. We now know that this was part of a disastrous plan worked out between the ANC leadership in exile and Buthelezi to build Inkatha.
All this meant that the workers didn’t have hostility towards Inkatha. They just had scepticism, saying “Are they going to deliver? We are not sure. But we know this union is ours.” With experience they became increasingly suspicious. They were not sure whether Buthelezi was for struggle or not. They did not want to get involved in anything that would cut them off from the workers in Johannesburg and Cape Town and elsewhere. A clear strategy by the unions at that time could have cut across the growth of Inkatha.
Struggles in the 1980s
The emphasis of workers’ struggle in the late 70s and early 80s moved to the Western and then the Eastern Cape, and the Witwatersrand. Particularly with the development of Saawu, there was a radical transformation.
But Durban never became totally quiet. Figures show that in 1983 and 1984 Durban was the leading city for industrial strikes per worker – though these years were not high points of national struggle. In every other year from 1980 to 1985 Durban was second in terms of industrial strikes per worker, usually behind the Eastern Cape.
That shows that what had been built in the unions in the 1970s was not lost. In fact the struggles in Natal were more protracted and tougher in some senses than some of the struggles elsewhere. This is partly because the Natal employers, foreign and local companies, stand together in a very tight bloc.
For instance, it is only in 1986 that union recognition was forced from the Frame group – a struggle that started in 1973. And this was despite a mass strike, virtually an insurrection, in the Frame factories in Pinetown in 1980, where the police turned out in force, and workers set up barricades in Clermont township.
At Dunlop it was in 1975-6 that demands were first raised which were won only much later. In the case of BTR the struggle is still in progress. Compare this with the speed with which union recognition has been won in other areas.
Compare the situation even with the mines, which has been one of the most difficult areas of all to organise. In 1982 the Chamber of Mines offered union recognition to mineworkers – though to a “company union”. But immediately the NUM began to take off, to 10,000 members, 25,000, and so on – and rapidly won recognition on some mines.
In the 1980s Natal was also the initial focus for a number of struggles which spread around the country. For example, there was the AECI dispute in 1984, the Dunlops dispute, and, most importantly, the pension disputes in 1981 and 1983. In 1981 thirteen of the pension strikes took place in Natal, and, for the first time, plantation workers took action. The Natal workers were determined not to be hemmed-in. They wanted to link-up with and push forward the struggle nationally.
There was also political development among the workers despite the policies of the leadership. The conservative tendency which crystallised in Fosatu had allowed a “division of labour” to develop between themselves and Inkatha. They did not challenge Inkatha’s reactionary domination of the rural areas and of the townships. In turn they hoped that Buthelezi would leave them alone to build the unions quietly and smoothly.
But this “division of labour” had to break down. In the October 1983 referendum against the tricameral constitution, the biggest response to the “No” campaign that Fosatu launched was in Natal. This showed that the workers had by no means succumbed to the domination of Inkatha, but were asserting their political independence of it.
Since then, there have continued to be important battles in Natal. In the bakery industry, for example, there have been occupations of the factories. Dunlop is now known as a fortress for Cosatu. Cosatu’s launching Congress was held in Natal, for the specific reason of trying to turn the tide against Inkatha – though this was not followed through by the leadership. The BTR workers have fought a protracted and determined struggle.
The youth took the lead in a struggle against Inkatha repression. But we should not forget that bus drivers, TGWU workers, and other sections of the workers have played an important role in helping the youth to do the job – despite the futile “peace talks” policy put forward by the UDF and ANC leadership. More and more, the tide has turned against Inkatha. Now we are hearing, even in remote areas, that headmasters who are members of Inkatha have had their houses burnt down, their cars smashed, etc.
All this is just the beginning of a movement that is going to transform Natal into a key storm centre of the South African revolution. Natal missed out, in a sense, on the uprising of 1976, and also on the insurrectionary movement in the townships in 1984-86. But this does not mean we have a permanent backwater. It is being rapidly changed.
The fact of the tide turning against Inkatha, together with the deep roots which have been developed by the unions, roots which have been fought for time and time again with nothing easily conceded, and despite a number of serious defeats – that is quite an explosive combination.
There is great potential for struggle, particularly if the socialists in Congress succeed in linking the youth with the organised workers. As the workers enter into struggle for decent wages and conditions of life, and for majority rule, they will begin the process of transforming the unions, and throwing out the conservative right-wing leadership that has accumulated at the top. On this basis, the Natal workers can be a key force in the transformation of South Africa.
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2019).
