Yours for the Union

Class and Community Struggles in South Africa

Baruch Hirson

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783609819
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Yours for the Union stands as a landmark history of the making of the black working class in South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it covers the crucial period of 1930–47, when South Africa's rapid industrialisation led to the dramatic growth of the working class, and uncontrolled urbanisation resulted in vast shanty towns which became a focal point for resistance and protest. Importantly, Hirson was one of the first historians to go beyond the traditional focus on the mines and factory workplaces, broadening his account to include the lesser known community struggles of the urban ghettoes and rural reserves. Written by an author with first-hand involvement in South African labour struggles, Yours for the Union broke new ground with its account of the effort to mobilise urban squatters, domestic workers and rural peasants, and remains an indispensable resource for the study of the South African labour movement.

1.The African Worker: Class and Community

Driven to the city originally by the necessity of supplementing their inadequate earnings … a part of them were seasonal workers who … regularly returned to their land. … Another part continued to work in the cities the year round … and left behind their families, who cultivated the family allotment in their absence. While it is true that a genuine working class permanently cut off from the land was becoming more and more numerous … the overwhelming majority of the workers were peasants, still strongly tied to the land, who came to the cities reluctantly to round out a subsistence which could not be adequately provided by tilling the soil alone.
Jacob Walkin¹

His tastes and appetites were those of the village, but his outward life was that of the factory. There was no harmony between the two.
Theodore von Laue²

The growth of an urban community

There are striking similarities between the recruitment and working conditions of workers in Czarist Russia and those of many black workers in Southern Africa until at least 1939 – further evidence of the widespread use of repressive methods in the early stages of industrialisation. Some came voluntarily (or even eagerly) to the towns, seeking employment and also the opportunity of building a better life; others came because of economic pressure or administrative fiat and returned home seasonally or at the end of a contract. They left their wives and families in the village or on the farms, and they lived either in single-sex hostels subject to tight controls, or where they could in the towns. Trade union organisation was forbidden (in Russia) or denied recognition (in South Africa) because, it was said, they were peasants (or ‘tribal’) and not workers.

A large section of the work force in South Africa came from the three High Commission territories – Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland – and were considered part of South Africa’s labour force; others came from territories north of the Limpopo. Most were recruited on limited contracts for the mines; an unknown number entered the country illegally to work on the farms and in the towns. What they contributed to the growth of working class organisation through their own unique initiatives is not known – despite the lengthy survey conducted by First (1983) of the men from Mozambique. There is also little information about the men who illegally crossed borders and stopped at farmsteads on their way down to the towns. They avoided prying eyes, leaving few accounts of what they endured in their quest for jobs. Yet it is obvious from the agitation (by Africans) for their removal that there were unresolved problems that kept these ‘strangers’ away from fellow blacks.

In 1928 the Transvaal African Congress (TAC) spearheaded by Selby Msimang pressed for a petition to the government to have all Nyasas (Malawians) deported, arguing that these men, who often worked as domestic servants, deprived the women of the northern Transvaal of employment, ‘exploiting’ and then deserting them.³ It is not known what precipitated that particular agitation, nor what occurred in 1941 when clashes involving large numbers of Africans from ‘northern territories’ were reported. Requests from Senator Rheinallt Jones, the Native Representative, for information on the latter event were refused.⁴

There can be little doubt about the importance of the migrants – both in terms of the country’s economy and also as a consequence of their contact, or conflict, with the local inhabitants. But they obviously represented a minority group (or groups) inside the larger black community and they only entered certain areas of the country. In the mid-1930s the Africans of South Africa lived mainly in the rural areas: some 2 million in the Reserves, 2.2 million on farms (almost all white-owned), and 1.4 million in the towns. Ten years later the numbers had increased by 300,000, 260,000 and 660,000 respectively, marking the continued movement to the towns, particularly on the Witwatersrand. Those with roots in the Reserves returned home periodically, while those who came from the farms stayed permanently.

There was a continuous movement from the white farmlands to the towns and the Urban Areas Acts of 1924 and 1930 both aimed to limit the number of Africans entering towns and villages, while several other measures were aimed at converting labour tenants into wage labourers. Trade unionism was forbidden on the farms and labour was controlled by Masters and Servants Acts which made desertion a criminal offence. Furthermore, the Native Services Contract Act of 1932 forbade the employment of labour tenants or their children in towns (Horwitz, 1967, pp.203–4). This did not stop men and women absconding, and the youth in particular sought to escape the poorly paid labour to which they were subjected. But this left them at the mercy of employers in villages and towns en route to their urban destinations when they stopped (as did the migrants from the north) to earn money for the journey.

The transition from countryside to town was slow and the process of proletarianisation uneven: some became permanent town dwellers, others travelled backwards and forwards, making painful adjustments at both ends. The factors that led different sectors of African society to work in the towns varied. Some men came willingly or were sent by their chiefs to secure money for arms and ammunition; others found that spells of labour in towns allowed them to obtain the money (though wages were so low) to buy cattle or increase production. But there was also reluctance to leave the land, particularly when the crops were good, because the towns – with their squalid slums or compounds, their unrewarding or dangerous work – held few attractions.⁵ Ultimately, decisions had to be made on whether to stay or return to the land. The multiple factors that determined their length of stay included the conditions inside the towns, the outcome of struggles (whether sharp or muted) for better conditions, and the struggles within the ruling classes over the disposal of their labour power.

This continued link with the land distinguished these African workers (like their Russian counterparts) from those of western Europe who had been ‘freed’ from the countryside (Brenner, 1977, p.35). In the end, however, the mines and the towns would ‘swallow people’ and an increasing number of men and women left the land.⁶ There was too little land, and eroded land at that, to sustain an increasing population: drought and disease only speeded the exodus. Whether they came permanently or as migrant labourers (many of whom went home for little more than an unpaid ‘vacation’ before returning to work), these were the new proletariat of South Africa.

Yet even those who had left the land retained links with their kinsmen, either directly or through contact with those who poured into the towns, and they imbibed or were absorbed by the cultures of both town and Reserve. Kinship ties were reinforced in hometown associations, and these were conditioned in turn by the system of segregated housing and reinforced through language, folklore and age group loyalties.

There were inevitably new conflicts, both in the towns and in the Reserves, as the workers confronted new problems. These struggles brought new organisations into being, fashioned by newly emergent leaders and by conditions in the towns that they entered. Because so many workers were unskilled, and worked in small shops, organisations first appeared in the locations or townships alongside, and not always separate from, church groups, youth clubs and organisations of stand holders, craftsmen, herbalists and tenants. It was these groups, bound in loose alliances, that took up the struggle for better living conditions.

In the workshops men grouped together, joining trade unions and political groups; in the rural areas, the same men belonged to clan associations or formed new groups, joined in ‘traditional’ pursuits and clashed with their own elders. They adjusted to different conditions as they moved between town and village, adapting the organisations of one ‘culture’ to meet the needs of a new environment or building unique groups to cope with new situations. It was this use of traditional forms to cloak associations of a new type that led to clashes, when ethnicity and class were joined to become the basis of workers’ solidarity. Thus, men determined on a strike would ascribe scabbing to ethnic differences, and picketing gave way to factional (or so-called tribal) fighting.

By 1936 census returns showed the appreciable growth of the population on the Witwatersrand. There were now some 570,726 Africans in the region, out of a total population that just topped the one million mark. But the inflow was dominated by men, the sex ratio badly skewed. In Johannesburg, the largest town, it was still 2.6:1, due in part to the official policy as formulated by Colonel Stallard (Local Government Commission of Inquiry, 1922, p.241):

natives – men, women and children – should only be permitted within municipal areas in so far and for so long as their presence is demanded by the wants of the white population. …

[T]he town is a European area … [with] no place for the redundant native, who neither works nor serves his or her [sic] people but forms the class from which the professional agitators, the slum landlords, the liquor sellers, the prostitutes, and other undesirables spring.

New legislation, including the Urban Areas Act of 1923, together with pre-industrial regulations, controlled or excluded Africans from the towns. Vagrancy laws, Masters and Servants Acts and so on were used as weapons against the unemployed or those on strike, and the liquor laws under which home brewing was controlled were used to deny women an economic base in the towns (B. Hepple, 1960, pp.760–813). Africans were also squeezed off the land, or white farms, under the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, and although regulations excluded their entry to the towns (Lacey, 1981, pp.268–9), men and women squatted on farms and fields and sought casual labour in neighbouring urban suburbs.

Over 300,000 men lived in compounds (on the mines and railways, in municipal and hospital services, as members of road gangs and sometimes as industrial workers). Other workers lived in ‘slum yards’, hostels, locations and townships, all of which lacked modern amenities and few of which had medical, educational or leisure facilities. During the 1930s the slum yards and some townships were closed by the authorities and their residents moved, by regulation and by force, to segregated areas.⁷

Residents’ or tenants’ associations opposed the evictions through the law courts⁸ but there were no campaigns against residential segregation. The residents demanded better housing, more transport, cheaper fares and improvements to the townships; and they campaigned against removal. This degree of acquiescence in the existence of racial ghettoes was an admission of powerlessness and an indication that those who came to the towns did not aim to undermine the system: they wanted integration into society. When the townships erupted, it was against the background threat of expropriation (Alexandra and Vereeniging), for lower bus fares (Alexandra and Pretoria), after serious traffic accidents (Sophiatown, 1944), for more houses (Orlando, 1946), for the right to trading stalls (Moroka, 1947), in protest against attacks on beer brewing (Springs, 1945), in support of demands for the reinstatement of a teacher (Brakpan, 1944), against lodger permits (Heidelberg, 1945) or to call for an end to police harassment (Vereeniging, 1937).

Community, identity, class struggle

The centralising tendency of manufacture, argued Engels (1976, p.55), led to a concentration of people, firstly at the place of work and then in residence. On the gold mines, black labourers were doubly concentrated – in the mine compounds and underground. Consequently, work and social activities tended to merge. Informal associations, originally based on clan organisations, helped determine work companions, dormitory associates and the dance groups that participated in the weekly displays run by the mine management.

But life on the mines was hard and the men took their complaints to management. These concerned food shortages, constraints on beer brewing, maltreatment by compound officials, safety conditions underground, wages and work conditions. Significantly, mineworkers presented their complaints over work and living conditions through their izibonda, or dormitory leaders – men who did not belong to the newly organised trade union, nor necessarily to ethnic associations. The izibonda represented the workers and called them out, independently of the African Mine Workers Union (AMWU), when there was a strike call in 1946.

Mineworkers did not link all their complaints together, nor did complaints inevitably lead to strikes. Nor were all miners of like mind; some protested over perceived injustice, others acquiesced; some were still rooted in their rural societies, others were said to have ‘deserted’ their kinsmen because they did not return to their former homes. The latter were as ‘urbanised’ as men who worked in industry, distanced themselves from ethnic associations and were amongst the firmest adherents of the AMWU.

There is little information available about hometown associations, or direct workers’ representation, in industrial and municipal compounds, and nothing is known about relations between such organisations and either management or the trade unions. Ethnic associations existed and they planned their own leisure activities, including inter-ethnic dance competitions. In the power works, (migrant) workers organised and established contacts between compounds in several towns, and called a strike in 1942 without being mobilised in a formal union (see Chapter 13).

The workers in towns (in locations or slum yards) lived in less homogeneous communities than those in the compounds, their fellow residents including workers from other industries, the young and the old who were not employed, and the women who, in addition to household work, took in washing, brewed, or occasionally engaged in hawking. They also lived alongside small independent craftsmen, hawkers and traders, stand holders, churchmen, shebeen keepers, teachers, nurses, and so on.

This latter group, a petty bourgeoisie barely distinguishable from workers in living standards, and sometimes taking labouring jobs, nevertheless tended to adopt their own distinct views of the world. Some were fiercely traditionalist, supporters of the chiefs; all were keen to assimilate to the culture of the ruling class, seeking advancement through education or turning to the more orthodox religions. Mkele (1961, pp.12–13) mentions their attachment to the ‘more respectable denominations’ (Anglicans, Presbyterians, the American-based A.M.E. Church and the Methodists) and the ‘best schools’ (St Peters – the ‘Eton of South Africa’ – Adams, Lovedale and Healdtown). Some cultivated ‘Western’ values, and ‘took considerable pains to behave in the proper and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Photographs and Illustrations
• Foreword by Tom Lodge
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Map of South Africa
• 1. The African Worker: Class and Community
• 2. Desperately Lean Times: The Socio-economic Background
• 3. Industrial Legislation and Minimum Wages
• 4. Rebuilding the African Unions, 1932–40
• 5. Organising Domestic Servants
• 6. Vereeniging: ‘To Hell with the Pick-up!’
• 7. The Politics of War and the Black Working Class
• 8. Trade Unions in Struggle
• 9. Organising Under War Conditions
• 10. Rural Protest and Rural Revolt
• 11. Azikwhelwa! – We Shall Not Ride
• 12. Umagebule – The Slicer
• 13. Organising the Migrant Workers
• 14. The 1946 Miners’ Strike
• 15. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index