Bonner, Hyslop, Van Der Walt - Transnational and Comparative Perspectives On Southern African Labour History

African Studies, 66, 2 3, August December 2007
Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context

Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop and Lucien van der Walt
University of the Witwatersrand
South African historians and social scientists have often bemoaned South African exceptionalism: in other words a tendency to see the countrys historical trajectory as absolutely unique. Yet they have also been strangely reluctant to place their ndings in a more global context. The articles which comprise this edition were papers given at a University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) History Workshop and Sociology of Work Unit international conference entitled Rethinking Worlds of Labour: southern African labour history in international context held from 28 to 31 July 2006. The conference provided an opportunity to move away from South African exceptionalism in practice, by considering comparisons and connections between the history of labour in South Africa and in other parts of the world. The title also reected the conviction of the conference organisers that such a shift away from parochialism would contribute to a rethinking of some of the fundamental assumptions of labour history in southern Africa, and contributes to a revivication of the eld. Furthermore, we meant worlds in a dual sense signalling not just the physical spaces through which people move, but also social worlds, and our special interest in the subjective ways in which the world is understood by workers.
Globalisation and labour history There has, during the rst decade of the twenty-rst century, been a clear rise in historians interest in working at a more international level (Hopkins 2002; Bayly 2004). This is certainly rooted in the sense that globalisation however that is understood is making an enormous impact on our daily lives. This causes a reappraisal of many certainties, economic, social and political, and gives rise to a historical curiosity about the antecedents of globalisation.
Indeed, it may be argued that historians have a particularly valuable contribution to make to globalisation debates. Very often we are told that features of globalisation
ISSN 0002-0184 print/ISSN 1469-2872 online/07/2-30137-32 # 2007 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand DOI: 10.1080/00020180701482628
138 African Studies 66: 2 3, August December 2007
are absolutely new, or unique to the present. But social scientists sometimes do this without any very careful attention to the past, which they are considering. Closer enquiry may in fact show that some features of globalisation have clear precedents. In this perspective we are only now re-emerging into something like the globalised world of before 1914. John Gray (1998) has pointed out that it is not helpful to conate, as commonly happens, the international turn toward free market policies in the 1980s with globalisation understood as the history of intensifying transnational connections as a whole. Globalisation has proceeded at many levels political, social, and cultural besides the economic. It has a long history, and is likely to survive the demise of recently inuential economic ideologies. Indeed Bayly (2004) has convincingly advanced the notion of archaic globalisation, linking empires and societies previous to modern capitalism. In her path-breaking study of the world of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Janet Abu Lughod (1989) likewise made a powerful case for the existence of a China-centred world economy before the rise of European colonisation. Indeed, many historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century would argue that there was in that era a rst globalisation, followed by a strengthening of nation-based structures after the First World War. So it would seem that claims about what is, and is not, original about current globalisation would benet from a much stronger base-line of historical comparison. In this context, labour history is a eld with particular claims for attention informed by a more global outlook. The glory days of the discipline internationally were in the 1960s to the early 1980s, and in that era there is no doubt that the interest in labours past was driven by the extraordinary waves of industrial militancy in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, India and many other countries during those years. Yet it is equally the case that subsequent developments caused a salutary re-examination of some of the notions that informed labour history. The defeats suffered by labour movements, the decline of the size of the industrial workforce in many major economies, the emergence of new forms of global ows of capital, and new patterns of production and consumption, all put question marks over any triumphalism about the cause of labour. Critics, many of them informed by post-structuralist theory, with some justication raised questions over labour historians neglect of the analysis of discourse and language (Steadman Jones 1983), its failure to engage adequately with feminist theory (Scott 1988), and its teleological politics (Joyce 1994). Yet though there was much that was valid in these critiques, and although the world of the 1990s was inhospitable for labour history, the subject of the working classes and their histories remains an inescapable one for any serious study of the modern world. There are also strong signs of a practical and theoretical revival of labour history that speaks to questions thrown up by globalisation. What has been striking over the last few years has been a revival of labour
Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context 139
history, particularly within the semi-industrial countries. At the same time, labour history has become increasingly attuned to the global dimensions of working-class formation. As Marcel van der Linden notes in his contribution to this collection, labour history is today not only more globalised in its practice, but it is also more global in its outlook. One of the major limitations of classical labour history was that it was largely conned within the boundaries of national histories. The greatest of all the works of labour history in its golden era was after all, EP Thompsons (1991) book on The Making of the English Working Class. The Scots, Welsh and Irish only got walkon parts in Thompsons great drama, while peoples further a eld were almost entirely ignored, notwithstanding the larger British imperial context. In general, labour historians have followed this approach, writing about the German, Australian, South African, Brazilian, Nigerian etc. working classes. Now, obviously the formation of nation-states was one of the major features of the nineteenth, and more especially the twentieth centuries, and working classes have often orientated politically towards such national frameworks. However, nationally based labour studies face several related problems. Taking the nation-state as the self-evident unit of analysis tends to naturalise what must be seen as a fairly novel (and for much of the modern period, unusual) state form, and the related assumption that labour must develop a national character. Relativizing and historicizing the nation-state can reveal much about the history of labour, help avoid teleological assumptions about the historical trajectory of labour movements, and undermine the sense of national uniqueness that produces a sense of exceptionalism. Nationally based labour histories have also tended to homogenise local variations within nation-states, inadvertently playing down regional specicity. Moreover, they have tended to ignore the point that many of the most important processes within the world of labour occurred across national boundaries. International ows of migrant workers, capital, political agitators, publications, cultures and public spheres are crucial to the histories of working classes in the modern world. Much can be gained by escaping from such connes. For all Thompsons great achievement, consider how much fuller is the picture of the late eighteenth century English working class that is presented in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redikers The Many-Headed Hydra (2000). Their argument for the existence of an Atlantic working class of sailors, labourers, slaves, freedmen and renegades linking Britain, West Africa, the Caribbean and North America has crucially expanded labour historians understanding of the seventeenth and eighteenth century world. It has drawn attention to the importance of understanding connections between continents and across different labouring groups, and the need to rediscover and rethink popular imaginations. The theoretical groundwork for such approaches was laid by important interrogations of the nation-state in the 1980s. By showing that the nation-state was a relatively recent phenomenon (Gellner 1983) based on imagined communities
constituted through print capitalism and other instrumentalities (Anderson 1991) and legitimised through invented traditions and the ideological work of military service and schooling (Hobsbawm 1990) social scientists and historians radically destabilised and denaturalised the nation state. In turn, these interventions made it much more possible for scholars to recognise the somewhat ctive character of the claims of the state, more generally, and the possibility that states could fail to make good these claims. For labour studies, this pointed to examining the relationship between changing state form and working-class movements, and questioning the view that empires and other types of state forms could be regarded as simply the prehistory of the nation-state. In a way, it was odd that labour historians had become so hypnotised by the nationstate, given that Marxism was so crucial to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Marxism was, in intent at least, an internationalist project, and Marx and Engels paean to the destructive and constructive powers of capitalism celebrated how commodities battered down Chinese Walls, denied that the proletariat had a fatherland, and, of course, famously proclaimed: Workers of All Countries Unite! The emergence of a historiography organised in largely national terms can be partly explained by the pragmatic reality of world politics, and by Lenins systematic re-orientation of Marxism towards strategic alliances with nationalist movements in the colonial and semi-colonial world. Aside from the revision of Marxs arguments this entailed (Warren 1982), and the difculty of reconciling class analysis with class alliances that must continually arise, the practical success of Lenins approach had the effect of making the national a central category within Marxist thought and politics.1 Nevertheless, there are notable works by Marxist historians that transcend approaches rooted in methodological nationalism. Perhaps most outstanding is Eric Hobsbawms (1977a, 1977b, 1987) great trilogy on the world of the long nineteenth century. Hobsbawms extraordinary portrait of the rise of a globally connected world is exemplary in the way in which it goes beyond national history. Its sensitivity to the cultural level of analysis, and its deep engagement with Latin American and Asian experiences in many ways anticipated the work of contemporary transnational historians. (It must be said though that subSaharan Africa remained something of a blind spot for the great historian.)
Thinking globally It is our view that labour history can benet greatly from the application of a more transnational approach. What would be different about the approach that we are suggesting? Perhaps it would be best to clear the ground by saying rst of all what we do not envisage.
Firstly, we do not want to adopt the slogan of World History (Pomper, Elphick and Vann 1998), which since at least the 1960s has been a fairly mainstream
branch of historiography (setting aside somewhat eccentric predecessors like Oswald Spengler (1926, 1928) and Arnold Toynbee (1960)). This trend did, as we do, seek to overcome parochialism, and it did produce some remarkable works of scholarship such as William H McNeills outstanding books on the global history of epidemic disease (1977) and of warfare (1983). However, even the most outstanding practitioners of World History, including McNeill, have tended to approach their task through the lens of analysis of Civilizations, which are usually dened through some form of cultural attributes. The difculty here is that, even in the hands of an able historian like McNeill, these world cultures seem to be monolithic, static, mutually exclusive and essentialised. It is striking that even in the work of an historian as great and innovative as Fernand Braudel (1982), the masters commitment to a notion of culturally intact civilization drove him eventually toward a distinctively protective posture towards French identity. The reductio ad absurdum of this approach is found in Samuel Huntingtons (1996) belief in an inevitable Clash of Civilizations. Moreover, when practised by less erudite and skilled historians than Braudel or McNeill, the project of a comprehensive history of the world can become overambitious, even farcical. Few historians can write with much plausibility about developments over a single century, let alone all human history. So, moving history outside national frameworks does not mean that one should make a hubristic attempt at comprehensiveness. Secondly, we are specically not advocating what has been the most inuential framework for global history in recent decades: the World Systems Theory (WST) of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). Wallerstein postulated that the expansion of Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century saw the creation of a single capitalist world system, one of a series of world systems: the modern world system was understood as a system of states, with a core in the West, a periphery subjected to the core by imperialism, and a semi-periphery of intermediate states that acted as agents of the core while striving for core status. Economic surpluses are drained to the core, enriching it at the expense of the other regions, which become underdeveloped. States can with difculty change their position within the world system, but the system persists. The objections to such a schema are so obvious that it is hard to understand the power that it has exercised over the minds of scholars. Its evident attraction is its very simplicity, as a universal explanation; the same simplicity is its weakness, too, for it posits a closed social analysis, conceived within a functionalist approach, and tends to operate through the static logic of system theory. It is difcult to see any room for resistance, for the role of ideas, or for ruptures in the structure (Adas 1998), while the meaning of the core idea, underdevelopment, is vague, shifting and very often tautological (Warren 1980). By displacing class exploitation within countries by international exploitation between countries, the framework displaces class, and perhaps more importantly, the role of class
struggles, from its analysis. The idea of nations remains relatively taken for granted and unexamined, and mapped onto the different regions. Many WST practitioners purport to be Marxist, yet the model of the world system is rooted not in a Marxist analysis of production, but rather in ows of trade (Brenner 1977; Laclau 1982), with the argument for exploitation between countries rooted, in the nal analysis, in the liberal theory of exploitation as monopoly pricing (Leys 1996). WST may be right, but it cannot be both right and Marxist, and the result is a radical theoretical incoherence. WST can only argue with great difculty that the Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, who initiated their modern world economy, were in any meaningful sense modern capitalists. With its vision of single systemic logic, WST is ill-equipped to analyse nonWestern empires, and unable to explain the rise of newly industrialised countries in late nineteenth, and again in the late twentieth century, world. Comparative studies of different countries have, on the other hand, a long and honourable tradition in the social sciences. By seeking to place two cases alongside one another, not only are we immediately led to question our assumptions and to look at what is similar and different in distinct historical contexts, but also our conceptual and empirical horizons are rapidly expanded. South African historians have, for example, almost universally accepted that super-exploited large-scale cyclical labour migrancy was a denitive feature of South African capitalism, and attributed this situation in large part to segregation and apartheid. However, as Philip Bonner (2004) has shown in a study of Indian and South African urbanisation, there are remarkable similarities in patterns of labour migrancy in the two countries, despite the general absence of any signicant state interventions in the colonial Indian labour market. This is one of several themes that Sumit Sakars article in this collection develops through a comparative discussion. Sakar notes, for example, that the interventions of the South African state in the elds of labour markets and social policy were far more extensive and ambitious than those undertaken in the British Raj: there was, for example, simply no equivalent in colonial India to South African-style township construction, social segregation and labour coercion. He cautions, consequently, against the tendency of some post-colonial theory to homogenise the colonial experience, and to downplay the importance of pre-colonial legacies. In India, unlike southern Africa, pre-colonial social stratication was extensive, and it was this that allowed the recruitment of a large labour force without direct interventions like land restrictions. Peter Alexanders contribution to this collection, which compares collieries in South Africa and India, makes the key point that female miners were almost unknown in South Africa as compared to India, and adds that daily pay for African miners was half of Indian miners. This suggests that the concept of cheap labour . . . involves a comparison with white South African labour, is parochial, and . . . should now be discarded (Alexander 2006:7).
Comparative approaches, in other words, help create the basis for a re-examination of some of the conventional wisdom in the eld. Perhaps some of the resistance of South African social scientists and historians to comparative work is based, though, on the important misunderstanding that comparing two situations entails making the case that they are somehow the same. This is absolutely not the case, for many of the most important comparative analyses are those that study different historical paths. A notable example is Barrington Moores (1987) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which explains the different routes that agrarian societies took to modernity, and their long-term political and social consequences. Similarly, Perry Andersons (1974) Lineages of the Absolutist State sought to explain the very different socioeconomic trajectories of eastern and western Europe. What constitutes a valid comparison? Some time ago, Mahmood Mamdani (1998) led a rather moralistic campaign about the need to place studies of South Africa in an African context. Whether one makes African or non-African comparisons should depend on the usefulness of the comparison to what one is studying, and the way it can illuminate particular issues. Thus, Jeremy Seekings comparison of the South African welfare system with those of Latin America, which appears in this collection, works exceptionally well because there is a sufcient degree of similarity and difference in the cases to make them illuminating. Allison Drews comparison of the agrarian engagement of Algerian and South African communists in this edition works so well because of the intellectual framing she gives it, rather than simply because the two cases examined are drawn from Africa. Similarly, Gay Seidmans (1994) comparison of the South African and Brazilian labour movements was productive given the comparable economic and social contexts. It would be difcult to compare the modern South African labour movement with that of a country without major industries. On the other hand, it is clear that in many areas for example popular culture, traditional authority and political democratisation comparisons between South Africa and other African countries are extremely illuminating. There is, in short, no moral obligation on researchers to accept certain forms of comparison, and refuse others. One way in which the growing scepticism about national histories can be extremely helpful is in developing international comparisons that take regional variation into account, rather than compare countries as a whole. Thus Peter Alexanders comparison of collieries has a keen sense of the social specicity of the region in which his Indian case is located, and of the distinctions between the Transvaal and Natal coal industries in South Africa. Similarly, while comparisons been South African and the United States as a whole can become rather unwieldy, a focused comparison of processes in particular regions can be very helpful: the career of segregation in the southern US and
South Africa have, for instance, been usefully compared by Greenberg (1980), Cell (1982) and others.
Transnational labour history We can now turn to transnational labour history. Let us offer a modest denition: transnational labour history does not assume that the nation-state is the necessary framework for historical analysis. It is interested in perspectives that move beyond the level of the nation to look at ows of people, commodities, ideas and organisations across national boundaries. It also considers the possibility that regions or cities within nation-states may have closer links with regions or cities lodged in other nation-states than with their own hinterlands. It does not seek to be comprehensive: rather it simply does not accept that its eld of enquiry should stop at the national border, or that a national unit is a self-evident, or necessarily a particularly useful unit of analysis. It argues for approaches that examine connections across countries, continents and cultures, for comparative studies, for transnational perspectives, and for rethinking the conceptual vocabulary of labour and workingclass history.
To say this is clearly not to pose a transnational perspective as the theoretical panacea for all historiographical problems. Nor does it suggest that the national is not a useful level of analysis, or deny that the nation-state and nationalism have been central forces in the modern period, or will remain powerful forces in any conceivable medium-term future. At the very least, a transnational view asks the scholar to hesitate before starting the analysis with the assumption that the nation-state is the relevant unit of analysis. And even the study of nationalism itself can benet from this, for one of the features of current historiography is its revelation of the way in which nationalisms form across national boundaries. For example, in his extraordinary book, Americana, James Dunkerley (2000) brilliantly illuminates the emergence of US and Latin American political identities in the mid-nineteenth century by treating both the North and South American continents as a single political arena, and by relating them in turn to political and cultural developments in Ireland, and elsewhere in Europe. What methodological benets might this sort of perspective bring to labour history? Firstly, it refocuses attention on the phenomenon of global migration. Of course, the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been continually re-shaped by mass migrations, of which working-class people were a central component. Now, a perspective that emphasises national labour histories can lead to the idea that migration simply involves a ow of workers from country A to country B, where they assimilate and form a component of the national working class. The reality, however, is more complex, as migrants often cling tenaciously to political identities from their place of origin, and infuse these into movements in the host country. Not only, for example, did radicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century US draw in large numbers of
immigrants, but they also communicated with them through a polyglot press. Thus, the rst anarchist daily newspaper in the world seems to have been the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language paper published in Chicago in the 1880s, which was then called the second largest German city in the world (Bekken 1995). Moreover, migration is often oscillating or lateral, rather than simply a move from country A to country B. Migrants dream of returning to their home country and often do so, and others move between several countries in the course of their migration. Thus, for example, at the beginning of the Witwatersrand mining industry, not only did many Cornish miners return to their families in Cornwall after several years on the Rand, but there was also a constant ow of Cornish miners between South Australia, West Australia, southern Africa, and western America: more adventurous Cornishmen could be found down mines from Malaya to Bolivia. Migration is a process, without a necessary national end point. One phenomenon that is now starting to receive more adequate attention, partly as a result of a more transnational outlook, is nineteenth and twentieth century Chinese and Indian indentured labour. The institution of this system in the backwash of the British Empires abolition of slavery had signicant effects on South Africa and in many other regions of the world. Whether one agrees with Hugh Tinkers (1974) famous contention that this was A New System of Slavery, or whether one accepts the more optimistic view that indenture played a signicant role in enabling labourers to accumulate capital and begin breaking out of a semifeudal village life (Northrup 1995), it clearly entailed vast mortality, suffering and social disruption. It is not generally recognised that the number of coolies shipped around the world was comparable to the numbers transported in the African slave trade. Indenture deserves a much more central place in labour history, and including indenture starts to raise signicant questions about how labour and the working class are dened, and to what extent free labour is characteristic of industrial modernity. Secondly, a transnational perspective leads to a reassessment of labours political movements. The present authors have sought to make a contribution to this project in their other work. Lucien van der Walt (1999, 2004), for example, has shown that the early twentieth century South African labour movements ideologies and actions cannot be understood without due attention to the global impact of anarchist and syndicalist ideologies and movements, often brought to South Africa by migrants and spread through an international press. This has been almost entirely ignored by South African labour historians. By placing South African developments in a global context, and examining the importance of transnational connections and inuences, Jonathan Hyslop (1999), too, has mounted a case that the trade unions of British immigrants in the same era are best understood as part of an imperial working class which straddled the British Empire.
This reassessment is especially necessary in relation to the history of Communism. Writers sympathetic to communist parties have emphasised the rootedness of their ideologies and activities in national struggles and conditions (for example, Isserman 1982), while their critics have stressed the heavy hand of Moscow through the Communist International (Comintern), the Cominform and funding (for example Klehr, Haynes and Firsov 1995). Both approaches are narrow and one-sided: the weight of evidence of tight connections between communist parties and the Soviet Union is overwhelming, and communist ideology stressed the importance of these links; on the other hand, the parties only became signicant where they were able to make genuine connections with national and local social grievances, cultural traditions and political struggles. It is useful, then, to understand Communism from a transnational perspective that recognises its parties were simultaneously shaped by both their relation to the Soviet Union and their national contexts. The work of Geoff Eley (2002) is distinguished amongst historians of the left for striking this sort of equilibrium on this issue. Thirdly, transnational labour history opens up exciting and illuminating possibilities in micro-history and biographical research. A transnational perspective poses key methodological issues, and it is striking that some of the greatest insights into global processes can be gleaned from a study of individual lives. In particular, following an individual travelling labour activist as he or she moves around the world illuminates complex global networks and ows of ideas. Karen Hunts article in this edition provides an excellent example of what can be accomplished here. By looking at Dora Monteore, a British socialist and feminist who travelled the world of the imperial working class, Hunt shows how ideas and movements can be (re)shaped by experiences in different, yet interconnected, contexts. A key work is Benedict Andersons (2005) study of the anarchist-inuenced Filipino revolutionary intellectuals of the late nineteenth century. Anderson brilliantly shows the extraordinary personal linkages in the 1890s between the left in Europe, the rebellion against the Spanish in Cuba, and the wars of the Philippine rebels against both Spanish colonists and American liberators. (He also notes how the Anglo-Boer War, a key moment in South Africa, became a key symbol of anti-imperialist resistance worldwide at the time.) Fourthly, following from the previous point, a transnational approach highlights the point that not nation-states, but empires, have been the typical state form over the past centuries (Stoler and Cooper 1997). Until the First World War, the empires of the British, French and Dutch (and their feebler Austro-Hungarian, Portuguese, Russian and Ottoman rivals) bestrode the world, and it was only after the Second World War that formal empires (like the Soviet Union) became rarities, rather than the norm. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, labour must be understood in imperial, not national, contexts. Passports were rarely used before the First World War (Torpey 2000), one indication of the relative unimportance of national types of state: indeed, it was considerably easier for workers to move around the world before 1914 than it is today. It is thoroughly
anachronistic for labour historians to project current national structures back in time. Fifthly, oceanic history must be an important component of contemporary history beyond national boundaries. Braudels (19723) great work on the Mediterranean is an important starting point, showing how maritime space can provide the arena for a dense social and economic overlapping of political entities. This insight has already been applied to the Atlantic Ocean with considerable effect (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000), and is now being mobilised in the labour history of the Indian Ocean (for example, Metcalf 2007). In turn, the more serious interest in oceanic contexts has been associated with a lively historiography that seeks to understand the world of the ship as a world of work (Dening 1992; Ewald 2000). The ship has been an important site of social life, and especially labour action, in the making of our world, as well as an important carrier of ideas and movements. Sixthly, and perhaps paradoxically, a transnational perspective leads us back to a focus on the city. The metropolis is often more connected to metropolises in other cities than to its own hinterland. As Ferguson (2006) memorably puts it, in Africa capital (and labour!) does not so much ow as hop. This means, at one level, that due attention needs to be paid to variation within countries; at another, it means taking cities seriously as cosmopolitan sites, as nodes in transnational networks, and as sites of state power and class formation. It is worth asking whether we are not perhaps coming to inhabit, in some regions at least, a world of weak states and strong cities, rather like late-medieval Europe. Merely concentrating masses of people into shared workplaces and neighbourhoods in large cities does not, however, necessarily imply class unity. Cosmopolitan contexts can as easily accentuate differences as limit their signicance: it is striking, for example, that it was in South Africa, and not India, that the expatriate Mohandas Gandhi came to see himself as rst, and foremost, an Indian (Markovits 2004:81). In understanding these dynamics, it is important to consider the complicated role of cosmopolitan centres as forcing houses of ideas, as nodes in networks, and as sites of both competition and cooperation in the popular classes. Finally, a transnational perspective has an important role to play in the very necessary task of rescuing labour history from what has undoubtedly been a very strong tendency to economistic forms of analysis. Although EP Thompson was extremely sensitive to the impact of literature and religion on the working class, and although Herbert Gutman (1976) made a powerful case for the centrality of culture to labour history, their successors have not always taken these points sufciently on board. While the Wits History Workshop has had a strong commitment to issues of popular culture, we have not been sufciently sensitive to issues like literacy, and its social and political impact. And some labour studies have been balefully economistic, treating workers as lacking any interest in such issues as ethnic identity, religion, sexuality, chiey politics, sports, language or reading.
The work of Karl Polanyi (1991) is enjoying something of a vogue in labour studies, in part because of his rejection of liberal economics. Yet Polanyis larger point is that society is never purely structured by economic relations: interactions need to be understood in radically social terms, and not reduced to the economy or politics. With the great acceleration of communications and transport in the nineteenth century (Bayly 2004) and the contemporary compression of time and space (Harvey 1991), it is important to recognise that the ow of ideas cannot conceivably be understood in terms of the cultural production of a single country, or simply as the result of an autonomous and pure national process. To understand the social worlds of labour in a given place, we need to study popular culture, but to situate this within a cultural arena formed by ideas owing across international boundaries, in relation to the manner in which different medias circulate them, and, again, in relation to the ways in which people reinterpret them in specic contexts. In the contemporary situation we as historians need to start thinking more systematically about the way in which the Internet is changing worlds of labour. The sociologist of religion Olivier Roy (2006) has, for instance, recently argued that the Internet is the key site where new militant Islamic ideologies are formed. And religious formations are of course eminently global with their claims to universal community, in the reach and technological sophistication of their propaganda: sometimes harnessed to nationalism, religious aspirations can also subvert the nation-state project with claims to a global community and project.
South African labour, or labour in South(ern) Africa? A transnational perspective can make an important contribution to the labour history of southern Africa, where scholarship on labour history is unevenly developed in the region, concentrated in South Africa, and generally been placed within the framework of the nation-state. Labour history in South Africa has derived from two main traditions: activist and scholarly work. Activist writing on labour, largely produced outside of academia, goes back to the 1920s. The earliest work came from white labour (Gitsham and Trembath 1926; Walker and Weinbren 1961), followed by writings by Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) members in the 1940s (Andrews 1941; Cope c.1943; Harrison n.d.; Roux [1944] 1993), Trotskyist analyses in the 1950s (notably Majeke 1952; Mnguni 1952; Tabata 1950; for a partial overview, see Nasson 1990), and a wave of works by writers associated with the CPSAs successor, the South African Communist Party (SACP) from the 1950s onwards (for example, Bunting 1975; Forman [1959] 1992; Lerumo 1971; Simons and Simons 1969 [1983]; for a partial overview, see Drew 1997).2
Leaving aside a few liberal analyses of labour that had some historical content (Horrell 1969), the scholarly tradition of labour history emerged in the 1970s in British and South African universities, and was inuenced by Marxism and
class analysis. This revisionist literature challenged older liberal approaches that emphasised the negative effects of apartheid and segregation on South African capitalism: in its starkest formulations, the revisionists portrayed the racial order as nothing but a function of capitalist imperatives, with capitalism supposedly unable to function without apartheid (Johnstone 1970; Legassick 1974; Wolpe 1972). The impact of structuralist approaches in the 1970s was also evident in the use of Nicos Poulantzas analysis of state policy as shaped by fractions of capital (Davies, Kaplan, Morris and OMeara 1976), the use of WST (Bundy 1979; Legassick 1977), and also a tendency to read labour history off labour processes (Lewis 1984). In large part as a response to the structuralists failure to examine popular agency and consciousness (Bonner 1994), and in contrast to the old labour history focus of much of the activist literature, the late 1970s saw the blossoming of a local social history in the Thompsonian mode, which stressed experience and culture (the key works would include Bonner, Hofmeyr and James 1989; Bonner, Delius and Posel 1993; Bozzoli 1979, 1983, 1987; Bozzoli and Delius 1990; Beinart, Delius and Trapido 1986; Marks and Rathbone 1982; Marks and Trapido 1987; Van Onselen 1982a, 1982b; for overviews, see Bonner 1994; Bozzoli and Delius 1990; Saunders 1988). The Wits History Workshop, formed in 1977 and focused on the Witwatersrand, was the main organised expression of this shift, but only one of several social history initiatives at the time. The new labour history developed as part of this social history project. In contrast to the functionalism and reductionism of the structuralists, the social historians stressed contingency, contradictions, ruptures and the reconstruction of history from below. What both the activist and revisionist traditions, structuralists and social historians alike, shared was a tendency to write the history of labour in South Africa as a specically South African labour history. Of course, both traditions were well aware of the importance of international processes and connections in shaping a South African society, and routinely made implicit or explicit comparisons between South Africa and other countries, generally with the emphasis on the exceptional character of South Africa. Attention to the global was inevitable, given that the industrial revolution on the Witwatersrand in the late nineteenth century was spurred on the one hand by foreign direct investment in the rst globalisation lasting roughly from the 1880s to the 1920s; on the other, it developed in tandem with the expansion of British and Portuguese imperial power in the region. It was also recognised, to some degree that the working class that emerged in South Africa was a multinational and multiracial one, drawn from across southern Africa, the British Empire and beyond. South African capitalism was embedded in a regional political economy, and in regional, as well as transcontinental, labour markets. In addition, there were several fruitful applications of revisionist perspectives elsewhere in southern Africa, most notably Mozambique (for example,
Harries 1994; Penvenne 1984, 1995) and Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia, notably Palmer and Parsons 1977; Phimister 1988; Phimister and Van Onselen 1979; Ranger 1970; Van Onselen 1976). Nonetheless, activist and revisionist scholars tended to take South Africa as the unit of analysis, and to examine labour history as South African labour history. Cross-border connections were examined largely from the perspective of their contribution to South African history; the regional labour markets were examined largely in terms of their importance to South African labour employers. The white unionists noted international inuences on the emergence of union traditions, but treated this as a passing phase before the mature period of a specically South African movement acting on a South African stage (Gitsham and Trembath 1926:11). The CPSA writers agreed, while many Trotskyists adopted an overtly nationalist narrative, with 300 years of oppression (Mnguni 1952) leading to the awakening of a people (Tabata 1950). SACP writers likewise framed matters in a national framework, adding a large dash of teleology: the two streams of class and national movements merged, apparently inevitably, in the 1950s when the CPSA/SACP allied with the nationalist African National Congress (ANC) (Bunting 1975; Forman [1959] 1992; Simons and Simons [1969] 1983). CPSA and SACP writers were, of course, well aware that the rise of Communism was closely linked to the rise of the Soviet Union, and shaped by that state. However, they stressed the national character of the party and its rootedness in the struggles of our people. There were substantial overlaps between SACP and nationalist ANC historiography (for a sophisticated example, sees Meli 1988; for an overview, see Lodge 1990). For the SACP writers, not only was the CPSAs 1928 adoption of the Native Republic thesis stressing the immediate task as a struggle against feudalism and imperialism, for the creation of a non-racial bourgeois society, rather than socialism not imposed by Moscow, but was supposedly actually largely initiated by CPSA members (Simons and Simons [1969] 1983:405; Bunting 1993). This is a typical example of the trend of pro-communist writers to stress the national character of parties. The same limitations were clear in the revisionist historiography. The social historians were accused by the structuralists of failing to move beyond culturalist and local studies to examine the larger political economy (Morris 1987; Murray 1989). However, with a few exceptions (notably Legassick 1977) the structuralists took the larger political economy as a national and South African formation. To the extent that there was an attempt by the structuralists to discuss southern Africa as a unit, the emphasis was on South Africas dominant role. WST ideas of unequal exchange played some role in these approaches, with the corollary that the region was analysed in terms of competing states, rather than viewed from the vantage point of empire, or examined as a unit with dynamics that were not simply the sum of (national) parts.
The structuralist charge that the social historians eschewed theory was not very well founded. The Wits History Workshop project, at least, was explicitly concerned with examining the signicance of popular struggles for the system of racial capitalism, and of using local cases to inform larger models (see, for instance, Bonner, Delius and Posel 1993; Bozzoli 1979, 1983, 1987; Marks and Trapido 1987). Nonetheless, the generalisations developed by the social historians were themselves typically posed at the level of South Africa, rather than, for example, southern Africa. If, however, the popular classes sprawled across the borders of South Africa, and if their experiences, ideas and struggles were not conned by borders, then it is not clear why generalisations from social history should have been made largely at the national level. Given that the popular classes in South Africa were not necessarily South African, and that South Africa was part of a regional political economy and enmeshed within a web of major transnational linkages, it is striking that a general history from below of the region was not developed. While South Africa was compared to other countries or regions within countries, as noted above, it is striking that there were almost no comparative analyses of labour within southern Africa (for an exception, see Phimister 1977), or a social history synthesis that grappled with the fact of a southern African, rather South African, working class. This was the state of play by the mid-1990s, when labour history in South Africa went into a sharp decline. Besides the international factors that affected labour history worldwide at this time, there were also local factors that came into play: the end of apartheid removed much of the oppositional political energy that fed into revisionist writing, and the lack of direction coincided with a series of critical onslaughts on revisionist approaches for failing to seriously engage with race and its meanings (Posel, Hyslop and Nieftagodien 2001), for forcing social history into a teleological history of anti-apartheid resistance (Minkley and Rassool 1998), and for remaining a largely white intellectual project (Bonner 1994; Bozzoli and Delius 1990; Worger 1991). Finally, the post-apartheid states project of creating a new, ofcial, national (and nationalist) history limited the space for revisionist history. On the one hand many of the themes of revisionist history have been incorporated into this new history; on the other, the record of history from below has often been forced into a monolithic narrative of a single struggle (the struggle), supposedly led throughout by the ANC (for examples of this genre, see Magubane 2004, 2006). As Martin Legassick documented in an important paper at the 2006 conference, which will be published elsewhere, this has involved heavy-handed ofcial control of work by independent scholars that has been commissioned for the new history.
Southern Africa, Latin America and North Africa The fortunes of labour history have changed in recent years, with a growing output of work dealing with both the pre-industrial and industrial periods in South Africa, as well as in the larger region. Some of this work has challenged the CPSA and SACP versions of the history of the left through the recovery of alternative left traditions and an examination of the social history of local Communism (Drew 2002; Hirson and Hirson 2005; Hirson with Williams 1995; Van der Walt 1999, 2004). Comparative analysis, which played a role in the older labour history (in addition to earlier citations, see Cooper 1991; Trapido 1971) has been revitalised, with more attention to other parts of the British Empire, Africa and Latin America (see Alexander and Halpern 2000, 2004; Bonner 2004; Greenstein 1998; Mamdani 1996; Marx 1998). Labour and social history have revived in other parts of southern Africa, often in response to the resurgence of labour movements in the 1990s, notably for Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia, Larmer 2007) and Zimbabwe (see, inter alia, Raftopolous and Phimister 1997; Raftopolous and Yoshikuni 1999). If the increasing isolation of South Africa from the 1940s played an important role in the somewhat parochial outlooks, it may be that the current globalisation has played a role in the widening horizons of current labour history.
The implications of applying a transnational perspective to labour history in South Africa and southern Africa are considerable, and in the remaining section we will indicate several areas where such a perspective may be fruitfully applied. One area is that of labour markets, which we touched on above. The racial wage gap on South African mines is well known, and it has also been noted that as early as the 1890s wages for skilled miners in what became South Africa were generally double (and sometimes ve times higher) than the wages of comparable categories in mining areas elsewhere (Katz 1994:67, 75-7). This process has often been explained in largely South African terms, as a response to the high cost of living, the bargaining power and aspirations of the whites, and employer strategies. However, a transnational perspective suggests this is too simplistic: unlike other white dominions in the British Empire, the South African state not only did not subsidise European immigration, but actively frustrated it, and white immigration was close to a net loss by the 1920s (Bradlow 1990:178 186, 192 193). The result was that employers in South Africa had to compete with other regions through unusually high wages. The peculiarities of South African immigration policy are, at one level, to be explained by reference to Afrikaner-English divisions amongst whites, and the anti-immigration policies of Afrikaner nationalists. At another level, however, the imperial context must be taken as central, for the South African state, alone in colonial southern Africa, had dominion status.3 This allowed state managers to defy imperial immigration policy, and to move towards important-substitutionindustrialisation (ISI) policies in the 1920s. This was thirty years before most other African countries, but closely paralleled the policy shifts in contemporary
Latin America to which some commentators (Cooper 1991; De Noon 1983; Seidman 1994) have noted. If, as Mamdani claimed, there were substantial parallels between British imperial systems of indirect rule and South African apartheid (Mamdani 1996), then, it would be a grave mistake to treat South Africa as simply a typical African colony; at the same time, the specicities of South Africa are nonetheless closely linked to its particular insertion within the imperial system. The existence of a large white working class, including many poor whites, is also sometimes regarded as an important element of South African exceptionalism. Again, a transnational perspective raises questions about this assumption. There were substantial white working classes in Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe; in Mozambique, whites were heavily concentrated in unskilled work (Capela 1981); and in Southern Rhodesia, a poor White problem concerned ofcials in the 1920s (Morrel 1992).
Migration, Regional Struggles and the Movement of Ideas As Van der Walts article in this collection shows, moreover, these white working classes were interconnected through migration (the opening up of mines to the north of South Africa was crucial), and that there was a spread of repertoires of struggle and organisational models throughout the region: the segregationist South African Labour Party, launched in 1910, was, for example, only the forerunner of a series of such parties in the region that were inuenced by White Labourism. This was, in turn, profoundly inuenced by the White Australia policy and the segregationist policies of the Australian Labor Party, ideas that were transmitted into South Africa by immigrants (Hyslop 1999). The 1922 Rand Revolt, so ably discussed in Jeremy Kriklers recent study (2005), was, Van der Walt suggests, not only part of the international labour militancy of the late 1910s and early 1920s, but also the peak of a regional wave of black and white workers struggles across southern Africa that has not been previously recognised.
The growth of Chinese indentured labour on the mines in South Africa in the early twentieth century is another important dimension of these regional and international struggles over labour supplies and wage levels. Brought in by the British from 1903 to 1907, the 60,000 indentured workers were to break the post-Anglo-Boer War shortage of African labour that amounted to an informal strike. The Chinese question was absolutely central to the rise of White Labourism in southern Africa in the twentieth century, which was inuenced by Australias ban on Chinese and Polynesian labour in 1900. Interestingly, as Kally Forrests contribution to this collection notes, an Australian connection plays an important role in the contemporary labour movement in South Africa. Her article, which draws attention to another fascinating example of the trafc of ideas and actors across borders, examines how the (predominantly
African) National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) sought to reposition itself on the eve of the demise of apartheid in the 1990s. Frustrated with ongoing adversarial conicts with employers, Numsa leaders sought to promote worker control of production, skills development and advancement through tripartite forums as a road to socialism. The main model that informed this approach was provided by Australian labour; Australian union personnel were drafted in to reposition the unions, in a fascinating parallel to the Australian connection of a century before. Now, if the white working class in southern Africa had a large immigrant component, was inuenced by ideas from abroad, and existed as a regional force, at what point can we start to speak of a South African white working class? The 1920s would seem to mark an important moment in the nationalisation of white labour: not only did a national level class compromise get forged after 1922, but immigration fell sharply, white labour became increasingly stabilised in families, and the state began to move towards systematic social policy and mass education (on these developments, see Lange 2003:12, 79, 153157). Internationally, it is also worth noting, the 1920s arguably marked the onset of a period in which working-class people and movements were increasingly nationalised elsewhere, through factors like mass schooling, national class compromises, and the increasingly closed national economies that were characteristic of the period into the 1970s. Seekings article is interesting in this regard, as it begins to examine the relationship between class struggles and social policy. Comparisons with Latin America are notably rare in South African studies, but as Seekings shows, can be most illuminating. Argentina had a fairly similar economic structure to South Africa, and a similar path to industrialisation. However, South Africas welfare system is rather unusual amongst semi-industrial countries, including those of Latin America, for it centres on tax-nanced non-contributory grants, rather than social insurance schemes. The potential for this divergence arose, in large part, from the character of the South African state created in 1910: it was a far more effective and bureaucratic state apparatus than its Argentinean counterpart, and able to raise public revenue more effectively. This, we might add, was the result of the imperial state engineering after 1902. However, Seekings stresses, it was the different character of labour struggles, the political landscape and the structure of the ruling group that was critical to the divergence between the two cases. South African policy-makers, in addition, evinced a concern for managing poor whites and maintaining racial order that was absent in Argentina. While the majority of the poor in Argentina were regarded as white, this was not seen as necessitating special interventions, and was not understood as a poor white problem. To this we might add the point that Latin America indicates that large-scale white immigration need not translate into the development of a
labour aristocracy: in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Brazil, for instance, white immigrants undercut black wages (Andrews 1988), quite the reverse of the South African scenario. We know, in short, surprisingly little about how state policy reshaped white working-class cultures, identities, and imaginaries in Africa in the twentieth century, and probably even less about the situation for other layers of workers. In large part this is because the assumption that labour in South Africa equals South African labour has prevented the question of the nationalisation of labour being posed at all. When people speak of the South African labour movement as a self-evident category, they do not always recognise that the rst truly countrywide union federations in South Africa only emerged by the early 1950s, with the South African Trades and Labour Council and the South African Congress of Trade Unions.4 Related to this, it is also worthy emphasising that very little is known about the role of working-class reading cultures and publics in the period of the rst globalisation, or in the period of de-globalisation that followed. Print media may, Sakar suggests, have played a relatively limited role in working-class movements in South Africa, as compared to India, with its early development of a mass popular press. The rise (and fall) of the working-class press in South Africa (and southern Africa) is, however, an issue that has only recently begun to be explored (Visser 2004), and there are enormous gaps in our understanding. The Indian case suggests important contrasts, which could be fruitfully explored. Comparisons between southern Africa and Latin America seem, then, a fruitful avenue for further research, and North Africa also seems eminently suitable for such comparisons. Algeria, a settler colony with the second largest white population in Africa, has only rarely been compared to South Africa. Drews paper is quite groundbreaking in examining the different trajectories of Algerian and South African Communism. Drew steers a path that avoids the simple dichotomy of domination by, or autonomy from, Moscow, and stresses the importance of the timing of the implementation of sectarian New Line policies in the late 1920s in each country, the different ways in which the policies were understood and implemented, and the way in which the local context conditioned the ability of communists to organise in the rural areas. Such comparisons could be extended to other periods of left and labour history: like South Africa (van der Walt, 1999; 2004), African countries like Egypt had signicant anarchist and syndicalist inuences before the 1920s (see Gorman 2005; Khuri-Makdisi 2003). Drews paper highlights the importance of examining the interaction between global and local factors in the shaping of political traditions, and underlines the importance of a more transnational understanding of traditions like Communism. We noted above, for example, that SACP writers have stressed the autonomy and initiative of the party with regard to the Native Republic thesis, which was adopted along with the New Line. Clearly, this approach is too simplistic: the Native
Republic thesis was the South African variant of the two-stage policy implemented by the Comintern throughout what was called the colonial and semi-colonial world, and it is exceedingly unlikely that the Cominterns global policies were decisively shaped by the views of a section of the small CPSA. On the other hand, the Native Republic thesis was amenable to many interpretations: in the 1940s, for instance, party journals like Vryheid-Freedom debated whether the policy really entailed two stages at all, or, if so, whether Afrikaner nationalism was a possible ally for the rst stage, or whether the CPSA should lead both stages. Local context clearly played an important role, and it is perhaps not accidental that the Native Republic was reformulated as Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) in the 1950s. While the Native Republic thesis stressed the struggle against British imperialism, CST described black South Africa as the internal colony of white South Africa, which effectively removed the British Empire from the agenda. The two-stage approach was maintained, in other words, but the antiimperialist element of the policy was transposed from the empire to South Africa. This shift took place in the 1950s, at the height of de-globalisation, the collapse of the empire, with a white republic on the horizon, the Comintern dissolved and the white working class (and perhaps the African working class as well?) increasingly nationalised. It is by placing the question of empire centre-stage, as part of a larger transnational focus that we are alerted to such shifts, shifts that are often hidden by a more narrowly national focus on South Africa. This allows us to rethink the way in which the social and ideological worlds of labour evolve and change, but never entirely as an endogenous national process. The migration of white labour northwards from South Africa was paralleled by the migration of coloured workers from South Africa into Namibia (formerly South West Africa), Swaziland and Zimbabwe, as well as by the migration of African workers across the region. The movement of Africans across the region, with roots going back to the pre-industrial period, has been examined by various authors (for example, Harries 1994; Katzenellenbogen 1982; Van Onselen 1976; Vellut 1983; Yudelman and Jeeves 1986). Nonetheless, this work has often been structured by the image of South Africas labour empire (Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman 1991). This has the merit of highlighting South Africas predominance in the migrant labour system, but carries the danger of suggesting a narrow focus on South Africa, and of seeing migrant labour as a specically South African device, part of a distinctive cheap labour system (Alexander and Halpern 2004:10). A more transnational perspective suggests important qualications to such approaches, and the need to examine the eminently transnational process of African migrancy on a larger scale than the vantage point provided by a particular
state. Structuralist accounts have portrayed the African migrant labour system as engineered from above, and as characterised by systematic labour control and coercion. However, a striking feature of the regional political economy was precisely the disjuncture between labour markets and states, and the absence of any single organisation that could control regional labour ows. The different colonial states competed with one another for labour, as did employers in different sectors, and in different regions within countries. It was partly in response to this situation that corporations established supranational labour recruitment bodies, notably the South African-based Native Recruitment Corporation (NRC) and Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA).These, too, however, did not have a truly regional control. The NRC and WNLA were quickly emulated by rival capitalists across the region, who formed competing bodies on the South African model: the Rhodesian Native Labour Board (RNLB) was consciously modelled on the NRC and WNLA (Van Onselen 1979:93), and the same seems true of the South West African Native Labour Association (SWANLA) (Moorson 1978). If mining in Kimberley was the template for labour controls on the Witwatersrand, then the Witwatersrand was in turn the template for labour controls throughout southern Africa. By examining the regional labour system from the vantage point of South Africa, and by viewing racial capitalism as a monolithic topdown process, scholars have sometimes ignored the rather disorganised character of African labour recruitment that a regional perspective reveals, as well as the fact that racial capitalism was less distinctively South African than characteristic of southern Africa as a whole. Now, precisely because there was no general regional mechanism to direct ows of African labour, African workers were able to navigate competing claims on their labour power in search of the best jobs across the region. Charles van Onselen (1976, 1979) memorably examined this process in Zimbabwe, and far more needs to be known about it in other contexts, as well as the way it played out at a regional level at different times. A narrow focus on South Africa as a distinctively low wage capitalist economy ignores the point that, in the regional context, the Witwatersrand mines provided, on the contrary, the best paid jobs (Van Onselen 1979), and, in addition, fails to recognise that racial wage gaps on the mines were highest, not in South Africa, but Zambia (see Meebelo 1986). The regional dimensions of the labour market and migrant labour system are not fully understood, and far more needs to be known about the role and signicance of migration outside of ofcial channels like the NRC, WNLA, RNLB and SWANLA, as well as migration outside of mining, like rural-to-rural circular migration. The labour history of agriculture is not well developed in southern Africa, particularly outside of South Africa, and Wazha Morapedis contribution to this collection is to be welcomed. Morapedi examines farm labour in Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) on predominantly white-owned commercial farms, and
develops a comparison with farm labour in South Africa. His analysis examines the signicance of different labour markets within the country, of competition with South African mines, the use of migrant labour, the role of ethnicity in the labour process, interaction of the worst sort of white South African farm exploitation with indigenous Botswana ethnic discrimination. Cross-border migration, by its very nature, is not easily studied on a country-bycountry basis, while close attention to varying wage zones within as well as between countries cautions against assuming that the different colonies were internally homogenous in terms of levels of economic development or state capacity. The boundaries of the colonial states were not only often quite arbitrary, but the borders were often very porous and commonly ignored, evaded or transgressed by Africans. We have repeatedly used the term transnational, which still suggests the centrality of the national, but the extreme variations within different countries in southern Africa must also be noted. Given the fractured legal systems involved in indirect rule and apartheid (Mamdani 1996), and uneven economic development within countries, it may be worth thinking of the signicance of internal labour migration across internal borders within countries: the experience of migration from the Eastern Cape reserves to Johannesburg could, arguably, be as signicant as that of migration from Gaza in Mozambique. It was noted earlier that white labour migration into South Africa was important to the transmission of union traditions, White Labourism, anarchism and syndicalism; it could be added that immigrants were also central to the communist parties of South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s (Drew 2002) and Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s (Lessing 1995). Southern Africas integration into regional and international labour markets enabled a constant circulation of ideas and linkages into ideas circulating in labour and left circles worldwide in the period of the rst globalisation. At the same time, the regional labour market was fractured and racialised, and different ethnic groups laid claim to particular occupations, which partly accounts for what Van der Walt describes as the tendency of ideas, organisational models and repertoires of struggles to ow along ethnic and racial conduits (although radical and internationalist left traditions could burst out of these channels). Colonisation and capitalism in Africa created new transnational connections, and international diasporas and networks of various types. George Gonas article in this collection explores examples of both in colonial East Africa, and draws the lessons of an older history of regional unionism for current labour movement strategies. He shows that the labour movement in the region assumed a regional character from the 1920s to the 1950s, and that migrants and travelling organisers played an important role in linking workers movements in the different colonies. The East African Trade Union Congress (EATUC) formed in Kenya in 1949 organised a wide variety of occupations, and, strikingly, set out to organise
labour in Uganda and Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) as well. The ethos of this union tradition was anti-colonialist but internationalist, and Indian workers a signicant component of the East African labour force played a prominent role, most notably the self-declared communist Makhan Singh. African migrant labour and migrant networks also played a critical role in the spread of subversive and transformative ideas over a vast area. Religion provides one example. In 1903, for example, a labour migrant from Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) called Elliot Kamwana was introduced to Jehovah Witness (Watch Tower) doctrines while working in Cape Town. From 1906 Kamwana preached an apocalyptic Watch Tower doctrine in Malawi, recruiting thousands. Kamwana was later exiled, but Watch Tower spread, largely through migrant networks, into the mining compounds of Zimbabwe, and subsequently into Zambia and the Republic of the Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo) (McCracken 2000; Phimister 1988; Ranger 1970; Raftopoulous and Phimister 1997). It is difcult to believe that Watch Tower did not get entangled with that other important labour current in southern Africa, and in which Malawian networks also played a central role: the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa, or ICU. Van der Walt notes that the ICU, itself inuenced by currents brought from abroad like Garveyism and syndicalism, was in many ways a transnational movement operating across southern Africa, paralleling in some ways the EATUC in East Africa. Certainly, shifts and cross fertilisation between religious and trade union dispositions have been common ever since throughout southern Africa, with the role of a church background, for instance, in the development of skills in oratory and organising an issue that merits closer examination. The overlap between religious traditions and labour organising is an area that remains largely unexplored, and an examination of the spread across borders of popular religious traditions, amongst workers of all races, provides an excellent way in which to explore the transnational formations and connections of working classes. The social history of unions and parties, more generally, is not well developed in southern Africa, where old labour history, focused on organisations, policies and leaders, has tended to predominate. The interaction between labour and left currents in South Africa and elsewhere was complicated and interactive, and the balance of inuence of transnational, national and other factors varied over time. Not only was the ofcial imperial ideology of empire (which is often not taken seriously enough) appropriated and reworked by subject peoples (Ranger 1983), but so, too, were international labour and left traditions.
Conclusion This introduction has argued for a labour history that takes regional and transnational processes seriously, and for situating South Africa in southern Africa, and southern Africa in the larger world. In eschewing what Van der Linden
calls methodological nationalism, and thinking about a southern African, rather than a South African, working class (Bond, Miller and Ruiters 2001), and in noting that working classes and working-class movements are not forged in autonomous national contexts, we emphasised connections and comparisons. While our discussion has raised questions about cheap labour, migrancy and their relationship to social imaginations, we have left the question of the conceptual vocabulary of labour studies open. This article is a contribution to opening transnational labour history, not its conclusion.
Notes 1. Indeed, many contemporary Marxists seem to regard progressive or anti-imperialist nationalist movements as intrinsically radical, an approach that can sometimes be used to support some of the most reprehensible regimes, like that of Robert Mugabe. 2. The work of Baruch Hirson, exiled South African Trotskyist, on the history of labour and the left, can also be usefully placed within the activist tradition: for a partial compilation, see Hirson and Hirson (2005) and also see Hirson (1989). 3. Only Southern Rhodesia, with the achievement of self-government in 1923, came close to the South African experience, and was able to make early protectionist economic policies by the 1930s (Phimister 1988; also see Bond, Miller and Ruiters 2001). Protectionist policies were adopted in Mozambique in the 1910s, but largely as a result of initiatives by Portugal itself (see Capela 1981; Penvenne 1995). 4. While the South African Industrial Federation was formed in 1914, the Cape Federation of Labour remained outside the fold of this federation and its successors for nearly forty years. Neither the Federation of Non-European Trade Unions, formed in 1927, nor later bodies like the Council of Non-European Trade Unions were countrywide (national) federations.
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Labour History: The Old, the New and the Global

Marcel van der Linden
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
I EP Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class was a landmark publication for the discipline of social history. David Brody (2005:15) rightly concluded that this work, rst published in 1963, provided the new labour history with a model it sorely needed: Thompsons great book, by emphasising culture and consciousness, transformed labour history into working-class history, once its message was assimilated. In the English-speaking world, Thompsons book was the most important signpost marking the transition from the so-called old labour history to the new one. A broad consensus exists nowadays about the nature of the transition.1 The Old Labour History was institutional, focused on the description of organisational developments, political debates, leaders and strikes. It was represented by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Wisconsin School of John Commons and others, and also by Marxists like Philip Foner. The New Labour History attempted to contextualise workers struggles. As Eric Hobsbawm put it, it accentuated the working classes as such ... and the economic and technical conditions that allowed labour movements to be effective, or which prevented them from being effective (Hobsbawm 1964:4).
The differences between Old and New Labour History are often exaggerated, because in the Old Labour History attention was not infrequently given to the working classes as such, visible for example in John and Barbara Hammonds magnicent trilogy The Village Labourer (1912), The Town Labourer (1917) and The Skilled Labourer (1920) which cover approximately the same period as Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class. Even so it cannot be denied that the New Labour History of the 1970s and 1980s introduced a drastic renewal of the discipline. Not just labour processes and everyday culture, but gender, ethnicity, race and age also nally gained the attention they deserved, along with household structures, sexuality, and informal politics. The New Labour History marked a genuine intellectual revolution.
II Labour history I use the term here in the broad sense, and include working-class history was for a long time studied mainly in the advanced capitalist countries
(plus, with a very restricted political focus, in the so-called socialist countries). Since the 1990s, however, the discipline has developed into a truly global project. To be sure, many earlier studies were already published about the history of proletarianisation and workers movements in the Global South I could cite as one shining example Rajani Kanta Das, who in 1923! published no less than three volumes about South-Asian labour (Das 1923a, 1923b, 1923c). However, the real breakthrough, in terms of conferences, associations, etc. is of very recent vintage. After an important early South African effort in 1977 the History Workshop group, formed that year, which ran ongoing conferences on labour history (Brown et al. 1991; Legassick 2002) the take-off occurred in 1995 with the founding of the Association of Indian Labour Historians, a dynamic organisation that not only stages conferences every two years, but also engages in many other activities. Soon afterwards Mundos do Trabalho was established, a network of labour historians within the Brazilian historical association ANPUH [Associao Nacional de Historia]. First conferences were held in Karachi (1999), Seoul (2001), and Jogjakarta (2005). This geographic expansion, and the substantial reections it gave rise to, enable us to view the Old and the New Labour History in a new light. Take, for example, Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class. From the new global perspective, there is something peculiar about this book, something that probably no one noticed before, but which now, under different circumstances, commands our attention: Thompson reconstructs the English process of class formation (in the period 1792 1832) as a self-contained process. England is, according to his analysis, the logical unit of analysis while external forces certainly inuenced it, these are specically portrayed as foreign inuences. Thus, the French Revolution plays an important background role in Thompsons narrative, as a source of inspiration of working-class activities, but developments in the neighbouring countries always remain an externality. Added to this is the fact that Thompson pays no attention in The Making to imperial connections. Colonialism, with its increasingly signicant inuence on the lives of the lower classes through the nineteenth century, is simply disregarded. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have pointed out that the London Corresponding Society (LCS, which plays such an important role in The Making) declared itself at its foundation in 1792 in favour of equality, whether black or white, high or low, rich or poor. But in August that same year, the LCS declared: Fellow citizens, of every rank and every situation in life, rich, poor, high or low, we address you all as our Brethren. Here, the phrase black or white had disappeared. Linebaugh and Rediker persuasively argue that this sudden change of phrase must be explained with reference to the revolt in Haiti beginning shortly beforehand. Race had thus become a tricky and, for many, in England, a threatening subject, one that the leadership of the LCS now preferred to avoid (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000:274). Such trans-Atlantic linkages cannot be found in Thompsons writing. Thompsons insular approach is all the more surprising, given that
Labour History: The Old, the New and the Global 171
politically he was clearly an internationalist, familiar from his childhood days with stories about British India, where his parents had lived for quite some time (Palmer 1994; see also Thompson 1994 and Nairn 1977:3034).
III Despite its path breaking achievement, The Making of the English Working Class in this way also shows us that there have been important continuities between Old and New Labour History. The emerging eld of labour history in nineteenth century Europe, and a little later in North America, was characterised from the beginning by a combination of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism; a combination which only very recently has become a topic of debate. Methodological nationalism links society and the state together, and therefore considers the different nationstates as a kind of Leibnizean Monads for historical research. Eurocentrism is the mental ordering of the world from the standpoint of the North-Atlantic region: thus, the modern period begins in Europe and North-America, and extends step by step to the rest of the world; the temporality of this core region determines the periodisation of developments in the rest of the world. Historians reconstructed the history of the working classes and workers movements in France, Britain, the United States etc. as separate developments. Insofar as they paid attention to the social classes and movements in Latin America, Africa or Asia, these were interpreted according to North-Atlantic schemes.
That is not to say that labour historians did not look beyond national borders. Of course they did, and already early on, but the approach nevertheless remained monadologic: the civilized European world was regarded as consisting of peoples who all developed in more or less the same direction, albeit each with a different tempo. One nation was regarded as more advanced than another, and that is why the more backward nations could see their future more or less reected in the leading nations. Initially, this thought was simplistically interpreted, and labour movements in other countries were studied, for example, to discover policy ideas for everyday politics in ones own country. This approach can be witnessed, for example, in the writings of the German pioneer of cross-border labour movement history, Lorenz Stein. In his 1842 study of socialist and communist currents in the French proletariat, he assumed initially that history develops via separate nations. In this way, he placed himself rmly on the terrain of monadologic thinking. Stein assumed, that every profound movement in one nation would sooner or later repeat itself in another nation. For this reason, a study of developments in France seemed an urgent task for him; the radical movement appearing in the neighbouring country would beset Germany as well in due course, and he queried rhetorically: Can we passively stand by and watch, how [the movement] grows among us, and remains rudderless, because it is not understood? (Stein 1842:iv, ix). This somewhat instrumentalist attitude led to a strong interest for the apparently highly developed peoples. Soon, however, it became apparent just how difcult
it was to derive useful political recipes from elsewhere. When Werner Sombart reconstructed the history of the Italian proletariat half a century after Stein, he concluded that such comparative studies provided hardly any useful policy advice for everyday politics at home. Although Sombart believed that nations can learn from each other, he argued for a more fundamental approach that focused centrally on purely theoretical questions (from where?, to where?). Such a modied approach meant a signicant expansion of the terrain for research, because now a study of more advanced countries was no longer sufcient, one also had to immerse oneself in less developed countries, insofar as they belong to the same cultural areas [Kulturkreise]. After all: If regularities in social development can be identied at all, these must recur in the late starters; it is there that the correctness of the hypotheses, formulated on the basis of earlier experiences in other countries, must be conrmed (Sombart 1893:178). Thus Sombart expressed the elevation of monadologic labour history to scientic status. Gradually, however, the monads gained windows. Sombart himself was conscious of the inuence of the example of the advanced countries on the lands that follow them (Sombart 1893:178). In the course of the twentieth century, attention for reciprocal inuences between separate peoples increased, even though those separate peoples remained the fundamental units of analysis. From James Guillaume (190510) to Julius Braunthal (196171), international organisations of the labour movement were, for example, interpreted as collaborative ties between workers who represented different countries, among patriots with different fatherlands an interpretation which also lived in the movement itself (Callahan 2000). In studies of international labour migration, the migrants were seen as people who either preserved the culture of their country of origin or assimilated in the culture of the country to which they emigrated.
IV Only in the last decades has the Eurocentric monadology as a whole been questioned. On the one hand, Sombarts idea that only peoples belonging to the same cultural area could be meaningfully compared came under re. On the other hand, the nation-state was increasingly historicized, and thereby relativized. These two subversive tendencies must be clearly distinguished, but they run more or less parallel to each other. Their appearance is linked to a series of changes that occurred since the Second World War, or started even earlier, namely:
. Decolonisation led to many new independent countries, especially in Africa and Asia, which began to investigate their own social histories; in this way, labour history acquired not only an increasingly important peripheral component (the number of monads expanded), but it also quickly became clear that the peripheral history obviously could not be written without constantly referring to the metropolitan history (see for example the work of Walter Rodney). . Transcontinental imagined communities developed, such as Pan-Africanism.
. In historical migration research the insight dawned that the perspective of nation-to-ethnic-enclave misinterpreted the reality of migrant life because they often lived transculturally. . The border cultures that were discovered did not t in the monadologic schema, creolisation, etc. . The same applied to transnational cycles of protests and strikes. All these developments (plus the strongly intensied contacts between historians of different countries and continents) have led to a situation where the two premises of traditional labour history are now clearly visible, and therefore a topic of debate. We are now in an exciting transitional situation, in which the discipline is engaged in re-inventing itself. New Labour History begins to give way to Global Labour History (Van der Linden 2001, 2004).
V To what does the term Global Labour History refer? Everyone can of course attach the meanings they like, but personally I mean the following:
. As far as methodological status is concerned, I would suggest an area of concern is involved, rather than a theory to which everyone must adhere. We know and should accept the fact that our conceptions of research and our interpretative frameworks can differ. Not only is this pluralism inevitable, it can equally well be intellectually stimulating provided we are at all times prepared to enter into a serious discussion of our disparate views. Notwithstanding our different points of departure, however, we must also strive to work productively in the same elds of research. . As regards themes, Global Labour History focuses on transnational and even the transcontinental study of labour relations and workers social movements in the broadest sense of the word. By transnational I mean the placing in a wider context of all historical processes, no matter how geographically small, by means of comparison with processes elsewhere, the study of interaction processes, or a combination of the two. The study of labour relations encompasses work that is both free as well as unfree, paid and unpaid. Workers social movements consist of both formal organisations and informal activities. The study of both labour relations and social movements requires that equally serious attention is devoted to the other side (employers and public authorities). The study of labour relations concerns not only the individual worker but also his/her family. Gender relations play an important part within the family, and in labour relations involving individual family members. . As regards the period studied, I think that in Global Labour History there are in principle no limits in temporal perspective, although I would say that practically the emphasis is on the study of labour relations and workers social movements, which have evolved along with the growth of the world market
from the fourteenth century. However, wherever indicated, for instance for comparative purposes, studies going back further in time should by no means be excluded. This is, indeed, an extremely ambitious project that has just begun. Many of the goals of this new approach remain unclear or need further elucidation. The development of Global Labour History will have to scale many obstacles in order to ourish. These obstacles include practical problems, such as the fact that in many countries of the Global South well-climatised, actively collecting archival institutions are absent.2 I will not dwell on these technical difculties, but will concentrate on the substantive challenges, because the greatest obstacle we have is ourselves, with our traditional theories and interpretations. I have mentioned the two most important pitfalls already: methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. Methodological nationalists are the victims of two important intellectual errors. Firstly, they naturalise the nation-state. By this I mean that they consider the nation-state as the basic analytical unit for historical research. Even although they recognise that nation-states only ourished in the nineteenth and twentieth century, they nevertheless still interpret older history as the prehistory of the later nation-state and consider cross-border or border-subverting processes as distractions from the pure model. We are therefore dealing with a teleology that we really ought to abandon. From a global perspective, the existence of nation-states obviously remains an essential aspect of the world system, but it is an aspect, which needs to be thoroughly historicized in connection with sub-national, supra-national, and trans-national aspects. Secondly, methodological nationalists conate society with the state and a national territory.3 That is to say: they think that societies are geographically identical to nation-states. The United States has its own society, Mexico has its own society, China has its own society, and so on. Here, too, a totally new approach is required. Perhaps we should think more profoundly about Michael Manns suggestion to regard societies as multiple overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of [ideological, economic, military and political] power. The implication is that Societies are not unitary. They are not social systems (closed or open); they are not totalities. We can never nd a single bounded society in geographical or social space (Mann 1986:1 2). There are three variants of Eurocentrism I should mention. The rst is simply neglect: there is only attention for part of the world; and the author assumes that the history of his piece of the world can be written without giving any attention to the rest. This attitude is well expressed by the popular distinction between the West and the Rest, mentioned by Samuel Huntington and others.4 The second variant is clear prejudice: the authors do consider global connections, but nevertheless believe that Greater Europe (including North America and Australasia) shows
the way. This Eurocentrism is especially evident among modernisation theorists (Binder 1986). Robert Nisbet characterised this approach to development as follows:
Mankind is likened to a vast procession, with all, or at least a very large number of peoples made into the members of the procession ... Naturally, Western Europe and its specic, historically acquired pattern of economic, political, moral, and religious values was regarded as being at the head, in the vanguard, of the procession. All other peoples, however rich in their own civilization, such as China and India, were regarded as, so to speak, steps in a procession that would some day bring them too into the fullment of development that was the sacred West. (Nisbet 1971:101)5
The third variant consists of empirical beliefs. This variant is most difcult to recognise and combat. We are dealing here with scientic viewpoints, which seemingly have been conrmed time and again by research. Empirical Eurocentrists make assertions because they think that all of this is fact. They believe, for instance, that trade unions are always most effective if they concentrate on some form of collective bargaining. This, they think, has been proven repeatedly. Historians defending such a view would deny emphatically that they hold any Eurocentric prejudices, and very few of them actually do hold such prejudices. As the late Jim Blaut wrote: Eurocentrism . . . is a very complex thing. We can banish all the value meanings of the word, all the prejudices, and we still have Eurocentrism as a set of empirical beliefs (Blaut 1993:9). Attacking the rst two variants (neglect and prejudice) is relatively straightforward, but the third variant presents a bigger obstacle. Lucien Febvre already formulated it half a century ago: Any intellectual category we may forge in the workshops of the mind is able to impose itself with the same force and the same tyranny and holds even more stubbornly to its existence than the machines made in our factories (Febvre 1973:258). All core concepts of traditional labour history are primarily based on experiences in the North-Atlantic region, and therefore should be critically reconsidered. This applies, to start off with, to the concept of labour itself. In the most important Western languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian etc.) a distinction is often made between labour and work, in which labour refers to toil and effort (as in womans labour), while work refers more to creative processes. This binary meaning to which a philosopher like Hannah Arendt (1958) attached far-reaching analytical consequences simply does not exist in many other languages, and sometimes there is even no single word for labour or work, because these concepts abstract from the specic characteristics of separate labour processes. We ought therefore to investigate carefully to what extent the concepts labour and work are trans-culturally usable, or at the very least, we should dene their content much more precisely than we are used to doing. Where does labour begin, and where does it nish? How exactly do we draw the boundary between labour and work, or is that boundary less obvious than is often assumed?
The concept of working class also merits a critical survey. It looks like this term was invented in the nineteenth century to identify a group of so-called respectable workers in contrast to slaves and other unfree labourers, the self-employed (the petty bourgeoisie) and poor outcasts, the lumpen-proletariat. For many reasons, which I will not discuss in this article, this interpretation is simply not appropriate in the Global South. The social groups, which in the eyes of Old and New Labour History are quantitatively not signicant exceptions which prove the rule are the rule in large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We will have to devise a new conceptualisation, which is less oriented to exclusion than inclusion of various dependent or marginalised groups of workers. We have to recognise, that the real wage-workers, which were the centre of attention for Marx, i.e. workers who as free individuals can dispose of their own labour-power as their own commodity, and have no other commodity for sale (Marx 1976:272), are only one kind of way in which capitalism transforms labour power into a commodity. There are many other forms that demand equal attention, such as chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, etc. (Van der Linden 2005). The necessity to reconsider our theoretical and methodological assumptions need not, of course, prevent us from tackling empirical research straightaway. Probably in reality it is precisely through the interaction of conceptual renewal and exploratory research that we will be able to build a Global Labour History. What could empirical research of this type look like? I think that we can promote activities on different levels. In the rst place, there is the level of data collection. Here I see two closely interconnected tasks. On the one hand, the collection of large quantities of quantitative and qualitative data on such themes as the structure of the world labour force, real wages, demographic developments and workers movements; and on the other, the development of techniques making it possible to compare data gathered from different contexts. Two examples of such data collections will sufce here. Example one: There are advanced plans to build a database on Indian indentured labourers across the world. Between 1834 and 1937 some thirty million people from British-ruled India moved to other parts of the world. About eighty per cent returned. Hindustani communities now exist in South-East Asia, South America, North America, Africa and Europe. The database is meant to cover this whole diaspora, but with a different precision per region. For some regions (for example Suriname in South America) individual datasets can be produced, while for other regions only sets of a higher aggregation level seem feasible at the moment (www.nationaalarchief.nl/suriname is a building block of this project). Example two: Since 1985, the Research Working Group on World Labor at the Braudel Center in Binghamton, USA, set up a database, using the indexes of The Times (London) (from 1906 onwards) and The New York Times (from 1870 onwards). Information on the year, type of action, country, city and industry
was recorded for every mention of labour unrest anywhere in the world. To begin with all the numerical data assembled in this way for the period 18701985 was used in further analyses. The most important results have been published in Beverly Silvers book Forces of Labor (2003). Other scholars are following this initiative. In 2005 a conference in Amsterdam further developed strike statistics for a large number of countries. Such projects require that we develop techniques that make data from different historical and geographical contexts comparable. An example is the so-called HISCO-project, which aims at creating an occupational information system that is both international and historical, and simultaneously links to existing classications used for present-day conditions. The information system will make available on the Web a historical international classication of occupations (HISCO) combined with information on their tasks and duties in historical settings as well as images on the history of work (see http://historyofwork.iisg.nl). Currently the HISCO scheme is based on the coding of the one thousand most frequent male and female occupational titles in datasets from eight different countries (Canada plus seven European countries), spanning the period 1670-1970, but mostly from the nineteenth century. The coding of new data is now undertaken in Columbia, New Zealand, Russia and the United States, planned for India, and nearing completion in Portugal and Spain. A second level at which we can be active is obviously real historical research, which reveals the interactions between different regions of the world and thus can answer questions which until recently could not even be asked. The number of research questions that can be asked within the new approach is limitless. I have published a list of ideas on the topic elsewhere (Van der Linden 2004). Here I will limit myself to just one example, which I call global labour chains. This concept continues an old idea from the economic theory, which in essence can be traced back to Adam Smith. The conservative Harvard economist Frank Taussig summarised this idea in the 1920s as follows:
We commonly speak of a tailor as making clothes, a carpenter as making a table, a cobbler as making boots. The familiar phrase, like most such, is elliptic, and it leads easily to misunderstanding. The labor of the tailor but gives the nishing touch to the work previously done by a long series of persons the shepherd who tended the ocks, the wool shearer, those who transported the wool by land and sea, the carder and spinner and weaver, not to mention those who made the tools and machinery of these workers. Similarly the carpenter is the last of a succession of persons who worked toward a common end the lumberman in the woods, the sawyer in the mill, the trainman and the engineer on the railway, and so on. Many laborers, arranged in long series, combine in making even the simplest commodities. (Taussig 1921:15)
When Taussig wrote this, he thought within the framework of the nation-state, the United States to be precise. But in the meantime we all know, that labour chains span the globe. Take, for instance, the jeans that many of us wear. The cotton for
the denim is grown by small farmers in Benin, West Africa. The cotton for the pockets is grown in Pakistan. The synthetic indigo is made in a chemical factory in Frankfurt, Germany. The rivets and buttons contain zinc dug up by Australian miners. The thread is polyester manufactured from petroleum products by chemical workers in Japan. All parts are assembled in Tunisia. The nal product is sold in Europe. Our jeans are, therefore, the result of a global combination of labour processes (Abrams and Astill 2001). One relevant question, especially important from the point of view of trade union internationalism, would be how these different labour processes relate to each other. One could, for instance, hypothesise that the nearer workers are to the nished product, the greater is their interest in a low remuneration for workers in earlier stages of production. Workers in a car factory prot in the short-run if steelworkers receive low wages, because this will increase the prot margin on the cars, and results in job security and, perhaps, higher wages. In other words, by studying the historical development of labour chains, we could develop an empirical and historical theory of the problems and possibilities of international solidarity. This is, of course, just one example. Many other important questions suggest themselves. Global Labour History will not only enable us to view transcontinental developments in their mutual connection. It will also enable us to view history in our own regions in a new light. The challenge will be to transcend Old and New Labour History in a new approach, which places the insights already acquired in a new and broader context. By this means, our ability to understand the world and explain it can only increase. As EP Thompson remarked in his The Poverty of Theory: Each historical event is unique. But many events, widely separated in time and place, reveal, when brought into relation with each other, regularities of process (Thompson 1978:84).
Notes 1. The terms Old and New Labour History seem to have been invented in the United States of America around 1970 (see Krueger 1971). A kind of codication of the distinction can be found in Brody 1979. 2. That it is possible to build a well-functioning archive with modest nancial means is shown by the example of the VV Giri National Labour Institute in Noida, India. 3. This does not mean that they were identied with each other. Rather they often functioned as counter-poles, as in Germany around 1848, when the concept of society was used to show ones opposition to the state. 4. The inventor of this expression seems to have been the Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani (see Mahbubani 1992). 5. Nisbet noted that Eurocentrism (at that time still called Ethnocentrism) is symbolised according to a biological metaphor of growth and development: societies are a bit like plants, emerging from seed and then developing into mature organisms. This growth metaphor is based on at least ve additional assumptions: This meant, in the rst place, that change is normally continuous. That is, each identiable condition of a thing, be it a tree, a man, or a culture, is to be understood as having grown
out of a preceding condition of that same thing. Second, large changes are to be understood as the cumulative, as well as incremental consequence of a host of small changes. Third, social change is characterized by differentiation. Precisely as the seed or fertilized germ cell is marked by differentiation and variegation of function and form in its history, so is the human culture or institution similarly marked by this kind of manifestation over time. Fourth, change of a developmental sort is regarded as caused for the most part by some persisting, uniform property or set of properties. From the doctrine of uniformity came the belief that social conict, cooperation, geographic location, race, or any of the other alleged causes so richly strewn across the pages of social history, is the prime and continuing cause of all development. Fifth, it is clear that in all of these theories of social development a kind of teleology is present. Always there is some end in view. The end is conceived in purely Western terms. (Nisbet 1971:100)
References
Abrams, F. and Astill, J. 2001. Story of the Blues. The Guardian Europe. 29 May. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Binder, L. 1986. The Natural History of Modernization Theory. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28(1):3 33. Blaut, J. 1993. The Colonizers Model of the World. New York: The Guilford Press. Braunthal, J. 1961 71. Geschichte der Internationale, 3 volumes, Hannover: Dietz. Brody, D. 1979. The Old Labour History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class. Labour History 20(Winter):111 26. 2005. Responsibilities of the Labour Historian, in D. Brody, Labour Embattled: History, Power, Rights. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 1 15. Brown, J., Manning, P., Shapiro, K. and Wiener, J. (eds). 1991. History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Callahan, K. 2000. Performing Inter-Nationalism in Stuttgart in 1907: French and German Socialist Nationalism and the Political Culture of an International Socialist Congress. International Review of Social History 45:51 87. Das, R.K. 1923a. Factory Labour in India. Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter and Co. 1923b. Factory Legislation in India. With an Introduction by John R. Commons. Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter and Co. 1923c. The Labour Movement in India. Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter and Co. Febvre, L. 1973. How Jules Michelet Invented the Renaissance, in Peter Burke (ed), A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre. Trans. K. Folca. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 258 67. Guillaume, J. 1905 10. LInternationale, 4 volumes. Paris: Societe nouvelle de librairie et dedition.
Hobsbawm, E.J. 1964. Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Krueger, Th.A. 1971. American Labor Historiography, Old and New: A Review Essay. Journal of Social History 4:277 85. Legassick, M. 2002. The Past and Present of Marxist Historiography in South Africa. Radical History Review 82(Winter):111 30. Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. Mahbubani, K. 1992. The West and the Rest. The National Interest Summer:3 13. Mann, M. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, volume one. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. 1976. Capital, volume one. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nairn, T. 1977. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism. Second Expanded Edition. London and New York: Verso. Nisbet, R. 1971. Ethnocentrism and the Comparative Method, in A.R. Desai (ed), Essays on Modernization of Underdeveloped Societies, volume one. Bombay: Thacker and Co, pp. 95 114. Palmer, B.D. 1994. E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. London and New York: Verso. Silver, Beverly J. 2003. Forces of Labor. Workers Movements and Globalization since 1870. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sombart, W. 1893. Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des italienischen Proletariats. Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik 6:177 258. Stein, L. 1842. Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte. Leipzig: Wigand. Taussig, F.W. 1921. Principles of Economics, volume one. New York: Macmillan. Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: The Merlin Press. 1994. History and Anthropology, in E.P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture. New York: The New Press, pp. 200 25. Van der Linden, M. 2001. Global Labour History and the Modern World System: Thoughts at the Twenty-fth Anniversary of the Fernand Braudel Center. International Review of Social History 46:423 59. 2004. The Globalization of Labour and Working Class History and its Consequences. International Labour and Working Class History 65(Spring):136 56. 2005. Conceptualising the World Working Class, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Jan Lucassen (eds), Workers in the Informal Sector: Studies in Labour History 1800 2000. New Delhi: Macmillan India, pp. 21 44.
Labour History in India and South Africa: Some Afnities and Contrasts
Sumit Sakar
Delhi University
Examining the afnities and contrasts between South Africa and India can shed light on hidden or occluded aspects in the history writing of both countries. The important point that emerges from even preliminary attempts at comparisons between the labour histories of India and South Africa is the way afnities lead to contrasts, and vice versa. Philip Bonner (2004) has already drawn our attention to this pattern, in a pioneering comparative essay, as has his colleague Peter Alexander (2005). Such an attempt offers an entry point into the second part of my article: a summary examination of the changing patterns of Indian labour history in terms of certain perspectives that can emerge from its South African counterpart. A pattern of afnities mingled with contrasts, between countries that have shared some broad commonalities (in the case of South Africa and India, long histories of Western-colonial domination), has two broader implications. Firstly, and most obviously, it provides a reminder that the value of comparative analysis can lie primarily in unveiling differences. This can open the way towards de-familiarising features that otherwise appear natural in a history studied within national connes alone. Secondly, it can provoke some loud thinking about how, in the present era of globalisation, it is most meaningful to conceptualise the relations between the more general, transnational patterns, and the particularistic patterns located within individual state, or regional, contexts. Globalisation, accompanied by the spread of theories of postcoloniality, has promoted habits of thinking that seek to go beyond nation-state boundaries, and that tend to generalise on much wider scales. Specically, approaches that assume the colonial experience to have been more or less uniform over space and time have become common. There is much merit in this expansion of horizons, for earlier historical analysis had remained far too conned within the boundaries of present-day political units, in effect treating them as somehow given and natural. For certain dimensions and questions, however, distinctions are vital.
I It is convenient to begin with the theme selected by Bonner (2004): the ways a working class emerged through employment in factories and mines from the
mid-nineteenth century in colonial India, and from around the turn of the century in South Africa, notably in the Rand and Kimberley. In both countries, the dominant pattern was of migration by single males, leaving their families in villages, returning there periodically, and generally leaving the city when jobs ended through dismissal or old age. Family maintenance was thus still in part derived from agriculture, with some ploughing-back of urban incomes. The growth of capitalism did not mean a virtual elimination of small peasant agriculture, unlike the British pattern. But survival was much more difcult in South Africa, because (unlike India, except to some extent in the European tea plantations in the then under-populated province of Assam) so much of the better land was ruthlessly grabbed by Boer and British farmers. The African rural population was pushed back into over-populated homelands. The bulk of the countryside in India remained rmly indigenous, with only a thin scattering of European ofcials who would return to England after their Indian careers were over. So, contrasts begin as soon as the afnity is probed a little further, in what has been a recurrent pattern.1 The most striking difference was the much higher level of both legal, and extra-legal, coercion deployed to create an African underclass in white-dominated cities most obviously, of course, the notorious pass laws. It may not have been difcult to push Africans towards the new cities and mining areas, given the enforced poverty of the countryside, but the Europeans wanted to organise the cities as basically white preserves, even while making full use of African workers. Enormously repressive pass laws were therefore required to regulate entry and guarantee short-term, single-male stay. In India, however, this blatant use of force and legal coercion was generally absent, with the exception of recruitment for plantations on an indentured basis, in Assam and overseas. A virtually semi-servile system was developed in these regions from the 1840s, to extract from great distances, and then immobilise, labour for sub-tropical plantations of tea, sugar, cotton and other protable crops. Labour could not be recruited cheaply from the Assamese countryside, as this was a scantily populated area where peasants did not feel any scarcity of land. In colonies like the West Indies, the settled black population in some of the overseas colonies after slavery had been abolished seemed rather troublesome in the rst ush of emancipation, and bringing in a new semi-servile labour force from far-off was required to run the sugar plantations. However, such open coercion was not generally required for providing the labour force for Indian mines, cotton and jute textiles, railways, etc. Normal channels of recruitment, usually via Indian contractors, also known as jobbers or sardars, proved sufcient. Factory-owners, both foreign and Indian, did at times complain about inadequate labour supplies, but an early work on Bombay labour by Morris David Morris (1965) was able to explode this myth. Bonner (2004) has indicated some of the ways in which this contrast in levels of coercion can be explored to open up a series of other signicant features of
Labour History in India and South Africa: Some Afnities and Contrasts 183
comparative history. Maybe at this point a personal impression can also be included, one which many Indian visitors to South Africa get as soon as they travel outside of the big cities. Mile after mile of apparently deserted countryside, with villages or small townships coming only after long intervals: the physical contrasts with the rural landscape in most parts of the Indian plains or plateaus could not be sharper. Even today, the population of South Africa, a fairly big country area-wise, is only around fty million or less: the population of a middle-sized contemporary Indian state, and very much less than Uttar Pradesh, for example. The data provided by Bonner regarding pre-colonial urban populations in South Africa conrms this sharp contrast: he mentions approximately 20,000 as the biggest known urban settlement. Cities at least ten to twenty times larger would have been fairly common in many parts of South Asia centuries before the coming of the British, even after discounting as probably exaggerated the impressionistic estimates of huge size, comparable with (and fairly often exceeding) European cities left by travellers and traders from the West in the several centuries of the early modern era. It is true that there was for some time an inuential historical view which held that such Indian cities were little more than camps associated with powerful rulers, with the bulk of the population living in allegedly self-sufcient village communities. This would presumably make the present obvious numbers of landless labour a largely colonial creation, a product of dispossession and depeasantisation through colonial policies and processes of commercialisation. The size of cites consequently expanded vastly, after an initial period of alleged urban decline. The three colonial metropolises, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were entirely new. However, these once-standard assumptions about pre-colonial cities as somehow extraneous to a society without sharp internal differences, with most people living in basically self-sufcient villages, have now been discarded, in a process started by anti-Marxist scholars like Dharma Kumar (1965), but subsequently accepted by Marxists too. A large landless rural population, buttressed by strong taboos against landholding by subordinate, untouchable (Dalit) castes, is now accepted as having existed for many centuries. This ensured mobility to cities whenever there was a demand for labour, constituting what Jan Breman (2003) has termed footloose labour, which could be recruited fairly easily via normal channels without need for new colonial laws and structures. The impressive monuments, temples, mosques, and palaces of ancient and medieval India would have been impossible without such a potentially mobile labour force, since slaves, while not unimportant, were generally not used in production except in agricultural labour in parts of the South. The pattern continued, and probably intensied with the growth of population, through colonial (and postcolonial) times. Again in sharp contrast to South Africa, the British in India were quite content with keeping the cities, old or new, predominantly Indian. They concentrated
only on providing enclaves of higher standards and amenities for their own residential areas. They also set up hill-stations where they could escape from the summer, which were more purely European in population and housing patterns, though still requiring considerable numbers of Indians to meet labour and service needs. Native housing was not generally their concern, except when epidemic diseases threatened that could also affect them. The plague panic of the 1890s, for instance, led to some very belated efforts at urban improvement, even for the Indian localities. In South Africa, by contrast, the need to keep the cities white, eventually building up into wholesale apartheid, also involved some state-organised housing for an African labour force that was deliberately kept down to controllable limits, deprived of normal family life, and not allowed to spill over into other parts of the city. An Indian visitor to Soweto can experience a certain sense of surprise when seeing its township houses and hostels, as these seem considerably better than what one sees in urban slums in India, as for instance the chawls (tenements) of Bombay. Perhaps Soweto is not typical (the worldwide outcry in the wake of 1976 having compelled the apartheid regime to adopt some ameliorative measures), and there are many shanty towns. However, there is still an impression of difference. Very little systematic effort was made to provide state or municipal housing for workers in South Asia, or to enforce such construction by factory owners, whether in colonial or postcolonial times. Workers and the underclass in general were left to fend for themselves amidst gross rack-renting by slumlords and contractors. Added to this, matters have been getting worse for large sections of the poor as the vast slums or bustees previously allowed to proliferate near city centres are nowadays often demolished, and their inmates pushed out into far-distant suburbs in efforts at beautication or development intended to suit upwardly-mobile middle-class tastes.2 The British encountered in India a more developed, or in other words more obviously class-divided, society than in South Africa. This was further aggravated by caste, and had supported powerful kingdoms and empires for many centuries. Not that inequality and oppression had been absent in pre-colonial Africa: one need only recall the already-existing channels of slave trade which Europeans were able to tap into, and greatly expand, from the sixteenth century. But one still gets a sense of more stable hierarchies in South Asia, not necessarily less exploitative and oppressive than the British overlords who would partly displace them. The many consequences of this contrast will accompany us for some time. For a start, there is the obvious link with the differences in patterns of labour mobilisation that have already been mentioned. The more developed exploitative hierarchies in India enabled Europeans to mobilise labour principally via Indian structures of recruitment, which were already in place or easily developed. Totally new systems like pass laws were not required, with the exception,
again, of the indenture system. Recent research, though, has indicated a general tightening of labour discipline with the coming of East India Company rule from the late eighteenth century, with the importation of devices like the British master and servant regulations (Hay and Craven 2004; Parthasarathi 2001).3 More fundamentally, what we cannot afford to ignore are certain basic differences between the logic and structures of a settler colony, as parts of South Africa became from the mid-seventeenth century, and the nature of British domination of India as well as related contrasts in the extent and forms of racism. With the exception, again, of relatively small numbers of planters, in Assam and a few other pockets, no white settler colony ever emerged in India, and there remained always a vast demographic imbalance between European and indigenous populations. (This was there in South Africa, too, for the indigenous peoples were not decimated, as in North America or Australia but still the contrasts remain signicant, given the smaller numbers). Already by the early twentieth century, in India, at most two or three hundred thousand whites not all of them equally privileged or prosperous were perched over a mass of Indians numbering around three hundred million. There was, therefore, an absolute necessity for the British to develop alliances with shifting categories of indigenous elites, old or new alliances between unequals, of course, but still generally not without some benets for the latter as guarantees of their own authority over subordinates. The process of partial accommodation was eased by a signicant difference in the levels of racism. Not that the latter was absent in India, manifesting itself in discrimination in jobs, business, ugly incidents on railways, etc. but there never developed any systematic apartheid of the kind manifested in South Africa. There can be no question of prettifying the colonial domination and exploitation of India, but we still cannot assume identical levels of brutality, or of efforts at total cultural conquest as some postcolonial theories tend to assume.4 Certain contrasting Western cultural presuppositions need to be mentioned in this context. A fair number of Englishmen came to India, particularly in the late eighteenth century, with a degree of respect for Indian culture as going back to ancient times, and such sentiments were strongly promoted by early Orientalist scholars like William Jones. Africa was, by contrast, viewed as a Dark Continent: the British admired so-called martial races, like the Zulus, and colonial administrators often saw themselves as sympathetic to (even protective of) African traditions, but there is no doubt that India had higher prestige in the colonial mind. The British in India developed structures of indirect rule through dependent alliances with Indian princes. The system was stabilised after the major crisis of the 1857 rebellion. A stable Princely India then emerged, of puppet rulers, servile towards the British but very authoritarian regarding their subjects, thanks to the British protection. By contrast, the settler colony of South Africa at least in areas where Afrikaner or English political and military control was complete had
more of a attening effect initially on indigenous society. Eventually, in the course of the twentieth century and particularly in the later phases of apartheid, similar patterns of indirect rule were tried out, erecting the impoverished homelands into autonomous units, set for independence under traditional (but often invented) authorities, an afnity also noted by Bhattacharya (2004). One intention, not entirely unrealised, was to foster the growth of ssiparous so-called tribal identities to break up the impressive unity against white domination that was being forged under the banner of the African National Congress (ANC). Some of the princely states of colonial India, in partial contrast, did have fairly long pre-colonial histories. This might have allowed elements of prestige and stature among their subjects that were simply missing in many cases from the obviously defensive constructions of an apartheid regime at the end of its tether. The Indian states, even so, could be integrated into the postcolonial formation fairly easily, through a combination of popular rebellion (notably the communist-led peasant guerrilla struggle in Telengana against the biggest of the princely states, Hyderabad) and pressure combined with concessions by the Indian government. Their South African counterparts seem to have been swept away rather more quickly in the immediate wake of democratic elections. This brings me to another instance of afnity leading to difference. The last years of British rule in India, and the closing years of apartheid in South Africa, both saw an enormous amount of internecine violence grievously disrupting anti-colonial and anti-racist unity. In India, as everyone knows, unprecedented levels of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims mutually-opposed but identically-structured forms of religion-based identity politics culminated in an independence that was accompanied by a bloody partition of the sub-continent, and the enforced migration of tens of millions of refugees. In South Africa, too, many more Africans were dying in internecine ghting than in conicts with their apartheid rulers in the last years of apartheid. But, once again, a closer look reveals important differences, in levels and consequences. South Asian communal distinctions had been consolidated over a fairly long period, and there is a fairly continuous history of Hindu-Muslim riots from around the 1890s. Religion-related communal identities, again, were one of a series of community or identity formations and solidarities, along the lines also of caste, language, region, ethnicity, class and occasionally gender. British divide and rule strategies played a part in promoting some of these at times. But the emergence of such alternative, rival, yet interpenetrating solidarities, in the decades between the 1870s and 1920s, was due much more to the ambiguous and contradictory patterns of late-colonial development. Qualitatively new levels of political, administrative, economic and communicational integration had the effect of highlighting afnities and enabling contacts between similarly placed, but previously localised, groups. This made organised all-India anti-colonial nationalism possible for the rst time. (Gandhi condemned railways in principle,
but, of course, made full use of them to build his own countrywide movements.) Yet such nationalism could only be one among several alternative solidarities being consolidated around the same decades. The consequence was the much longer, and more autonomous, history of communal and other forms of internecine conict in late-colonial India once again, a product of higher levels of development. The South African counterpart was bloody enough, but seems to have been (from the vantage-point of today, at least) a much more short-lived tragedy. In India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, in contrast, the story continues, with the rise of Hindutva nationalism, and the genocide it organised in Gujarat in 2002, constituting the most recent, and one of the worst, instances. In other words, while there was partition in South Asia, the postapartheid state was a unied formation, and associated with a marked decline in ethnic violence in South Africa, a different trajectory. Colonial India and white-ruled South Africa both had developed highly organised and powerful state-structures, producing ample written sources of archival sorts that can be used in labour history reconstructions. Levels of mass literacy and education among indigenous peoples were low in both countries, compared to Western standards, but signicantly, they were very much lower in South Africa. There is a striking difference in the spread of print-culture in the two countries. Print came late to India, in the wake of British rule, and Christian missionaries played a notable part in its early propagation so far there are obvious parallels with the South African experience. Then important differences appear. An educated middle class emerged quickly among Indians in the nineteenth century, taking over the new instrument of print. It could build on an earlier history (in many parts of the country though not in all) of already established vernacular written languages, and literatures in poetry (if not always to the same extent in prose). Ofcial archival material can therefore be complemented by a massive and growing quantum of non-ofcial written sources from the early nineteenth century onwards newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets, literary and discursive vernacular writing (which remained the preferred medium even for most English-educated Indians), as well as private papers of prominent and not-so-prominent Indians, and so on. South African historians, in contrast, have had to forage wider, to open up links with anthropological, eldwork methods and oral techniques, and to do so far more than their Indian counterparts. The next section will begin indicating some of the important implications of this contrast, in the specic area of labour history in the two countries.
II My own acquaintance with South African history writing began with the two volumes about Soweto and Kathorus, by Bonner, Lauren Segal and Noor Nieftagodien (Bonner and Segal 1998; Bonner and Nieftagodien 2001). The
books had very high standards, but came as a surprise as well, in two rather contrary ways. The historiographical approaches seemed signicantly different from standard South Asian frameworks of analysis of labour and social history, a theme that is elaborated below. The story of the notorious apartheid citadel of Soweto, and its experience of segregation, was, of course, very different from the postcolonial Indian experience, but there were also similarities. Soweto went back to efforts, starting in the 1920s, to break up the proximity between prosperous European residential areas in Johannesburg, and slums that initially housed a very mixed population, including poor whites. An inter-racial Marabi culture had briey ourished there, and was felt to be a threat to dominant groups. The origins of apartheid in the other urban areas lay, in part, in projects for slum-clearance, pushing the poor who in South Africa were predominantly black away from the central districts, initially on grounds of sanitation, urban development, and, no doubt, beautication. It was through such displacements, progressively more brutal, that Orlando emerged in the 1930s, fteen kilometres away from Johannesburg the nucleus of what developed into Soweto. The crucial and increasing racist dimensions were absent in India, once much weaker and less systemic forms of European racist behaviour vanished from the sub-continent with the departure of the British in 1947.5 Yet there were still unexpected similarities, too. By a curious coincidence, 1976, the year of the brutal suppression of the Soweto uprisings was also the year when massive slum clearances, pushing the poor far away from city centres, reached their early peak in Indian cities. This led to a bloody confrontation at Turkman Gate in Old Delhi, one of the most infamous incidents of Indira Gandhis Emergency. Such policies have been resumed intermittently since then. The commonalities (although not the identity of class and race) suddenly became concrete and vivid through the lens of the South African experience. The differences in approach and method between South Asian and South African historiography were striking. South Asian historiography has long been accustomed to a series of distinctions and polarities, making up a pattern that has started changing only very recently. South African scholarship seemed to operate with ease across such divides, and with extremely fruitful consequences. Soweto could have been written about very easily in terms of brutal repression and heroic resistance, as a narrative basically of politics and economic conditions. That, perhaps, would have been the usual approach of Indian scholarship confronting similar phenomena, manifested in writing on anti-colonial nationalist and even sometimes labour protests. Soweto A History (Bonner and Segal 1998) does, of course, have that, notably in a particularly moving chapter entitled This is our Day about the epic march of schoolchildren against the imposition of Afrikaans on 16 June 1976, and the massacre that followed. But these studies have so much more. These histories of
Soweto and Kathorus are not conned to conditions and movements within factories, even in Kathorus, which (unlike Soweto) has been a major industrial centre. They reach out equally to what, in India, is called the informal or casual section of the labour force, as well as to questions of housing and slums, neighbourhood life and community formations, changing patterns of everyday culture, recreation and even fashions in dress and dance. Women and youth, relationships of gender and between generations, forms of criminality, are integrated into what becomes a true total history of two big urban complexes. This is strikingly different from Indian narratives until quite recently. A glance at the references indicates that conventional written data have been deployed wherever available. These seem to have been more abundant for the Kathorus townships, in the forms of state and municipal archives and newspapers. However, an average piece of research on industrial labour in India would tend to have considerably greater amounts of archival data, as well as much more in the way of written material of non-ofcial origin. What South African scholars have done is to convert the lag in the levels of written materials and print-culture into a strength. The writing of Soweto and Kathorus became truly collective efforts, with young community members setting out to nd ordinary people who could tell the story of their home from the beginning (Bonner and Segal 1998). Oral sources, tapped through masses of patient interviews, were central to both projects methods that were, on the whole, rather more characteristic for social anthropologists than professional historians in India. Even more striking, for an Indian historian, is the massive collection and presentation of visual material, including photographs supplied by local people. One encounters such things today in specialised Indian histories of photography in colonial or contemporary India, but visual images remain rare in the vast majority of academic publications, a few more or less decorative illustrations aside.6 Soweto, moreover, actually began as a constituent part of preparing a lm about the history of the township. There is thus a basic contrast between the two historiographies, which provides opportunities for some mutual exchange and processes of learning from each others strengths and weaknesses. Several other works, both major and interesting, illustrate a similar crossing of boundaries of discipline and methods unmatched in Indian scholarship. Charles van Onselens life history of an African sharecropper is the key example of this fruitful crossing of frontiers in South African scholarship (Van Onselen 1996), part of a larger project on oral sources that inaugurated the Wits History Workshop. More recently, similar material has been brilliantly used by Peter Delius to reconstruct the unexpected transformation of a homeland in the north of the old Transvaal into a major stronghold of the ANC (Delius 1996). Given the very low literacy levels in such homelands, only oral material,
collected through a very large number of interviews, could have made such an historical reconstruction possible. Perhaps the only Indian counterpart, prior to one or two very recent publications on labour history that will be mentioned in conclusion, is the work of David Hardiman, the one member of the Subaltern Studies project who still adheres to its initial history from below impulse. He has written major studies of peasant nationalists, popular religious movements, and peasant attitudes towards moneylenders in the Gujarat region on the basis of masses of eldwork in villages across many years (see, in particular, Hardiman 2006). There is also much Indian scholars of literature can learn from Isabel Hofmeyers two very different books: one analyses traditions of oral storytelling in a South African chiefdom (Hofmeyer 1993); the other investigates the multiple forms of spread and appropriation of a central text of Protestant missionary evangelisation, the seventeenth century English classic Pilgrims Progress (Hofmeyer 2004). But oral data-collection and deployment of visual material, impressive in scholarly terms, also had another, initially perhaps more vital, purpose: the way in which the Wits History Workshop positioned itself in the anti-apartheid struggle (Bozzoli 1987; Bonner 1994). Members of the group, no doubt at considerable personal risk, held classes for labour activists. Particularly impressive were the Open Days in the conferences. In 1983 3,000 came to such an Open Day from outside Wits (in place of the expected 500 to 1,000) on buses organised to bring and take back Africans living in segregated townships many miles away. This had been preceded by the sale of 40,000 copies of six illustrated booklets, written in basic English and translated into Zulu and Xhosa. The 1987 Open Day became even larger, organised through the cooperation of trade unions and other antiapartheid organisations. Numerous plays, tapes, lms, radical music and dance were presented, many of them by workers and community people, like the one prepared by the National Union of Mineworkers about the experiences of women on night shifts. There were also delegates from embattled communities resisting eviction. The Wits campus was transformed, and a newspaper commented that a casual visitor might have been forgiven for thinking that the revolution had already happened. There is not even a remote counterpart to any of this in India. And that despite the considerable presence and academic contributions of many progressive and left wing historians, particularly in labour studies. Some good intentions and occasional exaggerated claims notwithstanding, even the most radical or subalternist of Indian history-writing has been addressed to largely academic audiences, and are written by professional scholars alone. Wits had been inspired by some History Workshop movements in the West, beginning at Ruskin College in Britain and spreading to the United States, West Germany, Sweden, and a few other countries.7 But none of these had been politically risky, given the democratic structures of these countries. South Africa under apartheid must have been a very
different experience. The white radical scholars of Wits would then have been a small and potentially beleaguered minority among people of their own colour, and no doubt they also faced a certain suspicion from many blacks on grounds of their race and material privileges.
III This article turns, in this last section, to Indian labour studies to highlight certain interesting contrasts and afnities with South African scholarship (for a review focused on South Asia, see Sakar 2004). The general pattern seems to have been one of marked contrasts, followed by recent indications of a certain coming together. This article has already suggested that the basic distinction has been between an easy crossing of disciplinary and methodological boundaries in South Africa, as against sharp and rigid polarities in India. Political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual; industrial workers, the mass of urban poor, peasants, agricultural labourers; food-gathering communities, pastoralists, settled farmers; pre-colonial and colonial the list can easily be extended.
The habit is not unconnected with the abundance of written sources, particularly for recent times. For these are easily too easily classiable into neat pigeonholes, apparently ready-made for particular themes. A young researcher visiting the national or state archives would know from the beginning that, for instance, the Home Political Series would be the right place to nd data on political, particularly nationalist or left movements, while for economic conditions and policies revenue, commerce, industries, or nance departments would be the most appropriate. Such distinctions would be much more difcult to make, and fairly unhelpful, for scholars working more with oral material. Here, perhaps, is one reason for the relative absence of such sharp polarities in South African scholarship. For a long time, the crucial distinction in Indian labour history has been that between the formal or organised, as contrasted to the informal or unorganised, sectors. The rst referred to factories using power and having on their rolls more than a certain number of workers, along with mines and plantations, as well as railways. The second was the much wider and diverse world of urban and rural artisans, petty industries, the oating mass of casual labourers, and menial groups in general. The polarity really emerged from colonial legislation regulating working conditions in the factories that began from the 1880s. In the course of time it came to be widely accepted as almost part of the natural course of things. A series of Factory Acts were enacted from 1881 onwards, regulating the conditions of employment of children and women, hours of work, and eventually wages: all initially quite limited in scope, but gradually expanding. The initial impetus came from Lancashire textile interests, alarmed by the rapid advance of Indian textiles in Bombay, along with philanthropic initiatives by some Englishmen and Indians. Trade union pressures became crucial at later
stages. Law making, trade union activities, and, subsequently, academic labour studies concentrated almost entirely on the formal sector. There were several reasons for this near-universal choice. Workers employed on a more or less regular basis in big units were obviously much easier to organise in trade unions, demonstrations, strikes, and occasional nationalist and more continuous left politics. There was also an important ideological element. Marxism became an important inuence and energising force from the 1920s, and the standard Marxism of those times, everywhere, equated the proletariat, the presumed ultimate gravedigger of capitalism, above all with industrial workers.8 Teleological and determinist readings of Marxism predominated, where the capitalism that had developed rst, and with maximum clarity, in Britain was assumed to indicate the linear path which other countries would eventually follow: though with many lags, particularly evident in colonial and/or semi-feudal conditions of a country like India. The rst communist groups therefore concentrated almost entirely on the big industrial centres, above all the Bombay cotton and the Calcutta jute workers. For quite some time developments seemed to fully justify such selectivity. There were a signicant number of formidable strikes despite intense persecution: the great six-month long Bombay textile strike of 1928, led by the Girni Kamgar Lal Bafta (Red Flag) union of the communists, certainly deserves to be remembered as one of the major landmarks of international labour history in the interwar years. This section of the working class made impressive gains, considerably improving their conditions. Internationally, too, the hopes placed by standard Marxist theory in the proletariat of big factories and mines did seem eminently justied for a whole historical period. Concentration of capital and labour was apparently going ahead, and the inter-war years were marked by a series of landmarks of proletarian militancy: Petrograd, Turin, the British General Strike, Shanghai, Barcelona and Detroit. For historians the formal sector also offered obvious advantages with regard to availability of data. State regulation produced written documents, and so did, increasingly, trade union and political organisations.9 A series of further disjunctions owed in India and not in India alone, it needs to be added from the formal/informal divide. The privileging of big production units by both activists and historians came to imply disjunctions with toilers in the informal sector, as well as from everyday life in the neighbourhoods, and in the city in general. Labour history thus became disjoined from urban studies. Yet casual or small-scale forms of labour actually engaged much greater numbers, even in big industrial cities. These often interpenetrated with factory work, constituting in effect an important part of what Marx had termed the reserve army of labour. Formal-sector workers usually lived in close proximity to sundry kinds of casual labourers and subordinated groups of the cities in general. Conditions in chawls and bustees were terrible, but these were also the
sites of whatever cultural life and forms of leisure workers could have in the little time that remained after very long and arduous hours of work. Such forms tended to reproduce or invent traditional ethnic, linguistic-regional, caste, and religious solidarities, some of which occasionally found expression through internecine communal clashes. For the ardent communists and socialists who from the 1920s led efforts at labour organisation in most industrial centres, these signied unfortunate lags, produced by the backwardness of capitalism in a colonial situation, things which would pass over, in time, as proletarian consciousness attained its proper maturity through the logic of slow, but inevitable, capitalist growth. Assumptions of inevitable transformation, come the great day of revolution, clouded also an understanding of, and initiatives about, the many problems posed by patriarchal values among workers, including the most militant elements. They deeply affected left wing cadres too. The special problems of women labourers, if posed at all in charters of demands during strikes, always came towards the end, and were the rst to be sacriced in negotiations with employers. Early history writing about labour, including important contributions at times by activists who had turned towards academics in later life,10 tended to share these patterns, concentrating on the economy and politics, which were largely abstracted from broader social and cultural considerations. The disjunctions were bound up with, and fed into, yet another polarity in South Asian studies: that between the disciplines and methods of history and of social anthropology. The latter, on the whole more conservative in its orientations than the generally left-leaning histories of labour, tended to focus on traditional village life, on caste, and on religion: a social and cultural orientation, as contrasted to the political and economic emphasis of most modern Indian historians until fairly recently. Historians worked primarily with written material, whereas social anthropologists prioritised eldwork with an initial commitment to participant observation and structural-functionalist approaches. And the formal/informal distinction also made rigid the separations between urban factory labour, peasants, and landless agricultural workers, even though the continual passing to and fro between these categories has always been fairly obvious. Matters seem to have been substantially different in South Africa, in many (though perhaps not all) respects. The distinction lay in some basic assumptions, and not just in the different proportion of written to oral material. I am tempted to suggest that one factor may have been the growing weight of white racism, which blocked the total prioritisation of the formal sector that characterised Indian labour organisation and history until recently. Until the Second World War boom, a substantial proportion of the most developed and organised workers were white, some of whom initially showed considerable anti-capitalist militancy. There was a syndicalist input from Britain, and a big general strike in the early 1920s in Johannesburg even aroused some fears of Bolshevism.
But subsequently the deepening of racism enabled an integration of the bulk of the white labour movement, with its privileged position in relation to the Africans, into the apartheid bloc. Emerging Marxist or left groups consequently could not rest their hopes on the formal sector alone. The South African Communist Party evolved from its primarily white origins into a vital multiracial component of the liberation struggle, making important contributions to African labour organisation, ideological training, and armed struggle. The sharp distinctions characteristic of India made little sense, anyway, to the bulk of the black urban population. All of them shared the burden of enforced separation from wives and children compulsorily left behind in homelands and the everyday irritations and terrors of pass laws. Neighbourhood or township organisation was vital, for labour and anti-apartheid movements alike, and Soweto: A History and Kathorus: A History provide massive evidence of how much such organisation contributed towards implementing the ANC call to make South Africa ungovernable, and forcing the apartheid regime into eventual surrender of political power. That the legacy has been a mixed one is undeniable, but this should not take away from the glory of those heroic years. Such a history has evidently enabled a far more integrated vision of the world of workers. The rst sign of a break with established patterns of Indian labour studies came with Dipesh Chakrabartys elegant study of Calcutta jute workers, published as a book but preceded by a number of articles from the early 1980s (Chakrabarty 1989). This highlighted the importance of cultural and religious dimensions in the life and presuppositions of workers, and foregrounded the survival, and persistence, of elements of a semi-feudal rural culture. Even middle-class labour activists, Chakrabarty suggested, unconsciously tended to share somewhat similar assumptions and values of pre-bourgeois, hierarchical kinds. However, the emphasis on survival partly weakened the possibilities of a radical historiographical breakthrough, for it implicitly suggested a prioritisation of research on peasants and village life from which such values had originated: an emphasis which Chakrabartys colleagues in the early Subaltern Studies project had already highlighted. Paradoxically, then, this brilliant work on labour may have encouraged for some years a turning away from labour studies, which did enter a kind of decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The apparent collapse of socialist hopes was, of course, a bigger and virtually worldwide, reason. The outcome was a major turn towards culturalist directions, to which Subaltern Studies made a decisive contribution, in India as well as the West. How far labour had become marginalised is clear from a glance at Partha Chatterjees The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), which remains a central text of postcolonial theory. Its chapters deal with the relationships between concepts of the nation and a whole series of entities: the colonial state, nationalist Indian elites, conceptions of history, women, peasants, outcasts, the national state, and communities. There are just two omissions: capitalists and workers.
A strikingly unexpected development, however, is the remarkable revival, in signicantly modied ways, of Indian labour history from around the mid1990s at a time when the decline of the old forms of organised labour movements continues apace in India as well as in most parts of the world. The big contextual change was, of course, the shift to new forms of exible capital investment, involving moves towards smaller units of production, integrated internationally under big capital across continents through new information technology. But the changes had started even earlier. One major Indian landmark was the defeat of the two-year long strike of Bombay textile workers in 19823. This was accompanied and followed by capitalists shifting from big mills to scattered power looms where trade union militancy was much more difcult to organise. The industrialists, in effect, were turning towards, and colonising, the informal sector. Academically, too, the formal/informal disjunction, and the absolute prioritisation of the former, was becoming untenable, a point made before these shifts by that unusual anthropologist Jan Breman in the mid-1970s.11 His studies of footloose labour were based on years of eldwork in accompanying the perennial migrations of the village poor towards city jobs and factories, and back again. Breman came to realise through such research the problematic nature of many of the sharp distinctions that had characterised Indian labour and social history. Anthropology, in its radicalised forms, is now coming nearer to labour studies, most strikingly through a volume of labour studies that brought together anthropologists, sociologists and historians (Parry, Breman and Kapadia 1999). Chakrabartys work had focused on big production units, and, despite the new cultural emphasis, had not really investigated the neighbourhoods much. Two major studies of Bombay by Raj Chandavarkar (1994, 1998; for a more detailed discussion, see Sakar 2004) undermined the old distinctions much more comprehensively through massive empirical studies. Central to these volumes is a sustained questioning, backed up by ample data, of the many polarities that have haunted Indian labour history for long: formal and informal, factory and putting-out and artisan labour, shopoor and neighbourhood, urban toilers and rural life.12 What constitutes the great promise of this new era of Indian labour history is this steadily expanding problem of old disjunctions. One such problem is the boundary of space and states. A new interest has developed recently in studies of migration, indentured labour, plantation economies, beyond the earlier concentration on the gross facts of unparalleled racist exploitation. This has included a new interest in Assam tea labour, as well as efforts at exploring enforced Indian migration to the West Indian islands in terms of the lives and problems of Indians who stayed on there. These constitute, as in other ex-indentured colonies like Mauritius or Fiji, a numerically very signicant part of Non-Resident Indians (Dasgupta 1992; Behal and Mahapatra 1992; Mahapatra 2004).13 Yet they have been generally ignored in South Asian postcolonial theories, which have concentrated on the problems and opportunities of relatively afuent recent immigrants in the
metropolitan countries. One area that remains to be studied by Indian scholars, though, is Natal. Here, surely, there is much scope for Indo-South African scholarly interaction. Ian Kerrs (1996) very original study of railway construction and maintenance (as against the usual focus on management and strikes) highlights the ways in which formal and informal have been combined in the constitution and reproduction of this vast enterprise. The combination brings together the most menial, sometimes age-old, forms of labour with the most advanced kinds of management at the top. Kerr suggests that such bringing together of labour processes of the most diverse kinds and levels represents an integration, in Marxist terms, of the formal and real subsumption of labour by capital, which have normally been taken as chronologically distinct phases: another instance of crossing of boundaries. Labour studies had been weak, indeed all but non-existent, with regard to questions of gender, and here even Chakrabarty and Chandavarkar had not changed things much. But a breakthrough seems impending, as indicated, for instance, by Samita Sens (1999) major work directly focused on female labour in the Bengal jute industry. Chitra Joshis study of Kanpur textiles across many decades of growth, labour militancy, and subsequent decline of both the mills and the labour movement also integrates women into labour history in impressive ways. But Joshis (2003) Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories leaps over, and links up, many other divisions. A study of what might, at rst sight, seem a single industry in one city brings in a new emphasis on changing spaces and times, of workers and their chroniclers alike. The lost worlds of her title refers, of course, to the collapse of what in the 1930s had been a powerful trade union and communist movement Red Kanpur amidst todays deindustrialisation and shift to casual and petty forms of labour. But Joshi points out that workers lives have always been characterised by loss of village homes, of specic employment, often of repeated movement from city to city in search of jobs. Also, the loss sometimes of memories of past militancy: she discovers that the 1930s hardly gure in the reminiscences of the residue of workers (or exworkers) today, indicating important generational gaps. Here is one more theme highlighted by the South Africans, but so far neglected by Indian scholars. A vivid impression emerges of the development of Kanpur as a city, particularly in the early chapters: as with Chandavarkars work, the wall between labour and urban history is breached. This mobility, labour as residing in in-between worlds Joshis bow to literary theorist Homi Bhabha, in a most unexpected way is vividly brought alive through a collection of oral testimony unparalleled in extent in Indian labour history so far, as well as the discovery of writings and poems by shopoor workers and activists. Yet another breakthrough is the
effort to integrate the text imaginatively with visual material, once again bringing Indian labour history a bit closer to the South African style. Eric Hobsbawm in 1971 declared that it was a good time to be a social historian (Hobsbawm 1971:45). One might be tempted for a moment to make a similar comment about labour studies today in India. There is an outpouring of very promising new work, and an Association of Labour History, set up a few years ago, is stimulating research by many young scholars and organising national and international conferences. Some of the latter have beneted greatly from the participation of colleagues from South Africa. But the 1960s and 1970s the Thompsonian moment, we might say had been a time of great radical hopes, worldwide. The difference, today, is tragically obvious. What a radical historian can attempt at best, Joshi reminds us, is one of the slighter gestures of dissent, an attempt, against the grain, not to forget that world. Or, keeping in mind this combination of major academic advance with the decline of the world they study, ponder again over Hegels famous comment that the owl of Minerva can y out only in the dusk.
Notes 1. Peter Alexanders (2005) comparative analysis of women in coal mining in the two countries also highlights differences. Women workers were numerous in Indian coal mines, but absent from all underground work in South Africa. Alexander traces this contrast in signicant part to differences in techniques of mining. Geological conditions necessitated very deep mines in South Africa, while in India coal was generally closer to the surface. The production unit remained much smaller and less capital-intensive in the latter, enabling a certain presence of Indian mine-owners. The entire family would often work in these surface mines. 2. Processes for which we cannot indulge the common habit of blaming colonialism, since they began on a large scale during the Emergency of the mid-1970s, and periodically continue, irrespective of the political colour of governments not excluding, sometimes, leftist ones. 3. In Hay and Craven (2004), see particularly the introduction, and the articles by Michael Anderson and Prabhu Mahapatra. 4. It may be, for instance, surprising for South Africans to learn that in British India there was never any legal bar to marriages between Europeans and Indians, and that inter-caste marriages between Hindus were far more difcult. 5. There is a view, though, among some Dalit intellectuals today that see caste discrimination, climaxed by untouchability, as having some important afnities with racism. Such views were voiced during the United Nations world conference on racism in Durban in 2001. 6. Even EP Thompson, universally acknowledged as the founder of the turn towards radical histories from below, and pioneer of so many of the approaches used in labour history everywhere, made relatively little use of visual material. See in contrast, Raphael Samuels incomplete masterpiece (Samuel 1996). There is no Indian parallel presenting visual material about anti-colonial movements comparable to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. 7. EP Thompsons great work had also started from lectures he gave to Workers Education groups in Yorkshire, as part of the British labour movement in those far-off, pre-Blairite days. 8. Incidentally, this is not an equation that follows necessarily from all of Marxs writings and activities. He had no hesitation in hailing the Paris Commune as a heroic proletarian upsurge, although he could not have been ignorant of the fact that factory workers formed only a small part of its participants and activists.
9. The concentration on broad parameters of economic conditions, trade unions, and strikes, however, had a certain self-limiting role even for the studies of the formal sector. Everyday shopoor life, accidents, and occupational diseases, for instance, were studied rather less than the case in many other countries in recent years. 10. One particularly impressive instance would be the late Ranajit Dasgupta, a pioneer of the history of Bengal labour who had spent many years as a full-time activist in the Communist Party of India. 11. An important reminder that there was no absolute necessity for that sharp disjunction even when the organised sector was still ourishing and had the most militant workers (Breman 1976). 12. His most recent essay seemed to presage a further methodological and political advance in the work of this major historian of labour: a moving introduction to a volume of oral history of Bombay labour (Chandavarkar 2004). Chandavarkars most untimely passing a few months back, at the height of his powers, has created an enormous void in South Asian labour history. 13. Brij Lal (1983) studied indentured Indian labour in Fiji many years ago, and Crispin Bates (2000) has developed a slightly different approach to the question of indentured migration to Assam from Bihar tribal areas, emphasising push factors like class and gender oppression.
References
Alexander, Peter. 2005. Women and Coal in India and South Africa, c.1900 1945. Paper presented at conference of the Association of Labour Historians, Delhi. Anderson, Michael. 2004. India, 1858 1930: The Illusion of Free Labour, in Hay and Craven (eds). Bates, Crispin. 2000. Coerced and Migrant Labourers in India: The colonial Experience. Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies 13. Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. Behal, Rana and Mahapatra, Prabhu. 1992. Tea and Money versus Human Life: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840 1908, in Daniel, Bernstein and Brass (eds). Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. 2004. The Colonial State: Theory and Practice. Presidential Address, 65th Session of the Indian History Congress, Bareilly, MJP Rohilkhand University. Bonner, P. 1994. New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977 1994. The Journal of American History 18(3). 2004. Migration, Urbanisation, and Urban Social Movements in Twentieth Century India and South Africa. Studies in History 20(2). Bonner, Philip and Nieftagodien, Noor. 2001. Kathorus: A History. Cape Town: Longman. Bonner, Philip and Segal, Lauren. 1998. Soweto: A History. Cape Town: Longman. Bozzoli, B. (ed). 1987. Class, Community, and Conict: South African Perspectives. Johannesburg: Ravan.
Breman, Jan. 1976. A Dualistic Labour System? A Critique of the Informal Sector Concept. Economic and Political Weekly 11. 2003. Footloose Labour: Working in Indias Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1989. Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890 1940. Delhi: Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press. Chandavarkar, Raj. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c.1850 1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Introduction, in N. Adarkar and M. Menon, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon, an Oral History. Calcutta, New Delhi: Seagull. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Daniel, E. Valentine, Bernstein, Henry and Brass, Tom (eds). 1992. Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia. London: Frank Cass and Company. Dasgupta, Ranajit. 1992. Plantation Labour in Colonial India, in Daniel, Bernstein and Brass (eds). Delius, Peter. 1996. A Lion amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Hardiman, David. 2006. Histories for the Subordinated. Delhi: Permanent Black. Hay, Douglas and Craven, Paul (eds). 2004. Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562 1955. Chapel Hill, London: University of North Carolina Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1971. From Social History to the History of Society. Daedalus 100. Hofmeyer, Isabel. 1993. We spend our Days as a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 2004. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrims Progress. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Joshi, Chitra. 2003. Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories. Delhi: Permanent Black. Kerr, Ian. 1996. Building the Railways of the Raj. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kumar, Dharma. 1965. Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lal, Brij. 1983. Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians. Journal of Pacic History 57(4).
Mahapatra, Prabhu. 2004. Assam and the West Indies, 1860 1920: Immobilising Plantation Labour, in Hay and Craven (eds). Morris, Morris David. 1965. The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1854 1947. Bombay: California University Press, Oxford University Press. Parry, Jonathan, Breman, Jan and Kapadia, Karin. 1999. The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour. New Delhi: Sage. Parthasarathi, Prasanna. 2001. The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sakar, Sumit. 2004. The Return of Labour to South Asian History (review article). Historical Materialism 12(3). Samuel, Raphael. 1996. Theatres of Memory, two volumes. London: Verso Books (new edition). Sen, Samita. 1999. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Onselen, Charles. 1996. The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894 1985. Cape Town: David Philip.
Women and Coal Mining in India and South Africa, c1900-1940

Peter Alexander 1
University of Johannesburg
One of the benets of comparative history is that it makes it possible to consider counter-factual questions. In this instance, I was initially interested in why it was that in South Africa there were no women working underground in the mines. Posing this absence as a problem was a way of thinking about gender in a novel way. My approach has been to compare labour practices in the coal mines of South Africa with those in the coal mines of India, where women were employed in large numbers until after the Second World War. In South Africa, labour practices on the collieries were similar to those on the far more important gold mines, so the argument presented here has a wider signicance. The value of limiting the discussion to collieries is that it permits one to develop a closer comparison, and thus a more reliable analysis. South Africa and India are well matched: both were part of the British Empire (except for the Boer republics prior to 1902), and both industries were similar in age and output.2In the process of exploring the contrast, it has been possible, I think, to advance a clearer explanation for the declining involvement of women in underground mining that occurred in India in the 1920s and 1930s. The presentation of this article is simple: rst India and then South Africa, and in both cases I start by looking at the industry in general and then at women in particular, using the former to inform my understanding of the latter. There has recently been a owering of literature on women and mining. This is reected in the publication last year (2006) of two collections of essays. The rst of these, edited by Jaclyn J Gier and Laurie Mercier, is presented as a contribution to global history and considers women in mining communities as well as women as miners. The second, edited by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Martha Macintyre, focuses more specically on women miners in developing countries. Between them, these volumes present chapters based on detailed primary research conducted in sixteen countries. There are gaps, including very little on Africa. Nevertheless, there is much new information and useful historical syntheses by the editors and Gill Burke. By linking this with what one knows from other sources it is possible to advance a broad outline, a model, for the employment of women underground in coal mines. In the early days, when mines were shallow pits, it is likely that women were widely, though not universally, engaged in mining (as also with the peasant farming that
mostly continued as a parallel, sometimes seasonal, activity). During the rst phase of the industrial revolution, when labour was generally scarce and alternative employment rare, this remained the case. However, there was usually a division of labour, with, according to Burke (2006:29), men always working as hewers of coal. The passage of the British Mines Act in 1842, excluding women from working underground, marked a turning point. By this date, some mines were using other means of hauling coal, a task commonly performed by women (so opposition from owners was minimal), and in key areas there were now factory jobs for women. There was also a growing middle class, which responded positively to reformers evidence of unhealthy working conditions and moral degradation.3 Similar exclusions gradually spread around the world. Germany was rst (with a ban introduced in 1878), North America followed (with Ontario, for instance, introducing statutory prohibition in 1890), and Sweden passed legislation in 1900. Women were still working underground in France and Belgium in the twentieth century; Russia imposed a ban after the revolution in 1917; India did so in 1929; and Japan prohibited most kinds of underground work in 1933. In 1935 an International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention gave added weight to restrictions on underground work by women, but a number of countries relaxed their rules during the Second World War.4A signicant exception to our general model is provided by China, where there were very few women miners until the second half of the twentieth century, possibly because of the prevalence of foot binding in the main mining areas (see Burke 2006:32). The employment of women never disappeared of course. Exceptions were made and laws were outed. In particular, women continued to work in artisanal and small-scale mining (see Lahiri-Dutt and Macintyre 2006). However, there was another turning point. In 1977, a United States law suit claried that countrys Equal Rights Amendment, paving the way for the employment of women underground yet again. The work is still tough, but automation, in particular, has helped to make the job more tolerable. Similar changes have taken place elsewhere (in South Africa, this was in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid). In China, women had been encouraged to enter the mines in the 1970s, as part of the drive for equality that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, but in 1991 a ban on such work was introduced (Yao 2006:22730). Today, in many parts of the world, including South Africa, women are often preferred as operators of the huge trucks that are used in opencast mining. In Indonesia, Lahiri-Dutt (2006a) was given the following reasons for this: women are more careful than men, easier to handle, less likely to be absent, and improve the behaviour of men. I will return to my outline model in the conclusion.
Indian coal mining and women miners

a) Indian coal mining
Indias main coalelds were Raniganj, in west Bengal, and Jharia, just over the border in that part of Bihar that is now Jharkand. Closer to Calcutta and partially
Women and Coal Mining in India and South Africa, c1900 1940 203
accessible by river, Raniganj was the rst to produce coal in large quantities, but it was only able to mount a signicant challenge to British imports after the coming of railways (the East Indian Railway, opened in 1855, using local coal from 1877). Production in Jharia, which had started in 1893, expanded rapidly after 1907, when the railway line reached Dhanbad, soon to become the industrys principal centre. Jharias rich coking coal attracted Tata Iron and Steel to the area, and the company provided a second major market soon after its establishment in 1911 (Ghosh 1977:40, 46, 51, 58). Boosted, in part, by wartime exports, Indias total output of coal virtually doubled in the ten years to 1919, in which year output reached 21.8 million tons, a gure not surpassed for a further ten years. The 1930s were marked by slump and stagnation, and output did not rise signicantly until 1937, when, once again, it surpassed the 1919 gure (Ghosh 1977:27577). By 1906 Jharia was producing more coal than Raniganj, and by 1927 it was responsible for fty-one per cent of Indias total output, with Raniganj producing twenty-ve per cent (Barraclough n.d.:146; Simeon 1995:16). Compared to South Africa, production per mine was very low. In 1921 687 coal mines produced Indias 17.1 million tons of coal; an average of less than 25,000 tons per mine. There were some larger mines producing more than 60,000 tons per year, and in the Bengal-Bihar coalelds these numbered eightysix in 1919 and seventy-two in 1935. These larger mines were responsible for fty-nine per cent of total output in 1919 and 64.5 in 1935 (Ghosh 1977:107, 276, 281). That is, there was some shift towards concentrating production in larger mines, but not much. The main reason for the generally small size of production units appears to have been that cost of entry into the industry could be minimal. Mining leases were relatively cheap and easy to obtain from the local zamindars (and sometimes these feudal lords engaged in mining themselves, as in seventeenth century Britain); at least in Jharia, workings were often shallow, thus requiring little investment; and it was possible to remove coal using lowcost labour and little machinery. It may also have been that narrow and angled seams, and faults and other obstructions, militated against the development of large and capital intensive mines (Ghosh 1977:52; Simeon 1995:1617; Rothermund 1978:17). AB Ghosh (1975:100 106) divides the mines into three structural forms. These were the captive mines owned by major consumers (i.e. railways and steel manufacturers), which tended to be the larger producers. Then there were mines controlled by managing agents who were mainly Calcutta-based and acted on behalf of British capitalists. These agents also had interests in other industries and were noted for investing on the basis of short-term gain. Finally, there were collieries that were privately owned; these were mostly small-scale mines owned by Indians.5 The Indian Mining Association (IMA), established in 1892, represented British interests, and by 1918 its one hundred or so members were responsible for about two-thirds of Indian coal production (Mining, Geological and Metallurgical Institute of India n.d.:522). Local capitalists were represented by the Indian
Mining Federation, formed in 1913, and also, from 1934, by the rival Indian Coal Owners Association (Simeon 1995:18). The Indian coal industry was marked by a low level of mechanisation. In 1925 only 13.3 per cent of mines were using electricity, and twenty years later the gure had only risen to 16.3 per cent.6 By 1930 only 11.3 per cent of mines had coal-cutting machines, and there was actually a decline during the early 1930s to 7.2 per cent in 1935. The gure was still only 11.2 per cent in 1940, in which year just eleven per cent of coal was cut by machine (falling to 9.1 per cent by 1945) (Ghosh 1977:151 6). The low cost and plentiful supply of labour, lack of capital and skilled labour, and inadequate loading and transport facilities have all been cited as reasons for the low level of mechanisation, and one wonders whether geological factors might have been a further consideration (Ghosh 1977:156; Welsh n.d.:197). There is, however, a direct relationship between lack of mechanisation and extensive use of living labour. In 1921 Indias 190,000-strong coal-mining workforce produced 18.4 million tons of the mineral.7 This averages only ninety-nine tons per person, a gure that rose to 130 tons by 1929, but was only eighty-seven tons in 1945 (Simeon 1995:23; Ghosh 1977:292). We might contrast that relatively high 1930 gure 130 tons per worker with comparable data from other countries for the same year. In Japan the gure was 150 tons, in France 182, in the United Kingdom 270, in Germany 311, in Australia 507, and in the United States 831 (Ghosh 1977:142). I will refer to South Africa later. Analytically, one can distinguish three kinds of worker: locals, settled immigrants and long-distance oscillating migrants. Dilip Simeon (1995:25) tells us that in the 1920s nearly half the Jharia workforce came from Manbhum (the district in which the Jharai eld is located), with about a quarter coming from neighbouring districts (see also Rothermund 1978:187). Ghosh (1977:129) conrms that throughout the pre-independence period the main sources of labour . . . were the areas adjacent to the coalelds of Bengal and Bihar. The signicance of this is that most locals were sufciently close to their villages to maintain agricultural production. They could walk or sometimes take the train to work on a daily basis, or at least return home once a week (see Barnes 1989:108). Then, there were workers who had settled on the mines as a consequence of efforts to stabilise the workforce. Many of these settlers returned home periodically (often to assist with agriculture in April, July and winter) (Simeon 1995:28).8 In general, whilst continuing links to rural areas could cause inconvenience for the mines, they enabled workers to cope with slumps in production (and, hence, reduced income), and meant that owners could avoid responsibility for many of the costs of reproducing their labour force. Finally, there were long-distance migrants who came from the western districts of Bihar, the eastern part of UP (United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh), north-east CP (Central Provinces, now Matya Pradesh), and even the Punjab. Typically they worked on a mine for eleven months of the year (Lahiri-Dutt 2001:9; Ghosh 1977:131; Barnes 1989:110).
The proportion of this third category of workers appears to have been growing during the 1920s (Barnes 1989:110; Nite 2004:50).9 The 1931 Royal Commission on Labour in India (quoted in Ghosh) explained that, whilst most of these workers retained some connection with land and agriculture,
they are not usually agriculturalists in the same sense as the aboriginals [mostly locals]. They approximate more nearly to perennial factory workers and may properly be regarded as miners dependent on mining for their livelihood. (Ghosh 1977:131)
The workforce, especially that element described here as locals, was dominated numerically by adavasis, sometimes called tribals or aboriginals; that is, the descendents of the pre-Aryan indigenous people of the area, who, as Delief Schwerin (1978:24) put it, survived in this mountainous fastness [of Jharkhand] by being shut off from the cultural, economic and political mainstream of India. In 1901 indigenous tribes constituted 57.2 per cent of the population of Chota Nagpur (which approximates to modern Jharkand) (Schwerin 1978:24). By 1921, according to Simeon (1995:24, citing the census), aboriginals and semi-aboriginals still represented 48.8 per cent of the twenty-six most numerous castes in the Jharia Coaleld. A further 20.2 per cent came from the depressed classes and 22 per cent were from traditional peasant, labouring or artisan castes; only 8.8 per cent came from high status castes (Brahmins, Rajputs, Pathans and Kayasths), and many of these were located in supervisory positions. Lahiri-Dutt (2001:3), whose main research was undertaken in the Raniganj region, also emphasised the importance of adavasi workers, especially as the initial labour force. In general, adavasis were geographically and politically marginalised, and, along with many low-caste Hindus, most lived in dire poverty, sometimes having to rely on roots for food and often employed as bonded labour (Schwerin 1978:32 34, 56). As a consequence, they were usually willing to work on the mines for minimal rewards. Underground conditions were awful. Drinking water was not provided, there was no sanitation, lighting was by kerosene lamps that were a re hazard, and rst-aid kits were uncommon. Above ground, many miners stayed in company quarters known as dhowaras, where clean water might mean a tap for sixty to eighty houses.10 This, taken together with poor ventilation and a lack of lavatories, ensured that serious illness was rife (Ghosh 1977:1478; Simeon 1996:9495). A common problem and a reason why many miners tolerated such conditions was debt, usually to a contractor (Simeon 1995:148).11 Hours and pay varied greatly, partly because of the different forms of recruitment, but also because conditions varied from mine to mine. However, a 1935 Act provided for nine-hour shifts underground and a fty-four-hour week, and by 1937 miners in Jharia were working forty-ve hours a week (Ghosh 1977:1712; Simeon 1995:150). A 1920 strike led to a pay rise for miners of twenty-ve per cent, and, according to Ghosh (1977:175, quoting Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector), in 1923 daily earnings on the Jharia eld amounted to the equivalent of about 1s 9d per day for
miners and 11d per day for women (though most of these workers were actually piece rated). For India as a whole, in 1929 miners and loaders pay was averaging 1 1s per month (Ghosh 1997:178); which, given that the mean daily income at this date was just over 1s, implies, I think, that they were only working for about twenty days per month. These sums may seem low, but, according to Rothermund (1978:10), in the 1920s miners were the highest paid workers in India. However, with stagnation and then slump, pay fell to less than half the 1923 gure.12
b) Women miners and their exclusion
A distinctive feature of Indian coal mining was the high proportion of women it employed. This is reected in the Table 1, which also reveals the decline in the proportion of women employed from 1920 onwards. Underground, the reduction became marked from 1929, though there was some increase in women working on the surface during the 1930s. The Second World War saw a growth in the number of women working underground, but afterwards this gure dropped to almost nothing. The employment of women was mostly associated with family production. A 1924 survey of women employed on the Jharia and Raniganj coalelds showed that forty-nine per cent were working with their husbands, thirty per cent were with relatives and twenty per cent were unattached (see Nite 2005:7). Lahiri-Dutt (2001:8) notes that the women who worked in the mines were very rarely from the upper castes and she suggests that the family system may, in part, have been a product of adavasi sentiments of family attachment, and the unwillingness of women to carry coal for men of another caste. In contrast to the locals and settled workers, long-distance migrants were overwhelmingly male (Lahiri-Dutt 2001:11). In underground mines, room and pillar extraction was in general use (at least in Raniganj). In other countries using this system, it was normal for miners to work in pairs perhaps a man and his son, or two buddies but in India the pair was often a man and his wife. As was also the case with the coal quarries described by Lahiri-Dutt (2001:67), the man would cut the coal and his wife would carry it to the surface (see also Rothermund 1978:187).14 Elsewhere, children and other kin augmented this twosome, with the men cutting and the
Table 1. Employment of women in coal mines in British India, 1915 3513 Underground employees Total (thousand) 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 94.6 102.3 110.6 116.7 112.3 No. women per 10 men 6.0 6.9 5.5 2.5 1.1 Surface employees Total (thousand) 146.9 172.7 167.0 169.0 159.2 No. women per 10 men 5.6 6.1 4.8 2.7 1.6
women and children loading, carrying and hauling the coal (Simeon 1995:150; Nite 2005:8). In 1937, a former manager (quoted in Ghosh) described the position thus:
The whole family, including children of all ages, entered the mine with their parents. The village miner came in with his wife and family approximately twice per week for a 24 hours shift. He came and went as he liked, went down and came up as he liked, worked or smoked or slept as he felt inclined, and would even do a double shift if it suited him for market day or Pujah pocket money. They took their food and their beds down with them, and I know of one case where two girl twins were born in the mine; I afterwards saw them married, and working in that same mine. (Ghosh 1977:49)
Drawing on various sources, including interviews with retired women miners, Barnes (1989:116, 130 8) convincingly demonstrated that underground work was not unpopular with the women themselves. A number of arguments were advanced. Family production was associated with relatively egalitarian relationships, where men cooked and women could drink and sometimes have affairs. In contrast, male-only employment would, and did, encourage alcohol abuse and prostitution. The women mineworkers were found to be generally healthy. Mining was dangerous and there was a preference for dying together rather than worrying about ones husband. Moreover, compared with surface jobs, working underground was better paid and cooler in summer. In general, the system meant that family incomes were greater than in households where just the man worked, yet the system was sufciently exible to allow women to take several months off after a child had been born, and for women in particular to undertake agricultural labour at busy times of the year. For the mine owners the main benet of the system was that it provided a labour force that was relatively cheap and required little supervision. Theoretically, at least, the cost of reproduction component of a mans wage could be minimal, especially if children were cared for at the workplace and income was supplemented by agricultural production. In addition, it meant that workers had an alternative means of survival during heavy rains when mines were ooded and output ceased. So why, then, was there a decline in the employment of women, especially underground? Lahiri-Dutt (2001) makes the following argument:
Coal mining began in India during the colonial period . . . Women of tribal and lower caste communities were an important part of the labour force. Their role in the resource extraction continued to be signicant as long as the techniques of production remained basic, labour intensive, small and surface bound. The expansion of coal mining (particularly in the post-colonial period when the industry was nationalised), with consequent increasing reliance on more mechanised production techniques, has led to a rapid decline in the participation of women. The exclusion has been aided and abetted by the State and its various agencies and laws, trade unions and the ILO who have all worked together in dening a place for women in a gendered resource economy.15
Some of this analysis must be qualied by reference to chronology. Most of the decline in women employment occurred in the 1920s. The principal ILO
convention (1935), independence (in 1948) and nationalisation (early 1970s) were clearly too late to be major considerations in this key period. Perhaps some labour leaders had a hand, but I am not aware of any miners union calling for exclusion in the 1920s, which is not surprising since many men would have suffered nancially from the loss of their wives income. By 1933, the Indian Colliery Workers Union was calling for a wage sufcient to maintain the workers and his family in reasonable comfort (Nite 2005:33), but this was more a consequence than a cause of the change. Perhaps LahiriDutt is right about an association with small and surface bound operations, but, as I have shown, women were often employed underground. Moreover, from 1901 to 1920, when mines were generally getting deeper, the proportion of women workers was increasing. What about mechanisation, which Simeon (1995:146) also regards as responsible for the decline in womens employment? This requires further consideration, but the most important form of mechanisation was the introduction of coal cutters, which would have replaced men rather than women. In my view, far greater weight should be placed on another consideration raised by Lahiri-Dutt (2001:6 7) the passage of the Indian Mines Act of 1929. This legislation prohibited women from working underground, granting the mining industry ten years to complete the process of elimination (Barnes 1989:143). Whilst the Act may be regarded as pivotal, we still need to know why it was passed and why the number of women working underground was already falling. As Barnes (1989:12339) has shown, from the early 1920s a body of respectable opinion was agitating for a ban, doing so on grounds of morality, civilisation and womanhood.16 In 1923, this lobby secured legislation prohibiting children from going underground (which, in turn, boosted its contention that working mothers should be at home looking after these young ones). At this point, however, the European as well the Indian owners were against extending the ban to include women. Critically, the 1929 Act was only passed after opinion among the former had been reversed. There appears to have been a shift in attitude sometime around 1925, in which year the chief inspector of mines (quoted in Barnes 1989:141) claimed: [women] are very largely in the way and prevent speeding up; they lead to difculties about discipline, and that sort of thing reduces output. One old man explained to Barnes (1989:134): the women would stop work and sing and dance. So no work was done. So the bosses stopped the women from going down the mine. But why 1925? In the early 1920s the owners were under pressure to make changes. The pay rise following the 1920 strike squeezed prots; local coal was losing out to, interestingly, South African coal in south-east Asia and western India; and, beyond the old coal districts, there were new mines opening with modern relations of production (Nite 2004:45; Simeon 1995:166; Lahiri-Dutt 2001:7). At the same time, the owners were nding it easier to recruit labour,
especially migrant labour. According to Barnes (1989:140, quoting the chief inspector of mines): In 1921 there was an acute shortage . . . in 1922 it was very scarce, and still in 1923 there was a labour problem. From 1924 the situation changes. Labour was plentiful in 1924, sufcient in 1925 and 1926, and in excess supply in 1927. That is, the mines were becoming less dependent on family gangs; on men who went down and came up as [they] liked and women who stop work and sing and dance. They needed to increase control over production, but, also, they had the chance to do so. Yet it was only some mines that were reducing the proportion of women they employed, and these tended to be the larger mines, that is the captive and European-owned collieries (Barnes 1989:140). Here, two other processes were underway. Firstly, there was some measure of mechanisation, with the number of coal cutting machines increasing from ninety-three in 1923 to 202 in 1930. There was also some electrication, and electric water pumps would have made it easier to maintain year-round production. The argument is not that machines were replacing women (this happened sometimes, but the relatively low level of mechanisation meant that direct causality was not the main issue). Rather, to get a return on their investment in machines, owners wanted to use them more intensively than family production permitted (Nite 2005:20). Also, mechanisation assisted in wresting control from the families. Then, secondly, the larger mines were attempting to make more efcient use of labour, with the development of shift systems being the prime example of this development (Nite 2005:48). The family system was anathema to this form of production. So, the reduction in the proportion of underground workers who were women was part of a broader attack on family-controlled production. Once major coal producers had scaled down their use of women underground, it was not simply that they could tolerate legal prohibition, it was also that a ban would positively benet them by disadvantaging their competitors (who, for the most part, were small, Indian-owned companies). In the earlier era, the owners main problem was that of securing a supply of labour, any labour. This is generally a major difculty that capitalists face at the onset of industrialisation. In this case, the problem was addressed mainly by recruiting nearby villagers, many of whom were adavasis, among whom there was a tradition of men and women labouring together, a tradition that was then adapted to work on the mines. However, for the mines, there was a price to pay. Because many of the new workers retained an interest in agricultural production they worked irregularly, and, as Barnes (1989:109) argues, because they were local and retained another means of survival, they were more independent than the largely proletarianised, long-distance migrants. Eventually, with improved supplies of labour and some mechanisation and reorganisation of production, the bigger owners decided that this was a price they could refuse to pay.17
South African coal mining and an absence of women workers

a) South African coal mining
South Africas main coalelds stretched in an arc from northern Natal, over the border into the eastern Transvaal (now Mpumulanga and Gauteng), and then south into the Orange Free State (OFS). Whilst the Natal coaleld was closer to Durban and the sea, thus better placed to serve coastal markets (including exports), the Transvaal eld could provide coal for the massive gold mines that began to develop on the Witwatersrand (the Rand) after the minerals discovery in 1887. Again railways were key to development. The Natal industry was given a major boost with the opening of a rail link to Durban in 1889. In the Transvaal, there was coal close to and in one case above the early gold mines (in what is now Gauteng), but the main source was around Witbank (in Mpumulanga), which, like Dhanbad perhaps, became a major junction and the principal centre of the countrys coal industry. The town was on a line linking Pretoria and Delagoa Bay (now Maputo) that opened in 1895, but production really took off after the establishment of a direct rail link to the Rand in 1906. If Natal was the Raniganj of South Africa, then Transvaal was its Jharia. After the Anglo-Boer War, output expanded rapidly, reaching 10.3 million tons in 1919 (with 64.5 per cent coming from the Transvaal and 27.3 per cent from Natal). However, unlike India, output continued to increase during the 1920s and 1930s, overtaking Indian production, momentarily, in 1944. In that year, South Africa produced 24.9 million tons of coal (70.6 per cent coming from the Transvaal). The main cause of this growth was the boom in the gold industry, which started in 1933.18 In South Africa, production was far more concentrated than in India. Thus, in 1920, just thirty-four collieries produced the total output of the Transvaal and OFS. They averaged about 240,000 tons, almost ten times the 25,000 tons from the average Indian colliery (in 1921) (Alexander 1999). By 1946, thirty-four large collieries produced 99.7 per cent of the Transvaals coal, at an average of 524,000 tons, and, in Natal, the fteen large collieries that were responsible for virtually all the provinces coal, averaged 344,000 tons apiece. Following a pattern established in the diamond mines of Kimberley, and transferred to the Rand gold mines, investment was undertaken on a very different scale to that in India.19 In the Transvaal, ownership was characterised by, rstly, a small number of companies (probably only twenty in the early 1920s); secondly, cooperation among these companies; and, thirdly, a close relationship with the gold industry. In 1907 representatives of most of the Transvaal collieries established the Transvaal Coal Owners Association (TCOA), which, unlike the IMA, agreed on production quotas and a xed price for coal. The strong grip that the gold mines had on the collieries was partly because, directly and indirectly, they provided them with their principal market. Crucially, however, it was a consequence of allowing the collieries access to labour recruited by the
Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (known as Wenela). Wenela had been established by the gold industrys powerful Chamber of Mines in 1901, and, through an Anglo-Portuguese agreement, had been granted a recruiting monopoly in Mozambique. In 1914, under pressure from Wenela, the colliery owners formed a Collieries Committee to deal with labour issues, and four years later this became a sub-committee of the Chamber of Mines. In 1920 the largest coal group was owned by a company that also had gold interests (though not on the Rand), and three of the Rands major mining houses owned Transvaal collieries.20 Share holders owned nearly all the mining companies and some were publicly quoted. Whilst most of the capital came from overseas, there were no managing agents of the Indian kind, and long-term investment decisions were possible. Moreover, there were no indigenous capitalists of the kind associated with Indias privatelyowned collieries (black ownership is a post-apartheid phenomenon). Whilst Natals collieries lacked the Transvaals links to gold and Wenela, it did establish a Natal Coal Owners Association modelled on the TCOA in 1913. South Africas collieries were highly mechanised at an early date, not only in contrast to India but also in comparison with the rest of the world. By 1920 fty-two per cent of Natals coal, and eighty-two per cent of the Transvaals, was cut by machine (either by compressed air or electric cutters). At the same date, the comparable gures for the United States and the United Kingdom were, respectively, sixty per cent and thirteen per cent. In India, it will be recalled, as late as 1940 only eleven per cent of coal was machine cut. High concentration of capital, character of seams, the cost and availability of labour, and an existing division of labour would all have contributed to South Africas early mechanisation. Unsurprisingly, the average South African worker was far more productive than his Indian counterpart. In 1920 South Africas 34,495 colliery employees produced about 333 tons of coal per person, more than three times the amount of an average Indian colliery worker at the same date (and more than the average European colliery worker as well). By 1944, some 49,099 colliery workers were producing an average of 507 tons per worker, more than ve times as much as the average Indian miner (Union of South Africa 1921:610, 615; Union of South Africa 1947:chapter xxii 51 and 56; Ghosh 1977:142). South African mines were also larger than those in India in terms of numbers of people employed. In 1920, the thirty-four collieries in the Transvaal and Orange Free State employed 578 workers each on average. By contrast, in 1921, Indias 687 coal mines employed, on average, only 277 workers. In South Africa there was not the same potential for local recruitment of workers as in India. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the mining areas of the Transvaal were sparsely populated. In Natal most Africans were still able to survive on subsistence cultivation and grazing, plus the collieries also competed for labour with the Rand gold mines, which provided better pay, and with local white farmers. There were chiefs and headmen, but not the massive differences in wealth and power associated with zamindari feudalism
(and whilst there had been an adavasi-like aboriginal population, it had been driven into the semi-desert far to the west). Local recruitment could only be minimal, even in Natal, and the owners had to seek workers elsewhere. In the Transvaal, this largely meant utilising the long-distance Mozambican migrants supplied by Wenela and employing them on year-long contracts. From 1912 the collieries were also using labour that had been obtained by the newly formed Native Recruiting Corporation, mainly from Lesotho.21 In addition, in the Transvaal, and more so in Natal, the collieries used agents, sometimes shopkeepers, to recruit workers in distant places. Contrary to established wisdom, the collieries were also concerned to stabilise an African workforce. In the southern Transvaal an attempt was made to settle families from the Cape, giving them some land in return for providing a male to work for the colliery (Sawyer 1900:10; see also Mendelsohn 1989). In Natal, the collieries encouraged workers to stay with their families by providing enough land for a house and a small amount of food production. It was estimated that, by 1938, some 65% of the labour force of the major Natal collieries consisted of permanent labourers who, together with their families, viewed the collieries as home(quoted in Edgecombe and Guest 1987:59). Even in the eastern Transvaal, by 1924 the number of women permitted to live on a colliery in the Witbank district was nearly twenty-ve per cent the number of African workers. At this point, the authorities limited the number of Africans who were married to fteen per cent of the total on any colliery. But, by 1939 the local magistrate was complaining that [a]round all the mine properties are congregated collections of native huts, occupied mostly by native women, and, in 1941, because of the need for increased war production, coupled with a shortage of building materials, the government suspended its regulations for the control of native married quarters. The Natal collieries also employed Indian workers, initially as indentured labourers, and, by 1910, 37.7 per cent of the provinces employees were of Indian origin. After the Indian government halted new indentures in 1911, their numbers declined, reaching 9.4 per cent in 1925. On the collieries, Indians were very largely engaged in the same work as Africans. In South Africa, the main division within the workforce was racial, and in the Transvaal, but not Natal, this was reinforced by legislation. In the early days, most of the whites on the collieries came from Britain. During the period under review, the proportion of employees that was white uctuated between four and seven per cent. These whites included miners who had to have a blasting certicate (which excluded blacks), but their main job was that of supervising a team of maybe fty black labourers. Although, as in India, there was room and pillar extraction, a room was worked by this large team, rather than a man and his wife, and there was an element of specialisation, with workers engaged in either cutting or drilling or loading or hauling. With this system it was relatively simple to replace hand drills with mechanical drills, and hand cutting with machine minding.22
Whilst working and living conditions for white workers could be grim and sometimes dangerous, they were a good deal better than those experienced by black workers. In the Transvaal, all whites had higher-status employment than all blacks, and the average white miner or mechanic was paid nine times as much as the average African worker. Whilst most white workers lived with their family in a ve-roomed house, most Africans were temporary residents of single-sex barracks (something like a dhowara). Because of language differences there was minimal communication across the racial divide, food and clothes were different, and churches, schools and social activities provided further separation. Indentured Indians were treated particularly badly; they cost much less than an African worker, starting on as little as 15s per month (just slightly more than on Natals sugar elds). However, with the ending of indentured labour, and after a 1913 strike involving Mohandas Gandhi, pay increased sharply, and, by 1921, the average Indian employed by Natals collieries received about 2 18s per month, compared to an average of 2 8s for Africans (whether in Natal or the Transvaal). However, if one were to add 1s 2d per shift for the food and quarters the collieries were expected to provide, the African labourers received the equivalent of about 4 3s per month. At this point, Indias colliery workers were paid only slightly less per day than South Africas. But if allowance is made for, on the one hand the wifes pay, and, on the other hand employment for more days a month and provision of free food, the South African received, very roughly, fty per cent more. Moreover, whilst Indian pay collapsed under the weight of economic stagnation (and possibly from the attack on family production as well), pay on South Africas collieries increased slightly (Alexander 2003). By the mid-1930s, just in terms of daily pay, Indian mineworkers were receiving less than half the amount paid to black South Africans.23 The pressure that led to the formation of the Collieries Committee in 1914 had been prompted by a riot, in the previous year, of Mozambican migrants protesting against being sent to collieries rather than gold mines. Concerned that poor conditions on the collieries might jeopardise all supplies of Mozambican labour, Wenela drew up an agreement on minimum conditions of employment and insisted upon its acceptance by the collieries. The main elements of the concordat included average pay of 2s per hour for underground workers, a working week of fty-seven hours and the implementation of minimum standards for food and accommodation. Wenela policed these conditions by means of twice-yearly inspections and the threat, occasionally enforced, of restrictions on allocations of labour. Whilst there were derelictions as one inspector put it, my impression is that the regulations and inspections, and periodic strikes against infringement of the regulations, ensured that circumstances on South African collieries were not nearly as awful as those that prevailed in India. Another factor was that some whites worked underground, and they had their own interest in ensuring basic levels of safety and sanitation. White workers also contributed to hours being reduced to something like forty-eight per week by 1920 (Alexander 2001:522).
As a consequence of the 1914 agreement, Transvaal colliery workers received a guaranteed minimum wage, even if for some reason beyond their own control they could not work. This was most unusual in coal mining, and did not apply in either Natal or India. Unlike coal mining elsewhere, which had to respond to unreliable markets, Transvaal collieries produced mainly for the gold industry, which was protected, to a considerable degree, from normal market forces.24
b) The absence of women miners
I will now turn to consider the question: Why did South African collieries not employ women as mineworkers? Belinda Bozzoli (1983) rejected the view that women were not engaged as migrant labourers on the mines because the work was too arduous for them. In part, her argument was that, in other contexts she does not mention India but could have done women do undertake heavy industrial labour. She proposed that we should, instead, consider the dynamics of rural life in South Africa. Signicantly, young men had often been involved in hunting, raiding and ghting, activities that were much less signicant by the end of the nineteenth century, leaving them with time on their hands (for example, Beinart 1980:82). At the same time, women, rather than men, were largely responsible for agricultural production, making it more difcult for them to be freed to engage in wage labour far from home. Womens role in biological and social reproduction ensured there were further pressures on them to remain at home.25 It would be helpful to know more about the long-distance migrants to Indias coalelds, but possibly the reproduction argument applied here as well. For the older men who dominated rural society, keeping women in the homestead had the added advantage of increasing the likelihood of men and their wages returning, and, for the young men, a wife at home helped protect access to land, the key form of social security (Eldredge 1993:194; see also Walker 1990:179). This rurally-focused analysis certainly has merit, but it can only provide a partial answer to my question. As has been shown, women did migrate to mining areas (not only to the coalelds, but also to Kimberley and even the Witwatersrand).26 On the Transvaal coalelds, females usually engaged in beer-brewing and prostitution, and were also involved in food production. They may even have worked on the surface of the mines, though the evidence for this is slim. In Natal, there was often traditional farming close to the collieries, so women there could have walked to work, as they did in India. The fact is, however, that women were not permitted to work underground, and a central element in my answer must concern legal prohibitions. The South African Republic (ZAR), which ruled the Transvaal, in its Wet No. 12, 1898 (XVIII:146), bluntly banned the employment of women. The relevant clause, written in Dutch, was carried over, almost word for word, into the Union of South Africas Mines and Works Act, No. 12, 1911 (paragraph 8.1). This stated: No person shall employ underground on any mine a boy apparently under the age of sixteen years or any female.27
But why was this prohibition introduced? This remains something of a mystery, since, so far, I have failed to locate any contemporary discussion about the clause and there is no obvious origin in preceding legislation. It is unlikely that it was a consequence of inuence from Kimberley, part of the Cape Colony from 1880, for, apart from other considerations, no ban on women could be found in Cape legislation.28 One might speculate that the relevant ZAR Act was inuenced by the leading engineers employed on the Rand mines, many of whom came from the United States and Germany, where, by this stage, there were bans on underground working by women.29 Given their backgrounds, white miners, most of whom were British, would, one can assume, have found it rather peculiar, and probably obnoxious, if women, certainly white women, had been permitted to work underground. Finally, drawing on my knowledge of India, I can consider the question in yet another way. Given that there was a labour recruitment problem for South African collieries, and mines, why not address the issue in the Indian way, by using family labour? After all, many of the leaders of the two industries came from similar European backgrounds. If legislation was an obstacle to capital accumulation, why not lobby for its repeal? I will offer three possible answers that ow from my analysis. Firstly, family labour was also local labour, and this did not exist in the Transvaal. In Natal, given the existing division of labour and relative stability of the rural economy, it would have taken considerable use of force to bring about the social transformation that might have permitted family labour to succeed. But, secondly, even in India family labour only made sense whilst production techniques were primitive and output uctuated as a consequence of inclement weather. The scale and character of production was completely different in South Africa, and required a consistently employed workforce from the beginning. Thirdly, and perhaps crucially, there was an alternative: long-distance labour (whether oscillating migrants, indentured Indians or settled immigrants).
Conclusion I can now summarise the key reasons why, in the rst three decades of the twentieth century, women worked underground in Indian collieries, but not in those of South Africa. In doing so, it is possible to highlight and expand aspects of the general model outlining the employment of women in underground mining internationally. These explanations can be listed as, rstly, technical requirements; secondly, economic pressures; thirdly, cultural constraints; fourthly, political campaigns; and, fthly, legal imperatives. I should emphasise that this model is tentative, one aimed at encouraging debate and further research.
With regard to the rst, where women worked underground, this was generally where family labour prevailed (this was true of Britain, India and Japan). By family labour I mean women, perhaps with a baby, and possibly with children, working alongside a male hewer. Women were also engaged in other capacities,
but they mainly worked with their menfolk as haulers (or bearers as they were called in Scotland).30 Family labour was associated with smaller mines and with hewing and hauling by hand. The family unit had considerable control over its own labour, deciding for itself, for instance, when to work. The removal of women was linked with the development of deeper mines and with mechanisation. As Sone (2006b:66) explains for Japan, the shift away from family labour made it possible to smooth the path of rationalization and reduce labour costs. The main issue for the owners was gaining control over production. It is now clear that the exclusion of women from Indian collieries was, in large part, for similar reasons. Secondly, and closely associated with this rst consideration, the main economic pressures confronting mine owners changed over time. Initially the main problem was securing a labour force, and if women were available there could be advantages to employing them principally, they cost less. Sooner or later other possibilities arose in India, notably the employment of migrant labour so dependence on women was reduced. But also, especially where other mines were producing coal more cheaply through mechanisation, the main economic pressure switched to increasing the efciency of production. However, thirdly, women were not always available for family labour. This was generally true in China until the second half of the twentieth century, and it was true of upper caste women in India. In the United Kingdom, where there was alternative employment for women, this was generally preferred. By contrast, in Scotland and Japan, as among the adavasis in India, family labour was an adaptation of existing rural relationships.31 In any event, where women were not available, there could be other ways of securing a labour force for early industrial mines. In Cuba, during the late-seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth century, slaves, the majority of whom were women, worked the El Cobre copper mine (Diaz 2006:21); in the Alabama collieries of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, prison labour was important (Worger 2004); and, in many parts of the world, workers migrated from poorer countries and regions. Fourthly, in Britain and India, public campaigns acted as catalysts to change. In Japan, the government was sensitive to international opinion (Sone 2006b:65). Whilst the signicance of political inuence should not be underestimated, one also needs to explain the timing and social base of these campaigns. This is complex, but in Britain and India, they appear to have been rooted in a moralism associated with new social forces, including a literate middle-class, philanthropists, certain churches, and, in India, some nationalists and trade unionists. However, it was not the case that prior to the passage of legislation male miners wanted to exclude women from the mines; such men were often the husbands of the women workers, and they and their families beneted from their incomes. Finally of course, legislation reduced the employment of underground women workers. Again, though, timing is important. In India and Britain, the key
legislation was only introduced after leading employers had already stopped using women underground. Having changed their own working practices, such employers would benet from prohibiting others, usually smaller capitalists, from taking advantage of labour relationships associated with little or no mechanisation. I will turn now to South Africa. Firstly, and most importantly, virtually from the beginning mining was conducted on a completely different scale to that in India. By 1920, the average Transvaal colliery was producing about ten times as much coal as the average Indian colliery, and, whereas Indian production was among the most labour intensive in the world, that in the Transvaal was possibly the most mechanised. Consistent with theories of combined and uneven development, South Africa pretty much jumped over the early-industrial stage of mining. South Africas collieries were soon highly capitalised, and they needed a regimented workforce not family labour to get a good return on investment. Secondly, South African collieries did not need to recruit women. With strong support from the state they had access to Mozambicans, to indentured Indians, and, increasingly to South Africans impoverished by taxation, land shortages and lack of support for African agriculture. Thirdly, there would have been opposition to the employment of women, certainly from British miners accustomed to an absence of women underground, but also from Africans, who depended on women for production of food. Fourthly, there was no constituency for a campaign to challenge the 1898 and 1911 Acts, which, fthly, banned women from underground work. Finally, if family labour is regarded as pre-modern, and male-only labour as modern, the swing to egalitarian practices might be considered post-modern. Extending my analysis I might conjecture that the shift was predicated upon automation and large-scale open-cast mining; globalisation and, in some instances, a desire to weaken mining unions; on separation from pre-industrial rural life; on the politics of equal rights that came, in particular, out of the womens liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s; and, of course, on new legislation.
Notes 1. I am grateful to the Association of Indian Labour Historians for allowing me to present an earlier draft of this paper to its international conference held in Delhi in November 2005. After the conference I was able to stay with Lindsay Barnes and Ranjan Khosh at their home in a rural area outside Dhanbad. Their generosity and the introductions they provided to local mining communities are much appreciated. The visit also enabled me to share ideas with Dhiraj Nite, who later sent me an email, dated 10 February, which posed some very helpful questions about my comparison. I have also beneted from exchanges with Elaine Katz, especially with regard to the legal position in South Africa. For this article, I draw extensively on my own previous work, especially Alexander 2004 and 2005, and where it is not stated otherwise it can be assumed that South African material comes from these sources. 2. As Klaus Tenfelde (1985) argued some twenty years ago, and as Stefan Berger (2005) repeats in the introduction to a new collection, mining is particularly well suited to comparative research and analysis. See, also, Phimister c2003; Taylor 2005:12.
3. See Ivy Pinchbecks account in Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, rst published in 1930. 4. See Ralushai 2003:15; Blomberg 2006:121; Burke 2006:31-33; Gier and Mercier 2006:90. For Japan, there is excellent work by Sachiko Sone (2003, 2006a, 2006b) and W Donald Smith (2005a, 2005b, 2006). 5. Though, during the nineteenth century, mining in Raniganj was dominated by the Bengal Coal Company, then Indian owned (Rothermund 1978:166, 174, 194). 6. According to Rothermund (1978:xv): Even today the supply of electricity stops just a few miles outside the centre of the mining area, and bow and arrow are still in use among the local people. 7. For a brief discussion of statistical data for Indian mines, see Nite (2005:2). 8. According to Nite (2004:46), by 1930 at least half of all colliery labour was settled (see also Nite 2005:6). 9. In 1942 the government established the Gorakhpuri Labour Organisation (GLO) as a means of increasing the supply of labour to the mines from UP (Ghosh 1977:134). There is an obvious similarity between the GLO and recruiting organisations in South Africa that would be worthy of further exploration. 10. As with mining compounds in South Africa, the dhowaras were each occupied by a different ethnic group. Whilst this may initially have been a product of the workers own choosing, employers recognised that it had benets in terms of divide and rule. As in South Africa, the dhowaras were divided into overcrowded rooms, but, unlike the compounds, it is likely that a family gang generally occupied these. (Nite 2005:6). 11. A contractor, a sardar, received a commission from the mine to recruit workers, who often came from his own village. Sometimes this sardar also organised the work, the owners only providing the mine and machinery, or sometimes this role was performed by a separate miners sardar (usually an experienced miner). An alternative arrangement was sakari labour, which was directly employed by the mine (Ghosh 1977:132-36; and see Simeon 1995:25-28). In Natal, some collieries gave workers an advance on their pay in the form of tokens, which could be used at a local store (notably, to buy alcohol). At the end of the month workers wages would go straight into the hands of the storekeeper. This was also a form of debt-bondage and was outlawed in 1938. 12. See also Rothermund 1988:78, 101. For a general history of the Jharia coal miners, see Ghosh 1992. 13. Figures taken from Nite (2005:13), the original source being Indian Coal Statistics, 1915-38. Totals exclude children. See also the gures in Ghosh (1977:297-8). 14. For Raniganj, Lahiri-Dutt (2001:7) shows that it was also mainly women who operated the gins, the winding gear, sometimes manually operated and sometimes powered by a steam engine that hauled coal to the surface. 15. This summary comes from an abstract, and Lahiri-Dutts full account is more nuanced. See also Lahiri-Dutt (2006b). 16. Reading Pinchbeck (1969:240-70), one is struck by the similarity between the Indian case, and arguments made some eighty years earlier in Britain. 17. We may note, as well, that in the 1930s miners pay declined more rapidly than that of other workers, and it is reasonable to conjecture that one reason for this was the shift away from family labour. 18. The period also saw the establishment of the state-run steel manufacturer (ISCOR) and the development of large-scale secondary industry. Whilst South Africa was slower than India in developing a signicant steel industry, its electrical power industry was probably more advanced, providing a major customer for the coal industry before the 1920s. 19. Geology may have been a contributory factor, especially in the Transvaal, where the seams were thick (typically four metres and more), horizontal, not dusty or gaseous, seldom faulted
20.
21.
22. 23.
24. 25.
26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
or cut through by intrusions, and had strong roofs. In short, the Transvaal was well suited to mechanisation and extensive underground workings. Although these ties strengthened the link between the two industries, the relevant collieries were not captive mines in the Indian (or US) sense, for they also supplied coal to other customers. For Mozambicans, working on the mines and collieries was preferable to being forced to work for the Portuguese for next to nothing. Lesotho is mostly mountainous and, unlike Natal, unable to sustain its population through farming. It would be interesting to know whether South Africas geology meant that the rooms could be larger than elsewhere, thus making it more efcient to work in teams rather than pairs. The use of cheap labour as a means of characterising South Africas economic success now looks, at best, ethnocentric, implying a comparison with Europe rather than Asia. Moreover, the low price of coal was a consequence of the high rate of mechanisation as well as the level of black miners pay. In 1920, the Government Mining Engineer observed: a coal-cutter probably saves forty natives (quoted in Christie 1984:21). Simeon (1995:326) commented: Coal mining [in India] . . . required a workforce which would appear and disappear with the uctuating needs of industry. There is an interesting contrast here with contemporary China, where most oscillating migrants are women. This is a society that attempts to limit population growth and in which men are central to rural production. The signicance of this is explored in Alexander 2001. In time, the mine owners, like the state, came to see the benets of the countrys migrant labour system, but, to begin with, they regarded it, as Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (1982:18) noted, as both expensive and inefcient. Wet No. 12, 1898 had limited the ban on boys to those under twelve years of age. A day was spent at the Library of Parliament in Cape Town wading through mining legislation. I am obliged to the staff of the library for their assistance with this fruitless activity. I am grateful to Elaine Katz for both this idea and the suggestion that I investigate the 1898 Act. In an interesting variation, Japanese hewers sometimes worked with a wife in the pit who was different from his wife above ground (Yoshida and Miyauchi 2006:140). For Japan, see Sone (2003:40), who links pressure on women to work down the mines to the patriarchal system, inherited from feudal Japan. In Scotland, mine owners were often also land owners, and beneted from the extension of master-serf relations until the end of the eighteenth century (Pinchbeck 1969:241).
References
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Barnes, Lindsay. 1989. Women, Work and Struggle: Bhowra Colliery 1900 1985. PhD thesis, Jawaharal Nehru University. Barraclough, L.J. n.d. Early Development of Coal Mining, in Mining, Geological and Metallurgical Institute of India. Beinart, William. 1980. Labour Migrancy and Rural Production: Pondoland c.1900 1950, in Philip Mayer (ed), Black Villagers in an Industrial Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Labour Migration in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Berger, Stefan. 2005. Introduction, in Berger, Croll and LaPorte (eds). Berger, S., Croll, A. and LaPorte, N. (eds). 2005. Towards a Comparative History of Coaleld Societies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Blomberg, Eva. 2006. Gender Relations in Iron Mining Communities in Sweden, 1900 1940, in Gier and Mercier (eds). Bozzoli, Belinda. 1983. Marxism, Feminism and Southern African Studies. Journal of Southern African Studies 9. Burke, Gill. 2006. Women Miners: Here and There, Now and Then, in Lahiri-Dutt and Macintyre (eds). Christie, Renfrew. 1984. Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa. London: Macmillan. Diaz, Maria Elena. 2006. Mining Women, Royal Slaves: Copper Mining in Colonial Cuba, 1670 1780, in Gier and Mercier (eds). Edgecombe, Ruth and Guest, Bill. 1987. The Natal Coal Industry in the South African Economy 1910 1985. The South African Journal of Economic History 2(2). Eldredge, Elizabeth A. 1993. A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghosh, A.B. 1977. Coal Industry in India: An Historical and Analytical Account. Part 1 (pre-Independence Period). New Delhi: Sultan Chand and Sons. Ghosh, Ranjan Kumar. 1992. A Study of the Labour Movement in the Jharia Coal Field 1900 1977. PhD thesis, Calcutta University. Gier, Jaclyn J. and Mercier, Laurie (eds). 2006. Mining Women: Gender in the Development of a Global Industry, 1670 to 2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. 2001. From Gin Girls to Scavengers: Women in Indian Collieries. Working Paper 28. Canberra: Resource Management in Asia-Pacic Project, Research School for Pacic and Asian History, Australian National University. 2006a. Globalisation and Womens Work in the Mine Pits in East Kalimentan, Indonesia, in Lahiri-Dutt and Macintyre (eds). 2006b. Kamins Building the Empire: Class, Caste, and Gender Interface in Indian Collieries, in Gier and Mercier (eds).
Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala and McIntyre, Martha (eds). 2006. Women Miners in Developing Countries: Pit Women and Others. Aldershot: Ashgate. Marks, Shula and Rathbone, Richard. 1982, Introduction, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870 1930. Harlow: Longman. Mendelosohn, Richard. 1989. The Country is Rotten With Coal: Sammy Marks and the Highveld Coal Industry, 1880 1910. Paper presented to the South African Historical Society, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Mining, Geological and Metallurgical Institute of India. n.d. Indian Mining Association, in Mining, Geological and Metallurgical Institute of India, Progress of the Mineral Industry of India 1906 1955. Calcutta: MGMIA. Nite, Dhiraj Kumar. 2004. Work and Culture in the Mines: Jharia Coaleld, 1890s 1940s. MPhil dissertation, Jawaharal Nehru University. 2005. Family and Work: An Exploration into the Displacement of Family Gangs and the Politics of Wages in the Jharia Coalelds 1890s 1940s. Manuscript. Phimister, Ian. c2003. Coal Mining and its Recent Pasts in Comparative Perspective. Manuscript. Pinchneck, Ivy. 1969. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750 1850. London: Virago Press. Ralushai, Matodzi. 2003. Experiences of Women Working on the Mines: A Case Study From the Rustenburg Platinum Mines. MA dissertation, Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg). Rothermund, Dietmar and Wadhwa, D.C. 1978. Zamindars, Mines and Peasants. New Delhi: Manohar Publications. Rothermund, Dietmar. 1978. Various chapters in Dietmar Rothermund and D.C. Wadhwa. 1988. An Economic History of India from pre-Colonial Times to 1991. London: Routledge. Sawyer, A.R. 1900. Coal-mining in South Africa. Newcastle: G.T. Bagguley. Simeon, Dilip. 1995. The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism: Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur 1928-1939. New Delhi: Manohar. 1996. Coal and Colonialism: Production Relations in an Indian Coaleld, c.1895 1947. International Review of Social History 41. Schwerin, Delief. 1978. The Control of Land and Labour in Chota Nagpur, 1858 1908, in Dietmar Rothermund and D.C. Wadhwa. 2005a. Gender and Ethnicity in Japans Chikuho Coaleld, in Berger, Croll and LaPorte (eds).
2005b. Sorting Coal and Pickling Cabbage: Korean Women in the Japanese Mining Industry, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (eds), Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center. 2006. Digging Through Layers of Class, Gender and Ethnicity: Korean Miners in Prewar Japan, in Lahiri-Dutt and Macintyre (eds). Sone, Sachiko. 2003. Exploitation or Expectation? Child Labor in Japans Coal Mines Before World War II. Critical Asian Studies 33(1). 2006a. Coal Mining Women Speak Out: Economic Change and Women Miners of Chikuho, Japan, in Gier and Mercier (eds). 2006b. Japanese Coal Mining: Women Discovered, in Lahiri-Dutt and Macintyre (eds). South African Republic. 1898. Wet No. 12, 1898. Taylor, Andrew. 2005. So Many Cases but so Little Comparison: Problems of Comparing Mineworkers, in Berger, Croll and LaPorte (eds). Tenfelde, Klaus. 1985. Comparative Research in the History of Mining Workers: Some Problems and Perspectives, in Gustav Schmidt (ed), Bergbau in Grobbritannien und im Ruhrgebiet. Studien zur Verleichenden Geschichte des Berghaus 1850-1930. Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Union of South Africa. 1911. Mines and Works Act, No. 12, 1911. 1921. Ofcial Year Book of the Union No.4-1921. Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Ofce. 1947. Ofcial Year Book of the Union No.23-1946. Pretoria: Government Printer. Walker, Cheryl. 1990. Gender and the Development of the Migrant Labour System, c.1850 1930: An Overview, in Cheryl Walker (ed), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945. London: James Currey. Welsh, K.J. n.d. Electrication and Mechanization of Mines, in Mining, Geological and Metallurgical Institute of India. Worger, William H. 2004. Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870-1930. Journal of Southern African Studies 30(1). Yao, Linqing. 2006. Women in the Mining Industry of Contemporary China, in Lahiri-Dutt and Macintyre (eds). Yoshida, Kayoko and Miyauchi, Reiko. 2006. Invisible Labour: A Comparative Oral History of Women in Coal Mining Communities of Hokkaido, Japan, and Montana, USA, 1890 1940, in Gier and Mercier (eds).
The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904 1934
Lucien van der Walt
University of the Witwatersrand
In this article, I argue that the history of labour and the working class in southern Africa in the rst half of the twentieth century cannot be adequately understood within an analytical framework that takes the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis.1 The literature has, with very few exceptions (notably Bond, Miller and Ruiters 2001:4 5), generally presented the history of labour in the region in this period as a set of discrete national labour histories for Namibia (South West Africa), South Africa, Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Swaziland, and so forth. Each national labour history is presented as taking place within a distinctively national context where organisational and political boundaries correspond with the administrative borders of the state, with labour politics developing inside these boundaries in response to national conditions, culminating in the emergence of national working-class movements. Such approaches project postcolonial borders onto the period of imperial rule, ignoring the way in which international labour markets, regional political economies, and networks of activists and propaganda operated both across, and beyond, the British Empire and southern Africa to create a transnational southern African working class in which activists, ideas and organisational models circulated. Transnational inuences played a critical role in shaping working-class movements, which straddled borders and formed sections across the region and beyond it. Furthermore, ideological, ethnic and racial divides within the working class across southern Africa played a more important role in constituting divisions than state borders. This article explores these issues by examining three moments of transnational labour activism in southern Africa in the rst three decades of the twentieth century. Firstly, there was the tradition of White Labourism: rather than being a peculiarly South African phenomenon, it originated in Australia, spread to South Africa in the early 1900s, and subsequently developed into a signicant factor in labour politics in the Rhodesias by the 1920s. Secondly, there was the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism, which stressed interracial working-class
solidarity. As developed by the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies) in the United States in 1905, this tradition came to South Africa via Scotland, where it spread from radical white labour circles to workers of colour in the 1910s, and then spilt over into the Australian IWW. Thirdly, there was the tradition of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), whose politics were an amalgam of two transcontinental currents: Garveyism and IWW syndicalism. The ICU operated regionally, spreading from South Africa in 1919 to South West Africa and the Rhodesias in the 1920s and 1930s. Set against the backdrop of regional waves of labour activism, the history of these transnational labour currents provides important insights into the social character of southern African labour movements in the period of the rst modern globalisation, lasting from the 1880s into the 1920s. The analysis presented here is inuenced by, and makes a contribution to, the new transnational labour history that relativizes and historicizes the nation-state as a unit of analysis, stressing the need to go beyond national boundaries and avoid methodological nationalism in understanding working-class formation (Van der Linden 1999:10801081). A transnational labour history yields important insights into labour and workingclass history, provides a new synthesis that goes beyond old labour history, with its stress on formal organisation, and new labour history, with its stress on lived experience, and stresses the interconnections between labour worldwide.
The novelty of the nation-state The lived reality of the late twentieth century where large-scale imperial formations are unusual and illegitimate, and where nation-states control education, media, identity documents and a host of other instruments for nationalising citizens (Torpey 2000) contributes to a situation where the normality of the nation-state, and its utility as a unit of social analysis, seem self-evident. A historical perspective, however, shows that the nation-state form of the capitalist state is a fairly recent phenomenon for much of the world, and only became the normal, rather than the novel, form of the capitalist state in the second half of the twentieth century. Before the late 1940s, the archetypical modern state was the formal empire, which drew a vast range of peoples and races under a single state apparatus. Different degrees of national autonomy might be allowed, but the empire was itself the focus of loyalty; there was no assumption that the state should correspond to a given nation. The modern nation itself being a fairly recent and problematic conception (Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983] 1992).2
Contemporary globalisation the second modern globalisation with its increasing integration of communications, investments and labour markets directs attention to the problems of understanding labour within hermetically sealed national frameworks. On the one hand, the current growth in power of transnational connections and supranational powers has challenged the view that social analysis can unproblematically take the nation-state as the site of
The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism 225
social action. On the other hand, contemporary globalisation should be historicised, and understood against the backdrop of previous eras of globalisation, notably the globalisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hopkins 2002). In this period, international trade, foreign direct investment and global ows of labour took place on a scale larger than is the case today (Hirst 1997; Hobsbawm 1977).3 The period of closed national economies should be understood, then, as a phenomenon of the 1930s to the 1970s, a world of nation-states bracketed by two phases of globalisation.
Early globalisation and the creation of Southern Africa An important consequence is the need to consider the international and transnational dimensions of labour history, and to locate the creation of the working class in southern Africa within the globalisation of the late nineteenth century. The industrial revolution that took place in South Africa from the 1880s following the discovery of large deep-level gold deposits on the Witwatersrand was premised on the inow of massive amounts of foreign direct investment. This was also a period of British imperial expansion, as the worlds largest and most important state extended its boundaries. The main African states were subjugated starting in 1879 with the conquest of the Pedi kingdom and Zululand; in 1884 the kingdom of Basutoland (now Lesotho) became a High Commission territory, followed in 1885 by Bechuanaland (now Botswana); in 1902 the kingdom of Swaziland became a British protectorate; and from 1890 onwards colonial states were formed in Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland (now Malawi). The Anglo-Boer War of 1899 1902 closed the period of imperial conquest and consolidation in the region.
While mining capital was rapidly centralised, so was state power: the Union of South Africa formed in 1910 as a British dominion comprising Afrikaner republics and British colonies incorporated as provinces, and African kingdoms as reserves. The working class that emerged within South Africa itself was neither distinctively South African, nor the product of a discrete South African history. It arose from the twin processes of overseas investment, which required a large supply of labour power, and incorporation into the British Empire, which provided the administrative and coercive means to meet that demand. The new working class was sourced from across southern Africa and the larger British Empire, and was a multinational and multiracial mass that continuously owed through the vast human rivers of migration and regional and global labour markets. Skilled workers were whites, mainly from Britain, but with a signicant number from Australia and New Zealand, continental Europe and the United States. By 1905, perhaps eighty-ve per cent of the white underground miners on the gold mines were British-born (often arriving via other mining regions in the Americas and Australia) (Katz 1994:65; Ticktin 1973:3, 259 260; Visser 2001:2), and a similar pattern prevailed on the collieries (Alexander
2004:188 119). In 1921, 59.8 per cent of all typesetters, 55.8 per cent of all tters, 52.1 per cent of barbers, 48.3 per cent of carpenters, and forty per cent of electricians were foreign born (Freund 1989:85). The mines proved an exception: Afrikaners, already a signicant component of the underground white miners by the start of the twentieth century (Visser 2001:45), became increasingly important; by the 1920s, around seventy-ve per cent of white underground miners were Afrikaners (Boydell n.d.:191), rising to perhaps ninety per cent by the 1940s (Andrews 1941:20). Unskilled workers were mainly male African migrant workers, who worked on the mines as cheap, indentured and unfree labour controlled by pass laws, returning periodically to rural homesteads where their families resided. This migrant labour system was insatiable, and drew in workers from South Africa and its neighbours, forming vast human rivers that linked South Africa, South West Africa, the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) into a regional political economy that was linked into the capitalist world economy. In 1920 only fty-one per cent of African mine labour in South Africa was drawn from within the country, largely from the eastern Cape African reserves, with a further thirty-six per cent from Mozambique, and thirteen per cent from the High Commission territories: Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland (Yudelman and Jeeves 1986:123 124). In later years, a growing proportion would be drawn from the tropical territories, situated north of twenty-two degrees S.L., reaching ten per cent in 1945, as well as a small number from South West Africa. African workers not employed on the mines tended to be more heavily drawn from South African sources than the miners. In 1931, for instance, 47.4 per cent of newly arrived African labour on the Witwatersrand, not working in mining, came from Natal, with a further 44.2 per cent from the Transvaal, while only 3.6 per cent and 10.6 per cent of African mineworkers were from Natal and the Transvaal, respectively (Freund 1989:83). Given an ongoing shortage of unskilled labour, employers throughout the region found themselves in continual competition for African workers (see Beinart 1987; Berger 1974:chapter 2; Cooper 1999; McCracken 2000:chapter 5; Meebelo 1986:chapter 1; Moorson 1978; Phimister 1988; Sanderson 1961; Van Onselen 1976; Vellut 1983). Dominated by American and South African companies, the Northern Rhodesian copper mines expanded rapidly in the 1920s as the central African copper belt was developed. The Northern Rhodesian mines found themselves competing for labour with the copper mines in the Belgian Congo, which began phasing out migrant labour in favour of an urbanised African labour force from 1927 in a bid to attract a stable labour force. Moreover, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland competed for migrant labour with both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The latter, with its relatively low wages, in turn fought an ongoing battle for labour with South Africa, while employers in the Cape did
their best to stop the ongoing outow of local workers to German South West Africa in the rst two decades of the twentieth century. Within the borders of different states, similar patterns of competition emerged: the less developed northern areas of Nyasaland competed with the emerging plantations in the colonys south. Within South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and South West Africa, farms competed with mines for labour, while the mines strove to prevent the outow of labour to the growing manufacturing sector. At the same time, the mines in southern Africa were competing with mines abroad for skilled labour. In the 1890s and early 1900s, not only did skilled white miners typically earn about ve times the wages of African miners, but wages for skilled miners and some categories of artisans were generally at least double and sometimes up to ve times higher than wages for comparable categories in mining areas elsewhere (Katz 1994:67, 75 7). Faced with the mismatch between labour markets and state boundaries, big capital began to form its own regional organisations for managing labour ows. In South Africa, the Chamber of Mines set up the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) in 1901 to organise the recruitment of African workers in the Transvaal, Bechuanaland, Mozambique, Namibia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, while the Native Recruiting Corporation, established in 1912, focused on Natal, the Cape, Basutoland and Swaziland (Jeeves 1985; Katzenellenbogen 1982). Employers in Southern Rhodesia and South West Africa established similar bodies, with government help, in order to channel labour, reduce workers choices, and prevent the loss of labour to other areas. Even so, competition continued: in South Africa, for instance, the collieries facing low prices for their product and unable to compete with the relatively high wages of the gold mines sought to attract experienced African miners by allowing a substantial number to settle permanently with their families near the mines from 1907, providing land for housing and small-scale farming (Alexander 2001:510515).
White labourism and the British labour diaspora Given these regional and global linkages, and the large-scale migration that they entailed, the borders of South Africa did not neatly determine the experiences and lives of working class people in South Africa. Not only were wages shaped by labour markets that crossed borders, but the politics of labour throughout southern Africa was shaped by ongoing interconnections across the colonial borders. The politics of white workers were, unsurprisingly, deeply shaped by foreign models, with trade unionism from Cornwall, White Labourism from Australia, and socialism from Scotland (Hyslop 2002), playing an important role. In the eighties and nineties a number of British unions opened branches in Durban, Kimberley . . . Johannesburg . . . [and] . . . Cape Town, including the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners in Cape Town in 1881, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1894, which organised skilled metalworkers such as
blacksmiths and tters and turners, and a South African Typographical Union for skilled printers in Durban and Pietermaritzburg in Natal (Andrews 1941:1213). White workers in South Africa developed a local tradition of White Labourism by the early twentieth century, which combined social democratic demands with a platform of job colour bars, segregation and the repatriation of Asians. While this drew on the existing traditions of the local unions, it was also demonstrably inuenced by the policies of the Australian Labor Party, which combined labourite parliamentary socialism with a commitment to white supremacy. While forming the worlds rst labour government in 1904, creating a workingmans paradise (Mackenzie 1966:132), the Australian Labor Party defended the White Australia Policy designed to maintain the thinly peopled continent as an everlasting home for an untainted European, and dominantly English community (Kennedy 1984:3 4). Australian immigrants like Peter Whiteside played a key role in promoting this project in South Africa (Hyslop 1999; Katz 1976; Kennedy 1984). Born in Australia, Whiteside was an engine driver and keen trade unionist who came to the Transvaal in the 1890s where he became active in the South African Engine Drivers and Firemens Association notable for securing the rst statutory job colour bar in 1896 (Ticktin 1973:109) and helped form the rst trades and labour councils on the Witwatersrand. Whiteside was also involved in efforts to form a white workers party on a segregationist platform, starting with the Political Labour League in 1905 (Grobler 1968:5764; Ticktin 1973:186209). The League was one of a number of similar initiatives, which culminated in the formation of the South African Labour Party (hereafter the SA Labour Party) in October 1909. This was backed by most of the Natal and Witwatersrand unions, as well as a bloc in the Cape unions. The party platform advocated residential segregation, the repatriation of Indians, and job reservation, alongside welfare and municipal reforms framed within a vaguely socialist aim modelled on that of the British Labour Party (South African Labour Party [1910] 1960:73).4 However, if White Labourism to South Africa came from Australia, it did not stop there, soon owing northwards from South Africa as new mines were established and new markets for skilled white labour were opened. With the opening of collieries and gold mines in Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s, the rapid growth of Lourenco Marques in Mozambique as a direct result of South African trade and investment,5 the opening of diamond and other mines in South West Africa after the turn of the century, and the development of the copper belt spanning the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia in the 1920s, many white workers moved northwards, bringing along their political traditions. In 1924, there were 702 whites and 8,740 Africans employed in mining and prospecting in South West Africa, with three quarters on the diamond elds (Cooper 1999:124). In 1931 the mining industry accounted for 35.1 per cent of white employment in Northern Rhodesia, with much of the remainder concentrated in
the civil service or in industries linked to the mines (Berger 1974:1617). By 1939, the Belgian Congo had 157,250 mine employees (including 2,250 whites), Northern Rhodesia had 24,900 (including 2,700 whites), South Africa had 464,359 (including 52,693 whites), and Southern Rhodesia had 90,886 (including 3,116 whites) (Vellut 1983:131, Table 4.2).6 Meanwhile, the white population of Lourenco Marques grew from around seventy-six in 1862 to 6,356 people by 1900, rising to four times this gure by the 1920s (Capela 1981:11) as the port town developed. A racial division of labour developed, with the skilled and supervisory jobs increasingly allocated to whites: between 1910 and 1925 the number of whites employed at the port complex tripled (Penvenne 1995:79 80, 82).
Divided workers and the regional strike wave of 1917 1925 From 1917 a large strike wave swept through parts of southern Africa. Out of 199 strikes recorded in government yearbooks for 1906 to 1920, a full 168 took place between 1916 and 1920 (Pike 1988:103 5). There were 205 strikes from 1916 to 1922, involving 175,664 workers (Simons and Simons [1969] 1983:333). Unionism also grew rapidly, with union membership rising from perhaps 9,178 in 1914 to 40,000 in 1917 to 135,140 in 1920 (also see Cope c1943:200; Van Duin 1990:640:39). An important development in this period was the emergence of unions amongst Africans, coloureds and Indians in Bloemfontein, Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kimberley, and Port Elizabeth. Mozambique, meanwhile, was rocked by a strike wave from 1917 to 1921, headed by the powerful Port and Railway Employees Association (see Capela 1981; Penvenne 1984).7 In South West Africa, popular unrest also grew in this period, and rumours of a general uprising by the Africans swept the country in 1922 and 1923 (also see Emmett 1986:8 15; Gottschalk 1978; La Guma [1964] 1997:1721; Katjavivi 1988:17 19). While rising ination played an important role in the unrest of the times, the international wave of proletarian and colonial revolt that started in 1916 in Ireland and Mexico, and the hopes of change that followed, was also important. Local developments were often important catalysts: the unrest in South West Africa, for example, followed directly from the rising (and quickly disappointed) expectations following the South African takeover in 1915.
Across the region white workers fought bitter battles against employers and the state in the 1910s and 1920s around issues ranging from wages to replacement by African labour, and the ideology of White Labourism played a central role. The best-known case is, of course, the struggles in South Africa that culminated in the Rand Revolt of 1922, a general strike centred on the resistance to the replacement of white by African miners, which spiralled into a violent insurrection on the Witwatersrand that was suppressed with martial law. However, the Rand Revolt was only one episode in the regional wave of class struggles, and only one of a series of dramatic confrontations between
white labour and white capital. As early as 1916, a European Railway Workers Union had managed to establish the job colour bar on the Rhodesian Railways, a private company that operated in both the Rhodesias (Berger 1974:45). In 1920, however, the (Southern) Rhodesian Mine Owners Association was formed to wage an onslaught on white miners, who had organised a general union from 1919, and the Association succeeded in inicting a decisive defeat in early 1921 with a three-week lockout. Inspired by this victory, employers took the offensive on the railways, inicting a crushing defeat on the railway union in 1929. An explicit ideology of White Labourism was not, it seems, developed in the labour movement of Lourenco Marques, perhaps because many unions retained close links to anarcho-syndicalist and socialist movements in Portugal. However, the unions that operated from 1905 to 1925 in Lourenco Marques were predominantly based amongst the Portuguese (Freire 2001:41). Few attempts were made to organise workers of colour, and the African workers who did join in the strikes of the time alongside the whites were routinely marginalised in strike settlements (Penvenne 1984:270277; Penvenne 1995:845). The strike wave in Mozambique faced increasing repression and was eventually suppressed by the military. This was echoed in Portuguese Angola, where troops were used to break a massive strike by white railwaymen in 1923. By 1925 the Port and Railway Employees Association was once again ascendant, and was strong enough to organise a major strike on the railways: this was crushed early the next year, when the railway service was militarised, with strikers evicted from their homes, hundreds red, and many key gures deported.8 The unprecedented scale of the repression was a shocking example for all workers in the city, white and African alike, and effectively ended all labour action until the 1930s (Penvenne 1984:273 4, 278). In May 1926, a fascist dictatorship was established in Portugal, and extended to the colonies, and a second strike by electricity workers and railwaymen in 1932 was given short shrift (Penvenne 1996:460461). Following the crushing defeat of 1921, and the subsequent demise of their union, white miners in Southern Rhodesia were unorganised until the late 1930s (Phimister 1977:196 7). From 1921, however, there were attempts to enrol these workers in the South African Mine Workers Union (the largest South African union, and a bastion of colour bar politics), which formed branches in both Rhodesias in 1936 (Berger 1974:49; Phimister 1977:1967). The Southern Rhodesian section initially competed with a local union, later merging to form the Associated Mineworkers of Rhodesia, which was recognised by employers in 1938 (Phimister 1977:197). In the meantime, several labour parties were formed in Southern Rhodesia with trade union backing, championing job colour bars. In 1933 the Reform Party won the elections, with the support of white labour, and implemented a programme of industrial relations reform, job reservation, and importsubstitution-industrialisation (Phimister 1988:173, 179181, 189192, 195,
248; also see Bond, et al. 2001). This was very similar to the platform of the Pact government elected in South Africa in 1924, a coalition of the National Party, an Afrikaner nationalist group that largely represented agrarian interests,9 and the SA Labour Party. Charlie Harris, secretary of the South African Mine Workers Union, travelled north to help make Northern Rhodesia a white country and ensure that union men only would be employed on the copper belt (quoted in Meebelo 1986:107 8). The colonys branch of the South African union eventually evolved into a separate body (Berger 1974:49; Meebelo 1986:1078), the Northern Rhodesian (or European) Mineworkers Union. This was recognised by employers in 1937, and obtained a gentlemens agreement securing the job colour bar in 1938. It faced competition from a Mine Workers Federation, but in 1939 organised 1,000 of the 2,500 daily paid white workers (Berger 1974:49), and in 1940, militants from the union led a week-long strike. Harris found a particularly sympathetic audience amongst white South African miners. Most white mine ofcials and miners came from South Africa (around 417 out of every 1,000 whites, as compared to 305 from the United Kingdom and Ireland (Berger 1974:49 51), many of whom brought with them the segregationist politics of mainstream white South African labour (Meebelo 1986:64). A labour party was formed in Northern Rhodesia in 1941, which won several seats on the legislative council in 1941 and 1944; it collapsed in 1944, but several unionists were elected in the late 1940s (Berger 1974:656, 989), as I will show below.
Radical White Labour, Syndicalism and Communism It is, however, important to understand that the politics of the white working class in southern Africa were not homogenous. The rise of White Labourism in the larger British working class diaspora was not to be seen simply as a process whereby the The Imperial Working Class makes itself White, stressing its whiteness to claim racial privileges (contra. Hyslop 1999). If the structure of capitalism in southern Africa in the period of the rst modern globalisation characterised by ongoing attempts to substitute cheap unfree African labour for expensive free white labour prompted many white workers to champion a job colour bar as a defensive response (Johnstone 1976:1375), it simply does not follow that the class interests of white workers were dependent on some degree of a job colour bar (Phimister 1977:203), that White Labourism was inevitable, or that white identity was simply (or even primarily) a vehicle to advance the politics of the colour bar.
The choice between exclusive forms of labour organisation and more inclusive approaches that played out elsewhere in the world also played out in southern Africa. If many white workers imagined themselves as citizens of what might be called the Empire of Labour that combined a project of racial domination
and class struggle (Hyslop 2002:3 4), the Empire of Labour was only one of many projects amongst white workers. The British labour diaspora in southern Africa also had more radical and internationalist wings, including more left wing and interracial forms of labourism, as well as syndicalism and, later, Communism that could potentially foster interracial movments. The Northern Rhodesian Mine Workers Union, for example, made an unsuccessful move in 1943 to form an African wing to forestall the emergence of independent African unions (Berger 1974:89). In Southern Rhodesia, the miners union and the Labour Party were deeply divided over the racial question, and the latter split in 1941 into an exclusive white socialist Labour Party and a nonracial Southern Rhodesian Labour Party that set out to organise an African Branch (see Lessing 1995:chapter 14; Phimister 1977:199201; Raftopolous 1997:72; Ranger 1970:168 169). When Kier Hardie of the Independent Labour Party (formed in Britain in 1893), and then part of the British Labour Party, visited South Africa in 1908, he was met with violent opposition by sections of white workers and the white middle class for his outspoken criticisms of colonial policies. In Cape Town, however, the colour bar tradition was weaker: the racial division of labour was less stark, coloureds formed an important part of the artisan layer, unfree African workers were a minority, a number of craft unions had a multiracial membership,10 and a radical left was fairly well-established. There were no incidents surrounding Hardies arrival, although a planned reception by the local trades and labour council was withdrawn following the events elsewhere in the country (Harrison n.d.: 22). Hardie was, instead, hosted by the local Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and held a meeting that was far and away the most enthusiastic I had in South Africa.11 The local SDF, led by the self-described philosophical anarchist Wilfred Harrison, was a far more open body than its British namesake, with a membership including Marxists, anarchists, reform socialists, [and] guild socialists (Harrison n.d.:16, 118 119). An active body, the SDF was an important inuence on local popular political culture, formed an interracial General Workers Union, operated in District Six, the heartland of the coloured working class, and organised multiracial demonstrations of the unemployed in 1906. In 1908, the SDF ran a candidate in District Six, where a number of coloureds had the vote, beneting from its image as a champion of coloured working-class interests (Ticktin 1973:337 8), losing the poll but still receiving hundreds of votes. The SDF, with its large anarchist section, was part of a larger, if minority, libertarian socialist current in the white working class. Outside of Cape Town, this current was often inuenced by syndicalism and the IWW currents rooted in anarchism that wished to form a revolutionary one big union of all workers to expropriate the means of production. The 1890s to the 1920s were the glorious period of syndicalism worldwide (Beyer-Arnesen 19971998:20), and in many
countries the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical Marxism (Hobsbawm 1993:72 3). The IWW in the United States was an important part of this upsurge, and it inspired IWW unions and groups across the settler colonies of the British Empire as well as IWW unions in Latin America and elsewhere. Given the transnational character of labour in South Africa, it is not surprising that In common with the labour movements elsewhere in the world, South Africa passed through a period of . . . disillusion . . . in the value of parliamentary reform that spread from Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand and took up the ringing call to action of the IWW and the doctrines of the revolutionary syndicalists (Cope c1943:108 110, also see 99100). On the Witwatersrand, Scottish activists like Andrew Dunbar and JM Gibson promoted the IWW ideas that they had imbibed in Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Irishman Tom Glynn championed the syndicalism he had learnt in New Zealand, and Jewish immigrants from the Pale in East Europe snapped up copies of the anarcho-syndicalist Kleb i Volya (Bread and Liberty), produced by Peter Kropotkins Freedom group in London.12 The Socialist, the syndicalist paper from Edinburgh, was available locally, as was the International Socialist Review of Chicago, which carried a wide range of syndicalist material. The Voice of Labour, published in Johannesburg by the immigrant radicals Archie Crawford and Mary Fitzgerald from 1908, also provided an important conduit for syndicalism and anarchism more generally, and provided the space where activists like the anarchist Henry Glasse, who was closely associated with Freedom, could promote the one big union: For a white worker in this South Africa to pretend he can successfully ght his battle independent of the coloured wage slaves the vast majority is, to my mind, simply idiocy.13 A visit to South Africa by Tom Mann in early 1910 gave local syndicalism a further boost. Mann, a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, had broken with Labourism while living in Australia, and was en route to Britain and France to promote and study his newfound syndicalist doctrines. Manns visit was the immediate impetus to the formation of two syndicalist groups on the Witwatersrand in 1910: the IWW, associated with Dunbar and Glynn, and mainly based in Johannesburg, with groups in Durban and Pretoria; and the Socialist Labour Party, associated with Gibson, PR Roux and others, which was primarily a Johannesburg group. Following a dramatic IWW strike on the tramways of Johannesburg, Glynn returned to Ireland in 1911, then moved to the United States, and ended up in Australia, where he edited the IWWs Direct Action, campaigned against the White Australia Policy, and was arrested for treason in 1916 (Burgmann 1995:36, 77, 88, 207). While the Witwatersrand left was in a state of collapse at the start of 1914, organised syndicalism revived after the formation of a War on War League after the
outbreak of the First World War. Initially a group that struggled, ultimately without success, to keep the SA Labour Party to an anti-war position, the group provided a pole of attraction for SA Labour Party radicals, and the IWW and Socialist Labour Party veterans. It was re-organised as the syndicalist International Socialist League (ISL) in 1915, which left the SA Labour Party and resolved that we encourage the organisation of the workers on industrial or class lines, irrespective of race, colour or creed, as the most effective means of providing the necessary force for the emancipation of the workers.14 The ISL established sections across the Witwatersrand, had sections in Natal and the Cape, and worked closely with the SDF, which contributed to, and distributed, the ISLs weekly paper, The International. Drawing initially on radical British workers, the ISL recruited increasingly amongst Jewish immigrants. If the IWW and Socialist Labour Party had opposed racial discrimination and prejudice in principle, but done little in the way of organising across racial lines, the ISL took a more activist line, calling on Africans to organise industrially against any tyrannical law.15 In addition to ongoing attempts to reform the white unions, its great achievement was to form syndicalist unions amongst workers of colour from 1917: the Indian Workers Industrial Union in Durban, the Clothing Workers Industrial Union in Durban, Johannesburg and Kimberley and the Industrial Workers of Africa in Cape Town and Johannesburg: modelled on the IWW,16 probably the rst union for Africans in Britains African empire. Through these initiatives, syndicalism became increasingly multiracial, as the ISL recruiting activists from the syndicalist unions like Reuben (Alfred) Cetiwe, Johnny Gomas, Hamilton Kraai, Bernard Sigamoney, and TW Thibedi, who argued that as soon as all of your fellow workers are organised, then we can see what we can do to abolish the capitalist system.17 In Cape Town, meanwhile, the SDF split, giving rise to an Industrial Socialist League with an IWW platform.18 Inuenced by ongoing visits by IWW sailors,19 it also managed to involve coloured and Malay comrades in our propaganda . . . amongst the coloured and native workers,20 and formed a syndicalist Sweet and Jam Workers Industrial Union. Initiatives like the Industrial Workers of Africa profoundly impressed a layer in the coloured rights group the African Peoples Organisation, and formed an early bridge between local socialists and nationalists. Cetiwe, Kraai and Thibedi were, moreover, active in the left wing of the South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress, or ANC, in 1923) (for more information, see Van der Walt 1999, 2004). These syndicalist unions were formed, in short, in the context of the rising tide of labour militancy in the region, in which they played a pioneering role, and should also be seen as part of the global wave of syndicalism then sweeping the world. They made an important contribution to the growth of socialism amongst
workers of colour in South Africa and, as I will show, this inuence later echoed across the region. As popular militancy rose, and radical ideas gained currency, there was even a move to launch a general strike amongst the African workers of the Witwatersrand. Following the arrest of African municipal workers for strike action, a series of mass meetings were held in Johannesburg in June 1918, presided over by the Industrial Workers of Africa, the ISL, and the Transvaal Native Congress, a section of the African nationalist South African Native National Congress. A general strike was proposed by members of the Industrial Workers of Africa, supported by the ISL and the left wing of the Transvaal Native Congress, and set for 1 July. It was called off at the last moment, but several thousand African miners did not hear the news on time, and clashed violently with armed police. Soon afterwards, the authorities arrested and charged ve Africans and three whites for incitement to public violence for their role in the strike movement. Six of the arrestees were members of syndicalist groups, and included Cetiwe and Kraai in their number, as well as other ISL activists like SP Bunting; the remaining two people arrested were Thomas Levi Mvabaza and Daniel Simon Letanka, who produced the South African Native Congress paper, AbantuBatho. A matter of exceptional interest in this case is the fact that for the rst time in South Africa, members of the European and Native races, in common cause united, were arrested and charged together for their political activities (Skota n.d.:171). There was also a radical wing in the labour movement in Lourenco Marques. Anarchism was an important factor in Portugal since the nineteenth century, and syndicalists came to dominate the unions in the early decades of the twentieth century (for an overview, see Freire 2001; Van der Linden 1999). Anarchism and syndicalism spread into Mozambique by the immigration of Portuguese activists, as well as due to the ofcial practice of deporting radicals for imprisonment in the colonies (Capela 1981:20; Freire 2001:16). One notable deportee was the anar chist Jose Estevam: released in Lourenco Marques in 1910, he was returned to jail after forming a revolutionary league, only to reappear as a leading gure in the railway unrest of 1915 (Capela 1981:65; Freire 2001:16). A Batalha, the Portuguese syndicalist daily, was widely distributed in Lourenco Marques, and the anarchists and syndicalists were a vocal minority in the Port and Railway Employees Association and the local labour press (Capela 1981:19 36). They also set up radical circles, like the Grupo Libertario Francisco Ferrer (named after a Spanish anarchist martyr), and also had a presence at the May Day demonstrations (Capela 1981:277228). Although the anarchist and syndicalist movement in Mozambique developed very few links to its South African counterpart, the ISL press was distributed in Lourenco Marques and some contacts were made.21
Anarchists and syndicalists also had some inuence in the towns lively associational life and intellectual culture, which drew in educated Africans, coloureds (mulattos) and Goans (Penvenne 1996:428, 443, 458). Joao Dos Santos Albasini the towns most prominent intellectual, its leading African personality, and editor of O Africano, later relaunched as O Brado Africano was, for example, familiar with a wide range of ideas circulating within the citys intense cafe culture, including socialist, anarco-syndicalist [sic], Masonic and other currents. Basically a moderate republican, Albasini was nonetheless sympathetic to labour of all races, and his articles periodically echoed the socialist rhetoric of the left wing of white labour (Penvenne 1996:4434, 449, 450451). The 1920s saw the rise of the communist parties worldwide, and this had some impact in southern Africa. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921, drew heavily on the older anarchist and syndicalist milieu, and had a syndicalist current in its early years. The Communist Party of Portugal (PCP) was formed the same year, but does not seem to have had a section in Mozambique. It is, however, noteworthy that several CPSA activists were in Lourenco Marques during the 1925 1926 strike, and were deported in the repression;22 Faustino da Silva, one of the few Mozambican unionists to identify openly with Communism, was exiled to South Africa at the same time (Capela 1981:34 36). Parties do not seem to have been formed elsewhere in the region at the time. There was an overwhelmingly white and short-lived Communist Group (later styled the Communist Party) in Salisbury in the 1930s and 1940s, which had links to the left wing of the in Southern Rhodesian Labour Party (Lessing 1995:chapters 11 to 17). It had ongoing contact with the CPSA, which in turn had some impact in the region, as will be noted below. Jack Hodgson, a white miner from South Africa active in unions in Northern Rhodesia in the late 1930s, was barred from returning in 1940 after a visit to South Africa. He joined the CPSA and Springbok Legion as a serviceman during the Second World War, was active in the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, and ed abroad in 1963. In the 1930s, Hodgson worked closely with Roy Welensky, who was the Southern Rhodesia-born chairman of the Northern Rhodesian branch of the European Railway Workers Union, and an opponent of the small (but vociferous) local section of the British Union of Fascists (Macmillan and Shapiro 1999:233 239). A founder member of the Northern Rhodesia Labour Party in 1941, Welensky was elected to the Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council in 1938 for the mining constituency of Broken Hill (now Kabwe), retained a seat after the party collapsed, and became the president of the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the 1950s.
The ICU: Garveyism meets the IWW Transnational connections also, of course, played an important role in nationalist politics in southern Africa. The African intelligentsia of South Africa was deeply inuenced by African-American intellectuals, notably Alexander Crummel, Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois (see, for example Masilela 2003). Not only were pioneer African nationalists like John L Dube, Sol Plaatje and DDT Jabavu educated in black colleges in the United States, but the early debates between Washington and Du Bois were played out in South African circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These African nationalists also looked to Asia for inspiration, and it was the Indian National Congress that provided the template for the South African Native National Congress, as well as the Natal Indian Congress. The Native Congress provided, in turn, the template for the early African nationalist groups in Southern Rhodesia, and it is not a coincidence that the main African nationalist groups in both of the Rhodesias were named the ANC for many years.
Labour migration and political interchange were major elements of these African connections. The South African ANC provided advice, aid and regular visitors to the nascent African nationalist movement in Southern Rhodesia in the 1910s and 1920s, also maintaining close connections with black settlers the Africans who had accompanied Cecil John Rhodes north (Phimister 1988:148153; Ranger 1970:56 63). If these early connections were largely an affair of the small African elite, African working class migration also played an important role in spreading ideas and movements. Migrant workers returning from the mines of the Witwatersrand spread Protestant Christianity across the hinterland of nominally Catholic Mozambique (Harries 1994:chapter 4). Labour migration was also crucial in the spread of the Watch Tower Christian sect in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, which was a millenarian movement with anti-colonial elements that drew on the doctrines of Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovahs Witnesses. Marcus Garvey a Jamaican opponent of Du Bois, and, surprisingly, an admirer of the more moderate Washington formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, an organisation that would have an important impact in southern Africa. By the time of the UNIAs 1920 world congress in New York, the organisation claimed branches worldwide, claiming four million members committed to Garveys Pan-Africanist vision of racial unity and Africa for the Africans (see Cronon [1955] 1969). This is an improbable gure, and Du Bois, for one, believed the UNIA membership to be rather smaller;23 a staunch critic of Garvey, he organised separate Pan-African congresses in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945. Even so, there can be no doubt that Garveys doctrines were immensely popular worldwide, that his movement grew at a staggering pace before his conviction for mail fraud in 1923, and that it was far more important than Du Bois Pan-African movement for many years.
While the UNIAs Negro World and Black Star Line of ships played an important propaganda role, it was migration, above all, that played the crucial part in the spread of Garveyism into southern Africa. Black sailors and, more particularly Afro-Caribbean sailors were central actors, bringing Garveyism to ports in South Africa and South West Africa (Hill and Pirio 1987). Many of these sailors were put ashore after the First World War as white sailors reclaimed their jobs: often assimilated into local coloured communities, many promoted Ethiopian churches and the UNIA (see Cobley 1992:357368). By 1921 there were UNIA branches in Cape Town, Durban and Windhoek, forming a regional base for the expansion of Garveyism throughout the subcontinent (see West 2002). In one sense, the wheel had turned full circle: illustrating that political inuences circulate, rather than simply diffuse outwards from greater Europe (Weinstein 2005). It seems that Garvey was inspired to form the UNIA following a shipboard conversation about conditions in colonial Africa with a West African friend and his Basutoland wife (Garvey 1923). The ICU is best known for its explosive growth in South Africa, where it started with a few hundred members in Cape Town in 1919, and reached at least 100,000 members by 1927, but perhaps many more (the ICUs record-keeping was poor, at best). However, the South African ICU was only part of the history of the union: it was an international body, with sections formed in South West Africa in 1920, in Southern Rhodesia in 1927, and in Northern Rhodesia in 1931. If the ICU was, in the most literal sense, a transnational movement, it was also a movement profoundly inuenced by ideas circulating in the international proletarian public sphere of the times. ICU doctrines were an unstable mixture of elements: in addition to moderate nationalism, liberalism and millenarian African Christianity, the union was profoundly and primarily inuenced by the ideas of the UNIA and the IWW. Clements Kadalie, the ICUs charismatic South African-based leader, was a great admirer of Garvey, while Afro-Caribbeans played an important role in the South African ICU (also see Bradford 1987:chapters 3 and 4; Cobley 1992:368 370). South Africans and West Indians headed the ICU in South West Africa and there was a clear overlap, and close working relationship, between the ICU and the local UNIA (see Emmett 1986:2029); the same was later true of the ICU in Southern Rhodesia (West 2002:338340, 347353). This transatlantic connection (Couzens 1982) between black America, the UNIA and Africans in southern Africa is well known, but there was another transatlantic connection to working-class America and the interracial syndicalism of the IWW that needs to be stressed. Like the historical importance of syndicalism more generally, the impact of syndicalism on the ICU has been greatly underestimated.24 The ICU was not simply a nationalist movement, but consistently invoked the ideas of interracial workers solidarity, one big union and the
general strike. The 1925 ICU constitution, for instance, drew directly on that of the IWW (ICU [1925] 1972:325 326):
Whereas the interest of the workers and those of the employers are opposed to each other . . . a struggle must always obtain about the division of the products of human labour, until the workers through their industrial organisations take from the capitalist class the means of production, to be owned and controlled by the workers for the benet of all, instead of for the prot of a few . . . This is the goal for which the ICU strives along with all other organised workers throughout the world.
At the ICU conference in 1926, Kadalie called for one big union of the workers of all races to assist in abolishing the capitalist class, who were in reality only a small body but owned practically everything; other speakers called for a general strike across South Africa.25 Allison WG Champion, the most prominent ICU leader in South Africa after Kadalie, described the ICU a year later as an industrial organisation for industrial and political democracy by and through the emancipation . . . of the African worker and the co-operative commonwealth, nothing more and nothing less.26 That year the ICU congress returned to the theme of the general strike that would paralyse South Africa as not a native would work (quoted in Bonner n.d.:9 10). The inuence of IWW syndicalism on the ICU can be partly explained as a consequence of the rising popularity of syndicalism in its glorious period, with many syndicalist unions peaking after 1917 as part of global climate of unrest. The respect that the IWW won from many black activists in the United States doubtless also played a role: Du Bois, for example, had famously stated that We respect the Industrial Workers of the World as one of the social and political movements in modern times that draws no colour line (quoted in Foner 1974:159), while the black socialists linked to the Messenger in New York, like Chandler Owen and A Phillip Randolph, held joint meetings with IWW speakers, and championed the IWW and its politics amongst black workers (Spero and Harris 1931:3912).27 Ofcial fears about the prospect of a potentially explosive alliance between the IWW and the UNIA (Pawa 1975:272273) were, however, misplaced. Garvey was quite hostile to the American left, and while Hubert Harrison the main editor of the Negro World in its early years was a former Wobbly, he had moved to a race rst position, and had partially broken with the left (see Perry 2001). Perhaps a more important vector for syndicalist inuence on the ICU operated within South Africa: the ISL and the Industrial Workers of Africa. In the middle of 1919, Cetiwe and Kraai left for Cape Town where they formed an Industrial Workers of Africa branch in the Ndabeni township, which housed African dockworkers. While the syndicalist union initially competed with the ICU, the two bodies cooperated in organising a dramatic strike of 2,000 African and coloured dockworkers in December 1919, which was supported by the left wing of white labour, the ISL and the Industrial Socialist League (Kadalie 1970:42;
Wickens 1973:67 80). The strike was not a success, for which the ICU blamed the Industrial Workers of Africa and its allies in the Cape Native Congress (Wickens 1973:79 80). It is noteworthy that Kadalie never mentioned the Industrial Workers of Africa in his later accounts of the 1919 strike (Kadalie 1970:717), the event that propelled the ICU into the public eye. Perhaps this was partly a result of the controversy over the strike Kadalies own tendency to identify the history of the ICU with his own person was also doubtless a factor, and it is a pity that later scholars have not viewed Kadalies claims about the unions history with more scepticism. Nonetheless, the Cape section of the Industrial Workers of Africa seems to have merged into the ICU sometime in 1920, and the ICU would long bear the imprint of the politics of the IWW. When a national conference of African and coloured unions was held in Bloemfontein in 1920, attended by the ICU, the Industrial Workers of Africa and other bodies, it aimed to form one great union of skilled and unskilled workers of South Africa, south of the Zambesi [sic], although it also wanted to settle differences with employers by amicable and conciliatory means (quoted in Wickens 1973:145146). We had, Kadalie later recalled, the one big union movement in view (Kadalie in 1923, as quoted in Wickens 1973:97). The ICU cannot be understood, then, unless it is properly grasped as a movement that was inuenced by two major currents, Garveyism and syndicalism, that came from across the Atlantic and which were spread by Afro-Caribbean and white immigrants, respectively. At the same time, the rivers of labour owing within the sub-continent profoundly shaped the spread of the ICU northwards from South Africa, which gave it an additional element of transnationalism. The rst move to establish the ICU outside South Africa came from a South African migrant, James Arnold Jimmy La Guma, a young coloured worker from Cape Town. Born in Bloemfontein in 1894, the son of an itinerant cobbler, La Guma was raised in District Six where he encountered working class literature and was drawn into an interracial movement of the unemployed organised by the SDF in 1906 (La Guma [1964] 1997:18). To Harrisons annoyance (he was not in favour of violent action, although he was regularly arrested for inammatory utterances), some marches turned into what were called the hooligan riots (Harrison n.d.:8 9). La Guma was actively involved in the looting that took place, which he found a mixture of fun, adventure and participation in the class struggle (La Guma [1964] 1997:18). Still unable to nd work, and seized with wanderlust, La Guma left for South West Africa around 1907 or 1908 (La Guma [1964] 1997:1721), one of thousands of local Africans and coloureds recruited by the German colonial authorities at Cape Town (Beinart 1981; Beinart 1987:especially 167170, 1789; Moorson 1978). Working on farms, diamond elds and the docks, La Guma organised a
strike in 1918, part of the strike wave that followed the South African takeover (also see Emmett 1986:8 15; Gottschalk 1978; La Guma [1964] 1997:1721; Katjavivi 1988:17 19). Upon hearing of the 1919 Cape Town strike, La Guma got in touch with Kadalie, and set up an ICU branch at Luderitz in December 1920 (La Guma [1964] 1997:714). He apparently considered himself a socialist by this stage (La Guma [1964] 1997:18, 249), although of what brand, it is difcult to say; the president of the South West African ICU was John de Clue, an Afro-Caribbean inuenced by Garveyism (Emmett 1986:21). The Luderitz ICU was viewed by authorities as a movement of well-educated coloureds, albeit one that with a real potential to spread to local Africans (Emmett 1986:32; Peltola 1995:77 78), and moves were consequently made to restrict the ICU to the Luderitz townships and the educated class, as well as to isolate it from South Africa (Emmett 1986:32). Nonetheless, communication was maintained through the ICU press and correspondence with Kadalie, and the South West African ICUs ideas seem to have been very similar to those of the South African ICU (Emmett 1986:2122, 32, 37). If the spread of the ICU into South West Africa was linked to the ow of labour from South Africa to the north, the spread of the ICU into the Rhodesias was linked to the ow of labour from the north into South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Kadalie himself was an educated migrant from Nyasaland: unable to speak local African languages, and far better educated than the average ICU members, he was often taken to be an American Negro (Kadalie 1970:545). Born in Chira Village near the Bandawe Mission Station on the shores of Lake Nyasa to a prominent Tonga chiey lineage, Kadalie trained at the Overtoun Institution of the Livingstonia Mission as a schoolteacher, but left his country in 1915 in quest of a higher civilized life (Kadalie 1970:33). Kadalie was part of a larger group of mission-educated men from northern Nyasaland, who left the country in search of employment elsewhere (see McCracken 2000:chapters 5 and 6). While Africans were employed in administrative and artisan positions in Nyasaland to an extent unknown elsewhere in the region, the large network of mission schools, coupled to limited job opportunities and commercial opportunities, led to a continual ow to the south (as well as the Belgian Congo in the west) of educated Nyasas (McCracken 2000:155156, 179 180, 187188, 194 195). The group was heavily drawn from northern Nyasaland, from which Overtoun drew most of its students, and were disproportionately represented amongst African mining clerks across southern Africa, a distinctive layer marked by education and class identity, but trapped by the colour bar (Van Onselen 1976:118121, 206 7). Kadalie, for example, worked rst in Mozambique, then in Southern Rhodesia as a clerk, and it was here that white racial prejudice radicalised him, before he left for South Africa (Kadalie 1970:34 7; Ranger 1970:150).
The network of educated northern Nyasas was crucial in spreading the ICU to the two Rhodesias. The British South Africa Companys fear that one big union would emerge in the northern territories began to be realised when African workers from Southern Rhodesia requested aid at the 1927 ICU conference (Phimister 1988:189; Phimister and Van Onselen 1997:39; Van Onselen 1976:210). Kadalie retained a deep interest in Southern Rhodesia, and the conference agreed to establish a Southern Rhodesian ICU, which was supposed to transfer twenty per cent of its income to the parent body (Ranger 1970:150, 155, 163). The task of setting up the ICU in Rhodesia was given to Robert Sambo an educated Nyasa friend of Kadalies and, with the aid of yet another compatriot, John Mphamba, Sambo founded the ICU in Bulawayos African location (Ranger 1970:151; also see West 2002:351). In March 1927 the union claimed 155 members and was growing rapidly when Sambo was deported, returning to Nyasaland where he later became a leading gure in the African independent church movement (McCracken 2000:322). Kadalie described Sambos deportation as in the best traditions of a capitalists democracy, and quickly dispatched Masotsha Ndhlovu to Bulawayo (Parry 1999:81; Phimister 1988:158; Ranger 1970:152; Van Onselen 1976:2101; West 2002:351). Exemplifying the importance of migrancy to the spread of the ICU, Ndhlovu was a Southern Rhodesian who had worked in South Africa for many years, mainly in Cape Town (West 2002:351). With the aid of Job Matabasi Dumbutjena Ndhlovu travelled extensively, addressing meetings all along the labour route, forming an ICU branch at Salisbury in 1929, and a further eleven branches over the next two years, including branches in the countryside (Phimister 1988:158; Van Onselen 1976:211 212). In the meantime, the ICU appeared in Northern Rhodesia, and transnational migrant networks with educated Nyasas again very prominent played a key role. It would have been surprising if some contacts between the northern labour force and more politically active southern workers did not exist, given the human rivers linking South Africa and the Rhodesias (Berger 1974:94). In the 1920s authorities in Northern Rhodesia were painfully aware that returning migrants brought subversive views, worrying about the spread of advanced ideas from the type of natives who recently sent a deputation to Moscow (quoted in Meebelo 1986:46 7). In 1924 police intercepted letters between Kadalie and his uncle Isaac Clements Muwamba an Overtoun graduate who worked as a senior clerk in Lusaka (McCracken 2000:190) revealing that he was regularly receiving copies of the ICUs paper, the Workers Herald, as well as the Messenger (Meebelo 1986:47). Muwamba and Sam KK Mwase of Livingston, another Nyasa, seem to have imbibed the proletarian ideas of Clements Kadalie and his Industrial and Commercial Workers Union although neither made any attempt to form a truly workers organisation along the lines of Kadalies union (Meebelo
1986:52). Then in early 1932 an educated man called Joseph Kazembe made some effort . . . to form a branch of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in Livingstone (Meebelo 1986:52, 101, 161), with apparent success. Kazembe had just been deported back to Northern Rhodesia from South Africa (Meebelo 1986:52, 81, 161). The politics of the ICU a peculiar meeting of the ideas of syndicalism and Pan-Africanism were inevitably wracked with tensions and ambiguities between internationalist class politics and nationalist race politics. The different elements jostled with one another across the region. In Southern Rhodesia for example, ICU speakers spoke, by turns, as moderate members of the middle class, as aspirant traders, as African nationalists, and as militant socialists. The ICU in Rhodesia sometimes saw whites in general as the enemy, but sometimes focused on the capitalist class . . . the capitalists who kept power by means of the government and the missionaries (quoted in Ranger 1970:159, 164): this was why we say let us organise in one union regardless of ethnic background or place of origin (quoted in Van Onselen 1976:212). The ICU is for proletarian people . . . We are the proletarian people (quoted in Ranger 1970:164165). Kazembe in Northern Rhodesia was more likely to conate race and class issues: in a speech during the 1932 African strike in Ndola, he stated that the comfort enjoyed by the Europeans was procured at the expense of the exploitation of the natives (Meebelo 1986:53). While the ICU was generally a spent force in the region by the mid-1930s, radical ideological currents continued to ow from South Africa northwards. The major union drives in South West Africa in the 1940s at Luderitz took place at the initiative of the Food and Canning Workers Union of South Africa, led by radicals and CPSA members (Peltola 1995:78 79). In Southern Rhodesia, there was some contact between ICU activists and the CPSA (West 2002:346347), and the CPSAs Umsebenzi also circulated amongst a tiny audience of black schoolteachers and workers in the early 1930s: one Malikongwa Shoko even used CPSA material in his teaching (Phimister 1988:198). The colonial government was also alarmed by the appearance of African trade union agitators from South Africa, like John Meshack Chamalula, graduate of a CPSA course on labour organising (Berger 1974:94). The Communist Party of Southern Rhodesia distributed the CPSAs The Guardian in the 1940s, mainly amongst coloureds and whites (Lessing 1995:269270, 279 288). Charles Mzingeli revived the ICU in Salisbury in the 1940s as the Reformed ICU: it was one of the most important African political groups in the country well into the 1950s. Mzingeli worked with the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party and the local left Book Club, and wrote for the CPSAs Inkululeko and The Guardian, although he was by no means a communist (Lessing 1995:304311; Phimister 1977:199 201; Raftopolous 1997:72; Ranger 1970:168169).
Conclusion: Transnational working class, transnational politics In southern Africa before the 1940s, human rivers of labour transcended countries even empires and it was along these ows that activists, ideas and models moved. The southern African working class was, moreover, linked into larger intercontinental ows within and beyond the British Empire. If the capital invested in southern Africa was often international, the working class it helped generate was equally sprawled across borders. Many of the experiences of this working class could not be described as national, nor could its ideological inuences and organisational development be neatly cordoned off, or effectively understood, within national borders.
The history of the working class in southern Africa, then, whether African, coloured, white or Indian, simply cannot be adequately understood through the use of a framework that takes the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis in working-class formation. Labour markets, ideas, union movements, and political groups repeatedly transgressed the borders of the colonial states. The lived experience of a regional political economy, linked into a world economy, and of imperial control rather than national sovereignty, was critical to this process, and the solidarities that developed within the popular classes solidarities of class as well as ethnicity as well as race were only occasionally linked to a denitively nationalist politics that aimed to carve the region into a set of nation-states before the 1940s. Such a situation cannot be understood if we remain conned by methodological nationalism. The assumption that working classes are somehow organically national cannot easily be reconciled with the objective existence of transnational working classes, such as that of southern Africa. If a national model makes some sense in the era of closed national economies, lasting from the 1930s to the 1970s, it has limited usefulness for the analysis of labour and the working class in the two eras of globalisation that bracket that era. In periods like the rst and the second globalisation, the possibility of labour internationalism need not be merely imagined: it corresponds to a lived reality. In such a context, with its interlinked labour markets, corporations and states, ideas of international solidarity, based on ties of economic solidarity and fraternal sentiment between the workers in all occupations in all lands (Bakunin [1871] 1971:249, 252), are by no means utopian.
Notes 1. I would like to thank Phil Bonner, Jens Andersson, Hugh Macmillan, and the reviewers of this journal for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article, which was presented at Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context, organised by the History Workshop and the Sociology of Work Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand from 28 to 31 July 2006. 2. An early and unduly neglected statement of this argument may be found in Rocker ([1937] 1978).
3. South Africa exemplies this process, while drawing attention to the rise of large-scale African migrancy: in 1886 Johannesburg had 3,000 prospectors; ten years later, it was a city of 100,000; by 1913 it was home to around 250,000 (Krut 1988:135 136). 4. Key party policies and documents from 1909 and 1910 may be found in Ticktin (1973:487 495, 526 533), while the 19121913 constitution and platform may be found in Grobler (1968:appendix one, 498 519). 5. Mozambiques foreign trade rose 300 per cent between 1877 and 1892 (more merchandise passed through that port in the rst six months of 1893 than in the previous ve years), a railway line linked Delagoa Bay to the Witwatersrand from 1895, the systematic development of the harbour took place from 1900 onwards, and large-scale South African-based investments in real estate and construction occurred. By 1910 South African-based interests controlled utilities, shipping and handling, insurance and banking, but local business interests responded aggressively and the colonial state rapidly displaced foreign investors in these sectors (see Harries 1994:141; Penvenne 1995:17, 35). 6. There was also a small mining sector in Portuguese Angola, north of South West Africa, with 8,697 employees (including 160 whites). 7. The Congo and Delagoa Strikes: the white labour fallacy revived, The International 10 September 1920; Troops: what for?, The International 17 September 1920. 8. Divisional Criminal Investigations Ofcer, Witwatersrand Division, 5 July 1926. Condential Report to Deputy Commissioner, South African Police, Witwatersrand Division, Johannesburg, in Department of Justice le, JUS 915 1/18/26 part 3. Pretoria: National Archives. 9. Another outcome of white migration in the region was the somewhat less successful, but far from insignicant, spread of Afrikaner nationalism. It developed a base in South West Africa, where there was a growing population of Afrikaner immigrants from both Angola and South Africa, and in 1924 the National Party of South West Africa was established. It was, however, unable to establish much of a foothold elsewhere, despite the widespread existence of Afrikaner communities. The profound alienation from Afrikaner nationalism felt by most whites in Southern Rhodesia accounted, in part, for the defeat of proposals in the 1920s to join South Africa as its fth province. 10. While the Cape tradition should not be unduly exaggerated, it was very real (Bickford-Smith 1995). The number of coloureds in commercial and industrial occupations in the Western Cape rose from nine per cent in 1891 to twenty per cent in 1904, with the number of clerks, storekeepers and hawkers tripling and the number of masons doubling in this period (Goldin 1987). 11. James Kier Hardie, South Africa: Conclusions, The Labour Leader 22 May 1908. 12. Henry Glasse, International Notes: South Africa, Freedom November-December 1905. 13. See, for example, The Voice of Labour 26 January 1912, letter from Henry Glasse. 14. League Conference, The International 7 January 1916; The First Conference of the League, The International 14 January 1916. 15. The Pass Laws: organise for their abolition, The International 19 October 1917. 16. It was actually named the IWW at rst, and ofcials regarded it as a a branch of the wider organisation which would appear to have been suppressed in Australia and New Zealand: Secretary of Native Affairs to Commissioner of Police, 14 November 1917, 983/17/F.473, in Department of Justice, The ISL and Coloured Workers, JD 3/527/17. Pretoria: National Archives. 17. Cetiwe, reported by police detective in an unlabelled report, May 1918 (full date illegible), in Department of Justice, The ISL and Coloured Workers, JD 3/527/17. Pretoria: National Archives. 18. Industrial Socialist League, February 1920, Where WE Stand, The Bolshevik. 19. Manuel Lopes, Cape Notes, The International 24 January 1919. 20. The Workers Dreadnought 7 August 1920, letter from Manuel Lopes. 21. David Ivon Jones, Friends across the Border, The International 10 September 1920.
22. Divisional Criminal Investigations Ofcer, Witwatersrand Division, 5 July 1926. Condential Report to Deputy Commissioner, South African Police, Witwatersrand Division, Johannesburg, in Department of Justice le, JUS 915 1/18/26 part 3. Pretoria: National Archives. 23. Du Bois estimated that the UNIA had 10,000 paid-up members, at most 20,000 active members, and perhaps 100,000 nominal members (see Rudwick 1959:428). 24. An important exception is P Bonner who characterises the ICU as millenarian syndicalism (Bonner n.d.). 25. Divisional Criminal Investigations Ofcer, Witwatersrand Division, 1 May 1926. Condential Report to Deputy Commissioner, South African Police, Witwatersrand Division, Johannesburg, in Department of Justice le, JUS 915 1/18/26 part 2. Pretoria: National Archives. 26. Allison WG Champion, 1927, The Truth About the ICU, the Roberts Printing Works for the African Workers Club, Durban:5 7, folder on the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in the IWW Collection, Collections of Archives of Labour and Urban Affairs, Walter P Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. 27. Also see Claude McKay, Socialism and the Negro, The Workers Dreadnought 31 January 1920.
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1995. African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenco-Marques, 1877 1962. Johannesburg/Portsmouth NH/London: Witwatersrand University Press/Heinemann/James Currey. 1996. Joao Dos Santos Albasini (1876 1922): The Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique. Journal of African History 37. Perry, J.B. (ed). 2001. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Phimister, I. 1977. White Miners in Historical Perspective: Southern Rhodesia, 1890 1953. Journal of Southern African Studies 3(2). 1988. An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890 1948: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle. London, New York: Longman. Phimister, I. and Van Onselen, C. 1997. The Labour Movement in Zimbabwe: 1900 1945, in B. Raftopoulous and I. Phimister (eds). Pike, H.R. 1988. A History of Communism in South Africa (second edition). Germiston: Christian Mission International. Raftopolous, B. 1997. The Labour Movement in Zimbabwe, 1945 1965, in B. Raftopoulous and I. Phimister (eds). Raftopoulous, B. and Phimister, I. (eds). 1997. Keep on Knocking: A History of the Labour Movement in Zimbabwe, 1900 97. Harare: Baobab Books for the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Ranger, T. 1970. The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, 1898 1930. London, Ibadan/ Nairobi: Heinemann/East Africa Publishing House. Rocker, R. [1937] 1978. Nationalism and Culture. Minnesota: Michael E. Coughlin. Rudwick, E.M. 1959. Du Bois versus Garvey: Race Propagandists at War. The Journal of Negro Education 28(4). Sanderson, F.E. 1961. The Development of Labour Migration from Nyasaland, 1891 1914. The Journal of African History 2(2). Simons, J. and Simons, R. [1969] 1983. Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850 1950. London: International Defence and Aid Fund. Skota, T.D.M. n.d. The African Yearly Register: Being an Illustrated Biographical Dictionary (Whos Who) of Black Folks in Africa. Johannesburg: RI Esson. ger South African Labour Party. [1910] 1960. Programme of Principles, in D.W. Kru (ed), South African Parties and Policies, 1910 1960: A Select Source Book. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau. Spero, S.D. and Harris, A.L. 1931. The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labour Movement. New York: Columbia University Press. Ticktin, D. 1973. The Origins of the South African Labour Party, 1888 1910. PhD thesis, University of Cape Town.
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Workers and the Beginnings of Welfare State-Building in Argentina and South Africa1
Jeremy Seekings
University of Cape Town
Class struggle and the welfare state The rapid commodication of labour and needs under capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generated profound social as well as economic and political changes and conicts. In response to these, and in part to changing inter-national relations, modern states were built, with war-dominated states being transformed into states that were involved in a myriad ways in the economic and social lives of their subjects or (increasingly) citizens. Repression was one possible response to the social question, but in all industrialising societies states sought, sooner or later, to resort less to repression and more to state regulation of the employment relationship and state participation in paying a social wage. Workers became embedded in new relationships with the state and assumed new identities, either as citizens or as client-subjects (depending on the degree of democracy).
The predominant interpretation of this shift in Europe and Australasia emphasises processes of class struggle and compromise. Korpi (1983), Esping-Andersen (1985, 1990), Przeworski (1985), Castles (1985) and others analysed welfare state-building in terms of the redistributive concessions made by capitalist elites to the industrial working class, through social democratic political parties. In return for abandoning its revolutionary project of socialising the means of production, the working class would win the socialisation of protection against the risks of unemployment, illness, disability, and old age. The welfare state thus represented a qualied victory for the working class and a triumph for social democratic parties. This social or labourist interpretation of welfare state-building was promptly criticised from several angles. Baldwin (1990) showed that it tted poorly the many non-Nordic cases where workers were clearly either minor actors in early policy-making (for example, in Britain, with its liberal tinkering) or were the passive objects of policy-making (for example, in Germany, with its Bonapartist string-pulling). It also tted poorly the Nordic cases, where small farmers were initially of greater importance than the working class (see also Luebbert 1991).
Baldwin argued that pro-welfare coalitions were dened by risk, not simply by their position in the capitalist labour process. Sections of the middle class were therefore often important players. Stephens similarly demonstrated the redistributive achievements of many Christian democratic parties as well as social democratic ones (Huber and Stephens 2001). The exceptional case of the United States of America (USA) a laggard in welfare state-building was widely explained in terms of the design of its political institutions, which prevented the consolidation of political authority required to legislate major social policy reforms (Skocpol 1992). Most recently, Swenson (2002) and Mares (2003) have argued that pro-welfare coalitions often included even capitalists, whose own interests could entail state intervention in the regulation of markets. The potential interest of diverse actors meant that the precise design of the welfare state became consequential. If the welfare state shapes who gets what in society, the details of the design determine more concretely who gets how much and who pays for it, and thus what are the consequences in terms of political identities and relationships. Struggles around welfare state-building concerned what to build i.e. the design as much as over whether to build. The most fundamental choice was over the mix of social insurance, i.e. contributory schemes in which risks were pooled among the members of each fund, and social assistance, which entailed non-contributory, tax-nanced assistance, generally on the basis of acknowledged need. If social insurance was chosen, further choices had to be made over whether risks were pooled within small groups or large groups (with universal coverage as the extreme case), and over the determination of contributions and benets. If social assistance was chosen, further choices had to be made about the categories of deserving poor, the generosity of benets, and the incidence of taxation to nance the programmes. The battle lines in struggles over the design of the welfare-state were never xed. The preferences of conservative state elites, employers, organised labour, and the middle classes varied from setting to setting, and over time. In the early twentieth century organised labour, for example, favoured social assistance in Britain but social insurance in Sweden. In all cases in the industrialised countries of the global North, however, organised labour was one of the key players, either directly or indirectly, in the pace and design of welfare state-building. Welfare state-building was very much about the incorporation of the industrial working class into the political system, even if the terms of this incorporation varied (with important political consequences). Is the same true in the global South? Capitalist development and commodication generated massive social and political changes in the later industrialising societies of Latin America and South Africa, as well as Australia, just as they had in the industrial pioneers of either side of the north Atlantic. Did the working class in these late industrialising societies also inuence the form of welfare statebuilding? This article examines these questions with respect to two countries on opposite sides of the South Atlantic Argentina and South Africa in their
Workers and the Beginnings of Welfare State-Building in Argentina and South Africa 255
rst formative phase of welfare state-building, between the end of the First World War and the mid-1930s. Both Argentina and South Africa began to build welfare states in this period, but the form of their welfare states differed. In Argentina, a classic Bismarckian model of segmented social insurance was introduced: organised workers in key sectors were covered by employment-related, industry-structured, contributory welfare schemes. In South Africa, in contrast, the welfare state was focused on non-contributory social assistance. Special schemes for workers took the form of private, company-based schemes (although framed by legislation). Proposals for comprehensive social insurance were either defeated (in Argentina) or failed to even reach the legislature (South Africa). The working classes in both Argentina and South Africa were key players in their respective processes of welfare state-building, although reforms were initiated from above. Firstly, sections of the working class showed that they had accumulated sufcient disruptive power through strikes and direct action that repression alone was no longer attractive to key economic and political elites. Secondly, some workers had become important as voters. These factors together with others motivated elites to consider reforms that would serve to placate and incorporate sections of the working class. Thirdly, the political choices made by organised labour i.e. by trade unions and associated political parties shaped the form of reform. Strategic choices about engagement with the state and with the political parties supported by other classes had important consequences for public policy-making. Overall, although labour was in a structurally weak political position, it did more than merely acquiesce in its own incorporation.
Working-class struggles against despotic capitalism in the South Atlantic At the beginning of the twentieth century capitalism in both South Africa and Argentina was raw and brutal. Both economies were based on the export of primary commodities (meat and wheat from Argentina, gold from South Africa). On the land, on the railways, and down the mines, workers faced employers who were arrogant and despotic, and who were determined to keep wages low. Large landowners or employers, who readily used the coercive apparatus of the state against their own workers when necessary, dominated governments. And repression was often necessary. Employers need for labour required considerable immigration, including from Europe, which meant that workers were exposed to anti-capitalist and anti-state ideologies.
Cities and towns were the most visible cauldrons of class struggle. Industrial cities were growing at a furious pace. By 1914 Buenos Airess population had reached 1.7 million. The gold mining towns along the Witwatersrand, centred on Johannesburg, were much smaller, but had grown from nothing to a population of perhaps
one-third of a million. Both societies were deeply unequal. By 1930 there were more cars in Argentina, relative to the population, than in any European country except Britain. But the opulence of the rich was in stark contrast to the poverty of the urban poor, living in conventillos (tenements) stretching south and west of central Buenos Aires. In South Africa, there was a similarly stark contrast between the worlds of the rich and poor, even within the white population; the gulf between poor white and very poor black workers was even greater (Van Onselen 1982; Krikler 2005). Both Buenos Aires and Johannesburg were full of migrants from elsewhere: from southern Europe in the case of Buenos Aires, and from Britain, Australia and southern Africa, in Johannesburgs. The differences between the social compositions of the two cities working classes were to be of crucial importance. In Argentina, cheap labour was of European origin, but in South Africa, it was local or at least from southern Africa and black. White immigrants in South Africa tended to be skilled; most immigrants from southern Europe to Argentina were unskilled. Most (but not all) white workers in South Africa were enthusiastic adherents to the racist ideology of transnational White Labourism. Unlike black workers, most white workers in Johannesburg had the vote in the early twentieth century. They had a strong interest and the means to demand a relatively privileged position in the labour market and society. There was one further and important difference between Buenos Aires and Johannesburg. Johannesburg had a growing population of largely unskilled white South African workers: Afrikaans-speaking small farmers who had been forced off the land by the growth of capitalist agriculture. In 1908 three-quarters of white mineworkers on the South African gold mines had been born outside South Africa; by 1931 twothirds were native-born. Workers in industry and transport were militant and combative in both countries. Trans-national ideologies, including anarchism and syndicalism as well as more staid socialism and Bolshevism, found receptive audiences among workers because of the environment of authoritarian capitalism and a nakedly pro-capitalist state. Anarchists dominated the labour movement in Argentina in the rst decade of the twentieth century. Militancy won immediate improvements in workers lives, including higher wages, shorter working days, and cheaper rents. In 1909 between 200,000 and 300,000 labourers in Buenos Aires went on strike against police brutality, and later in the year an anarchist assassinated the citys chief of police. In 1910 the formation of a syndicalist labour federation threatened the anarchists dominance; when the anarchists responded by calling for a general strike, the government moved to intense repression of the anarchists (Baily 1967). South Africas rst trade unions were also rooted among immigrant workers, on the railways and in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. On the latter, working conditions were especially appalling, fatality rates high, and life expectancy short (due to miners phthisis as well as rock falls and explosions). Major strikes by white workers in 1913 14 (on the mines and railways) prompted
state repression, including the declaration of martial law, the mobilisation of the army, and deportations of labour leaders (Katz 1976; Hyslop 2004). The First World War, which disrupted trade and depressed real wages, prompted renewed protest in both Argentina and South Africa, as across much of the industrialised or industrialising world (Silver 2003). The Argentine labour movement revived in the late 1910s under syndicalist and socialist leadership. The dominant unions were no longer the craft unions based in Buenos Aires, but the unions in the transport sector reaching across the length and breadth of the country. By 1920 one half of all organised workers in Argentina were in transportation. Unions had also grown among white-collar workers employed by government, parastatals and the private sector (especially banks and journalists). It was these newer unions that drove a wave of strikes between 1916 and 1919, in the ports, among municipal workers, and (especially) on the railways. President Hipolito Yrigoyen initially sought to present the state as an arbiter. Unlike his predecessors, he tried to avoid deploying troops in support of employers and indeed provided moral support to workers. But in 1918, under pressure from the British government (acting for the British owners of the Argentine railways), his government turned against the strikers. A general strike prompted a repressive backlash from military and paramilitary units, which in January 1919 conducted bloody massacres in immigrant neighbourhoods in the Semana Tragica. The death toll was in the hundreds, and perhaps even exceeded one thousand. Trade union leaders were arrested and deported (Rock 1975:chapters 6 and 7). In South Africa, also, both workers and employers saw this period as one of heightened class struggle. In the late 1910s black workers engaged in a wave of demonstrations, boycotts, strikes and riots in towns and rural areas. In 1919 a strike by white workers paralysed the building industry. In 1921 the Communist Party of South Africa was formed at the instigation on the Communist International. Employers worried about a general strike, as the sinister shadow of Bolshevism spread across South Africa (Bozzoli 1981:chapter 5). The 1922 Rand Revolt overshadowed these. White mineworkers, inspired by a mix of socialism, racism, and anti-British Afrikaner nationalism, rebelled against employers and the state and brutally attacked black workers. The state mobilised the army, turned machineguns and artillery on striking workers, and even bombed their positions from the air. Some rebels, being led out to their execution, sang the Red Flag (Krikler 2005). In 1924, many of the all- or mostly-white unions came together to form the South African Trade Union Congress (which later combined with other unions as the South African Trades and Labour Council, SATLC). Later in the 1920s, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union organised widely among black people, causing considerable panic within the white population (Bradford 1987). This wave of working-class militancy was followed by the social policy reforms that marked the beginnings of welfare state-building on both sides of the South
Atlantic. In both cases, civil servants and workers on state-owned railways already had welfare schemes. After the protests that culminated in the Semana Tragica, Yrigoyen began to extend the Argentine welfare state through extending similar social insurance schemes to private sector railway workers, workers in public utilities, and banking and insurance workers. In 1922 his party put forward a plan that would have provided Argentina with the worlds most comprehensive social insurance system (Lewis 1993:182). Four new funds would provide old age and disability pensions, funded out of employer and employee contributions, to industrial workers, commercial employees, merchant sailors, and printing workers, except in small businesses. The Argentine congress passed the bill in September 1923 (Horowitz 2001). The South African state began to reassess its stance towards the working classes slightly earlier than its Argentine counterpart, in the aftermath of the 191213 strikes. But it was only after the 1922 Rand Revolt that the state introduced legislation that regulated employment, wages and industrial disputes, and laid the foundations of South Africas welfare state. The regulation of employment and wages played a far more prominent role in South Africa than in Argentina. Labour legislation and policy established minimum wages at the same time as effectively guaranteeing employment for white workers, while limiting the opportunities open to African workers. Welfare reforms followed. The state expanded its existing state-nanced pension and insurance schemes for white soldiers, civil servants, and employees on the state-owned railways and docks. In 1926, the government appointed the Pienaar Commission to examine old age pensions and a system of National Insurance providing for the risks of sickness, accident, premature death, invalidity, old age, unemployment and maternity. The Pienaar Commissions First Report (in 1927) led to the introduction of means-tested, non-contributory old age pensions, for white and coloured people only, under the 1928 Old Age Pensions Act. The commission also recommended noncontributory disability (or invalidity) grants, which were introduced, after some delay, in 1936 37. In its Second and Third Reports (in 1928 and 1929), the commission recommended a system of social insurance to cover sickness, unemployment and other risks. Subsequent commissions of enquiry in the early 1930s endorsed these recommendations. There was a clear link between working-class protests and subsequent labour and social policy reforms. The South African state and elements within the Argentine state supported a shift from repression to incorporation as solutions to what in Latin America was simply called the social question, but which in South Africa had a racial dimension. Their priority was the incorporation of those selected groups of workers who posed special threats to the economy and society, i.e. workers in gold mining (in South Africa) and in transport and public utilities (in both Argentina and South Africa). But both states contemplated reforms that would incorporate broad swathes of semi-skilled and skilled workers, and even some unskilled workers i.e. most of the urban working class. Even in
the South African case, some proposals for reforms including the Pienaar Commissions proposals for social insurance envisaged the incorporation of all urban formal sector workers, including African workers. But this link between protests and reforms did not run primarily through trade unions. In both Argentina and South Africa, the trade unions priorities reected the realities of despotic capitalism and a repressive state. Their demands were primarily economic (around wages and employment conditions) or political (around repression). Social policy issues were generally neglected, in part because unions were slow to see the state in broadly social democratic terms. Social reforms were the terrain of reformist elites seeking a solution to the social question, and had limited appeal to the unions themselves. Indeed, in both countries, unions opposed a number of reform initiatives. As early as 1904 one of the more progressive members of Argentinas conservative oligarchy had proposed a national labour law in Argentina. Business and most conservatives, who thought that repression still sufced to deal with the social question, opposed the proposed Ley Gonzalez. It was also opposed by the anarchist-dominated labour movement, which suspected any regulation by the state, and by the Socialist Party, which feared being marginalised politically. When the government tried to establish a mechanism for settling labour disputes, neither anarchists nor socialists would participate (Baily 1967:24; Walter 1977:83 90). Two decades later trade unions again joined with business in a one-day general strike and lockout to block the implementation of the 1923 welfare reforms, and then in getting the legislation withdrawn (Horowitz 2001). South Africas white-dominated trade unions were only weakly and conditionally supportive of social insurance. Most white workers were concerned, above all, with maintaining a clear racial hierarchy. Unlike their Argentine counterparts, but like their Australian role models, they lived in a colonial society in which employers could easily replace them with cheap, non-white labour (whether Chinese or African). Labour leaders especially on the Witwatersrand knew that their political bread was buttered on the side of white privilege (Simons and Simons 1968:128). Organised white labour in South Africa generally demanded that the state intervene to uphold a civilized standard of living. This meant, rst and foremost, that the state should ensure that white workers had wellpaid jobs. Unskilled white workers should be protected by a job colour bar or sheltered employment in the public sector. During the Great Depression, organised labour demanded that the government run high-wage public works programmes for unskilled white workers and subsidise the employment of semi-skilled and skilled workers threatened by unemployment. In labours view, the welfare state was to provide a very secondary mechanism of support (as in Australia see Castles 1985). Moreover, welfare policies should cover and provide generous benets to all white workers, and should be costless to the workers themselves.
Schemes that required employers to contribute would also be counter-productive if they raised further the cost of white labour relative to black labour. One of the members of the Pienaar Commission was the racist Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) Harry Sampson. Sampson dissented from the commissions First Report, not because it excluded African and Indian people but because it set the old age pension at too low a level. The proposed pension was quite inadequate for the maintenance in South Africa of an individual on a civilized basis (South Africa 1927:34), meaning at the level at which white men and women should be maintained so as to maintain a higher standard of living than African men and women. Organised labour favoured generous, tax-nanced, non-contributory pensions for white, and perhaps for coloured, men and women. Subsequent debates about social insurance were conducted against the backdrop of rising unemployment during the Great Depression. Trade unions agreed on the need for state action to help unemployed white workers, but were divided over who should pay. The SATLC proposed an insurance fund to provide a minimum living to all (white) men and women, funded out of contributions by employers and the state, not from employees. Employment on public work programmes should also be funded out of taxes on employers and on wealth (South Africa 1932).2 When the government tabled an unemployment insurance bill, the SATLC denounced it, demanding instead a national non-contributory Unemployment Fund, which should include all workers meaning all white workers because all workers are entitled to employment, or alternatively, to maintenance by the State (South Africa 1932). Labour Party MP Walter Madeley also spoke out against contributory unemployment insurance, because the experience everywhere is that once you build up an insurance fund to which the State and employers and employees contribute, there is not that denite urge on the part of the State to see to it that all the population are employed. He advocated a contributory scheme in which only the state and employers contributed. More important, he emphasised, was a reduction in the working week (with no loss of earnings) to eliminate unemployment and higher minimum wages.3 Trade unions were also ambiguous about health insurance. A commission of enquiry in 193536 reported that some of the organized workers, who are already in enjoyment of the benets of health insurance are opposed to any interference by the State with their schemes, meaning their existing, voluntary, friendly and medical benet societies. The commission noted unions seemed unaware that in other countries it has been clearly established that a voluntary scheme embraces only the steady well-to-do worker, that under such a scheme he is not usually completely covered against the risks of sickness and that no adequate provision is made for the tens of thousands of workers who are unable or fail to make any provision for themselves (South Africa 1936).
In both Argentina and South Africa there were specic groups of workers or unions that were more enthusiastic about welfare reform, and were prepared to negotiate separately with employers or the state. In South Africa, white railway workers were all covered by welfare programmes run by the state as their employer. White mineworkers preferred to cut separate deals with the Chamber of Mines than to work towards the socialisation of risk. In 1933, the (white) Mine Workers Union withdrew a substantial wage demand in return for modest contributions into a provident fund that was being established. Lured by the prospect of substantial employer contributions, the Union opted in 1936 for the employers proposed voluntary pension fund in preference to a governmentrun statutory fund (Davies 1979:286). In this sector, white workers preferred, in effect, to defer a wage increase in order to ensure higher incomes in retirement. Having secured employment guarantees through labour legislation, white workers sought to make doubly sure that the racial income hierarchy was maintained in retirement. In Argentina, the rise of industrial (as opposed to craft) unions contributed to the decline of anarchist and syndicalist ideology and a greater willingness to engage with employers and the state. The pioneer in this was the Union Ferroviaria, formed in 1922 with an initial membership of about 50,000 railway workers. In 1926 it joined other unions in a new socialist-oriented, and nationalist, federation. Argentine unions were to become strong supporters of the welfare state by the early 1940s, but in the 1920s it was only in selected cases that they were proactive. In South Africa, the rise of industrial unions and the SATLC was, for the most part, marked by a less brazenly racist approach. But skilled and semi-skilled workers increasingly found that they could negotiate favourable insurance against risks with employers directly, and did not need the states assistance. Unskilled white workers remained dependent on state intervention, but their priorities remained the immediate ones of job-creation, employment protection and minimum wages, whilst provision against risk should take the form of non-contributory social assistance.
Reforms from above Malloy, in his important study of welfare reform in Brazil, argued that reform in the early twentieth century was a matter of patrimonial statecraft.
The impact of labor as a social force presenting ill-dened problems to the system outran the organizational capacity of the working class to channel that force into a coherent thrust capable of transforming the system either wholly or partially in terms of a new working-class image of a new Brazil. (Malloy 1979)
Whilst strikes resulted in growing concern with the social question, welfare reforms constituted an elite-designed response aimed at dampening protest and weakening radical labour organisers, dividing the working class and co-opting workers in the best-organised and strategic sectors. Fragmented,
group-specic social insurance programmes were a response to generalized pressure from an emergent working class, but they provided for selective and incremental co-optation. They were not a response to generalized class demands, i.e. they were not a response to a compromise with labour as a class. This was, in Malloys words, segmental incorporation (Malloy 1979:34, 45, 151, 153). Brazil was a laggard in welfare reform, compared to Argentina, but a somewhat softer version of Malloys analysis is appropriate for Argentina also. Yrigoyens Union Cvica Radical or Radical Party introduced most of the welfare reforms. The Radicals were communitarian conservatives rather than advocates of either the new liberalism or social democracy. They emphasised that democracy was not merely a guarantor of personal liberty but also involved the opportunity of everyone to enjoy a minimum level of welfare, but paternalism towards the poor went along with very clear defence of the economic interests of the elite. The Radicals were only weakly linked to the immigrant working class. Whilst articulating a pro-worker rhetoric of obrerismo, the Radicals also shared in some the general prejudices against workers. The Argentine state under the Radicals secured some autonomy from capitalist interests, but at the same time Yrigoyen was concerned to protect elite interests by incorporating dangerous threats as citizens (Rock 1975:63 4, 98; Horowitz 2001). In South Africa, also, elites were concerned to incorporate politically the white working class and to institutionalise it in terms of industrial relations, with the goal of transforming them from insurrectionary workers to regime-supporting citizens in a white South Africa. Davies interprets this in terms of the interests of capitalism. The real achievement of the Pact government (from 1924), he concludes, was that at the cost of certain economic concessions (all well within capitals capacity to pay) . . . the Pact regime had succeeded in bringing about the almost complete political capitulation of the white labour movement to capital at the same time as deepening racial divisions among workers; by institutionalizing and bureaucratizing the white trade unions it had ensured that these organizations would never again pose the kinds of political threats to capital which they had previously (Davies 1979:198; see also Yudelman 1983). In describing the meaning of institutionalisation for the unions themselves, Simons and Simons tell a more complex story:
Leaders of a new type took the place of the rugged, class-conscious radicals who had built the rst unions. Between four and ve hundred trade unionists sat on industrial councils, conciliation boards, apprenticeship committees or other public bodies; attended conferences . . . and formed part of a large bureaucracy. Some ofcials administered large establishments, were well paid, associated with employers and government representatives in ofces and hotels, and often depended on employers to collect membership dues under stop orders. The bureaucrats kept a rm grip on the union by manipulating constitutions and meetings, induced employers to enforce closed shop agreements, and threatened militant members or potential rivals with expulsion from the union and eventual dismissal from the trade. (Simons and Simons 1968:334)
Unions and their members also gained from their engagement with employers, mediated by the state.4 White workers and poor whites were to be guaranteed civilized standards of living not as workers or as the poor, but as whites. The South African welfare state was built not as a result of the struggles of organised workers or elites concern to co-opt them as workers, but rather to raise up poor whites and incorporate them and white workers in to the defence of racial privilege. Non-contributory old age pensions were a crucial pillar of the Pact governments strategy to lift poor whites out of poverty. As one National Party MP put it, the poor white problem:
. . . is a question which not only concerns the poor; it affects the whole white civilisation of this country. It confronts us with the question whether we, the descendents of the staunch old pioneers, will maintain their civilisation and hand it over to our children . . . It may be asked whether there is poverty only in South Africa and whether other countries do not suffer from the same thing. There are poor people everywhere, but the circumstances in South Africa are unique. In Europe poverty has proved a great breeding place for Socialism and Bolshevism. If grievances arise there it is simply an economic matter. In this country, however, there is a small number of whites against the natives, a few civilised people against uncivilised hordes, and for that reason it is so important that not a single white person should be allowed to go under . . . There is no greater problem than this, because the existence of the European civilisation in this country hinges on it.5
Land settlement policies and civilised labour policies protected employment, the colour bar in mining, and minimum wages helped the employable. Old age and disability pensions helped those white (and coloured) people who could not work (Seekings 2006a). In South Africa, as contemporaries noted, the category poor white only meant sense because of the racial demographics. In Argentina, many white people were very poor indeed, but the fact of their whiteness did not entail them to any special privileges. Only in South Africa, with its fragile racial hierarchy, could public policy be targeted on distinguishing between the poor, providing some with sheltered and over-paid employment or social assistance simply because they were considered white. In neither South Africa nor Argentina were the reforms the product of employers. Both the Radicals in Argentina and the National Party/Labour Party pact coalition in South Africa explicitly contrasted themselves with their capitalist elites (agrarian in Argentina, mining and nancial in South Africa). Employers were generally hostile to welfare reforms. They were invariably concerned about costs, especially if they were unable easily to pass on costs to their customers through price increases. They were also generally wary of expanding the scope of government, only slowly shifting from laissez-faire liberalism to seeing merit in the state regulation of competition.
In Argentina, employers had long opposed the 1919 reform that extended social insurance to private sector railway workers. The government needed stability in this crucial sector, and appeased the employers by allowing them to pass on the costs of their contributions through a special surcharge on passenger and freight trafc (Lewis 1993:179). This ensured that the commodity-exporting landowners who supported the Radicals conservative opponents helped to nance stability on the railways. Similarly, the introduction of a contributory pension fund for public utility workers meant antagonising mostly foreign-owned businesses, who in any case were adjudged to earn sufciently high prots that they could afford to pay (Meso-Lago 1978:172). In 1923, Argentine employers opposed the radical National Insurance Law because, they said, it would entail high administrative costs and would inate labour costs (Horowitz 2001). On this occasion, an unholy alliance of employers and unions forestalled the reforms. South African employers especially on the mines, but also emerging manufacturing employers were also unenthusiastic about many of the Pact governments reforms. Employers negotiated important concessions from the government, and some sections of capital beneted massively from new tariff protection as well as industrial stability. But capital was forced to compromise under the Pact government in unprecedented ways (see Kaplan 1976; Bozzoli 1981:chapter 6; Yudelman 1983). At the same time, there were limits to what the government could do. The Pact government did not increase taxation dramatically (until a rising gold price made this possible in the 1930s) and ensured that the debate over welfare reform remained within the bounds of sound public nance. The government also chose not to act on the recommendations of technocrats (and many MPs) in over-riding opposition to social insurance from employers. When, in 1932, employers were asked for their views on the establishment of a fund to redress problems of unemployment, the Chamber of Mines stated its strong opposition. The Federated Chamber of Industries supported the establishment of a fund, as long as it was nanced out of general public revenues (i.e. not out of contributions from employers) and was used to subsidise existing employer-run unemployment insurance funds or employers generally. Only the National Federation of Building Trade Employers, with distinctive interests, was positive about a fund to assist artisans, nanced through contributions from employers, employees and the state (South Africa 1932). Similarly employers organisations opposed compulsory health insurance for workers because of the cost. The Cape Chamber of Industries argued that the time is not ripe for this drastic social legislation; other legislation was already increasing the costs of production and becoming a serious burden on Industry. The South African Federated Chamber of Industries also complained of the burden of costs placed upon Industry through the charges imposed by social legislation. The Transvaal Engineering and Allied Industries Federation, the Transvaal Chamber of Mines and the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce shared these
views (South Africa 1936:6 7). But it is impossible to assess the importance of opposition to social insurance among employers in Argentina in 192324 and in South Africa in the early 1930s because employers were not the only opponents. Organised labour with notable exceptions in specic sectors was also either opposed to or distinctly lukewarm about the proposed insurance reforms. Neither government over-rode employers opposition lightly after all, these were capitalist states in the sense that the states were structurally dependent on capitalists. But in both Argentina and South Africa, the government was also heedful of organised labour, in part because of the threat of strikes or riots, and in part because growing numbers of workers were also voters and thus wielded electoral power over political parties.
Working-class voters and partisan politics Political statecraft, fuelled perhaps by scal imperatives and rendered possible by astute polices on taxes, provided the broad context for welfare reforms in these southern countries. But there was one further factor that provided strong incentives to reformers, at least in some times and places. Competition for the votes of particular groups provided an incentive for incumbent parties to implement reforms and for challengers to promise them. In addition, in a partially democratic political environment, the form of welfare state-building reected which parties or coalitions of parties were in ofce. In Argentina, a centrist political party enacted reforms with cross-class support in urban areas. In South Africa, the initial reforms were enacted by a coalition between a weak workerist party and a stronger party relying primarily on small farmers. Neither of these governments included the parties representing the interests of the major employers.
Both South Africa and Argentina had competitive elections, but with a limited franchise and low participation. Literacy and property restrictions were removed in Argentina in 1912, but most foreign-born immigrants were excluded from the franchise. Literacy and property qualications remained in force in South Africas Cape Province, and the franchise was restricted to white men (and women after 1930) in the rest of South Africa. Overall, in both cases, only small proportions of the urban adult population voted. But the racialisation of the franchise in (most of) South Africa was a crucial difference. As Simons and Simons wrote, white labour policies emerged from an all-white franchise (1968:98). The major advocate of welfare reform in Argentina was initially the Socialist Party. The Socialists programme focused primarily on wages and working conditions but included also demands that the state should support the inrm, the aged, and orphans; that education should be compulsory, free and secular; and that indirect taxes should be replaced by progressive income tax. Latin Americas rst Socialist congressman was elected in Buenos Aires in 1904 (Walter 1977). The franchise reform in 1912 strengthened the Socialist Party, although many immigrant workers remained disfranchised and the socialists also had to
contend with the anarchists suspicion of engagement with the state. The major beneciary, however, was the Union Cvica Radical or Radical Party. Under Yrigoyen, the Radical Party was transformed into a populist party appealing to the urban middle and working classes. Their success was based on a combination of their self-representation as being above class and regional interests, strong local organisation based on patronage, and (in the words of a contemporary) a moderate form of state intervention to alleviate the rigours of economic laissez-faire on behalf of the poor. The Radicals favoured interventions were paternalistic and discretionary (Radical Bread, Radical Milk, Radical Meat, Radical Seed, and the Radical Homestead) (quoted in Rock 1975:59). In the 1916 presidential elections, the Radicals won ve times as many votes as the Socialists (Walter 1977:137) and Yrigoyen became president. The Radicals needed to limit the growth of the Socialist Party if they were to counter the landowner-backed conservatives. Yrigoyen told congress that democracy does not simply consist in the guarantee of personal liberty; it also involves the opportunity of everyone to enjoy a minimum level of welfare (quoted in Rock 1975:98). Given the Radicals lack of roots in the union movement, they preferred to deliver social wage through a welfare state rather than higher earnings through labour legislation. Although the Radical government was constrained by its commitment to scal stringency, it was quick to introduce reforms that offered clear political benets at low scal cost to the state. By extending social insurance to private sector railway workers in 1919, the Radicals placated a key group of native-born workers who had the vote (Lewis 1993:1778; Horowitz 2001:56). The Radicals 1923 proposals for social insurance also represented partisan manoeuvring (Horowitz 2001). The Radicals did not aspire to be a social democratic party, however. In terms of ideology and support, the Radicals were more like the Christian democratic parties of continental Europe. This was in part because the Socialists posed only a muted electoral threat to the Radicals. Even after the Semana Tragica, which left Yrigoyens pro-labor, man-of-the-people image . . . seriously tarnished, the Socialists could not win more than ten per cent of the vote, and never expanded outside of working-class Buenos Aires (Walter 1977:157, 230 1). This reected, in part, questionable strategic and tactical choices by the Socialist Party. Socialist deputies rarely voted with the Radicals in congress, and aligned with conservatives on a surprising range of issues (including the 192324 welfare reforms). They were therefore almost always on the losing end of the vote (Smith 1974). The Socialist Partys strategy limited its expansion, and its refusal to negotiate and compromise with the Radicals certainly undermined the possibility of a more broadly encompassing welfare system. Having opposed the 1923 24 reforms, the Socialists proposed their own social security legislation in 1925 (Walter 1977:195). Politically isolated, however, this amounted to a rhetorical gesture rather than a practical reform initiative. The shrewder strategy would have been to negotiate over the initial, Radical Party proposals.
The South African counterpart to Argentinas Socialist Party was its Labour Party. Formed in 1909, uniting a number of parties, leagues and associations in different parts of what was about to become the Union of South Africa, the Labour Party called for progressive taxes on land and income, workers compensation, compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes, minimum wages (for white men), restrictions on immigration and old age pensions (Simons and Simons 1968; Ticktin 1973). The Labour Party performed strongly, especially in constituencies on the Witwatersrand with sizeable populations of white mineworkers. It won its rst seats in 1910. In 1920, at the peak of its strength, it won a remarkable twenty seats. Although it attracted much the same share of the vote as the Socialists in Argentina, the South African Labour Party wielded more inuence. Firstly, the urban (white) working-class vote was a much more oating vote, with the Labour Party competing with the both the Afrikaner nationalist National Party (for the votes of unskilled, Afrikaans-speaking workers) and the relatively proEnglish and pro-business South African Party (for the votes of more skilled, English-speaking workers). Moreover, in 1924 the Labour Party held the balance of power in a hung parliament. After the 1922 Rand Revolt, the Labour and National parties joined in an electoral pact, and in 1924 they formed the coalition Pact government. From 1924 to 1933, the Labour Party controlled the newly-established Department of Labour (whose ambit included social security). The Pact government, which laid the foundations of the South African welfare state, resembled in key respects the red-green alliances that introduced foundational welfare reforms in Scandinavia. As in Sweden, it was the party with support among small farmers that was most keen on non-contributory pensions. Most of the National Partys supporters were in the countryside, including many smaller white farmers, or were among former farmers squeezed off the land by the growth of large-scale capitalist agriculture. It was unsurprising that the National Party favoured social assistance, funded out of taxation. Many of its supporters could not easily afford to contribute themselves, nor could farmers call on employers to do so for them. In addition, the National Party wanted to deliver benets immediately, without the lag entailed in any contributory system. For the National Party, tax-nanced old age pensions served a similar function to tax-nanced aid to small white farmers or tax-nanced public works programmes or sheltered employment for white men. The National Partys support base might explain the presence of social assistance programmes, but this leaves unexplained the absence of social insurance in addition. Its ally in government, the Labour Party, favoured a mix of social assistance and social insurance, which would have much broader coverage than social assistance alone and would mean higher, employment-related benets for the Labour Partys semi-skilled and skilled supporters. Why did the participation of the Labour Party in the Pact government not result in a contributory scheme to supplement a basic old age pension, as was the case in Britain after 1925? Put another way, why was the price of the incorporation of skilled labour in South
Africa not so high as to include statutory social insurance? One crucial factor was that the primary demands of the unions (of white workers) and the Labour Party were around high wages and guaranteed employment. The rise of unemployment during the Great Depression reinforced the preference for guaranteed wages and employment, including through the colour bar, rather than unemployment insurance (Simons and Simons 1968:chapter15). In addition, when social insurance was discussed, the unions and Labour Party consistently pressed for schemes that would be funded entirely or substantially by employers (or the state) without contributions from employees. Initial welfare reforms in Sweden might have been driven by a red-green alliance, but subsequent expansions to its welfare state were driven by cross-class coalitions that also encompassed important sections of capital (Swenson 2002). The South African Labour Party, like the Argentine Socialist Party, over-reached itself in its demands for social welfare policy. Perhaps most importantly, the red-green alliance effectively ended in 1928. After bitter disputes over the fact and terms of its participation in the Pact government, the Labour Party split, with both factions performing very poorly in the elections of 1929 whilst the National Party won an absolute majority of seats. Although one faction of the Labour Party continued to serve in the Pact government, it had lost any leverage it had had hitherto. The National Party had little interest in comprehensive social insurance. Ideologically, large sections of the National Party were opposed to the state taking over responsibilities that were better left to individuals or the church. The introduction of non-contributory old age pensions led to a backlash, reected in the hostility of the Carnegie Commission to state-based welfare programmes (Seekings 2006b). Politically, the National Party had few voters among the skilled working class and parts of the urban lower middle class that would be the major beneciaries of any contributory welfare system. It was not the red-green alliance of the Pact government, but their rivals in the South African Party (in successive incarnations), which was to provide the impetus behind the expansion of contributory schemes in the mid-1930s. Not unlike the Radicals in Argentina, the South African Party competed for the votes of more skilled workers in town and enjoyed strong support among urban middle classes. But the South African Party was far more closely tied to urban and rural employers than were the Radicals in Argentina, constraining their reformist impulses. Compared to Argentine reforms, therefore, the South African Partys contributory schemes gave greater power to employers. The unemployment insurance scheme introduced in the mid-1930s applied to very specic sectors only, whilst contributory retirement provision was expanded through the statutory recognition of private schemes negotiated in collective bargaining between employers and unions.6 More and more groups of (white) workers joined those on the railways and gold mines in being covered by employerbased pension schemes.
Conclusion The cases of Argentina and South Africa present clear contrasts in terms of the scope and character of welfare reforms prior to the late 1930s. In each case, selected groups of politically-powerful workers most notably, in public service, on the railways and docks secured privileged insurance schemes, although the states role was much more pronounced in the Argentine than the South African case. But in South Africa, these were combined with and overshadowed by social assistance schemes that extended the benets of citizenship to some non-working poor, especially the elderly, along racial lines.
Neither the extent nor the character of reform can be easily explained in terms of overt class conict. There were few obvious differences between the countries in terms of the intensity of direct class conict, of worker militancy, or of employer injustice: in both countries, employers sought cheap labour, exploited ruthlessly wherever possible, and provoked strong reactions from their workers. Workers and unions fought for higher wages and improved working conditions. Even when anarchist and syndicalist inuences were weak, as in South Africa, unions were often wary of forms of state regulation that might institutionalise the unions. Workers in some sectors fought for privileged insurance reforms. And the Argentine Socialist Party and South African Labour Party both campaigned for some social policy reforms. But, overall, neither workers nor unions nor allied political parties played the decisive role in welfare reform in either Argentina or South Africa, in stark contrast to their counterparts in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Nor were private employers proactive in welfare state-building. In South Africa, and to a lesser extent Argentina, the major elements of welfare state-building were driven by politicians looking for electoral gain and guided by modernising technocratic elites who developed proposals in the light of what they identied as best practice elsewhere in the world. In both cases, policymakers were at least relatively autonomous from employers, although they remained anxious about scal probity and preferred to assuage employers through astute concessions (especially nancial) than to override them directly. Their goal was not state-building per se, but rather the forging of new national political identities that (to some extent) transcended class divisions. The form of welfare reform was shaped by partisan politics, by the class bases of the major political parties at the time and by the strategic and tactical choices made by unions and their associated political parties. Counter-intuitively, the more modern of the two states did not embark on a grander project of welfare state-building. The South African state was a much more modern state in many respects. It was organised into coherent and purposive government departments, was far more bureaucratic, collected and used statistics, used commissions of enquiry to inform policy-making, had professionalised the armed forces and police, and had superior public revenues (not relying on customs and excise) even before it ramped up its regulation of the employment relationship and expanded its
social welfare policies in the 1920s. Yet the South African state did not embark on comprehensive social insurance. It was in Argentina that a much more expensive welfare state was to develop after the Second World War. The post-war, Peronist welfare state in Argentina was built, however, on the workerist (or corporatist) foundations of the 1920s: separate, contributory schemes for workers in different industries or sectors. The South African welfare state remained rooted on its quite distinct foundations, in non-contributory social assistance, supplemented by employerbased provision. The size and shape of the Argentine and South African welfare states thus continued to reect the partisan politics of the 1920s, and above all the South Africans concern in the mid-1920s with racial hierarchy. Both the Argentine social insurance system and the South African social assistance and supplementary employer-based system reected the strategic and tactical choices of organised labour and associated political parties in the 1920s.
Notes 1. This article draws on parts of a larger paper that discusses also the Brazilian and Uruguayan cases. The full paper, The politics of welfare state-building in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and South Africa in the early Twentieth Century, was presented at the conference on Rethinking World of Labour at the University of the Witwatersrand in July 2006, and I am grateful to comments made at and after that conference (as well as by anonymous referees). Brazil was until 1930 a laggard, but within the Argentine mould. Uruguay was very different, developing a system that was more Beveridgean than South Africas in that it combined strong social insurance with a social assistance safety net. 2. The Cape Province Federation of Labour Unions which included many coloured workers, and was less worried about racial hierarchy was more positive about an unemployment insurance fund funded out of contributions from employers, employees and the state. 3. Hansard, House of Assembly debates, 27 February 1934 col 834. 4. Most studies of South Africa in the 1920s cite trends in average white wages as evidence that white workers did not benet under the Pact government. This claim requires, at the very least, close interrogation. Trends in average wages are difcult to interpret in a context in which lower-wage, unskilled employment is expanding. It is especially difcult to interpret in the context of downward pressure on wages in the Great Depression from 1929. Whilst there is some disagreement over whether or when the living standards of all white workers rose under the Pact government, there is no doubt that they fared incomparably better than did black workers who were increasingly excluded from all dimensions of citizenship. 5. Hansard, House of Assembly, 12 August 1924, col 429 32. 6. Under amendments to the Industrial Conciliation Act, employers and unions could negotiate welfare schemes that could then be extended by the state to the entire sector, i.e. including to rms that had been a dissenting minority or had not even been party to the collective bargaining in the industrial councils.
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Towards a Concrete East African Trade Union Federation: History, Prospects and Constraints
George M Gona
University of Nairobi
Introduction Contemporary globalisation has sparked many institutions and social actors into action. These social actors and institutions are trying to slow its pace, coming to terms with it or strategising to cope. Globally it is affecting every aspect of human endeavour. In the context of labour, one response to the onslaught of globalisation has been the development of vigilantism against capital. More recently the tendency for translocation of enterprises to countries where labour costs are cheap (a common agenda of globalisation) has meant that the labour movement has to organise itself across borders to counter the anti-trade union tendency inherent in globalisation, hence the transnationalisation of trade unionism.
An East African Trade Union Council in the East African region (Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya) has existed for almost fteen years. In early 2006 it became a confederation with its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania. The urgent need to render such a confederation effective appears to increase as the East African countries inch closer to a political federation in 2012.1 While the idea of a labour federation preceded that of a political federation, it appears that the political issues have outstripped other important matters like labour. Indeed other regional bodies like the East African Business Association and the East African Professional Association are thriving. Yet the move towards a working transnational trade union organisation seems slow and far-fetched. The urgency for bringing to fruition a federation of labour movements in East Africa cannot be understated. Two recent occurrences underscore this. The rst was the deportation of Kenyan workers working for a Tanzanian daily newspaper Mwanachi; a sister daily of the Daily Nation published in Kenya. The Tanzanian authorities argued that the deported workers work permits had expired. While there has been talk about working closely among the East African countries, particularly around the free movement of workers; this incident pointed to the urgent need for a federation of workers in the region. The other occurrence involved the concessioning in early 2006 of the Kenya-Uganda railway to a South African business conglomerate that involved international capital.
The conglomerate was granted the concession to run and manage the loss-making Kenya-Uganda railway for a period of twenty-ve years. What this meant was that the realities of globalisation were at these countries doorsteps. What was disturbing was that while international conglomerates had evolved mechanisms and legal frameworks of confronting states collectively, trade unions were caught napping. Indeed there was no word from the East African Trade Union Council. The Kenya Railways Union stood alone; arguing against the take-over before pensions were paid to members. The railway workers insisted that a take-over by the consortium would lead to a loss of their benets. The matter is still in court. Signicantly, the railway workers of Uganda and Kenya have not collectively articulated their demands. In fact, one would wonder, to whom would they present them? Both incidents point to the urgent need to concretise an East African federation of labour movement. The fashioning, success and organisation of such a body will depend on historical, local and national union strength and organisation. It will depend on how much the labour movements in the region are willing to work with other anti-labour groups.
Trade union development in East Africa in the colonial period The colonial authorities in the East African territories were openly against the development of trade unions, let alone encouraging any form of cooperation between them (Sandbrook 1975:30). Nonetheless, organisations calling themselves trade unions and articulating workers grievances emerged. In Kenya, as early as 1908, strikes of African workers employed at a government farm engaged in loading railway engines with wood at fuel stations along the railway line in Mazeras near Mombasa were reported. Another strike of the African rickshaw-pullers, which lasted for several days, took place in Mombasa. It protested stringent regulations of the Nairobi Municipal Committee. In July 1914 Africans and Asian workers working on the railway went on strike to oppose the introduction of the Poll Tax and in support of the removal of other grievances regarding housing, rations and medical facilities. The strike only ended on the assurances of the authorities that the demands would be considered (Singh 1969:912).
The First World War and the rising problems that accompanied it brought further misery to the Africans. At the end of the war, Africans began to organise in political associations. Among these was the Kikuyu Association, which was formed in 1920 under Chief Koinange. A prominent leader emerging in this group was Chief Josiah Njonjo. It was impossible at the time to differentiate what was political agitation and what were workers demands. We also need to emphasise that at the time, people from different parts of the region worked in Mombasa and in Nairobi and therefore the African peoples representations to the authorities were not only for Kenyans, but for all workers in the region. The burning issues facing Africans in the 1920s were of similar nature: poor working conditions,
Towards a Concrete East African Trade Union Federation: History, Prospects and Constraints 275
the kipande system, low wages, racial discrimination, poor health services and a lack of African representation in all forums. Meanwhile, serious thinking was going on among leaders of the Kikuyu and the Buganda associations and other African groups. It was felt that conning African associations to particular tribes was not the best form of African organisation to solve the problems common to all Africans. They held joint discussions and came to the conclusion that what was needed was an African organisation that would be open to all Africans. An organisation that would cooperate with all people of other races in Kenya, and from elsewhere, on issues which concerned all people of the region irrespective of race, colour or creed. As a result in July 1921 the Kikuyu Association, which had now become the Young Kikuyu Association, changed its name to the East African Association (Singh 1969:202). The East African Association was to act as both a political association and a general workers union and made representations to the colonial authorities and to employers respectively (Singh 1969:202204). This laid the foundation for the cooperation among trade unionists in the East African region. Its formation, policies and activities as a general workers union were important since it could be joined by Africans and other people of all the East African territories and its activities could spread from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. At the end of 1922, the Railway Artisan Union came into existence. This was composed of both African and Asian railway employees who were not allowed to join the staff or civil servants associations lest they became trade unions, which could back strikes. The reaction of the government was swift: those who were involved in the campaign to form the union were deported to India. Artisans who remained did not stop the campaign. This exercised pressure on the railway authorities, who decided to recognise the union and drop their plan to reduce wages by ten per cent and to retrench workers. However, they dismissed the president of the union. A few weeks later the unions secretary was also dismissed. These acts of victimisation intimidated members of the union, which closed down in 1923 (Singh 1969:41). By and large this union was localised in Kenya, with no Ugandan or Tanganyikan labourers involved. The next attempt at forming a union took place in 1931 when at a mass meeting in Mombasa artisans, workmen and labourers met to discuss a tragic accident that had occurred at a construction site on Kilindini Road. A number of people had lost lives in this accident, raising the issue of workmens compensation. The deteriorating working conditions coupled with falling wages and lengthy working hours only added to this immediate trigger of the accident. A Trade Union Committee of Mombasa was thus formed to promote and safeguard workers interests (Singh 1969:41). This Mombasa Committee lasted only for a few months, and then died.
Another organisation, the Workers Protection Society of Kenya was formed in October 1931, when a strike of building workers took place during the construction of the new municipal market. The strike was in protest against the reduction in wages. This resulted in the formation of the Trade Union Committee of Mombasa and the Workers Protection Society of Kenya, which prompted the Native Department to look into questions such as those concerning trade unions, workmens compensation and minimum wages. The native department also undertook to examine the conditions under which Europeans and Asians work (Report, Native Affairs Department, quoted in Singh 1969:43). Yet the Depression increasingly narrowed or localised activity and horizons. In Mombasa unions were dominated by a core group of the Kikuyu and Kavorondo people who, by the end of 1922, had pushed coastal people out of their old niches in domestic service, dominating more completely than before the market in monthly labour. These were to form the core of the labour organisations emerging in Mombasa (Cooper 1987:32 33). In 1935, Makhan Singh, the father of Kenyas trade union movement, formed the non-racial Labour Trade Union of Kenya from the Indian Labour Trade Union. The union later changed its name to the Labour Trade Union of East Africa (Singh 1969:5057.) Forced by the declining working conditions and low wages, it called a strike against Nairobi Asian and European builders and contractors in April and May 1937. Alarmed by the nascent trade unionism, the legislative council passed the Trade Unions Ordinance in August 1937 to prevent all irresponsible agitators from causing trouble among labour in the colony.2 This legislation made it compulsory for all trade unions to be registered by government; it neither legalised peaceful picketing nor protected unions from actions of tort (Sandbrook 1975:30). Similar legislation was passed in Tanganyika and Uganda in 1934 and 1936 respectively. Responding to pressure from the colonial ofce the Kenya government eventually allowed picketing and workers would not be prosecuted for striking. The emerging unions, however, were weak in organisation and bereft of leadership and consequently generated little income and membership. The start the Second World War reduced the momentum of trade union organisation in the East African region. A blanket ban was imposed on any form of African organisation. In spite of this ban strikes by African workers took place in 1941 and 1942 in Nairobi, Mombasa and other towns. In January 1947 a strike broke out in Mombasa (the Mombasa general strike) in which 15,000 workers were involved. Led by Chege Kibachia the strikers demanded an increase in wages and equal pay for equal work (Singh 1969:143, see also Cooper 1987:98 113). It ended through the intervention of Eluid Mathu, the African Legislative Council representative. The government appointed a tribunal to investigate the trade dispute and make recommendations. Tribunals were also to sit in Uganda and Tanganyika. On the recommendations of
the tribunal wages were increased in Mombasa, Kisumu, Nairobi, Eldoret and other towns of East Africa. The African Workers Federation was formed on the rst day of the strike. It later linked with the then-territorial party, the Kenya African Union (KAU). Together they declared at the KAU annual conference a clarion call for United Front to Win Freedom (Singh 1969:151). Between the 1947 Mombasa general strike and the declaration of a state of emergency in 1952 trade unions and political parties openly worked together, which was at the time an affront to the government. This is the period Stichter has referred to as the militant phase of trade unionism in Kenya, in which Fred Kubai, the radical president of KAU was very much at the centre of the labour movement working closely with the radical trade union leader Makhan Singh (Stichter 1978:155 74). The struggles by the nationalists and trade unionists coincided since they recruited from the same base, their leadership were from the same social stratum and they were agreed on the need for change in governance. A signicant aspect of the 1947 strike lay in the formation of the African Workers Federation (AWF) with ofcers and an executive during the strike, which gave organisational unity to this mass identity (Cooper 1987:98). Even more signicant was the aftermath of the strike. The weekly meetings in the Field of the Poor attracted thousands, kept alive the symbols of unity from the strike, and through the political education and planning that took place at these meetings promised a more organised approach to future disputes (Cooper 1987:195). In 1949 representatives of the Labour Trade Union of East African, the Transport Workers and Allied Workers Union, the Tailors and Garment Workers Union, the Typographical Union of Kenya and the Shoemaker Workers Union formed the East African Trade Union Congress the rst East African Central Organisation of trade union was born. The East African Workers Federation, the Domestic and Hotel Workers Union, the East African Seamans Union and the East African Painters and Decorators Union joined later (Singh 1969:219). While it was formed in Kenya and was led mainly by trade unionists from Kenya, it embraced all workers in the East African region including Asians (Singh 1971:9 10). A branch was set up in Tanganyika but made a negligible impact there. What was important is that it acted as the umbrella body for the East African trade unions. It provided the organisational context in which nationalism was bred and nurtured. It provided the framework around which national issues and workers issues were articulated. It was the foremost supra-ethnic organisation to emerge in Kenya and in East Africa. It shunned tribally based organisations and appealed to working class solidarity. Efforts were made by the colonial government to curb trade union organisation when it published a bill in 1949 that required all trade unions registered before April 1948 to re-register. If the bill was to become law, the Labour Trade Union of East Africa, the Transport and Allied Workers Union, the Typographical
Union of Kenya and the African Workers Federation would have had to be re-registered. According to the central council of the EATUC, the bill was aimed at crippling and emasculating their union (the Central Organisation of trade union movement in East Africa), a move they would resist at all costs (Singh 1969:210211). While the law would only apply to trade unions in Kenya, the leadership of EATUC read mischief in the whole thing. Trade unionists protested against the bill, but by the end of the year it had become law. Despite the repressive legislation, trade unionism persisted amongst Africans. Many unions continued to exist without the ofcial recognition under the 1949 Act. The spirit of trade unionism was kept alive by the rise of the nationalist leadership; some of whom had their roots in the unions. Makhan Singh joined hands with other leaders of the militant KAU, like Fred Kubai, to address African grievances. Such nationalists transformed the labour movement into a social movement in Kenya. They held ery meetings in Nairobi, committing the organisation to primarily political goals (Singh 1969:240242; Stichter 1978:115 74). As the KAU (the only territorial party in Kenya) was banned in 1948, it was substituted by EATUC. The EATUCs constitution also reected a social movement character for it committed its members to ameliorate the social conditions of the working class as well as its economic conditions (Sandbrook 1975:31). While the EATUC was refused registration, it deantly continued to operate. In early 1950 it launched a campaign for its afliates to achieve their demands, including the release of Chege Kibachia, who had been arrested in the 1947 Mombasa strike. Meanwhile, the decision was announced by government to raise the status of Nairobi to a city. EATUC used this occasion to express the workers indignation of the policies of the British and Kenyan governments and the Nairobi Municipal Council (Singh 1969:253). The result was that the overwhelming majority of workers in Nairobi and adjoining areas declined to participate in the celebrations on 30 March 1950, and on subsequent days remained home or in their residential areas (Singh 1969:256). What appeared a non-trade union issue (granting a royal charter to Nairobi) was aligned to a trade union matter (government anti-trade union policies). In this way issues peculiar to trade unions became national issues. It was Makhan Singh and his group that spoke about demanding political independence for the rst time through the EATUC. At a meeting in April 1950 they passed a resolution demanding complete independence for East African territories at an early date (Singh 1971:13). On May Day 1950 the EATUC members declared that our unions and the EATUC would do their utmost for the achievement of workers demands, complete freedom and independence of the East African territories and lasting peace of the world as a nal solution to the problem of the workers in East Africa (Singh 1969:205208). Following the May Day 1950 disturbances, Makhan Singh and Kubai were arrested and
charged with being ofcers of an illegal trade union. The EATUC then called a general strike in Nairobi to protest the arrests. This was quelled by a massive show of force in which the army as well as the police were employed, and some 300 strikers were arrested (Sandbrook 1975:3132). At the end of the trial Makhan Singh was declared an undesirable person and deported to the Northern Frontier District where he was to languish for eleven years before his release in 1961 (Patel 2006:chapter 6). The arrest of the trade union leaders created a leadership vacuum among trade unions in the region. In the absence of Singh and Fred Kubai, Tom Mboya became critical in trade union organisation, but was equally important as a nationalist leader. In Kenya, the labour leadership became crucial from 1952, when the colonial government banned political parties in the country. The latter-day national parties that would lead the respective countries into independence forged these ties too. In effect the workers role as citizens seeking independence frequently necessitated membership to the nationalist movement or a political party and to the union. The trade union leadership could not divorce itself from the whirlwind of national politics (Goldsworthy 1982). However, differences surfaced in the trade union movement and with political leaders before independence was achieved in the three countries. The allure of impeding independence for each of the East African countries meant a re-orientation towards national, rather than East Africanwide, trade union objectives. This was a critical moment. In the end, the labour movements in the three countries concentrated on providing support to nationalist struggles. The endeavours of Makhan Singh and his group for an East Africa-wide labour movement naturally waned. In Tanzania the colonial authorities did not encourage the formation or growth of trade unionism. Since Tanzania was not as industrialised as Kenya, the formation of trade unions started late. Problems of migrant labour hindered the organisation of workers because a majority of workers did not have an attachment to their work. Industrialisation speeded up in the years immediately before independence but for most of the colonial period it was effectively non-existent (Coulson 1982:7980). Essentially, most of those who were employed either worked in agriculture or in the service sector, which included the government, the railways, and the docks. Even those in the agricultural sector and government service were employed on short-term contracts of three to six months. The trade union movement, therefore began among workers in service industries, notably amongst the dockworkers. Once migrant workers on sisal estates were organised, the power of unions was an extremely strong force in favour of independence (Coulson 1982). For many years the docks were the biggest employers of labour in Dar es Salaam and Tanga. Conditions of work were poor, so it was not surprising that the docks were the rst places where the working class became conscious of their power (Coulson 1982). In 1937 there was a docks strike in Tanga. However, the rst large scale strike in Dar es Salaam, in 1939, was a strike by the casual workers
who wanted not only more money but also some of the fringe benets enjoyed by the permanent workers . . . It failed because the companies were in a position to recruit a new unskilled labour force (Coulson 1982:105). In 1943, during the war, when ination had caused a rise in prices and wages had fallen behind, there was another strike. Eight hundred men were involved, and this time the permanent and more skilled workers joined in, making it much harder for the companies to break the strike by recruiting a new labour force. A tribunal was set up during the strike, and as a result of its report, the wages of the skilled workers were raised; even so, the unskilled labour force was still probably worse off than it had been in 1939 (Coulson 1982). Perhaps the most remarkable strike in colonial Tanzania was the dockworkers strike of 1947. Increasing prices in the late 1940s resulted in workers striking. Shortage of goods made living conditions in Dar es Salaam very difcult. In September 1947, after fruitless negotiations the dockworkers went on strike, which rapidly spread to other groups of workers. The dockers were soon joined by railway workers who started spreading the strike up-country. On the fourth day there were pickets all over Dar es Salaam, and by the sixth day even African teachers in two secondary schools had joined. In Dar es Salaam the strike ended on the twelfth day when a tribunal was set up. The outcome of the tribunal indicated the extent of the discontent among workers (Coulson 1982:140). It recommended a forty to fty per cent increase in dock wages, making them better off than they had been in 1939. The government and private employers soon brought their wages into line. The signicance of this strike, like that of Mombasa dockworkers was that it made the Dockers a privileged group among Tanzanian workers, the best paid, most formidable, labour force in the country. It was won by the rst real exercise of African power since the end of Maji Maji an exhilarating experience, no doubt for those who participated (Iliffe 1970:134) but even more signicant was the recommendation by GW Hatchell who led the tribunal that the workmen shall appoint accredited representatives of each category of workmen who shall be allowed to represent the workmen and to discuss with the employers any matter arising out of the employment. The dockers thus formed their rst permanent organisation (Iliffe 1970). Iliffe observes that their action had created consciousness; now consciousness was institutionalised in a trade union (Iliffe 1970). Equally important was the fact that what was created was Tanganyikas rst powerful trade union among the dockworkers. It transformed from a trade union with an illiterate leadership in 1943 to a well-organised union led mostly by headmen (Iliffe 1979:404). Nevertheless, the strike showed that solidarity among workers was limited. Action was conned almost entirely to the central railway area and its feeders. No attempt was made to create a general trade union of the kind then being advocated in Kenya (Clayton and Savage 1974:27683). This was because industry in
Tanzania was less developed and less differentiated to allow for a general workers union. The rst strong union in Tanganyika was formed in 1943 by the dockworkers in Dar es Salaam. Later in the 19489 work stoppages the union showed much solidarity, strengthened by its capacity to prevent non-members obtaining work in the port. Since dockworkers were now a privileged group, the union collaborated with a government scheme to register it and exclude other casual labourers from employment. Yet such a large union without permanent employees could not last. By 1950 it had closed up (Iliffe 1979:14042). Between 1950 and 1955 the government contained African trade unionism. It only encouraged the formation of staff associations among craftsmen and joint negotiating procedures of welfare capitalism. Trade unionism was revived by African educated men seeking to create a labour movement from above, on a territorial scale, and with the full-time leadership, which most labour actions had lacked. The chief pioneers were clerks in the capitals commercial rms who in 1951 founded the African Commercial Employers Association, probably moulded on a parallel Asian organisation. The leading activists notably MM Kamaliza and MM Mpangala were close to Tanganyika African Association (TAA) and Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), two of Tanganyikas budding political parties, whose headquarters they used as their ofce until 1955. They hoped to form a Tanganyika African Trade Union Congress, but the government was hostile and the territorys scattered groups of organised workers proved keen but difcult to coordinate when approached in April 1955 (Iliffe 1979:537). The stalemate was broken when Tom Mboya visited Dar es Salaam in July 1955, and convinced the administration to allow for the formation of an umbrella body. On 7 October 1955 the Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL) was launched. Its president was JB Ohanga, leader of Railway African Union, and its general secretary was Rashid Kawawa, the president of Tanganyika African Government Servants Association (TAGSA). It sought to preserve the independence of the labour movement from political control but also encouraged its members to register and vote so as to exercise their full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and to perform their rightful part in the political life of the nation (Friedland 1969:116 20, 538). Following on the formation of TFL, a wave of strikes demonstrated newfound solidarity. For example, when the Domestic and Hotel Workers Union struck in 1956, building workers and commercial employees came out in sympathy and only the law prevented dockworkers following them. Public support was shown in TANU-backed boycotts of buses and bottled beer. Open cooperation between trade unions and the labour movement was now seen. By 1958 a rapid growth of trade unionism had also begun, albeit still under regulation (Iliffe 1979:540). This was evident in their rapid growth and inuence. Indeed, it was clear that although there were still less than 50,000 unionists (1958), they had organised successful boycotts of buses and the brewery, achieved
wage increases for more than half Tanzanias 400,000 wage earners and the rst legal minimum wage in Dar es Salaam, and caused widespread disruption on the sisal estates as they tried to get recognition (Tardoff 1969:13741; Friedland 1969:52, 161). Towards the end of 1958 the sisal workers had been allowed to form a national union, and by 1961 the government estimated that 136,000 were members of the Plantation Workers Union, out of the approximately 200,000 union members in the country (Friedland 1969). Trade unions were the most threatening group to the colonialists. That inuence was evident in the militant Christopher Tumbo of the Railway African Union who supported the nationalisation of the railway service after independence. It should be noted that railways and postal services in the region were run under the East African High Commission. Tumbo had feared that under this arrangement, white employees would continue to hold positions of inuence even after independence, hence his dislike for working under the East African High Commission. He demanded maximum Africanisation, the abolition of the East African High Commission, and union independence to avoid the take-over of the unions by the party. Indeed the demand for the abolition of the Commission by extension was anti-East African wide trade union orientation (Iliffe 1979:542). No sooner had Tumbo taken over the leadership of this railway union in February 1961 than he led a strike that lasted for eight days. The strike was directed at the arrogance and racialism of many white employees of the railways. The strikers feared that if cooperative or federal arrangements continued, these men would stay on in positions of power after Tanganyikan independence. Such sentiments by Tumbo and others scared the politicians and partly explains the parting of ways between the politicians and the trade unionists when TANU took over power in 1960 (Friedland 1969:138). Independence meant different things to the two groups. The cooperation between the two ended formally when trade unionists were arrested in January 1964 after a mutiny of the Tanganyikan army. Uganda, equally, has a chequered history of trade union development. Like elsewhere in the region there was a delay in the formation of trade unions. Scott has attributed this to three factors: low industrialisation, the migrant nature of labour, and the ethnic divisions in the unions when they were formed (Scott 1966:10). Added to these factors was the often spelt out government position that trade unions were not to be encouraged lest they fell into the hands of unscrupulous persons anxious to exploit it for their own ends (Mamdani 1999:190). The rst organisation calling itself a trade union was formed in Uganda in 1938. This body was associated with the earliest stirrings of political nationalism in the country. As in Kenya, the distinction between trade unions and political associations in these formative years was not clear. Since political parties were not allowed at the time, trade unions as authorised bodies provided space for political leaders to articulate African grievances (Scott 1966:910). One such organisation was the Uganda Motor Drivers Association under James Kivu and IK Musazi.
It was dully registered but in its six years existence it rarely functioned as a trade union. It operated as a platform from which its political leaders directed criticism towards the colonial government and the Buganda kingdom. In January 1945 strikes and violent rioting occurred. Members of the Drivers Association were deeply involved and its leadership including Kivu and Musazi were deported and the union closed down (Scott 1966). However, at the core of the strike were domestic servants. They were to light the spark at Entebbe on 1 January from where the strike spread to other urban and rural areas. They were also instrumental in consolidating these sporadic uprisings at Kampala on 14 January. The strike spread to government workers, to those employed in factories, hospitals, public transport, and plantations. Every urban centre in the colony was paralysed (Mamdani 1999:179). A wildly unrealistic wage claim is said to have encouraged support for a general strike, but a commission set up to look into the disturbances found that the strike had been politically inspired and motivated (Scott 1966). The riots had been targeted at the colonial order and the policies of the Buganda rulers that were both objectively exploitative and personally humiliating (Mamdani 1999:178). Similar disturbances occurred in 1949 but were neither as general nor as effective as in 1945. This had been preceded by the formation in April 1949 of the Transport and General Workers Union led by Musazi who had been released in 1946. It was dominated by the radical Kampala taxi drivers. Musazi also founded the Uganda African Farmers Union as a focus for opposition to the protectorates marketing control of coffee. Both organisations were politically inclined and were at the core of the 1949 political disturbances (Scott 1966; Mamdani 1999:183). The response to the general wave of strikes was the Trade Unions Ordinance of 1952. The primary purpose of this ordinance was to control the scope of union activities (Mamdani 1999:191 and Scott 1966:chapter 4) and also prevent them from being used for political purposes. General unions were declared illegal making proletarian solidarity based on the general interests of the working class unlawful (Mamdani 1999:191). The Ordinance provided for strict measures of union registration and the stringent annual inspections that included the submission of nancial returns. A number of unions protested the new order but without success. After eight months of protesting, and as a result of contact with the more developed Kenyan union movement, the Busoga Motor Drivers Union nally registered. Other unions to be registered were the Kampala Local Government Staff Association, the Railway Asian Union and the Uganda Posts and Telegraph African Welfare Union (Mamdani 1999). Mamdani has pointed out that the ordinance had the effect of increasing the number of unions, but at the same time reduced the membership of individual unions as each sectional interest received its own separate organisational expression. This also had the effect of weakening them. By 1957 the only remaining union with a membership higher than 500 was the Railway African Union
(Mamdani 1999:191). Moreover, following the Ordinance the union as guardian of the interests of labour was now displaced by work committees, which were established in every place of work and were closely supervised by the department of labour who mediated between the workers and their employers in the case of dispute (Mamdani 1999:191). Overall, between 1952 and 1955 Ugandan unions lost both their organisational unity and autonomy. Parallel to these developments was the gradual shift of trade union leadership from the semi-skilled and unskilled workers (drivers and domestic servants, respectively) into the hands of white-collar civil servants (Mamdani 1999: 239). Increasingly the divisions in the labour movement undermined their ability to articulate workers issues or even pretend political leadership of the country. These divisions played out well in the largest and most organised union, the Railway African Union. The Railway African Union was the oldest and most active union in Uganda. Like other unions its history illustrates a number of features common to Ugandan unions particularly the divisive effects of tribal loyalties, the value of international assistance and the problem of irresponsible leadership. Space does not allow a detailed expose of these, which has been dealt with elsewhere. Sufce to note that the International Transport Workers Federation (ITWF), the British Trade Union Congress and the ICFTU were instrumental in the growth of the union. In 1958, ITWF supported the union in its request to have an inter-territorial department for workers of the three territories. This was allowed in 1959. The union grew under the leadership of Humphries Luande, a Samia from Kenya. Having risen in the ranks of railway workers between 1941 and 1958 he nally accepted a full-time position in the union in 1958. His leadership however was resisted by the Luo, who were the largest single group of employees, but perhaps in reaction to Luo Solidarity, the other Kenyan tribes, especially the Samia and the Luhya combined to keep the Luo group taking control of the RAU. On several occasions attempts by the Luo to eject Luande from ofce were unsuccessful. On one occasion, Omolo, a Luo, resigned as treasurer after the executive failed to support his bid to suspend Luandes salary and allowances because of alleged nancial mismanagement. Vice-president of RAU and Trade Union Congress (TUC) general secretary Peter Okatch, another Luo, supported Omolo, threatening to form an alternative union. In an earlier episode in 1959, Okatch was evicted from RAU for refusing to pull the union out from the TUC. Such wrangles between TUC and RAU (the largest and oldest union and among its leaderships in Uganda) epitomise the divisions in the labour movement (Scott 1966:62 73). These divisions were accompanied with exaggerated threats to strike, at times on imsy matters. These were done with the aim of union leaders outdoing each other to gain popularity, thus preserving their own power. However, because nothing happened despite the threats, there was a danger that outsiders would cease to take the leadership seriously (Scott 1966:73).
Differences among leaders in the labour movement did not suggest lack of connections between political parties and unions. Indeed the earlier trade unions were in fact organisations primarily concerned with political agitation. Yet the restrictions brought about by the 1952 Trade Unions Ordinance made politicians discard trade unionism. Only C Makuyu, the rst general secretary of the Uganda Trades Union Congress (UTUC) stayed on and tried to organise workers. After the formation of UTUC in 1955, following the visit by the ICFTU and Mboya, Makuyu remained the dominant gure in the organisation, often associating himself with the Progressive Party (a non-effective entity) and later joining the Democratic Party as an executive ofcer. In 1957 he quit his party post to be full-time general secretary of UTUC (Scott 1966:147). Thereafter unions in Uganda were not committed to party politics and by extension involved in the nationalist struggle. Scott has explained thus
political life in pre-independence Uganda was characterized by disunity bred from personal, religious and regional rivalries. No party offered coherent programmes which could attract the unied support of union leaders. Consequently, union leaders were left to disagree among themselves and in general, to avoid total commitment to any of the competing nationalist parties. (Scott 1966:152)
As the country progressed towards independence and the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) established itself as the dominant party, trade unionists like Luande began to associate closely with it. He was later endorsed by the party for . . . and elected to represent an urban area. He was however excluded from the cabinet and became a virulent critic of the party and later resigned from it (Scott 1966). Perhaps this was to conrm a strong belief among some of the labour leaders that trade unionism should not be close to power. Yet the government felt that the labour movement ought to be an arm of state and went ahead to form the Uganda Federation of Labour, which identied with the Pan African All African Trade Union Federation based in Ghana (Scott 1966:154). This reected a general trend in the continent: states were intolerant of the labour movement and wanted to control them. Systematic muzzling of workers voices was to be the norm in the post-independence period. A number of issues emerge from this outline of trade union development in the East African countries: There was a close connection between unions and civil/ political issues and national parties. There were no differences in the articulation of trade union issues and those of a political nature. Labour movements facilitated the implementation of militant unity that had its base in the declaration of the fth Pan-African Congress on achieving independence for Africa. This explains the pan-East African connections between trade unionists and politicians alike. However, political pre-occupation gradually drowned Pan East African association. It got worse in the 1980s and 1990s, largely missing out in the re-democratisation agenda of the 1990s and the combating globalisation. What then went wrong?
Trade unionism in the post-colonies The achievement of political independence by African countries in the 1960s was only a beginning in the long road to attaining self-determination. Soon the independent states realised that the questions of achieving national integration, nation building and economic independence were major issues by themselves. These early challenges to African independent states resulted in a serious curtailment of any form of dissent. Open discussions or challenges as well as constructive criticism to the regime were not tolerated. Pluralism was seen as an alien concept that Africans could do without. The new political elite viewed the ideology of the one-party state as a panacea to the project of national integration and development. Little of the colonial security apparatus changed. The new presidents inltrated and controlled security institutions inherited from the colonial period, thus fostering an element of partisan loyalty to themselves and to the ruling party. Under the rubric of state security and emergency powers the postcolonial regimes did not allow any substantive democracy to thrive. In Kenya, for example, the revolutionary ideology of the struggle for independence was taken over by an emerging elite, dedicated to the promotion of a deformed capitalism, serving thereby its interest as a class and the interests of foreign capital. In the case of Tanzania state socialism became a state dictatorship. The consequences were grave: citizens lost their rights to almost everything.
The period 1962 to 1964 witnessed a restriction of trade unionism in Tanzania. In 1962 three Acts were passed, one limiting the right to strike, another preventing civil servants from joining unions (though they were allowed to join the party), and a third giving the Tanganyika Federation of Labour powers over its constituent unions. Its general secretary, Kamaliza, was brought into the cabinet as Minister of Labour, and in September 1962 a Preventive Detention Act was passed, soon to be used against trade unionists. In 1963 negotiations to include unions as part of government collapsed because unionists resisted the move. Christopher Tumbo, the leader of the railway union, was arrested by the Kenyan police in Mombasa, and handed over to Tanganyikan authorities at the Tanganyika border; he remained in detention without trial for four years. At the same time Victor Mkello, the leader of the Plantation Workers Union was conned by government order to a remote part of the country (Pratt 1976:1856). The rest of the key leadership of the trade union movement was to be detained after the mutiny of 1964. In 1964 members of the ruling elite around Nyerere stage-managed a military coup partly with the aim of implicating trade unionists opposed to the merger of the TFL with TANU. The aftermath of this unrest was the detention of up to 200 trade unionists including the secretary general of the TFL, John Magongo (Gona 2002:71 72; Friedland 1969:148 149). Magongo remained behind bars without trial until 1973. In its place Nyerere created a pliable monolithic National Union of Tanganyika Workers (NUTA). NUTA, the sole trade union, was allowed to afliate to TANU and with its general secretary was appointed by the president.
Membership of NUTA was made compulsory for workers, and it was given a guaranteed income of more than 500,000 shillings per annum through compulsory deductions by employers from every wage or salary paid (Coulson 1982:140, 273 4). A highly centralised monolith of an organisation was created with a close association with the ruling party. Its creation marked the end of trade union autonomy in Tanganyika. Clearly workers were not involved in the creation of the new structure. It was imposed through legislative action, and as the unionists began to be released from detention they were confronted in effect, with a structural fait accompli from which many of them were now excluded (Friedland 1969:149). According to Friedland there was no indication that NUTA or the government tried to solve workers problems. Worse still when Nyerere promulgated the Arusha Declaration in 1967 the hopes of workers wages and better working conditions were dashed. Nyerere insisted that workers should help in the bridging of incomes between the workers and rural peasants (Friedland 1969:150151). In 1966 workers had already lost their most valuable tool, the right to strike when Nyerere banned them. Subsequent to the Arusha Declaration state socialism took precedence over everything else. In 1971 Nyerere promulgated Mwongozo, a further guide to Tanzanias socialism in which workers were given the mandate to monitor employers who were said to have been rude to citizens. For the rst time in Tanzanian history strikes not concerned with wages and other remunerations took place (Mapulo 1973:32). Workers undertook a change of tactics; strikes were no longer tools employed after the breakdown of negotiations. Instead, lockouts became the norm: instead of striking because of the commandist or abusive practices of the boss, the workers would simply lockout the boss in question until their grievances were solved satisfactorily . . . (Mapulo 1973:33). Soon lockouts developed into factory takeovers that alarmed the government. In short, the idea of striking had lost credence and gaining it was far-fetched. Under state socialism trade unions were swallowed and had no relevance except to propagate Nyereres ideas. Little serious study has been undertaken on unions in Tanzania in the 1980s and 1990s to provide a complete picture of trade unionism under state socialism. Nonetheless, state socialism was an inhibition to the development of an autonomous labour movement in Tanzania. Trade union factionalism in Kenya emerged at the dawn of independence and reected the ideological differences among trade unionists. Two competing centres took shape: Arthur Ochwadas group in the Kenya Trade Union Congress (KTUC), later to register as the Kenya African Workers Congress (KAWC) supported by Oginga Odinga and Argwings Kodhek, two of Kenyas constitutional nationalists; and the Tom Mboya group of the KFL. The KTUC, formed in 1959, espoused radical policies, which favoured the formation of a labour party to project the political aspirations of the labour movement (Gona 2003:6872).
These divisions, in the eyes of government did not augur well for economic development. The government often claimed that the conict between the Congress and KFL brought about industrial disharmony, which was not healthy for the edging economy.3 There is no evidence to suggest that the wrangles between the two rival centres caused any capital ight. However, such unsubstantiated allegations by the state were used to justify the need to contain labour through the creation of a national centre that the government could control. It is in this context that the government went ahead to create a centralised trade union organisation. This was achieved through the formation of Central Organisation of Trade Unions, COTU in 1965 (Sandbrook 1975:40 42; Gona 2003:6268). Kenyatta ordered the attorney general to draft a constitution for COTU. The president would appoint COTUs top three ofcers. KANU would be represented on the executive board of COTU. In effect the state had created a quasi-ministerial body in the name of a workers organisation, which received government funding to run its affairs. Subsequently, the government passed restrictive legislation that robbed unions of any autonomy and operational leeway. A new Trade Dispute Act was enacted in 1965 that aimed at curbing union radicalism and strikes. It made all strikes illegal unless a long and laborious process was followed before any strike was called. The minister was given sweeping powers to declare a strike illegal and to determine whether a matter before him constituted a dispute. Another feature of the industrial relations system was the essential services stricture. While it initially covered areas like nursing and water provision, it had by the 1970s and 1980s been extended to almost all sectors of the economy. Striking was basically outlawed. The rst repressive action by the state was to pass the 1966 Preventive Detention Act, which was aimed at stopping the spread of socialist ideology. The rst victims of the Act were trade unionists such as Denis Akumu, Patrick Ooko and Vicky Wachira who found themselves in detention.4 With the detention of Akumu and his group industrial peace obtained only briey. Increasingly the government made efforts to create a pliable labour leadership. This did not happen in the 1960s and 1970s. Akumu and later Juma Boy tried to keep government inuences at bay. This is not to suggest all was well in the labour movement. Constant wrangling occurred. Trade union elections were no longer transparent or democratic. The embezzlement of members funds had by the 1980s reached an endemic level. These problems weakened unions in the country and made them vulnerable to government inltration and manipulation (Gona 2003:193202). In the early 1970s wrangles in COTU centred on the ght between the Kikuyu and the Luo ethnic groups. James Karebe of the Local Government Workers Union led the Kikuyu group and Dennis Akumu, a Luo and COTU general secretary, led the Luo faction (Gona 2003:89). The Kenyatta government preferred COTU to
be led by Karebe, but never succeeded in achieving this goal (Interview: Dennis Akumu 23 January 2002). The government nally managed to incorporate the COTU when in 1980 they aided a pliable Joseph Mugalla to lead COTU. Delegates were feted in a typical government-sponsored election. Subsequently, COTU retreated and would not challenge government on matters of wages or broader societal issues. In fact, by the time of the calls for re-democratisation in the country Mugalla was talking the language of KANU, which had become intolerant of criticism. COTU to all intents and purposes became too close to government; it was a part of government by association (Gona 2003:174 183). Daniel arap Moi sought to hobble, co-opt and isolate the labour movement and its leadership from mainstream politics. Any effort to link workers and the masses was thwarted. Conversely, a trade union leader who opted to join politics was expected to support the government. Joseph Mugallas reign at the helm of COTU in the mid-1980s and 1990s epitomises this trend (Gona 2003:170 199). Where trade unionism was allowed, it was under strict surveillance or under a labour regime that was repressed or operated under the auspices of government. Uganda was much inuenced by the experience of both Tanzania and Kenya in the way in which the post-independent government related to trade unions. As in Kenya and Tanzania, the government in Uganda not only intensied its role in the industrial relations created by the colonial state, but also sought to change the basic character of the machinery, and in particular, extended the levers of ofcial control over the trade unions (Scott 1966:161). The trends in Tanganyika in 1962 where Nyerere had given powers to the Minister of Labour to discipline unions had drawn the ire of Ugandan trade unionists who averred that they would not tolerate similar legislation in their country (Scott 1966:162163). Initially the government seemed to take its cue from the demands of the unions not to enact repressive laws and intervene unnecessarily in trade union matters. However, strikes in September 1962 and later in 1963 in the cotton ginneries in Soroti and a general strike at Fort Portal impelled the government to enact the 1964 Trades Disputes (Arbitration and Settlement) Act, which made it an offence to strike without rst exhausting the existing ofcial disputes procedure (Mamdani 1999:240). The government also threatened to expel from the country the militant Kenyan unionists whom they accused of being behind the strikes. Indeed in 1965 the government expelled Kenyan workers en masse on the grounds of improving the conditions of national labour (Mamdani 1999:284). This did not augur well for an East African-wide labour movement. Fear and suspicion among workers from outside Uganda engulfed unions. Those who were vocal among them went into silence for fear of losing their jobs. Between 1966 and 1968 relations between the trade union leadership and the government took a turn for the worse. E Kibuka, a trade unionist from Ankole and now established in the UPC staged a revolution and established himself the leader of
the Uganda Labour Congress (ULC) (Mamdani 1999:283). The government established a one-man commission of inquiry and recommended among other matters that the minister of labour have power to veto any candidate submitted by member unions for election as a ULC ofcer and that no trade union ofcial be allowed to be a member of parliament or hold any other paid ofce (Mamdani 1999). According to Mamdani these recommendations were in fact a detailed strategy for state hegemony over trade union organisation. He insists that Ugandan unions increasingly became organisations of bureaucratic control, undemocratic and inducing a disinterest among members who dwindled over the years (Mamdani 1999:283). It got worse with the takeover of the state by Idi Amin in a 1971 coup. When Amin took over power he pledged to scrap Milton Obotes one-party system immediately. Little did people suspect that the replacement would be his no-party system. His aim was to coerce and cajole the people into leaving politics as an activity t for their rulers, while concentrating their attention on production (Mamdani 1984:46). The military regime did not come to power on a popular mandate, and was unwilling to throw even crumbs to the popular masses (Mamdani 1984:40). The workers were not spared since manufacturing, which was the basis of their existence, was completely destroyed. Amin militarised the economy and re-oriented economic activities towards the building of military machinery. This meant greater state control of and supervision over economic activities. In the end export revenue was increasingly utilised to import arms and other commodities for the armed forces. The regime argued it had to import arms so as to strengthen the countrys security and defence. What this meant was that most revenues earned from exports were spent on the import of arms thus starving the manufacturing sector of raw materials, components and spare parts. Manufacturing declined drastically (Mamdani 1984:47). As manufacturing declined, money supply declined over six-fold. The result was an inationary spiral. People could no longer afford to buy basic commodities. Workers moved from absenteeism to strikes and sabotage (Mamdani 1984:47). All the major sugar plantations were burnt down by workers at some point. Strikes in the biggest industries, like Kilembe Mines and UTC, were suppressed brutally with the army mowing down unarmed workers. Workers were in a weak position because the decline in manufacturing led to a decline in employment. The result was the move from town to the countryside. In the absence of workers, factories went into disuse and little trade union activity could happen during Idi Amins era (Mamdani 1984:49). Subsequent governments did not do much to stabilise the situation. The result was an increasingly restless trade union movement not sure of what to expect from both government and employers. Even with the coming of President Yoweri Museveni in 1986 trade union activities have been minimal. Trade unions have not enjoyed any autonomy. Observers have pointed out that the current general
secretary of the National Organisation of Trade Unions (NOTU), John Ongaba is a Museveni sympathiser and a mole in the labour movement.5 In short, by the 1980s the labour movement in the three East African countries was characterised by weak unions, disarticulated federations and co-opted leaders. There was too close a connection to a corrupt state particularly in the case of Kenya, and too little to civil society organisations. In Uganda, there was little autonomous space for unions both during Obotes regime and in the militarised state of Amin. The militaristic solution was no solution at all. In Tanzania the legacy of state socialism impinged on and negated the essence of trade unionism. Kenya offers a possible way forward, if it can rediscover the practices of the 1940s and 1950s. That is, to re-establish the close civil/political trade union integration for this is where the democratisation process unfolded in the 1940s and 1950s and from which independence was achieved. However, this was, in the 1980s and 1990s distinguished by the absence of formal trade union engagement and the espousal by other organisations of workers issues. As a result of these weaknesses and increasing global intolerance for trade unionism, coupled with ethnicism, lack of programmatic issues among unions, lack of cross-border linkages between unions and poor communication networks, the labour movement has been ineffectual and unable to combat globalisation. It is not surprising that the railway workers in Kenya and Uganda cannot act in unison to counter what looks obvious and surmountable. The problem is that national governments are embracing globalisation and are in fact moving towards political federation. There is no doubt, therefore, that trade union federation is the way forward, but not under the circumstances described above.
Conclusion Trade union federation in the region cannot be achieved in the context of weak structures, non-existent cross-border linkages, and autonomous leadership, strong shopoor organisation and so on. Trade unions have to, as a matter of urgency, get back to the basics of trade union organisation, but most signicantly must tie these up with close civil/political trade union integration. In the absence of these, global rms will continue to negotiate with governments in the East African region and workers will not be able to inuence the process.
An East African Trade Union Federation should not overlook the general malaise in the labour movement. Trade unions have to reinvent themselves by building strong and militant unions among national labour movements. There is no evidence to indicate an improved solidarity among Kenyan workers let alone East African workers. Solidarity is the basis for the survival of workers and hinges on numbers. Solidarity campaigns between unions of similar employment and those that have economic linkages (for example railways and dockers) can easily affect the cross-border campaign for their benet.
As observed, unions in Kenya appear not to represent workers interests against employers. COTUs economist Noah Chune has pointed out that few of the incumbent leaders in the labour movement can win elections in a truly open democratic election (Interview: Noah Chune 31 January 2002). A re-democratisation of the unions is critical to a move towards a federation of trade unions. Currently there is an assumption that trade unions are democratic institutions. This is far from the truth. Of signicance perhaps is the legal framework on which a labour federation hinges. So far there is no legal framework that allows freedom of movement across borders and this makes it impossible to federate labour. In this regard Uganda and Tanzania recently suspended a decision to open their labour market to competition from Kenya exposing the underlying fear that the more businessminded Kenyans would take over their jobs (The Sunday Standard 29 January 2006). According to Ali Kilindo the co-coordinator of the ILO East African Labour Migration Project, Uganda and Tanzania were still wary of Kenyas highly qualied labour market. In the wake of these developments, the matter of free labour movement across the region has been suspended until committees on the judiciary, trade, security, transport, and communications among others present their proposals on the labour sectors harmonisation (The Sunday Standard 29 January 2006). Indeed, while the East Africa Trade Union Council the predecessor to the envisaged federation won observer status in the East African Community, its effect is yet to be felt. As observed at the beginning of this article, the granting of a concession to the South African group to run the affairs of the Kenya-Uganda railways underscored the realities of globalisation in our midst. That Kenya and Uganda could negotiate with a global investor without consideration of workers input made things worse. The intriguing question is how and to what extent the legal framework inhibits trade unions to maximise regionalisation to enhance the well being of its members in situations where state region-centric policies adversely affect them. Legislating on cross-border investment and the place of labour in such processes is absolutely necessary. In the absence of such law labour will continue to be found napping in the event of similar concessions, like the one the South Africans won. That global investors are negotiating with more than one country for business ventures makes it even more urgent for such a legal framework that will safeguard labour against any further exploitation. Lastly, a labour federation in the region needs a committed and uncompromised leadership. That is lacking. The current labour leadership has to borrow from the seless histories of the Makhan Singhs where ethnicism, race and creed did not matter. What was of essence was class identity that as workers they had to ght for their rights and these found expression in the political arena. There is an urgent need for linkages between these arenas. These local linkages are critical for networking among unions and across borders. My argument is that if there is
no enduring resurgence (so far this is far-fetched among the East African countries) of the labour movement, if the lights continue to dim on the expansion of workplace and political democracy, then a concrete and functional East African Trade Union federation will remain an illusion.
Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The East African July 3 9 2006. Kenya Colony, Legislative Council Debates, 11 (1937) col. 48. Kenya National Archives (KNA), MAC/KEN/69/2, Public Speeches Jomo Kenyatta, 1965 69. Republic of Kenya, Annual Report 1967. Personal communication, Andrew Kailembo, general secretary, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, African Regional Organisation, December 2002.
References
Coulson, A. 1982. Tanzania: A Political Economy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cooper, F. 1987. On the African Water Front: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Clayton, A.H. and Savage, D.C. 1974. Government and Politics in Kenya. London: Frank Cass. Friedland, W.H. 1969. Vuta Kamba: The Development of Trade Unions in Tanganyika. Stanford: Hoover Institute Press. Goldsworthy, D. 1982. Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget. Nairobi: Heinemann. Gona, G. 2002. Andrew Mtagwaba Kailembo: The Life and Times of an African Trade Unionist. Nairobi: Catholic University in Eastern Africa. 2003. Workers and the Struggles for Democracy in Kenya, 1963 1998. PhD dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Iliffe, J. 1979. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. A History of the Dockworkers of Dar es Salaam. Tanganyika (Tanzania) Notes and Records LXX1(1970). Mamdani, M. 1999. Politics and Class Formation in Uganda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. 1984. Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda. New Jersey: Africa World Press. Mapulo, H. 1973. The Workers Movement in Tanzania. Maji Maji. Patel, Z. 2006. Unquiet: The Life and Times of Makhan Singh. Nairobi: Zand Graphics Ltd.
Pratt, R.C. 1976. The Critical Years in Tanzania 1948 1968: Nyerere and the Emergence of a Socialist Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sandbrook, R. 1975. Proletarians and African Capitalism: The Kenyan Case, 1960 1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, R. 1966. The Development of Trade Unionism in Uganda. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Singh, M. 1969. History of Kenya Trade Unionism to 1952. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. 1971. East African Trade Union Congress: The First Central Organisation of Trade Unions in Kenya. Historical Association of Kenya Annual Conference, 24 27 August. Singh, M. 1980. 1952 56 Critical Years of Kenyas Trade Unions. Nairobi: Uzima Press. Stichter, S. 1974. Trade Unionism in Kenya, 1947 52: The Militant Phase, in Peter C.W. Gutkind, Robin Cohen and Jean Copans (eds), African Labour History. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Tordoff, W. 1966. Trade Unionism in Tanzania. Journal of Development Studies 2.
Urban Activists and Rural Movements: Communists in South Africa and Algeria, 1920s 1930s1
Allison Drew
University of York
This article investigates the efforts of communists in the settler societies of South Africa and Algeria to engage with rural populations in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It seeks to understand how popular movements concerned with access to land respond to ideas or ideologies introduced by urban-based activists. It also contributes to broader debates about the relationship between the Communist International (Comintern) and its national sections, asking whether this relationship can be adequately captured by the dichotomy of domination or autonomy that has characterised much thinking. It forms part of an ongoing discussion about the Cominterns controversial New Line of class against class and suggests that generalisations about the New Line and by implication any Comintern policy must take into account the variations introduced by its different timing and impact in distinctive local contexts (McDermott and Agnew 1996:81119; Worley 2004a, 2004b). Any discussion of rural mobilisations for land access must begin by investigating the patterns of proletarianisation that shaped the experiences of rural people and framed their political responses. The impact of those political responses only becomes clear when seen as part of a broader political landscape, in which the relationships of existing political organisations open up or limit the space for new movements. Set against this political landscape, an understanding of communist activities entails both a consideration of the relations between the Comintern and its national sections the geopolitics of the international communist network and of the local conditions in which communists worked. While Comintern policy provides a constant factor in both cases, this article investigates four variables that may illuminate the divergent experiences of activists in South Africa and Algeria: the timing of the New Lines introduction in each country, the timing of rural movements in both cases, the timing of communist intervention in particular rural areas and the relationship of the local communist parties to existing national or cultural movements. South Africa and Algeria display striking similarities in the modes of colonial conquest and their political economies. Although European colonisation in
South Africa began two centuries earlier than in Algeria, both countries were subjected to protracted military conquest throughout the nineteenth century. The indigenous people were suppressed, their social systems undermined and their cultures denigrated. The pre-colonial peasantries were subjected to a long process of proletarianisation, resulting in the development of an agricultural proletariat, a migrant labour force and an urban working class that was rigidly divided along national or ethnic lines. Both countries were characterised by a rigid division social, economic and political between the European settlers and the indigenous majorities. Black South Africans and Muslim Algerians were ` subjected to extreme social, economic and political inequalities vis-a-vis their white and European counterparts (Ross 1999:2153ff; Ageron 1991:527, 65 7; Drew 2003:16975). Although most indigenous people in both countries eked out an existence on the land, urban-based political organisations of the 1920s and 1930s paid little attention to developments in rural areas. The tiny communist parties in South Africa and Algeria offer cases in point. Their urban orientation and minute numbers precluded serious organisational work amongst both rural black South Africans and rural Algerians. Nonetheless, pushed by the Cominterns intervention, it was precisely the communist parties in both cases that took the initiative in making forays into rural areas to interact with peasants and other rural dwellers.
The Politics of Land in South Africa and Algeria Despite their common experiences as settler colonies, the political systems and patterns of proletarianisation of Algeria and South Africa differed in signicant respects. South Africa became a politically autonomous British dominion in 1910, but this followed several centuries of European settlement and military conquest. The rst European settlement in this part of Africa was established at the Cape in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company. The British took control of the Cape Colony in 1806, leading by the 1830s to an exodus of Dutch settlers Afrikaners north and east. Both British and Afrikaners sought to extend their control over the region and over the next several decades fought a series of wars against the indigenous African societies.
Rivalry between the British and Afrikaners was spurred by the mineral discoveries of the late nineteenth century. Diamonds were discovered in 1867, and a seemingly endless gold supply at Langlaagte in the Transvaal in 1886. This precipitated the rapid development of the gold mining industry and intensied competition to control the region, culminating in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 1902, a prolonged and bloody struggle in which Britain nally defeated the Afrikaner republics in the interior of the country. The last war of resistance to the British, by the Zulu state, was not quashed until the rst decade of the twentieth century (Callinicos 1981:8 9).
Urban Activists and Rural Movements: Communists in South Africa and Algeria, 1920s 1930s 297
The year 1910 saw the launch of the Union of South Africa. The union entrenched political rights for whites to the exclusion of black rights. But Afrikaners and English-speaking whites remained sharply divided along ethnic lines, despite their rights and privileges over blacks. Three years later the 1913 Native Land Act attempted to standardise state policy towards the territories that the European colonisers had designated as areas reserved for Africans. The Land Act laid the parameters for future African existence in the reserves, and a growing African population was squeezed into approximately thirteen per cent of the land. In the Transkeian Territories, the Glen Grey Act of 1894, with its one man, one lot principle, far from promoting a homogenous peasantry, accelerated class differentiation and proletarianisation as land became fragmented into economically unviable holdings. Although a minority of cultivators in the late nineteenth century had turned to commercial production and developed into a prosperous peasantry, by the early twentieth century poverty was driving Africans from the reserves into migrant labour both on mines on the Witwatersrand and on whiteowned farms (MacMillan 1919, 1949:120132; Roux 1949; Jordaan 1959: 12 13, 22; Bundy 1979; Lewis 1983; Ntsebeza 2006:59, 649). Over the following decades the South African government strove to bolster white dominance and to fragment the population along sectional lines. The small minority of black men that enjoyed a qualied franchise a legacy of the British colonial era was systematically whittled away. African men were subjected to pass laws, and the right of Africans to live in towns was progressively eroded and subjected to severe restrictions. These racist laws did not go unchallenged. The year 1902 saw the launch of the African Political Organisation (APO). Its political identity was ambiguous. Calling for a qualied franchise for all men, regardless of colour, it nonetheless styled itself as an organisation of the coloured people only with responsibility for the rights and duties of the coloured people . . . as distinguished from the native races (Lewis 1987:57). The year 1912 saw the formation of the rst specically African political organisation that transcended tribal identity the South African Native National Congress, precursor to the African National Congress (ANC). A decade of turbulent labour and peasant struggles followed. Between 1920 and 1922 these were brutally smashed by the state, with Jan Smuts of the South African Party at its helm. In 1924 Smuts was defeated, and a Pact government comprising the Labour and National parties came to power. Signicantly, despite the increasing strictures placed on political activity aimed at the extension of democratic rights, black South Africans were free to join the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) that was launched in July 1921 (Drew 2002). In contrast to South Africas political autonomy, in 1834 the French wrested control of Algeria from the Ottoman empire, which had dominated it from the sixteenth century, and legally constituted it as part of France. The fall of Algiers in 1830
had been heralded with the looting of Algerian properties; the transfer of land to the hands of French settlers soon followed. Over the next four decades the French army marched across the Algerian landscape, using a brutal scorched earth policy to terrorise and subjugate the rural population. This conquest was a prelude to surveying the land and transferring it into what became known, under French rule, as la domaine publique the public domain, controlled by the state. Much of this would be transferred, in due course, to the growing number of colons or settlers in what John Ruedy has called the most intensive colonization effort in French history (Ruedy 1967:vii; Bennoune 1973:1314). The law was used to expropriate Algerian land in the name of lutilite publique. Over the two decades between 1873 and 1892, the state incorporated 309,891 hectares of land into the public domain. Once in the public domain, land could be placed under military authority or onto the market, which became the primary means of land redistribution from the Algerians to the French. Reforestation, implemented by the Service des Eaux et Forets (Forest Service), and one of the rationales for expropriation, was especially stressful for Algerians. The loss of their land inevitably forced many of them from the lowlands to the hillsides. The Forest Service planted shrubs on Algerian-owned land, beginning at the top of the mountain and encroaching bit by bit on their property. Those with animals were prohibited from grazing them on this vegetation, and infractions were subject to nes and conscation of animals (Bennoune 1973:1516; Ruedy 1992:83, 95; Radiquet 1933:576). In Algeria, proletarianisation continued as an ongoing, piecemeal process well into the twentieth century. By comparison with South Africas migrant labour system, in which Africans typically migrated from the rural reserves to the mines, Algerian migrant workers often left their own country to take up work in French industry. Alongside a small movement to Algerian towns, migration to France began in the early twentieth century in response to French industrialisation, increasing during the First World War, as French men left for the war. French government statistics suggest about 69,000 Algerians in France in 1926 and 80,000 in 1928. However, the numbers may be higher: between 1914 and 1928 there were 471,390 departures compared to 365,024 returns, suggesting that about 100,000 Algerians were living in France around 1928 (Ageron 1979:52730). Algerian workers who went to France not atypically remained, joined trade unions and sometimes had contact with the French Communist Party [Parti Communiste Francais or PCF]. Hence, Algeria, with a signicant part of its proletariat in France, was characterised by a displaced proletariat (Ageron 1979:526; Drew 2003:1734). The different geographic patterns of migrant labour in both countries had important ramications for popular mobilisations. French policy aimed to unite all European settlers under the rubric of French citizenship. In 1865 North African Jews obtained the right to apply for French natu ralisation on an individual basis; the Cremieux decree of October 1870 gave
French citizenship and equal rights to all North African Jews in Algeria. Muslims, by contrast, were subjected to a set of regulations known as the code de lindigenat [native code], while government policy also divided the Arab and Berber Muslim populations through differential education and socialisation (Ageron 1979:24, 1991:1 12; Julien 1986:2 105, 464 7). The code imposed extremely harsh punishments on Algerians for infractions that were not illegal in France but were unlawful in Algeria when committed by Algerians. These infractions included travelling without a permit, failure to pay special Native taxes, defaming the French Republic and speaking disrespectfully to or about a French ofcial. The code de lindigenat also meant that, in contrast to the case of black South Africans, Algerians were not able to join the Communist Party. Reecting Algerias legal status as part of France, the Communist Party in Algeria remained a region of the French Communist Party until 1936 (Ruedy 1992:88; Zagoria 1973:45). Efforts to reform the Algerian political system to allow greater Muslim representation date from the early twentieth century. They were repeatedly met with resistance by European settlers. The reform movement gained momentum in 19078 through the efforts of the Jeunes Algeriens [Young Algerians]. While calling for respect for Arab and Muslim culture, the Young Algerians also idealised French culture and, before the First World War, aspired to assimilation with France. This reform movement died down during the war; after the war reform efforts continued to meet with settler resistance. The Jonnart Law of 4 February 1919 conceded to settler concerns by dropping the idea of common representation for Europeans and Algerians. But it expanded the Muslim electorate to about 425,000, giving about forty-three per cent of the adult male Algerian population the right to vote in separate electoral colleges for those classied as nonFrench. The maximum proportion of representation for Algerians was set at one-fourth in general councils and one-third in municipal councils. The Jonnart reforms reinforced settler resistance to further reforms, while intensifying Algerian political activity and anti-French sentiment (Ageron 1979:22753; Ruedy 1992:110 12, 91 2; Thomas 2005:2469). In each country, the timing and development of rural movements reected local patterns of expropriation and labour migration. In South Africa the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) was founded in 1919 as an organisation of black dockworkers in Cape Town. As black sharecroppers and labour-tenants lost their access to land in the aftermath of the Land Act, the ICU began to address their concerns. By the mid-1920s the ICU had spread across the country and was organising Africans seeking to retain their access to land. Hit by state repression and wracked by factionalism, inexperience and corruption, the ICU was unable to stop African proletarianisation. Nor were rural protests conned to anti-proletarianisation struggles. In the Western Cape, the ANCs organisation of rural farm workers became a groundswell, only halted at the start of the 1930s by brutal repression (Bradford 1987; Hofmeyr 1985). The Transkeian Territories had been proletarianised through the workings of the 1894 Glen Grey Act. Linked
to the one man, one lot principle was a model for separate local government for Africans known as the District Council system. In the Xhalanga region landholders resisted the establishment of a District Council for over two decades, using various forms of passive resistance, including delegations and deputations to the colonial authorities. Their failure was marked by the establishment of the Xhalanga District Council in 1924 (Ntsebeza 2006:6992). Generally, the reserves were not the scene of militant struggles in the 1920s or early 1930s, although ICU activists agitated in the Transkei in the late 1920s. In Algeria, by contrast, the situation was very different. The ongoing piecemeal expropriation efforts provoked enormous anger and led to localised antiexpropriation struggles across the country in the rst several decades of the twentieth century. However, these were not part of any overarching political movement. The Young Algerians had been too elitist in their own backgrounds and aspirations to inspire a following amongst Algerias poor and working class, whether urban or rural. The rst Algerian political movement with a working-class base, the Etoile Nord-africaine [North African Star], was founded by North African immigrants in Paris in 1926, a reection of the countrys displaced proletariat. There was no such comparable political organisation within Algeria (Ruedy 1992:136 8; Stora 1991:747).
The Comintern, Anti-Imperialism and Agrarian Struggles Despite the rural discontent in both countries, the orientation of local communists was towards urban workers. This reected the development of socialist thought within a European context that, from the mid-nineteenth century, had privileged the urban proletariat as the leading force in social change, a view reinforced by the Bolsheviks interpretation of the 1917 Russian Revolution. However, as the 1920s progressed, pressure to organise the rural populations of colonised and non-industrial countries came from the increasingly Russian-dominated Comintern, which theorised the relationship of peasant and anti-imperial struggles on the basis of Asian experiences notably China and India not African. As the prospects of revolution in Europe waned, the Comintern maintained that peasant-based anti-colonial and national liberation struggles could help to weaken imperialism until such time as the contradictions of capitalism led to its collapse. The French Communist Party was criticised for neglecting its colonial work, and communists in South Africa and Algeria for neglecting the peasantry.
At the Cominterns Sixth Congress in 1928 Nikolai Bukharin argued that post-war Europe had gone through a rst stage of revolutionary upheaval and a second stage of capitalist stabilisation that had been characterised by the communist strategy of united fronts. With fascism seemingly secure in Italy and the left in retreat elsewhere in Europe, the capitalist crisis had reached its third period. The contradictions of the capitalist system were rapidly leading to its collapse, it was argued. In such conditions the working class would develop revolutionary proletarian class
consciousness. With worldwide revolution imminent, social-democratic and reformist policies were seen as counter-revolutionary attempts to divert the working class from the struggle against capitalism. Hence, the Cominterns repudiation of united fronts from above and its introduction of the New Line of independent leadership and of class against class (McDermott and Agnew 1996:4254, 68 71, 81 90; Drew 2002:95, 112). The imposition of the New Line across the Cominterns national sections took place unevenly. South African communists experienced their rst case of concerted Comintern intervention in 1927, when the Comintern introduced the Native Republic thesis. This argued for an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers and peasants republic with full safeguard and equal rights for all national minorities (Resolution on South Africa, n.d. [c.1927], Roux Papers, A; Roux 1993:112; Legassick 1973; Kanet 1973; Grossman 1985:14461; Hirson 1989, 1990; Nyawuza 1990a, 1990b; Drew 2002:94 111, 2007). The CPSA, which had been virtually all white in composition at its founding in 1921, had reoriented itself towards black workers in 1924. This was largely through the efforts of Sidney Bunting, an English-born solicitor, who came to South Africa in 1900, slowly became radicalised and eventually helped found the CPSA. In the mid-1920s the CPSA began working closely with the ICU, and by 1928 the Party claimed about 1,600 African members out of 1,750. Not surprisingly, when the Native Republic thesis was introduced, many communists, and notably Bunting, objected to what they felt was its prioritisation of the peasantry over the urban proletariat; some also feared that it would alienate white workers, whose support they believed to be necessary. Nonetheless, after much resistance, the CPSA adopted the thesis in January 1929. But the New Line itself, with its emphasis on repudiating social democratic links and its purges of those deemed to be nonconformist, was not felt in South Africa until 1930 and hit with full force only in 1931 (Drew 2002:76 9, 112 36). In the Algerian case, the New Lines impact on local communists was notably earlier, a consequence of their incorporation into the French Communist Party and that partys signicance for Moscow (Hopkins 2004). Communists in Algeria had been hit by a wave of repression in the mid-1920s due to their opposition to the Rif War in Morocco; a number faced prison sentences of two years or deportation to the south. In 1927 28 their tiny numbers were decimated by purges resulting from the Cominterns policy of Bolshevisation. As the New Line was introduced membership plunged further, from 280 in 1929 to 130 in 1932. The purges, which led to the virtual collapse of local communist activity, took place against the repressive backdrop of the 1930 French celebrations of one hundred years of colonisation (Sivan 1976:36 7, 52 5; Drew 2003:1978, 202). The French Communist Party itself faced repeated condemnations from the Comintern for its alleged inadequacies on a number of fronts, and undoubtedly
the long-simmering tensions in Paris between the North African Star and the PCF reected the New Line (Hopkins 2004:11718; Ruedy 1992:138; Stora 1991:77). The Cominterns Executive Committee (ECCI) criticised the PCFs lack of colonial work in December 1929, and several years later, in September 1932, the ECCIs twelfth plenum reinforced the idea of a colonial agrarian revolution. Andre Ferrat, the head of the PCFs colonial section in Paris sent a representative to Algeria to impress upon local communists the need to organise peasants and rural workers (Schweitzer 1972:118 19; Sivan 1976:70, 746). This was made very clear at the PCFs regional conference in Algeria on 2223 October 1932, when Arabization of the party became the key slogan. Arabization meant an orientation towards Algerian workers, peasants, artisans and small traders with the aim of establishing close contact with the national movement (Lutte Sociale October, December 1932).
The CPSAs Efforts at Rural Mobilisation For South African communists like Sidney Bunting, the governments escalating attempts to curtail black rights justied the adoption of the Native Republic thesis. But by the time the CPSA adopted the thesis, it was marginalised from the ICU and from many ANC leaders. The ICU, which was beginning to fragment, had expelled communists from its National Council in December 1926. Although the ANCs president-general, Josiah Gumede, had close ties with the CPSA, his views were not representative. At the ANCs second annual convention of Chiefs, held in Bloemfontein in April 1928, mention of the CPSA caused such an uproar that the meeting had to be recessed. When it was reconvened, the ICU leaders insisted the ANC renounce its relationship with the CPSA, to which the Chiefs unanimously agreed (Drew 2002:98).
General elections were scheduled for June 1929, and the black peril was high on the agenda of white political parties. The CPSA decided to use the opportunity to promote the idea of a Native Republic. Africans and coloureds in the Cape still had a qualied franchise, although only whites could represent them. This franchise was a legacy of the representative government that Britain had granted to the Cape Colony in 1853, when all male British subjects over the age of twentyone who owned property in the form of land or buildings of a certain value or who received a certain annual income were given the right to vote, irrespective of colour (Roux 1964:53; Davenport and Saunders 2000:30812; Ntsebeza 2003:143). The CPSA decided to contest seats in the two constituencies where blacks constituted close to half the electorate. One was the urban area of Cape Flats outside Cape Town; the other was Thembuland, a region in the Transkeian Territories where the dispersed rural towns and homesteads and the rough roads made campaigning slow and arduous and where there was no prior history of communist activity (Bunting 1975:104; Roux 1964:217; Johns 1995:235, 237; Ntsebeza 2003:51). Thembuland had a population of about one million Africans
and 20,000 whites. That year 3,487 people were registered to vote, up from 3,259 two years earlier. Of these, over half, or 1,711, were Africans, 1,629 were whites and 147 were mixed and other Coloured races (Government Gazette 1929:678, 667). Sidney Bunting, perhaps hoping to demonstrate his loyalty after his initial opposition to the thesis, was to contest the Thembuland election against AOB Payn, the South African Party candidate, and GK Hemming, a South African Party member who had been holding the seat, but who was now running as an independent with the support of Professor DDT Jabavu. Bunting canvassed the region for a period of six months accompanied by his wife, the communist Rebecca Bunting, and their comrade Gana Makabeni, who acted as interpreter (Drew 2007:16687). There was already a precedent for English-language campaigning in the Transkei, assisted by translators. In addition to the liberal Cape politicians who periodically campaigned for the African and coloured vote, in 1921 the Gold Coast educator James Aggrey had visited South Africa on behalf of the American philanthropic Phelps-Stokes Commission, addressing enthusiastic crowds in the Transkei on the need for patience and hard work. Several years later the Natal-born Wellington Buthelezi, inuenced by Marcus Garveys United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), restyled himself as the English-speaking African-American Dr Butler Hansford Wellington, claiming to represent both the UNIA and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He toured the Transkei in 1926 and 1927, preaching liberation brought by African-American emancipators in airplanes, punctuating his speeches with hymns, prayers and biblical passages. He was nally banished from the Transkei in March 1927 but not before drawing a large band of followers (Edgar 1976:3240, 47; Hill and Pirio 1987:23842). Thus, while Buntings presence as a white campaigner was unusual, neither his use of English, nor his frequent censorious references to Dr Wellingtons hoped-for air-borne liberators were unfamiliar to his audiences. Nor, indeed, were his frequent biblical references. Bunting had been raised in a staunchly nonconformist family and while he was scathing about missionary inuence, his own political discourse was steeped in that tradition. From the moment the three communists entered the territories they were tailed by police. The harsh repression and racism they encountered reected a region that had been deeply marked by colonial penetration and by long resistance. Colonial inuence brought other changes as well, especially in the domains of religion and education. Christian missionary inuence in the Cape Province was long established; by the twentieth century, Methodism was the most inuential Christian denomination in the region and had permeated many families (Gish 2000:10 11; Mbeki 1964:12; Mandela 1994:4, 15). Aside from state-assisted education, African education fell under the domain of missionary societies, and the impact of these was particularly strong in the Cape Province. Of the twenty-six leading African secondary education institutions, the Cape Province had fourteen. The Cape was also the home of the South African Native College, founded in 1916
at the military post of Fort Hare in Alice (Ntsebeza 2003:131, 1334; Sampson 2000:21). Rather than target African voters, who were essentially freehold land owners, Bunting focused on Africans inadequate access to land and their lack of political rights, urging voters and non-voters alike, men and women, to show up at the polls on election day and protest their lack of democratic rights. His speeches pointed to the unequal patterns of landholding between black and white, which resulted in African poverty in the rural areas. On 12 March the trio were charged with violating the Native Administration Act that is, acting and speaking with intent to promote feelings of hostility between Natives and Europeans.2 The three were convicted, but a notice of appeal was led on 18 March and bail was granted at 50 each.3 They continued their campaign, returning to Mthatha on 10 April. But the trio were again arrested on 13 April, and once more released on bail.4 Whatever harassment the trio experienced, they were vindicated in June by their election results. Ominously, the National Party won the general elections outright, signalling the end of the National-Labour Pact; General Hertzog remained as Prime Minister, but Oswald Pirow replaced Tielman Roos as Minister of Justice. Bunting, however, fared better than expected. Of the 2,302 votes counted in the three-way Thembuland contest, Bunting received 289 or about 12.5 per cent of the total, and was able to keep his deposit; his counterpart in the Cape Flats received three per cent (Roux 1993:13840). Bunting won his court case. Since the intention to promote racial hostility was central to the charge of contravening the Native Administration Act, Bunting based his defence on the denial of such intent. Communism, he told the court, emphasises class divisions and thus cuts away the ground of mere racialism. The trial transcripts indicated that most of the African witnesses were receptive to Buntings condemnation of inequality. The Eastern Districts Court set aside the previous conviction and allowed Buntings appeal; the solicitor-general, EW Baxter, decided not to prosecute the case. The Court noted that there was little doubt that great mischief will be done to the Natives in the Territories by the circulation of communistic speeches and pamphlets, but argued that the Act
was not meant to apply to persons in good faith advocating the doctrines of the political party, to which they happen to belong, unless the doctrine, or the words used in advocating them or the circumstances under which they were uttered and published must necessarily have the effect of promoting hostility between Natives and Europeans.5
The Chief Magistrate of Mthatha was concerned that the decision would leave agitators free to propagate their doctrines. The Communist Party was a tiny organisation in 1929, even though its membership had been growing. But against the backdrop of militant ANC activity in the Western Cape and the ICUs recent
protests in Durban, with which communists were said to be involved, state ofcials were fearful. There is no doubt Communism is spreading amongst the natives in these Territories and immediate steps should be taken to deal with Mr. Bunting, the Chief Magistrate argued. In light of proposed legislation from the new Minister of Justice, regarding the expulsion of undesirables from particular areas of the country, the Chief Magistrate recommended that action be taken against Bunting on lines similar to those taken against Dr. Wellington . . . who is by no means as dangerous as Mr. Bunting.6 The matter reached the House of Assembly on 8 August, introduced by General Smuts, who hoped that the government would tighten the law to prevent a repeat of such an outcome. Prime Minister Hertzog replied that the Minister of Native Affairs was already aware of the need to take further legislative action, although not directly through an Act. The new Minister of Justice warned that Communism was at present merely a nuisance, but that there is a possibility, even a probability, that within a short time it will become an absolute danger. Amendment of the Native Administration Act raises a legal difculty which is almost insuperable, he continued. The difculty was, he stated, that whilst on the one hand you want to suppress what is unlawful, on the other hand you do not want to introduce legislation which will unduly curtail the liberty of the subject (Hansard 1929:575 8). The law would continue to be paramount, even though its parameters were ever more constricted. In July 1929, following his electoral campaign, Bunting had formed a League of African Rights (LAR). ANC president Josiah Gumede, who had close ties with the CPSA, became the leagues head, and Gana Makabeni, its rural organiser. The LAR called for the retention of the Cape African vote; the extension of the parliamentary franchise to blacks on the same basis as whites; universal free education for black children on the same basis as white children; and the abolition of the pass laws throughout the Union. More broadly, it aimed to protect African interests on all matters, to demand all rights to which Africans were entitled, and to train its members to hold meetings, demonstrate and send deputations to the government. It immediately launched a petition drive in support of the above demands for presentation to the government. The idea behind the petition was that in canvassing for signatures organisers would be explaining the leagues demands, a form of political education.7 Makabeni based himself at Maxakas location in Libode, western Phondoland. He spent several months there late in 1929, travelling by horseback and even foot in some cases; the work was hard and slow-going. Bunting, in the meantime, continued promoting the league in the Transvaal, but the new LAR was seen as a threat to established organisations like the ANC and ICU. The increasingly repressive political climate intensied the CPSAs marginalisation from those organisations.8 This resistance was not the only problem faced by the LAR. In late October 1929, the CPSA received a cable from the Comintern ordering the leagues disbanding
on the grounds of possible fusion with reformist organisations. This reected the Cominterns New Line: communists were to repudiate alliances with reformist and social democratic organisations. The CPSA, however, continued to promote the LAR, and the leagues conference duly took place on 15 December 1929 (Drew 1996:108 10, 2004; Roux 1993:141 2). The Minister of Justice was proposing two anti-African bills the Native Contract Bill and a revised Urban Areas Act, and the CPSA organised an All-in Conference in Johannesburg on 26 January to discuss the bills. Although some delegates hoped that the LAR could lead a strike campaign against the proposed laws, Bunting was more cautious. Despite acknowledging the rising tide of interest in oppressor bills and an increased degree of cooperation among native organisations in protesting against them, it was unlikely, he speculated, that this cooperation would come together under the LAR banner anytime in the near future. The LAR was being squeezed between the Comintern and the resistance of the other African political organisations. In April 1930 the ANC turned to the right. Gumede was replaced as president-general by Pixley ka Izaka Seme and a conservative slate of ofcials (Bradford 1987:272 8; Simons and Simons 1983:4279; Drew 2002:81, 98 9). Gumedes ousting, together with the ambiguous attitudes of the various ICU fractions, signalled that the political space for the LAR was shrinking. By all indications, the league withered.9 As the Cominterns New Line made itself felt, communist parties around the world expelled those members who were seen as recalcitrant in promoting the new policy. Almost invariably, this included the founding members of those communist parties, as a new cohort of leaders took over. In South Africa this phenomenon took place several years later than in many other countries. In 193132 the CPSA was wracked by a series of purges similar to those that other sections of the Comintern had experienced several years earlier. Many of the CPSAs leading activists, including Sidney Bunting and Gana Makabeni, were expelled. The Party was already damaged by its isolation from the ANC and ICU. With its ranks depleted and its remaining members consumed with bitter sectarian disputes, the foundation for rural organisation that had been laid in Thembuland and Phondoland could not be continued.
Communists and Rural Mobilisation in Algeria The late 1920s saw the Algerian regions ranks depleted both due to state repression communists were hounded by the authorities and imprisoned or deported to the south and to purges resulting from the Cominterns New Line (Combat Social 1927; Sivan 1976:36 51). A report dated October 1931 described the Party as so fragmented that the author could only point to a petit parti bonois, oranais et petit parti algerios [little party in Bone, in Oran and in Algiers]. There were not even links between Algiers and Blida, even though they were only fty kilometres apart.10
But by late 1932, when the French Communist Party increased the pressure on communists in Algeria to turn their attention to the countryside, the local Party was recovering from the expulsions that had depleted its membership a few years earlier. Although the local Communist Party was trying to increase the number of Algerian members, it was still disproportionately European in composition indeed, far more so than its South African counterpart. This, along with its tiny numbers and urban orientation, seemingly precluded serious organisational work amongst rural Algerians. Yet for a brief period in the early 1930s, pressured by the Comintern and in turn by the French Communist Party headquarters in Paris, they turned their attention to rural struggles taking place around Blida, which lies south-west of Algiers and south of the fertile Mitidja plain at the foot of Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria. The region around Blida saw many localised anti-expropriation protests. Founded by Andalusians in the mid-sixteenth century, Blida was conquered by the French in 1838. By 1851 about 36,000 rural families, comprising ten per cent of the total Algerian population, had been pushed out of the Mitidja. French colonisers built small towns on the Mitidja that reminded them of southern France, but divided into a European section reminiscent of small-town France and an Arab quarter with whitewashed houses squeezed together in a jumbled maze. Blida was refashioned in similar style. By the 1930s it was a good-sized town: the 1936 census listed 209,427 inhabitants, of whom 41,507 were European and 167,920 Algerian. The arrondisement of Blida consisted of 260,974 hectares of land, with a population density of 80.24 inhabitants per square kilometre (Bennoune 1973:16; Macey 2000:212 13; Annuaire Statistique de lAlgerie 19391949:chapter 2, 22). Blida was a commune de plein exercise a civil territory in which there was deemed to be a signicant European population and in which French law was applicable (Ruedy 1992:73).11 Local politics was very much a microcosm of the colonys class relations. The mayor of Blida, Gaston Ricci, was from an extremely wealthy family that owned entire mountains around Blida. His brothers, Maurice and Henry Ricci, prosperous businessmen, were successful our millers and manufacturers of pasta that carried the family name. The town had European artisan and trade union traditions.12 France celebrated the centennial of its conquest of Algeria in 1930 as the international depression was hitting the country with full force. The centennial celebrations were accompanied by the repression of any political movement seen as remotely anti-colonial. In turn, this led to an upsurge in Algerian nationalist aspirations in the early 1930s. The Islamic Reform movement, which could be traced back to the rst decade of the twentieth century, began growing more rapidly in the 1920s, under the leadership of Cheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis. The movement was cultural and religious in discourse, but it used political concepts, such as umma [nation], chaab [people], watan [homeland], and quawmiyya [nationality]. It sought to unify Muslim Algerians across religious sects and ethnic
lines, criticising the traditional marabouts and Islamic brotherhoods as upholders of the rural aristocracy (Ruedy 1992:134 5; Stora 1991:74; Julien 2002:1023; Thomas 2005:250 51, 258). The reformist oulemas Muslim scholars specialised in Islamic law and theology expressed the hopes of many petits fellahs [small rural cultivators] for egalitarian land reform (Launay 1963:378; Stora 1991:75). In the absence of any Algerian-based working-class political movement aside from the minute and predominantly European Communist Party the culturally-oriented Islamic Reform movement was able to occupy much of the political landscape. The launch of the Association of Oulemas of Algeria in Algiers in 1931 was a crucial indicator of the growth of the Islamic Reform movement. The following year, in March 1932, an organisation known as El Hadaia [guidance] was formed in Blida.13 El Hadaia focused on three main areas: religious work, social activity, and cultural work aimed at the revival of Arab theatre, letters and history. Its religious work was led by Cheik Taeb el-Okbi, a reformist oulema who worked closely with Ben Badis. Born in Biskra, el-Okbi had spent twenty-ve years in Hedjaz, the region in which Mecca is located, before returning to Algiers. An excellent orator much respected for his long stay in Mecca, he was a committed follower of the Wahabite movement founded by Mohamed Abd-el-Wahab (Planche 1999:19091; Sellam, Younessi and Planche 1999). Chiey petty bourgeois and bourgeois in composition, according to local communist reports, by early April El Hadaia had about 160 members, and by June was claiming about 460. It clearly had a popular resonance. The PCF had a decade-long, if feeble, presence at Blida. Its largely European membership had been sharply divided over the question of national liberation. Most preferred the approach of trying to organise European and Algerian workers into trade unions. However, through a turnover in membership following the New Line purges, the Party began to revive and the attitude of communists in Blida began to change.14 In no small part this was due to the growth of the Young Communist League and the recruitment of Algerians into its Blida section. By July 1932 the Young Communist cell at Blida had six members, all of them Algerians; in the Department of Alger as a whole, there were fty-ve Young Communists, twenty-six of whom were Algerian.15 The inuence of the Young Communists in Blida could be seen in practice by 1932. Two Young Communists were members of El Hadaia, one each in the social and cultural sections. The latter was giving weekly lectures to audiences of about fty on Arab history, hoping that this might be a means of promoting anti-imperialist ideas.16 Thus, in contrast to the CPSAs difculties in working with other organisations during the period of its rural campaigns, Algerian communists in Blida were able to work with a growing cultural movement.
But even in rural towns like Blida, the orientation of communists was towards urban workers. However, pressure to follow the new Arabization policy, along with the arrival of French Communist Party representative Paul Radiquet from Paris in late 1932, led to changes. Blida, with a reasonable communist cell not too far from Algiers, provided a convenient location for communist work in support of peasant protests against expropriation. When Paul Radiquet arrived in Blida on 22 November, about 600 to 800 peasants were faced with expropriation orders on the grounds that the land was needed for reforestation, ostensibly to prevent ooding during the rainy season. The land in question had quarries that were being exploited by two local entrepreneurs; in Ghella where the peasants made charcoal, the government wished to rent part of the land and sell some of it to the colons. The mayor himself was an interested party in the affair: his land bordered one of the targeted areas, and expropriation would enable him to extend his property.17 The region was in a state of ferment; in nearby Menerville, peasants were refusing to pay taxes.18 By the time Radiquet arrived in Blida, the local communist cell was already involved in the resistance. It had circulated a petition opposing the expropriations, and several communists had tried to meet with local peasants, only to be greeted, initially, with suspicion. Some of them had lost money to other individuals who had approached them offering help. But the attitude of the peasants softened after they spoke to one of the municipal councillors, Boukemiet Hamed, in whom they evidently had much condence. He advised them to listen to the communists.19 Radiquet and a Young Communist named Rafa Naceur Ben Ali travelled around the region by bus, contacting peasants threatened with expropriation.20 The peasants appointed delegates to represent them and agreed to link the present predicament of those facing expropriation with an earlier expropriation in 1925 for which no adequate compensation had been made; to ask Algerians in town to support those facing expropriation; to make use of the local councillors in whom they had condence to order to build a united front; and to prepare an Arabic-language yer. The plan worked. The yer called upon the peasants to meet in their localities and form anti-expropriation committees. Each locality was to designate representatives, and they were to organise an open-air demonstration.21 The communists succeeded in setting up a meeting with about sixty peasants, with discussions in Arabic and French. A defence committee consisting of eight peasants was elected.22 In Paris the PCF publicised the struggles against expropriation in the National Assembly and in its press. Lucien Monjauvis, the communist deputy from La Seine who had raised the issue of expropriations with the Minister of the Interior, was sent to Algeria by the PCF as a gesture of solidarity. On 22 December Monjauvis addressed a public meeting against expropriations in Blida attended
by a large crowd of French and Algerians.23 He was arrested immediately, but released later that evening after a large demonstration. Ben Ach, the PCFs regional secretary was arrested in Algiers (LHumanite 22 December 1932). Over the next several months, communists continued to organise peasants in nearby villages. With their support, the peasants at Blida had succeeded in stopping the expropriations; this provided excellent publicity for their cause. Unlike the communists, the peasants often seemed unmoved by the threat of arrest.24 There were several reasons why the communists were able to evoke a resonance with peasants in and around Blida. Firstly, the demands put forward by the communists coincided with those of the peasants. Secondly, the tactics proposed by the communists, such as boycotting the taking up of compensation dovetailed with the approaches used by the peasants. Thirdly, the type of organisation proposed by the communists made sense in terms of peasants own system of self-government, based on the dzemaa or village council (Bennoune 1977:1). The communists found that collective resistance to expropriations already existed in many areas. By impeding the efforts of Forest Service representatives to gain access to land around Blida and Rovigo, for example, local peasants had hampered the expropriation efforts.25 Finally, the communists were able to use the success at Blida to gain the support of peasants from other localities. But in addition to the PCFs direct work with the peasants, members of the Young Communist League presumably became known in Blida through their work in El Hadaia. As Henri Alleg (1981:191, 193) has noted, French Communism was characterised by an anti-clericalism that was prevalent across the European left. This anti-clerical stance was presumably more acute in colonised areas where colonial authorities and settlers derided the indigenous religion as primitive. European communists in Algeria were typically imbued with such attitudes and saw the efforts of Islamic Reformists in this light. The Cominterns New Line arguably reinforced such anti-clerical views. But these were not necessarily reective of Algerian communists who were Muslim, even if some were secularised. The success of the Blida YCL in recruiting even small numbers of Algerians in the early 1930s enabled it to make links with El Hadaia. The combined efforts of the local Islamic Reform movement and the communists were successful enough to worry the French administration. On 16 February 1933 the secretary-general of the prefecture of Alger, Fernand-Jules Michel decreed that surveillance of the Islamic Reform movement and of Koranic schools be stepped up. Islamic Reform oulemas, including the popular Cheik el-Okbi, were banned from speaking at government-controlled mosques, and the Algiers Cultural Association was dissolved (Julien 2002:1045; Thomas 2005:25051). Along with the Islamic Reform movement, the Michel circular went on, agitation by communists Paul Radiquet and Rafa Naceur Ben Ali against the Forest Service necessitated active surveillance.26
The attempts to prevent Islamic Reform leaders from speaking at the principal mosque in Algiers, along with the closure of Koranic schools and the bannings of newspapers, sparked signicant protest in Algiers, and especially in the Casbah (Planche 1999:188). There was a certain effervescence amongst a small section of Muslims on 24 February and 3 March, the British consulgeneral noted in his quarterly report on 31 March. Demonstrations of el-Okbis supporters were dispersed by the police supported by a small number of troops. A well known local communist seized the opportunity to incite the demonstrators to resist the police. But the police swiftly clamped down on the demonstration. By early May, claimed the British consul-general, the agitation was by all indications quelled.27 The regional PCF may have been willing to work tactically with the Islamic Reformists to the extent that its tiny numbers allowed. But it was not willing to work with the North African Star, numbers of whose members were returning to Algeria due to growing unemployment in France. That same May a group calling itself the Parti National Revolutionnaire was founded in the Casbah. Its members included tramway workers, skilled workers and artisans. One of the new groups founders, Sidi Ahmed Belarbi or Boualem, as he was known, was secretary of the regional PCF and had studied in Moscow. The group signalled the Cominterns interest in building an Algerian national movement that was independent of the North African Star and sympathetic to communist ideas, but it proved to be short-lived (Planche 1999:1879; Sivan 1976:58). Back in the Mitidja communists continued the anti-expropriation campaigns. The French communist leader Maurice Thorez arrived in Algiers on 10 May 1933 as the Paris delegate to the Partys regional congress scheduled for 21 May.28 Peasants in the Mitidja were still keen to have contact with the PCF. Hearing of Thorezs visit, they asked that he come and speak to them. Despite police intimidation, large crowds arrived in Blida to hear Thorez. The authorities denied him a hall, so he spoke in the open air, translated into Arabic. Later he and a comrade were taken around the villages by mule (Durand 1986:11617). Communist efforts to organise peasants appears to have declined after this. But with the Algerian qualied franchise in mind, the PCF decided to contest local elections set for August 1933. Despite massive intimidation on election day what one communist described as a civil war and state of siege around the polling stations the electoral response indicated that the PCF still had some support in this area. In the rst round of voting the communist candidate, Taieb Abdelouahad, obtained 120 votes out of 3,577 or 3.4 per cent, dispersed around the local towns as follows:29 Blida, 2.8 per cent; Birtouta, 1.6 per cent; Boufarik, 14.4 per cent; Bouinan, 0.9 per cent; Mouzaiaville, 4.4 per cent; La Chiffa, 0.6 per cent. The rst round of voting led to a run-off. That the PCF was able to maintain its candidate in the running and in the second round obtain 118 votes out of 3,745
or 3.2 per cent showed their intensied efforts: Blida, 2 per cent; Birtouta, 0 votes; Boufarik, 4.8 per cent; Bouinan, 0.3 per cent; Cheble, 0.8 per cent; Mouzaiaville, 0.2 per cent; La Chiffa, 0.1 per cent; Souma, 0.9 per cent. Thereafter, however, communists in Algeria lost interest in rural organising and focused their gaze on the urban areas. By the early 1930s, poverty in the rural areas was contributing to a rapid increase in the movement of rural Algerians to towns (Ruedy 1992:120). This demographic shift led to an increase in urbanbased political activity, an increase fuelled by the political repression signalled by the Michel circular. The agitation that the British consul-general presumed had been quelled in fact formed the backdrop for a wave of urban protest centred in the Algiers Casbah. This upsurge of urban-based activity continued over the next few years, transforming the face of Algerian politics (Planche 1999:180 90; Thomas 2005:256).
Conclusion Local communists had limited control over the conditions in which they worked. They were constrained on the one side by the policies and pressures imposed by the Comintern, and on the other by local difculties: their own limited numbers, repression and the risk of imprisonment and the arduous conditions in rural areas that made organisational work extremely difcult. Comintern policy both the New Line and the pressure to address rural areas provided a constant factor for communists in South Africa and Algeria in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Four factors help to explain the different experiences and outcomes of communist intervention in rural areas in the two cases. These include rstly, the timing of the New Lines introduction in each country; secondly, the timing of rural movements in both cases; thirdly, the timing of communist intervention in rural areas; and nally, the ability of local communists to make alliances with national or cultural movements. But these factors need to be understood against the political landscape of each country.
In the South African case, communist electoral activity propaganda for a Native Republic preceded the organisational work of launching the League of African Rights, and communist activity in rural areas preceded the impact of the New Line. Sidney Bunting canvassed in an area where there were no ongoing rural movements or struggles. The interest he raised was indicated rstly by the large crowds he attracted, secondly by the testimony of the African witnesses who expressed sympathy with the issues of land access and equality that he raised, and thirdly by the electoral turnout. Bunting was not catering to African voters but to the African population more generally, nor was he offering the possibility of immediate tangible improvements. Thus the votes he received were arguably protest votes, representing quite a substantial proportion in electoral terms. If peasant response to Gana Makabenis rural canvassing was slow and hesitant, in the urban areas the LAR was seen as a rival by the established organisations.
The mounting repression in South Africa had already contributed to the CPSAs isolation from the ICU and ANC. When the New Line made its impact in South Africa, its inuence was two-fold. Firstly, communists were pressured to disband the LAR that they had been organising in both rural and urban areas. While they did not do so immediately, by all indications they eventually let it whither under the combined pressure of the Comintern and of the established national organisations. Secondly, the purges of Party activists that were a consequence of the New Line decimated the Party, leaving it without personnel to canvass in rural areas. The timing of the New Lines impact was thus critical in determining the human resources available to undertake organisational work. In the Algerian case, the New Lines impact was felt well before local communists began their work in rural areas. By the time local communists started their rural work, the local Party had overcome the worst impact of New Line purges and was making some progress in rebuilding its membership. Thus, its ability to work in rural areas was not curtailed by Comintern intervention. Moreover, in contrast to the political quiescence that South African communists encountered, communists in Algeria were able to connect in a constructive manner with ongoing political protests. Two factors explain the decline of communist activity in the Mitidja region. Firstly, political repression around Blida intimidated local communists from continuing their work in the area. Secondly, the intensication of political struggle in Algiers itself arguably an indirect consequence of the conjuncture of movements in the nearby Mitidja region shifted the focus of the tiny Communist Party back to the urban areas. Communists working in and around Blida beneted from their reasonable working relationship with the local Islamic Reform movement. This was possible because the Young Communist League, in particular, had been able to recruit some Algerian members. The positive response that local communists received from their organising work was indicated by the willingness of the initially sceptical peasants to meet with them and by the movement of peasants into towns to attend rallies held by the communists. No doubt the willingness of the communist activists to work with local peasant structures, their success in facilitating contact between peasants of different villages and in forestalling expropriation in at least one case were critical factors in their ability to garner support from local peasants. In turn, that the communist candidate was able to win even a small percentage of votes six months later despite the intense intimidation to which Algerian voters were subjected indicates some residual sympathy. These case studies indicate that the impact of Comintern policies was mediated both by the timing of the Cominterns interventions and by the diverse conditions that local activists encountered. Thus, claims that a uniform Comintern discourse and policy resulted in a uniform practice and outcome across the various countries in which communist parties operated cannot be sustained. In the cases of South Africa and Algeria local communists interpreted Comintern policies to make
sense in the diverse conditions they encountered, and their activities were constrained by those conditions. In both cases rural people were receptive to the message of urban communist agitators insofar as it reected their own concerns for more land or for an end to expropriation. The issues of land access that struck a chord with rural people were incorporated by communists into a broader democratic agenda with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist dimensions. However, the political landscape shaped by the different patterns of proletarianisation differed signicantly. In late 1920s South Africa the CPSA found itself in an increasingly competitive relationship with the ANC and the ICU. In Algeria, by contrast, the absence of a working-class political movement inside the country meant that the political landscape of the early 1930s was framed largely in terms of cultural politics. The local PCF did not at that moment face the political rivalries that confronted the CPSA. It was perhaps in the brief period when communists temporarily linked with national or cultural movements giving voice to similar concerns that the potential for politicising rural struggles was highest. But that potential was limited precisely because it was transient.
Notes 1. I wish to thank the British Academy for awarding me Research Grants enabling me to conduct archival research on Algerian history and an Overseas Conference Grant enabling me to present an earlier version of this article in South Africa. 2. Rex versus S.P. Bunting and 2 others Native Administration Act: Reasons for Judgment, 456 and Rex versus S. Bunting and two others Native Administration Act, 234, in NASA:BAD 6647, 67/331. All legal documents cited are from this le. They are not in order, are not always clearly identied and sometimes use different abbreviations for the same case. To identify them, I have used the name on the rst page of each document. See also Roux 1964:219. 3. Rex versus S.P. Bunting and 2 others Native Administration Act: Notice of Appeal, 18 March 1929. 4. Preparatory Examination Covering Sheet and Magistrate W.J. Davidson to Chief Magistrate, Umtata, 31 August 1929, both in NASA:BAD 6647, 67/331, part 1. 5. Rex v. Bunting and two others, p 29; Magistrate W.J. Davidson to Chief Magistrate, Umtata, 31 August 1929; E.W. Baxter, Solicitor-General, Grahamstown, to Secretary for Native Affairs, Cape Town, 31 July 1929; Secretary for Native Affairs to Solicitor-General, Grahamstown, 12 August 1929, all in NASA:BAD 6647, 67/331, part 1. 6. Chief Magistrate of the Transkeian Territories to Secretary for Native Affairs, 3 September 1929, NASA:BAD 6647, 67/331, part 2. Hansard, 8 August 1929:584 6. 7. S.P. Bunting to Secretary, C.P., 21 July 1929, copy, authors possession. 8. [Gana Makabeni], statement of 31 August 1929, Roux Papers, League of African Rights, D; [Gana Makabeni] to Nzula, 3 September 1929; G. Makabeni to Bunting, 4 September 1929, and [Solly?] Sachs, 5 September 1929, Roux Papers, B2; Roux 1993:141. 9. S.P. Bunting to [Roux], 3, 6, S.P. Bunting Papers; Van Diemel 2001:148. 10. Report on Algeria, 23 October 1931, 1, RGASPI 517.1.1144. 11. Communes de plein exercise contrasted with the mixed territories, which were under military rule but had limited self-government for the Europeans, and with the Arab territories, which were entirely under military rule. 12. Fayet, Rapport sur ma delegation en Algerie, December 1932, 11, RGASPI 517.1.1332; Situation du mouvement Communiste en Algerie, April 1933, 1, RGASPI 517.1.1506.
13. Statuts de lAssociation Musulmane Blideenne, El Hidaia, stamped 4 Jul 1932, RGASPI 517.1.1320. ` 14. Le rapport sur lAlgerie fait par le camarade Celor a la commission du Proche-Orient, reunion du 11 Juillet 1928, RGASPI 517.1.697. 15. Report from Dupont, 2 April 1932, RGASPI 517.1.1373. 16. Rapport de linstructeur de la Section Coloniale Centrale en Algerie, Juin 1932, p 15, RGASPI 517.1.1332. 17. [Radiquet?], letter to comrade, 23 November 1932, p 1, RGASPI 517.1.1526; Le secretariat pour la region aux camarades, 12 December 1932, RGASPI 517.1.1320, pp 139 144. LHuma nite, 28 December 1932, p 3, reported that 800 peasants were threatened with expropriation; other Communist accounts state 600. 18. Letter to Radiquet, 23 November 1932, RGASPI 517.1.1320. 19. [Radiquet?], letter to comrade, 23 November 1932, p 1; Letter to Radiquet, 23 November 1932, RGASPI 517.1.1320. 20. Le secretariat pour la region aux camarades, 12 December 1932; Letter from S.C.C. to camarades, 29 December 1933, RGASPI 517 1 1506. See also Rapport sur le cas Naceur, Alger, 12 September 1933, RGASPI 517.1.1525. 21. [Radiquet?], letter to comrade, 23 November 1932, pp 1 2. 22. Le secretariat pour la region aux camarades, 12 December 1932. ` 23. Aux ouvriers et paysans Arabes, a la population laborieuse de Blida, poster, RGASPI 517.1.1331. 24. R[adiquet] to central colonial section, p 2, [c. February 1933], RGASPI 517 1 1506. 25. [Radiquet?], Situation du mouvement Communiste en Algerie, [April 1933], p 5, RGASPI 517.1.1506. ` 26. Prefecture dAlger, Affaires Indigenes et Police Generale, 16 Fevrier 1933, TNA: PRO FO 371/17294, no 5391, 191 2. 27. G.P. Churchill, British Consul-General, Algiers Quarterly Report, 31 March 1933, TNA: PRO FO 371/17294, 175 86, 183; G.P. Churchill to Lord Tyrrell of Avon, 9 May 1933, TNA: PRO FO 371/17294, no 5391, 18990. See also Region Algerienne du Parti Communiste, one-page French/Arabic yer, RGASPI 517.1.1525. 28. CAOM ALG GGA 3CAB/24 Communisme, Folder-Thorez; Bulletin Regional edite Par La Region Algerienne du Parti Communiste, nouvelle serie 1, Mai 1933, RGASPI 517.1.1525; Donnat n.d.:33 4. 29. Voting statistics from B.R. dAlger au B.P. du P.C.F., 27 September 1933, plus annexes, RGASPI 517.1.1525.
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Roux, E. 1949. Land and Agriculture in the Native Reserves, in E. Hellmann (ed), Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa. Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University, pp 171 90. Roux, E. 1964. Time Longer than Rope: The Black Mans Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, [1948] (2nd edition). Madison and London: University of Wisconsin. Roux, E. 1993. S.P. Bunting: A Political Biography [1944]. Bellville: Mayibuye. Ruedy, J. 1967. Land Policy in Colonial Algeria: The Origins of the Rural Public Domain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California. 1992. Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana. Sampson, A. 2000. Mandela: The Authorised Biography. London: HarperCollins. Schweitzer, T-A. 1972. Le Parti Communiste Francais, le Comintern et lAlgerie dans les es 1930s. Mouvement Social 78(January March):115 36. anne Sellam, S., Younessi, B. and Planche, J.-L. 1999. Un Reformateur venu du Desert: Cheikh El Okbi, in Jordi and Planche, pp 204 9. Simons, J. and Simons, R. 1983. Class and Colour in South Africa 1850 1950 [1968]. London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa. Sivan, E. 1976. Communisme et Nationalisme en Algerie, 1920 1962. Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Stora, B. 1991. Histoire de lAlgerie Coloniale (1830 1954). Paris: La Decouverte. Thomas, M. 2005. The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society. Manchester and New York: Manchester University. Van Diemel, R. 2001. In Search of Freedom, Fair Play and Justice: Josiah Tshangana Gumede (1867 1947), A Biography. Belhar: South Africa. Worley, M. (ed). 2004a. In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. 2004b. Courting Disaster? The Communist International in the Third Period, in Worley 2004a:1 17. Zagoria, J.D. 1973. The Rise and Fall of the Movement of Messali Hadj in Algeria, 1924 1954. PhD thesis, Columbia University.
Towards a Gendered and Raced Socialist Internationalism: Dora Monteore Encounters South Africa (1912 14)
Karen Hunt
Keele University, United Kingdom
Capitalism called large masses of workers from all over the world. These men mixed, travelled, compared notes and returned home and spread the propaganda they had learned . . . . That was why there was a band of socialistic agitators travelling all over the world, stirring up the people. (PN 13.6.1912)
So observed one transnational socialistic agitator to a meeting at the town hall in Pretoria in June 1912. The speaker was remembered, by a not entirely sympathetic commentator, as a rather masculine middle-aged lady with a most aggressive personality, who was a very forceful platform speaker (Boydell n.d.(1947?)).1 To readers of the South African socialist weekly, Voice of Labour, this English woman was recommended in rather different terms: Wherever she had been and that meant everywhere she had been held in high esteem, and done yeoman service in the cause . . . The ght was to her the very breath of life; the cause worth living for, yea, worth dying for (VoL 8.3.1912). To a reception held in her honour, this same speaker introduced herself with a similar transnationalist emphasis: She had been used to travel but as an International Socialist she was never homeless. Wherever she had gone she had met with the same kind welcome and found home and fatherland wherever there was work to be done for Socialism (VoL 8.3.1912). It is this particular travelling International Socialist and her encounter with pre-First World War South Africa who constitutes the focus of this article. Her experience, and more importantly her narration of it to a range of different audiences, provides the means to explore transnationalism in practice and to tease out the complex nature of the radical diaspora to be found within and beyond the British Empire in the early decades of the twentieth century. As the opportunities for global travel and for migration exploded from the second half of the nineteenth century, so did the possibilities for the transfer of all aspects of culture between peoples across the world. In particular, mobility accelerated the transmission of political ideas, aspirations and strategies. Thus with the migrants, the itinerant workers and the travelling propagandists came the political press
(national, provincial and parochial) which could nd an echo in societies thousands of miles away from its point of production. This was particularly the case with those who were part of the new progressive movements of the later nineteenth century socialists, anarchists and feminists who shared internationalist aspirations. What exactly they meant by internationalism may have varied but all sought in some way to connect the struggles of the oppressed across the world. The mapping and analysis of the various inter-related radical diaspora and its effects on the metropolitan centre and the often colonial periphery is in its infancy. Thus far it has tended to be segmented into a number of parallel historiographies that explore international networks amongst particular political activists, such as feminists (Rupp 1997) or syndicalists (Van der Linden and Thorpe 1990), without necessarily looking at how individuals not only linked up across national boundaries but also across ideological or organisational divides. Another historiography focuses on the effect of transnationalism on the colonial experience, particularly on the character of labour movements. Thus histories of the South African labour movement and left (such as Walker and Weinbren 1961; Drew 2000) acknowledge the national origins of many of the key actors from Britain, particularly Scotland, as well as from other parts of the White Dominions, such as Australia. Their concern, however, is the effect on the politics of South African labour rather than exploring the diasporas themselves and the specic processes whereby transnationalism was enacted in the early decades of the twentieth century. Biographical studies can trace specic experiences of transnationalism in an individual life, as in Jonathan Hyslops exemplary study of JT Bain (2004), although the biographer is always limited by the boundaries of their subjects own politics and practice. To date we have too few such biographies, and even less which foreground participation in these intersecting radical transnational networks. I would suggest that it is particularly important to consider not only how transnational forces shape the colonial periphery, but also how transnationalist practice is constituted at specic historical moments and how transnational experiences are deployed in a range of different political spaces including those of the metropolitan countries (see Hunt 2007). The task is to establish how an individual not only moved between different national contexts but also made connections between them. How were experiences that were derived from one national culture put into play in the politics of another? The subject of this article is Dora Monteore (18511933), a British born socialist, suffragist and later communist who, though based in England, spent key periods of her life travelling, networking and making her politics outside Britain. I make no claims for her typicality in any respect (as a socialist, as a suffragist, as a socialist woman), but by assessing where and in what ways her experience was distinctive, the parameters in which a transnational practice might be developed in the early decades of the twentieth century are revealed more clearly. Dora Monteore was well placed to build a transnational practice spurred as she was to develop an internationalism that challenged class, gender
Towards a Gendered and Raced Socialist Internationalism 323
and even racial divisions. Yet she sits awkwardly within national historiographies and within the historiographies of transnational organisations. We have little to date that allows us to explore the ebb and ow of ideas, experiences and campaigns not just between national socialist or suffrage movements, but also between them across the world. I therefore offer this article as a contribution to the larger project of exploring the nature and effect of transnationalist practices amongst progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century. But rst a few denitions. Dora Monteores life and politics sit at the intersection of a number of often separate historiographies where key terms can have slightly different meanings. I therefore will follow Leila Rupp (1997) in her important study of the international womens movement, in using the term transnational to describe activities, organisations and practices that cross national boundaries. Such transnational activity could literally be international, that is, not only communicating across national borders but also between and even above nations. However, there can be no presumption that transnational or international activity will also be internationalist. Thus Rupp has explored how women active in womens transnational organisations struggled with their nationalism and in many cases constructed a version of internationalism which did not challenge national identities and loyalties (Rupp 1997:10729). For others the focus of their concern with transnationality arises from the study of the movement across the world of peoples and their cultures, practices and ideas. This too is relevant to my concerns here because it alerts us not only to an increasingly mobile international proletariat in this period, amongst whom there were political activists, but also that these diasporas were not necessarily homogenous but might more usefully be thought of as an evolving collection of transnational, multisited social networks(Gabaccia and Iacovetta 2002:6). To what extent was there a socialist, or labour or feminist transnational, multi-sited social network in the early years of the twentieth century, and did its transnational character override the traditional areas of tension within national or local environments? Once the terrain of the transnational was entered, how divisive were different political philosophies (socialism/anarchism/labourism/communism) and different political priorities (ghting gender, class or race power) amongst the mobile or travelling activists? It may be that rather than seeing the transnational as a space of cultural transfer where unmediated ideas pass from one context to another, it might be more useful to trace how individuals sought to build a transnational practice, premised on making connections between disparate experiences located in political spaces which were foreign to them. Such a practice might then be as much about how these foreign experiences were deployed by the political traveller than about the experiences themselves. I want to begin to explore some of these issues in relation to one political woman for whom travel was a central thread through her activism. There are many ways to narrate the life and politics of Dora Monteore, for example by headlining her suffragism or her socialism, or by focusing on her
experience of being represented as a difcult woman, a woman who does not t into the traditional stories told of her time either by contemporaries or by historians (for example, Hunt 2000a, 2001). Her organisational afliations changed over time but give some sense of her location within and across the key issues of her day. Thus she was a member of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (c1900 1912), the British Socialist Party (from 1916) and a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. She was also involved in the Union of Practical Suffragists, the Womens Social and Political Union and the Adult Suffrage Society, as well as being associated with other broad left activities such as the Clarion Scouts, the Daily Herald League and the Central Labour College. Such lists only tell us so much, and give no real avour of how she and others built a political practice as socialist women (see Hannam and Hunt 2000). Elsewhere I have explored the extent to which internationalism enabled Dora to link together the socialist and feminist (not a term she used of herself) parts of her politics when organisationally and even conceptually there was so much tension between these two politics (Hunt 1998). To place Doras internationalist politics into a context I have also discussed the challenges that internationalism presented for British socialist women more generally before the First World War (Hunt 2000b). Now I want to explore the specic effect that one important stimulus to Monteores internationalism, her extensive foreign travel, had on her own politics. In particular, it is her encounter with South Africa that lies at the heart of this article. Travel was experienced in different ways by the increasingly mobile populations of the world in the later nineteenth century, from those spurred to migrate by economic deprivation or by ethnic or political persecution to those who took advantage of the new technologies of mobility to acquire fresh experiences in their modern pursuit of leisure. Political activists also travelled for many reasons and in many conditions. This is apparent when one contrasts the travels of two political activists whose paths crossed in Sydney in 1911. One had travelled from London (Dora Monteore) and the other from Johannesburg (Archie Crawford). She had travelled at her leisure in some comfort while he worked his passage, for example as a stoker, and travelled in the cheapest manner possible (discovering to his relief a fourth class on the railways in Germany).2 For some, travel created the conditions out of which their activism grew, while for others it was their activism that prompted the travel. However, whatever the reason for travel, it was an activity which contained transformative possibilities. In her memoirs Dora recalled travel of various sorts in her early years. She remembered summer holidays with her father travelling in continental Europe in order to research his papers to Social Science Congresses on topics such as scientic farming and afforestation. She acted as his translator. These travels were, she said, some of the happiest and most valuable in my life (Monteore 1927:27). Already travel was not simply about leisure. Her longest journeys in the years before she became politicised were those she took to and from Australia. She travelled out on the long sea voyage to New South Wales, accompanied by a cousin,
so that she could undertake the duties of an unmarried daughter helping her eldest brothers delicate wife to manage the housekeeping and the care of the children (Monteore 1927:30). It was in Australia that she began to take the rst steps on a political journey that would occupy the rest of her life. Australia was to play an important role in her evolving politics both as the location of key political experiences politicisation as a suffragist (188992); as a socialist activist encountering White Australia (1911); and as a communist (1923) but also as a source to which she instinctively turned for compelling examples to use in her work as a political propagandist (see Hunt 2003; Kirk 2003). Thus although Britain (mainly England) was where she centred her political activism after 1892, it was an important feature of her politics that another country, albeit part of the British Empire, had shaped her rst political steps and continued to have personal3 as well as political signicance for her. Travel continued to be a signicant feature of her life. She lived in continental Europe (Paris, Brussels) at various points after her return from Australia and often chose Europe, particularly Italy, as a place to recuperate or as a place to holiday (with her children and later on her own or with friends). She also began to travel for political reasons: to attend conferences (both international congresses and the national congresses of other national socialist or suffragist organisations); to make speaking tours; to conduct investigations; and to accept invitations that resulted from networking at international events. There were also more extensive trips to the United States of America, to Australia and to South Africa where she often moved from observer to participant in the political life of the country. This was through her journalism and by editing newspapers, by participating in political congresses (rather than just witnessing them) and by taking on short-term political tasks, such as being scrutineer at a count for one of the rst socialist candidates in a South African election.4 She also provided nancial support to ventures and campaigns within the country she was visiting. The destinations of her travels could therefore provide new experiences and encounters which she reported back to British and to other audiences but which also stimulated reections, revisions and even recongurations of her personal politics and the priorities within them. For example, in 1913 she reected to Daily Herald readers:
The more I have travelled, the more I have compared programmes and parties the world over, the more I incline to the opinion (though I have fought myself on the subject now for some time) that no real revolution can come about through the agency of a political party. (DH 25.8.1913)
However, it was not just the destinations that presented new political possibilities it was also the journeys themselves, particularly sea voyages. These provided opportunities which Dora seized to network, to reach different audiences and to engage in political tourism brief meetings organised on the shore and new literatures picked up along the way.5 But rather than provide a chronology of Dora
Monteores travels I want to take the example of one specic encounter and examine how she used this experience as part of her political practice. In particular I will focus on the way in which Monteores visit to South Africa in 1912 shaped her evolving internationalism. By 1912 Dora Monteore used the language of internationalism. She had a world vision, frequently drawing on comparisons with other countries in writing and speeches. She also travelled extensively, seeking out socialists and feminists wherever she went. As a consequence she had a wide network of comrades, political contacts and friends across the world. These relationships were reinforced by her membership of transnational organisations (both socialist and feminist), her attendance at international congresses and the intervening correspondence and journalism which formed the strands of the web that kept these organisations in existence between congresses. I have explored elsewhere whether we can make a distinction between internationalism and working internationally in transnational organisations (Hunt 1998). Certainly acquiring an international reputation, being known outside ones own country, does not necessarily mean a commitment to internationalism at all. Although internationalism could include experience of the politics of other countries through travel, membership of international organisations and attending international congresses, these activities do not, of themselves, make one an internationalist. However, by 1911 when Dora was introduced to readers of the local socialist press when she arrived in Australia, it was her internationality that was stressed:
She is international, charming and lovable, lling the eye with a ne personality, and charming the ear with a musical voice and noble language and sentiments. She is a great traveller, and has visited the brethren in all countries. (IS 24.6.1911)
At one of her earliest public meetings on this trip to Australia, she was billed as part of an International Socialist Demonstration, her contribution being a speech on Why I am an International Socialist, to which women were specially invited (IS 1.3.1911). On another occasion she introduced herself as a pioneer International Suffragist (The Vote 23.7.1915). So she was seen as being international and saw herself as being part of an international community. When she attended the national conference of the Socialist Party of America, internationalism was palpable: I felt . . . how vital and vibrating was the force of international Socialism, just as when she travelled she said, The joy of Socialism is that we nd friends and comrades and fellow-workers in every land (J 28.5.1910, 30.4.1910). The group she became involved with in Sydney was the Socialist Federation of Australasia (SFA) and it was their newspaper, International Socialist, which she was to edit for some of 1911. This was a paper that had a strong sense that socialists were an international community you could write about the British or American or German movement, without explaining who people were and which organisations were which, and your audience would understand. Being international was central to their denition of their politics, for amongst the
objections that the SFA had to the Australian Labor Party was that It is not international; it is not anti-militarist; it is not Marxian (IS 30.7.1910). It seems that the term international was often synonymous with internationalist. So what did Dora mean by internationalism at this period? She wrote in the Melbourne Argus:
We say, given the enormous amount of wealth which science and modern discoveries and inventions enable us to produce, let us agree to produce for use and not for prot. We say, do away with competition, with hideous advertisements, with chaotic industrial and social strife, and let us, now that easy communication and facilities for travel have brought the ends of the earth so close together, let us recognise, in our social and industrial life, the solidarity of the human race. (Quoted in IS 8.4.1911)
She certainly used the phrase solidarity of the human race on a number of occasions. This also tied in with the language she used to describe her womanfocused politics. For example in 1904 she had written:
The woman movement is as deep down Democratic as any movement; it is as far removed from feminism as the North Pole is removed from the South; and is rooted in the principle that No man will be really free until all women are freed. (New Age 21.7.1904)
For Dora, the woman question, as distinct from feminism, was crucial not as a separatist project, but as part of the wider question of human emancipation. She also stressed that this question of the position of women in the Socialist movement is not merely a national question, but an international one, and it can only fairly be studied from an international basis (Monteore 1909:1). She believed that in internationalism . . . lies our hope for the future, for enlarged culture, for the spread of free thought, and for the realisation of the solidarity of the human race (New Age 19.10.1905). Dora was even seen as representing the power and appeal of internationalism. The International Socialist specially printed and distributed a photograph of Dora with Archie Crawford (of South Africa) and Harry Holland (of Australia), which, it said was intended as a symbol of the international solidarity of the Socialist propaganda and the Socialist press (IS 10.6.1911). Grouped together, each holding their national socialist newspapers, they were seen as symbolising the effect of mutuality and solidarity: they were internationalism. In her articles in the International Socialist, Dora posited internationalism against imperialism in her critique of empire (IS 3.6.1911). She stressed in her attacks on militarism that once more we return to the same old urge; Workers of the world unite. It is you, and you only who can make war on war (IS 24.6.1911). Anti-militarism was a key component of Doras politics and it was integral to her internationalism. During her time in Australia in 1911 she argued strongly against compulsory military training for school-age boys, writing what were seen by some as seditious leader articles in the International Socialist. Doras argument was that the working class had no enemies among the workers of
other countries. That the enemy of the working class was the capitalist class, and that all workers and their sons should refuse to serve in any capitalist army, but should enlist in the ranks of the workers to overthrow capitalism (Monteore 1927:136). As for so many socialists this commitment was tested by the First World War and the fracturing of the Second International. The aspiration remained to place fellowship above competitive imperialism (Monteore 1927:192). But what else characterised her internationalism before she arrived in South Africa? When she had rst landed in Australia in 1910, she had spoken to the Victorian Socialist Party on The English Movement and Internationalism for close on one and a half hours. She held the rapt attention of her delighted and appreciative listeners. Applause was frequent and the speakers points sharp and telling. said The Socialist. These points were reported as including: The essential doctrine of our Socialist creed was Internationalism; Class conscious women made the best ghters and organisers; and most clearly of all The workers of the world, including the coloured workers, had to be organised in order to down Capitalism (The Socialist, Melbourne 16.12.1910). This was not necessarily what even a socialist audience in White Australia wanted to hear. Yet Dora persisted. On another occasion she warned Australian Labor, When they tap at the door of the International Bureau, they will have to drop their provincial impediments of a White Australia and compulsory military service because International Socialism unites on the basis of THE CLASS STRUGGLE, NOT COLOR OR SEX STRUGGLE (IS 30.12.1911). Sex or race could not be allowed to divide the solidarity of an international proletariat. Although not alone in making such claims, Dora remained unusual in trying to nd a way to translate this aspiration to create an internationalism that challenged hierarchies based on class, on gender and on race into a distinct internationalist practice. Visiting South Africa was to provide new experiences and challenges to her aspirations for an inclusive internationalism. It is to the role of South Africa in Dora Monteores internationalist politics to which I now turn.
South Africa The detail of Dora Monteores itineraries do not appear to have been planned in advance and when she set off for Australia in October 1910, there is no evidence that she intended to make South Africa a signicant part of her travels. It seems likely that the serendipity of political travel led to this important episode in Doras political life. The coincidence of Archie Crawford, editor of Voice of Labour (Johannesburg), and Monteores presence in Sydney in March 1911 together with their shared focus on Harry Hollands small socialist party, the SFA, and its paper the International Socialist, soon led to their sharing the platform at public meetings. For example, they were the speakers at an event in Sydney that symbolised international solidarity and which would have found echoes throughout the socialist world, a memorial meeting for the Paris Commune. Together their speeches were reported as demonstrating a clear and
uncompromising pronouncement concerning the Revolutionary Socialist attitude (IS 18.3.1911). Part of the purpose of political travel was, as Crawford told the readers of International Socialist, to compare notes with leading comrades along the way. He recounted his rst encounter with Dora:
She has met and talked to every Socialist worth meeting and talking to. She has attended several International Socialist Congresses. She isnt a politician; has no axe to grind and no reason or desire to live except to help the revolutionary cause. To her I unfolded my idea and asked her opinion. To my joy I found she had been for years tending in the same direction. (IS 6.5.1911)
What was the idea that galvanised these two socialists of different sexes, of different generations,6 of different classes,7 from different places8 and with different emphases in their politics?9 They both were dissatised with the Second International and in some senses regretted the passing of the old International. Crawford argued, We must regain its spirit and revolutionary fervour and lose the methods of artice and contrivance of hypocritical politicians who seek to pervade our ranks. However Marxs International was too truly intellectual and what was needed now was a Red International (Doras phrase), which would guarantee that purpose is not sacriced to an articial unity (IS 6.5.1911). What they and others envisaged was a network of revolutionary socialists linked together through the editors of socialist newspapers who would act as international correspondents sharing the truth of Labour troubles in the various countries (IS 6.5.1911). At the same time as Crawfords piece appeared in the International Socialist Dora contributed an article to Crawfords Voice of Labour. She employed a powerful metaphor, explaining that she wrote so as to link up another strand of the web of the Red International which is spreading round the world, and weaving the warp and woof of the new brotherhood of man (VoL 5.5.1911). As if to conjure up this brotherhood for her South African readers she continued:
I dont know what Comrade Crawford may have written you about me, but I will take it for granted he has been writing nice comradely things; for we have done our little bit of propaganda together in Sydney, have together wandered through its slums and unlovely spots besides enjoying (in the delightful companionship of Charles Edward Russell, the American writer and Socialist, and of Miss Mander, the Socialist correspondent of the New Zealand Commonweal ) the natural beauties and seductive loveliness of Sydneys world-famed harbour. (VoL 5.5.1911)
It seems that it was as part of this international network that Dora decided to make South Africa her next port of call when she nally sailed from Sydney at the end of January 1912. As she left, the International Socialist reected that the effect of Doras voice and pen had been the broadening inuence of internationality that world-travel brings (IS 9.3.1912).
What was she to make of the new Union of South Africa (formed in 1910) and how would these experiences affect her optimistic vision of the power of internationalism? South African socialists had organised a warm welcome for her when she landed at Durban. Immediately she was reminded of the transnationality of political activism, as amongst those greeting her was a former member of the Bristol Socialist Society who had often heard her speak in England (J 6.4.1912). She was guided around the political tourist sites of Durban by Harry Norrie, which included the native market and the municipal eating house for the natives, as well as addressing meetings in the Public Gardens (J 6.4.1912). She then travelled on to Maritzberg where she stayed with Comrade Green and his wife. Here the public meeting does not seem to have been so successful, but again her reputation preceded her. She recalled meeting Dr Vreundlich, editor of a Dutch paper, who knew her writing in New Age during the Anglo-Boer War. She felt that meeting him was opportune, as he would dispose the Dutch population favourably towards my mission here (J 13.4.1912). She then took the night train to Johannesburg, comparing the veldt she passed through to her more familiar Sussex South Downs. She was met at Germiston by a group of socialists led by Crawford, whose face was that of an old friend, and Mary Fitzgerald, of whom I had heard and read so much. These dozens of comrades were eager and anxious to show their goodwill to their visiting comrade, and to make a rm and lasting reality of the coming solidarity and brotherhood of men (IS 13.4.1912). At this stage she told Australian readers: Problems here are complicated, but intensely interesting. Already she saw South Africa as the epitome of capitalist exploitation and as such she thought it presented a real opportunity to socialists. Capitalists had brought the nations and races to South Africa to exploit them, but in so doing they had provided an opening for socialists to agitate for revolt against this exploitation which would form the basis for the creation of a new economic and social order (IS 13.4.1912). Soon she was established in Johannesburg where from her fourth oor at she observed the pollution from the mines. She commented that the whole place to me is a horror, although the town is modern, up-to-date and convenient (IS 15.6.1910). Themes in her representation of the Rand were soon apparent. With a vision attuned by her experience in Australia, she focused in on the South African Labour Party (as in Australia the Labour Party are misrepresenting and misleading the people) and the proposed defence bill. In Australia she had fought against compulsory military training for school-age boys, but she warned that the South African authoritys proposals would be even more draconian: every man would have to carry a pass of identication and they would not be allowed to leave the country without leave from the military authorities (IS 15.6.1910). For her the battle continued to be against labourism and militarism. She saw her task in South Africa as writing every week for the Voice of Labour, helping to organise a headquarters for the new united socialist party, and to try to get a womens committee and socialist Sunday school going. She
then hoped to take up the invitation to work with socialists in Durban and the Cape Colony during the winter months. Through her journalism in South Africa and elsewhere, one can map out the series of meetings Dora addressed. There were set piece debates with socialist critics such as that with Vere Stent, editor of the Pretoria News (see VoL 3.5.1912; PN 1.5.1912), or meetings that brought to socialist audiences her critique of reformism based both on her observations of the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party (PN 13.6.1912). She reected on the virtues of syndicalism,10 coming to a position that she would continue to advocate when she returned to Britain as she became more involved in the Daily Herald and in the Daily Herald Leagues (DHLs). Placing herself as a revolutionary socialist she saw syndicalism as providing a fresh and new revolutionary appeal to the workers in several countries as well as creating a real bogey scare among capitalists. Like syndicalists she questioned this political make-believe, but linked this with the cynicism that women also now felt about a political system, which denied them citizenship. The only weapon the workers should use in their evolutionary ght is direct action; and they must learn to back up their ballots, not with bullets but with the organised, well thought out and well carried out industrial strike (VoL 10.5.1912). She was revealing herself to be well out of step with the old guard of the British Socialist Party, a party that she was to leave at the end of 1912. Like the self-styled rebels of the DHLs (see Holton 1976:1806), she was attracted by the energy that syndicalism evoked and its potential to link with other important themes: the ght against gender and racial oppression (for similar connections in Australian politics, see Burgmann 1995). That, however, did not make her a syndicalist in any formal sense. She continued to see herself as an open-minded revolutionary socialist. Dora also kept her woman-focused politics before her audience in South Africa and used her time there to network with suffragists, with socialist women, and to continue to reect on the signicance for contemporary politics of South Africas most famous socialist woman, Olive Schreiner. South Africa had already played a role in the evolution of Doras politics long before she ever set foot on its soil. She returned again and again to an image that she rst used in a Union of Practical Suffragists pamphlet in 1899. In Women Uitlanders she pointed out the double standard of a British government willing to ght a war in South Africa over the Uitlanders disenfranchisement while refusing to act on a similar case much nearer to home, that of voteless British women (Monteore 1899; see also Hunt 2000a; Mayhall 2000). In 1904 speaking at the sale of her distrained goods after one of her rst attempts at passive resistance (when she refused to pay tax without representation), she reportedly justied her action on the grounds that Women were not allowed a vote. They were outsiders. They were Uitlanders. They ought not to be forced to obey laws which they did not help to make (WLO 3.6.1904). She also turned to this image in 1910 when addressing suffragists in New York. She argued we women are still Uitlanders in our own
country. We have no voice in the making of the laws we must obey (NYC 4.5.1910). Once in South Africa, although her principal connections were with socialists she was also sought out by suffragists (Womens Enfranchisement League 1912). She did not share the politics and background of much of the South African suffrage movement, which was rooted in philanthropy and Christian social activism, particularly the Womens Christian Temperance Union (for varieties of South African suffragism, see Walker 1979; also Scully 2000). In contrast to the South African movement, Dora had always argued for the larger demand of adult suffrage (for all adult men and women irrespective of any property qualication) through a range of constitutional and later militant suffrage groups, nally joining the Adult Suffrage Society in 1907. She might have looked like many of the South African suffragists in class and racial terms, but her suffrage politics were by 1912 very different. Indeed, she would have concurred with the Voice of Labours judgement in 1911 that the (South African) Womens Enfranchisement Leagues demand was insufcient as it was only for limited womens suffrage rather than the socialist demand of adult suffrage. The paper claimed Socialism is the only remedy and votes for women on the same terms as men is but the proverbial red herring. Socialism is womens only hope! (VoL 28.7.1911). Dora would not have disagreed with this, at the same time she was well used to the way in which this particular conguration of the socialist suffrage demand allowed many men to slough off any responsibility in campaigning for adult suffrage. So just as she could not count on all socialists to live up to their rhetoric on the suffrage so she still saw woman suffragists as a potential audience for her different reading of suffrage politics. For Dora saw herself principally as a propagandist self-consciously following Morriss motto Education towards Revolution (IS 29.4.1911) and thus took the opportunity to bring her politics to new audiences. She therefore responded to invitations to address suffrage societies, including the Womens Enfranchisement League in Durban (a very enthusiastic meeting) and a series of suffrage meetings in Cape Town, which attracted many of the leading suffragists of the region such as Mrs Solly and Miss Molteno (Monteore 1927:152). Interviewed on her return from South Africa by Justice she included the womens suffrage movement in her discussion on The Working-Class Movement in the Colonies. She reported that there was a strong movement for womens suffrage and that she had been constantly called upon to speak for it. In her view the South African suffrage question was complicated by political issues the tensions between the Dutch and the English on the one hand as well as the issue of race. She recounted meeting a woman who had been a keen suffragist in England, but who was opposed to enfranchising women now that she lived in Johannesburg as she feared it would increase the representation of the back veldt Dutch. In the Cape Colony the issue was a different one for here there was talk of disenfranchising coloured men at the same time as granting a limited suffrage to women. This,
Dora thought, would split existing womens suffrage organisations (J 19.10.1912). So, while in South Africa, Dora did not distance herself from suffrage organisations with which she had signicant disagreements on adult suffrage and also on race. On the contrary she sought a dialogue with these women. She obviously felt there was room for persuasion on this particular issue. In contrast, she refused an invitation from the South African Labour Party to take part in an anti-militarist demonstration because they would not accept her insistence on conducting the campaign on Socialist class-war lines (Monteore 1927:147). Suffrage had also been a difcult issue for Olive Schreiner. Dora had not met Schreiner before she went to South Africa, although at the end of 1913 she was to chair a reception for Schreiner at the Lyceum Club in London when she returned to Britain for the rst time in sixteen years. On that occasion, Dora spoke of Schreiners inuence: Most of us meet tonight for the rst time one who has companied with us in our youth and remains through life an abiding friend (The Vote 2.1.1914). Schreiners writing had been a presence in Doras political life for some time: she had reviewed Trooper Halket for the feminist periodical Shafts (May 1897). Both their names were bracketed together in a piece in Justice in 1905 when it was announced that one of the few really great women writers, Schreiner, had joined the SDF. As part of their welcome to this new recruit, Justice commented that they should have made more of Schreiners identication with the red ag, for
Outside this island, several of our homegrown Social Democrats enjoy great and worldwide reputations. Here we take little or no account of them . . . Leaving the men aside, where will you nd three abler women than Mrs Monteore, Mrs Rose Jarvis and Mrs Despard? (J 22 May 1905)
The following year Dora announced in her column in the radical journal New Age that she had received a letter from Schreiner wishing she was in England and saying that it would not be long before the women of England would have the vote (New Age 13.12.1906). Nevertheless it does not seem that the two met in South Africa. However, Schreiner was clearly on Doras mind when she was on the Rand, for she quoted from Schreiner in speeches and discussed some of the arguments in the recently published Woman and Labour. For Dora the most important lesson she took from Schreiner was the need to see the womens and workers struggle as one (J 9.11.1912). When Monteore wrote for Voice of Labour on the Woman Question and its relationship to socialism, it was a discussion of Woman and Labour that sat at the heart of her article. Despite the earlier welcoming of Schreiner into the SDF, Dora felt that the book revealed that its author
had never heard the true international Socialist interpretation of the exploitation and degradation of humanity, including its womanhood, otherwise her poet soul would have caught re from the lambent ame of humanitys demand for reconstructed
ideals, as oppose[d] to only womanhoods reconstructional demands. She has, I observe, come in touch with Labourism and its narrow ideals. (VoL 17.5.1912)
For Dora, unlike Schreiner, the explanation for the undoubted masculinism of labour was economic. She argued that trade unionists in the past had destroyed machinery
because they thought in their blindness, they could in that way, destroy its power of competition; and they are still ghting unskilled labour and native or coloured labour in the same spirit not understanding, as does the Socialist, that all workers are interdependent, and that the solidarity of labour is ONE. (VoL 17.5.1912)
This was why it was crucial not to separate the womens movement from what she called the human movement. She said that the problem for women was not as Schreiner said Find labour or die, but Find labour and get its full reward or be both economically and sexually degraded. Dora went on to make the case that the socialist party is the only political party which gives the fullest opportunities to the woman movement to become part of the great human movement for the Woman Movement is but the lapping waves of one of those great forceful movements which from time to time permanently modify and revolutionise the conditions of humanity (VoL 7.5.1912). Doras reading of Schreiner and the way in which she interpreted this back to South African and British readers shows that she was wrestling at this time not only with how socialism had to confront and destroy class power, but also that the socialist project would fail unless, in addition, it challenged power derived from gender, and, it was increasingly clear, from race. This was not some easy politically correct rhetoric, but an issue that nagged away at Doras desire to create a powerful and inclusive socialist internationalism along the lines that she had begun to tease out with Archie Crawford and others in Australia. Like many of her contemporaries Dora used a language to discuss race, which can seem awkward to modern eyes and sometimes even offensive. She was not unreective on this, so she mostly talked in terms of the coloured and native races, using what she understood to be tribal terms such as Kafrs, Zulus etc., and when very rarely explicit pejoratives were used, they were heavily italicised. Thus, in explaining to a British audience that Capitalism in South Africa is so entrenched, so unscrupulous and so powerful, and Labour, in consequence of colour and race prejudices, is so divided against itself, that it will be some time before the Socialist interpretation can be successfully placed before the workers of that part of the Empire, she used the phrase the government is being used by the mine magnates as their willing tool to carry out their schemes for keeping not only the nigger but the white man in his place (J 19.10.1912). Earlier in her political life she had rehearsed some of the traditional prejudices of her class and generation in a leaet on Imperial Philanthropy. She had written The Kafrs, the only servants, obtainable for rough work, are unreliable and scarce and that Boer women were such excellent shots because when their
men folk were away from home they had to defend their persons against outrages on the part of the blacks (Monteore 1902). Ten years later, and no longer in ignorance of conditions in South Africa, these sentiments had disappeared from her writing. Indeed her lengthiest articles subsequent to her visit to South Africa were a series in British Socialist (December 1912March 1913), which explored capitalist development in South Africa in which the economic exploitation of native labour was a central theme. In anticipation of arriving in South Africa Dora had made clear to readers of Justice that race would be a central issue. She reported that the rst native congress was being held in Durban as she arrived. However, at the same time as recognising that these workers had to be included in the great human movement that was international socialism, there was also a sense in her journalism that the native population were an unknown other: All these various races, with their many coloured costumes, their draped and veiled women, and their swarming children, make up a picturesque crowd with a psychology about which one feels it is vain for the white man or woman to speculate (J 6.4.1912). She therefore partly saw her task as providing for British socialists the facts of the South African native question (J 13.4.1912). She saw the issue of race as tied up with what she observed as the failings of labour parties:
Set one race against another, one colour against another, and you will keep the workers quarrelling among themselves, instead of combining against capitalism. That is the work, in South Africa as elsewhere, of the Labour Party, as well as of the capitalist parties. (J 3.8.1912)
She saw South Africa as the most extreme example of capitalist exploitation and that therefore it held the strongest lessons for socialism as distinct from labourism. For her, socialism was premised on inclusivity, on internationalism, unlike sectional labourism dominated by the exclusive traditions of craft unionism. Her propagandist work in Australia and now in South Africa had crystallised a view that had been growing in the preceding years in England. By bringing examples from one country to another she underlined the global nature of capitalist exploitation. So for South African audiences she compared what she called the death in life of Rhondda miners with the gold miners dying of phthisis on the Rand, and drew attention to the fact that the Welsh miners were currently striking against the great coal combines for the right to live. In response the great throb of a common wrong, of a common exploitation, has caught at the throat of my listeners, and they have understood that our message of international Socialist solidarity is the only message in the world of any use to them (J 6.4.1912). And by recounting this back to British socialists through the pages of Justice, she was underlining her internationalist message. So for Dora Monteore, her encounter with South Africa underlined the centrality of internationalism to revolutionary socialist politics where nothing (whether gender, race or nation) should be allowed to divide the workers. This, however,
did not mean that she thought that there were no racial, or indeed gender or national, differences. She wanted to nd out about differing experiences, particularly through her travel, and bring those experiences to British and other audiences through her propaganda work, in speeches and in journalism. Dora was determined that the politics she made and in which she took part should not be parochial. This was a political practice premised on making connections: after all, her political journey had begun by connecting her experience (as a disenfranchised widow with no right of guardianship of her children) to that of other women (Monteore 1927:30 1). When she became a socialist, she never saw a contradiction between her middle-class background and her increasing espousal of revolutionary politics. It was her experiences, conversations and campaigning with people of other classes, nations and later races that fuelled her politics as a socialist and then communist woman. What this meant in South Africa was that as a sixtyyear-old middle-class woman, she went down a diamond mine to study the conditions of native labour, as well as a gold mine in Johannesburg where she groped and stumbled through the narrow passages and tunnels, even crawling on hands and knees (Monteore 1927:148; BS February 1913). This was not a perverse form of political tourism but was where her political curiosity took her in her search for tools to ght the capitalist system. She also went to see one of Lever Brothers large soap factories outside Durban, again observing the way in which various ethnic groups were differentially exploited within the plant (Monteore 1927:151 2). She had several talks through an interpreter with the priests and heads of the Indian villages scattered around Durban, which fed into an article for the Daily Herald on which she wrote in 1913 on The Indian Question in Natal. Here she used the experience of Ghandi to show what colour means in South Africa. The high caste Gandhi, his wife and sons when travelling by train from Natal to Johannesburg have to travel in the trucks provided for the natives, as no man or woman of colour would be tolerated in a compartment reserved for whites (DH 22.11.1913). Having, she said, made a special study of the colour problem in South Africa, she concluded for her British audience that it was
self-evident that not only had the various and complicated problems in connection with colour hardly yet declared themselves, but that, in the main, any future troubles, which were bound to arise, were due to the unimaginative, hasty and too often callous way in which the whole question of the native and coloured population had been and still is treated by the administrators of South Africa. (DH 22.11.1913)
Through her journalism she sought to keep reminding audiences wherever she could nd them of the diversity of workers and their experiences across the world, as part of a project of internationalism, which she labelled the Red International.
Conclusion So what difference did her experience of South Africa make to Dora Monteores internationalism? She certainly did not seem to feel that these distinct South
African experiences were of no further use as she re-entered the turbulent politics of the British left. On her return to England, she quickly found herself on public platforms bringing the greetings of the socialist movement in Australia and South Africa, making the political point that her travels had underlined her hope that the working-class movement might be as international as capitalism (DH 1.10.1912). She had been sending back articles to Justice while she was in South Africa. The paper continued for a time to contain her reections on her time in the Colonies, as she also set about writing some longer pieces for the monthly British Socialist. Soon she was also writing for the new unaligned left daily newspaper, the Daily Herald. Indeed it was the fact that she had written in the Herald about her dissatisfaction with the International Socialist Anti-War Congress, which she had attended in Basle in November 1912 on behalf of the BSP, which led directly to her resignation from the party (see Socialist Record January 1913). She argued that having spent the last two years with the revolutionary socialist parties of the colonies their message was that they refuse to be dragged at the tail of any revisionary or reformist party. Indeed she went further, that if the International Socialist Bureau will not keep step with the revolutionaries, then the Red Internationalists must come out and form their own revolutionary International, instead of wasting their time and their energies on playing around with model sections such as the thrice-sold Labour Party, the place-seeking Fabians, and the dependent I.L.P (DH 4.11.1912). Her experiences of the White Dominions of the British Empire seem to have given Dora Monteore a new vehemence in her politics. She continued to speak to socialist meetings on the themes that had pushed to the front of her agenda during her Australian and South African sojourn: for example, she spoke on Imperialism and Conscription in the Colonies and wrote on Slavery on the Rand (J 11.1.1913; DH 12.7.1913). But these issues were soon twisted up with others in the new rebel politics, and all this was taking its toll on her health. When she returned to South Africa in early 1914 it was for the sake of her health after her exertions to Save the Kiddies of striking workers during the Dublin Lockout during which she was arrested for child kidnap (Monteore 1914). She landed at Cape Town on the day of the deportations of the nine labour leaders, including Crawford. As there was nothing she felt she could do, she continued her journey into the mountains, but returned to Cape Town to chair the welcome meeting for Tom Mann, who had been sent out to South Africa by the British left to hold a series of protest and solidarity meetings on the issue of the deportations (Monteore 1927:179). Although this was a lower key visit than her rst, it was nevertheless headlined in the Daily Herald (25.5.1914) as Woman Socialist in Africa. Preaching the Gospel of Revolution. In this shorter stay, she did far less in terms of political meetings (see Speeches and Deeds of Labour Leaders n.d.), and of course Crawford, Fitzgerald and the Voice of Labour were not there for her to work with.11 However she was not idle. She remembered in her memoirs a small privately arranged meeting where she spoke to young Cape coloured workers employed in a range of unskilled
jobs (Monteore 1927:17980). She recalled that she was the rst white woman ever to have spoken to these outcasts on the necessity for industrial organisation. She feared that the swift intervention of the war meant that this work was not continued after she left the country. Her encounter with South Africa had enriched Monteores politics and conrmed for her that travel provided stimulation to her as a political woman. She seemed to relish the way that travel could provide challenges to her ideas as well as access to experiences very different from her own. Most of all she recognised that for her travel knitted up the bonds of comradeship and made her feel how vital and vibrating was the force of international Socialism (J 11.6.1910; 28.5.1910). Dora was engaged in many ways in a form of transnational practice. She made connections across national borders and between the parallel universes of the socialist and womens internationals. This was not always easy nor was she always successful, as her right to participate was often challenged. But for her the connections themselves could empower. It was not simply a case of transferring one set of practices, arguments or tactics from one country to another. Moreover, her travels gave her a sense of new possibilities and of new challenges as well as of international solidarity. Travelling not only enriched Monteores own politics, it enabled her to connect with others. Most of all it enabled other activists who had no prospect of attending an international conference or engaging in any kind of foreign travel to feel that they too could aspire to internationalism. As one woman SDFer said of Doras column in Justice, she welcomed news of the organised ght of the working women in those lands against the forces of tyranny and reaction. We recognise that we are one with them, and our hearts rejoice (J 1.5.1909). This was the kind of dividend that Doras brand of transnationalist practice could produce. At the heart of her practice sat a desire to make connections and to try to work towards a gendered and raced socialist internationalism. First one had to expose the differences that gender, class and race made to individuals experiences and then try to create an internationalist politics that recognised those differences in a new kind of solidarity. Doras encounter with South Africa crystallised for her the challenges of such a project, but also its absolute necessity.
Notes 1. The Hon Thomas Boydells memories of Monteore may have been affected by his misapprehension that she was a member of the aristocratic and wealthy Monteore family of bankers in England. She was not: she had become a Monteore through marriage into a distant Australian branch of the Monteore family. By the time Boydell encountered her, Dora had been a widow for over twenty years. Boydell seems to have remembered her through a haze of class and gender prejudices. 2. Crawford described the arduous conditions as he shovelled coal into the furnaces of the Minnewaska on a six hours on, six hours off shift across the Atlantic It was quite the hardest work I have ever done (IS 18.11.1911). In contrast, Monteore recalled a journey from Cape Town to Southampton on one of the nest passenger ships I have ever travelled
3.
4. 5. 6. 7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
in, where her time was passed debating suffragism with an elderly German General (Monteore 1927:182). Her children were Australian and her son returned to live there as an adult, serving in the Australian Imperial Forces in the First World War. The widowed Dora also derived her income from Australia, where the investment fund that managed her husbands estate was located. Dora Monteore was one of two scrutineers at the count when Harry Norrie was the rst United Socialist Party candidate to contest a South African parliamentary seat (J 3.8.1912). See descriptions of her journeys from Australia to South Africa in 1912, and from South Africa to England in 1914 (Monteore 1927:146,182 3). Crawford (1883 1924) was twenty-eight years old while Monteore (1851 1933) was fty-nine. Crawford was a working man who had trained as a tter and turner before enlisting in the British army to ght in the South African War. After his discharge he worked in the Pretoria railway workshops until he was dismissed in 1906. He then became a full-time political activist, including sitting on the Johannesburg council from 1907 and founding and editing Voice of Labour from 1908. In contrast, Monteore was a middle-class woman of independent means who lived on the income derived from the trust fund set up by her husband before his premature death after only eight years of marriage. Crawford was born in Glasgow and had arrived in South Africa in 1902 as a nineteen-year-old recruit in the British army. She lived in Australia for about fteen years before and during her marriage, but made her home as a widow with two small children in England. Crawfords politics had grown out of trade unionism whilst Monteores had sprung from suffragism. For a brief prole of Crawford, see his entry in Rosenthal 1966:79. For Monteore, see her entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). For contemporary pen portraits of both of them, see IS 24.6.1911. In recent South African historiography Dora Monteore has been represented as a syndicalist (Hyslop 2004:192), however this is to misunderstand her politics at this time and the inuence upon her of those she associated with in Australia (particularly Harry Holland) and in South Africa (particularly Archie Crawford). The Voice of Labour ceased publication at the end of 1912, when the economics of producing a revolutionary socialist weekly nally defeated Archie Crawford and Mary Fitzgerald. Crawford was among the labour leaders deported by the South African government in January 1914 following the labour strikes of June 1913 and January 1914 (see Hyslop 2004:229 65). As Fitzgerald and Crawford were not married, she was not among the deportees wives whom the government eventually paid to travel to England to join their husbands. Nevertheless, she left South Africa to join him, speaking at a number of labour rallies (DSAB V:266).
Abbreviations
BS DH DSAB IS J NYC PN VoL WLO British Socialist Daily Herald Dictionary of South African Biography International Socialist Justice New York Call Pretoria News Voice of Labour West London Observer
References
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Comparative Aspects of Farm Labour in Twentieth Century Botswana

Wazha G Morapedi
University of Botswana
Botswana became a British protectorate in 1885 and attained independence in 1966. The British had for the most part neglected the country for the entire colonial period, and Botswanas economy was largely integrated into that of South Africa. There was no signicant white settlement in Botswana, but four settlerfarming enclaves emerged in the 1890s and early 1900s. These were the Tati to the north-east, Ghanzi to the west, the Gaborone and Lobatse blocks to the south and the Tuli Block to the east.1 These enclaves were the ones that became freehold agricultural estates and adopted commercial agriculture. South African inuence was pervasive in Botswana during the colonial period, but it was largely in these settler enclaves that it clearly manifested itself. Most of the white settlers were South African nationals and as such had close afnities with that country. This article will focus mainly on the Tuli Block and Ghanzi farming areas because they were, and still are, the most economically viable. The aim of this article is to draw a comparison between the labour situation in Ghanzi and the Tuli Block farms during the protectorate years, specically from 1930 to 1966. These two areas lie in two extreme ends of Botswana. The Ghanzi farms lie in the dry highlands of western Botswana, close to Namibia. In the 1930s and early 1940s Ghanzi was a peripheral area, having little contact with the rest of the country and the settler economy being largely subsistence. The Tuli Block is in the valley bushveld of eastern Botswana close to the Transvaal (now Limpopo province). By the 1930s and 1940s, this area had already adopted commercial farming. It is interesting to compare these two areas because while one would expect many similarities under British protection, the contextual variations that existed also created divergences that invite comparisons. Whites (predominantly Afrikaners) from South Africa owned the farms in both areas, but there were different regional variations, different ecological zones and ethnic workforces that make an interesting comparison. These key aspects of the farming areas and their implications will become clear as the study unfolds. Another interesting comparison is between the different ethnicities that provided labour within the Ghanzi farms. This study is placed in the general context of the farm labour situation in southern Africa during this period. As such, some comparison with South Africa on a
crucial phenomenon will be made at some stage. However, the study is specically located in the context of Ghanzi and the Tuli Block freehold farms. There were different economic and social contexts that also contributed to certain variations and similarities in these areas. Most interesting to emerge is the degree to which these manifested themselves.
The labour market and nature of work It is important to note the ethnic nature of the labourers and the manner in which ethnicities related. The majority of labourers in the two settler enclaves belonged to what are known as subject or minority groups in todays Botswana. In Ghanzi, the Basarwa, derogatively referred to as the Bushmen comprised the majority of labourers. The Basarwa are of Khoe-san stock, and they are different from the Bantu-speaking people of Botswana. Being largely hunter-gatherers, they were subjected by Bantu-speaking groups and turned into servile people with the status of serfs. Some of the labourers in Ghanzi were Baherero and Bakgalagadi who were also Bantu speakers. In the Tuli Block, the majority of labourers were Babirwa and Batswapong. Although these four (non Basarwa) groups belong to the Bantu-speaking majority in Botswana, they are regarded as people who originally came seeking refuge (Bafaladi) to the Setswana speakers and hence subject peoples. The different ethnic compositions of labourers in the farms, the Bantu speakers and the Basarwa, contributed to their different conditions on the farms. As will be shown, there was differential access to resources between the Bantu speakers and the Basarwa, which resulted in differential treatment and opportunities.
Throughout the colonial period, freehold commercial farming in Botswana did not become highly signicant as it did in the neighbouring settler states of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, and the numbers of those employed by white farmers was small. Thus, freehold farming never provided enough employment to qualify as a major source of livelihood for the merafe (tribes) of the Protectorate (Croston 1993:275). The number of labourers and farmers involved was small, the farms were scattered and differences existed from farm to farm. Differences also existed not only between districts, but even between farms in the same district, and depended on the personalities of different farm owners, the labour needs of a particular farm or farms, the wealth of a particular farmer, and the location of a farming area within the protectorate (Croston 1993). In spite of these differences, however, a general pattern concerning farm labour is discernible. The Ghanzi freehold farms in Botswana were superimposed on a predominantly Basarwa settlement area, and the Basarwa who stayed in the farms were given the status of squatters and were obliged to provide labour for the farmers. After the farms were fenced in the 1950s, there was increased range degradation and Basarwa were gradually moving into a situation approximating that of
Comparative Aspects of Farm Labour in Twentieth Century Botswana 345
proletarians. Those who stayed on farms had no other source of income except wages (Mogalakwe 1986:14). As indicated, farm labourers were very few in Botswana. In Ghanzi, no precise census population of Basarwa labourers was taken until the 1950s. Between 1938 and 1945, it was estimated that approximately 200 Basarwa were employed by the white farming community, while about 100 Africans were also employed on cattle related duties. The labour supply was described as plentiful. In 1956 it was estimated that there were about 12,000 Basarwa in Ghanzi district, and that about 4,000 of them lived on farms. Of the estimated 4,000 on farms, only about 300 were believed to be employed by farmers, while the rest were regarded as squatters (BNA S.564/12). This situation of surplus labour placed Basarwa labourers in a precarious situation because farmers did not have to compete for labourers either amongst themselves, or with other sectors of the economy. Farmers could thus summarily dismiss labourers and engage others without any difculty. Thus, the labour market here was different from that which existed in the Tuli Block where farm labourers were offered better working conditions because of the need to retain them. These prospects were not available to Basarwa labourers in Ghanzi. During the 1920s to the 1960s, migrant mine labour to the South African mines was the main avenue available to Batswana unskilled labourers, and thousands of them enrolled for the mines. This avenue was not available to Basarwa because the protectorate government and Bantu speaking dominant groups discriminated against them. In the Tuli Block, the number of farm labourers also remained small during the colonial period. There were 449 men and 388 women living in the Tuli Block in 1936, about three tenths of a percentage of the population of Botswana at that time. In 1946, the numbers living in the area had fallen to 224 men and 190 women, about one tenth of a per cent (or about one thousandth) of the total population of the country. Although it was not possible to obtain the total number of employees over the whole period, the numbers changed very little over the years (Croston 1993:275). However, one can assume that with the rise to prominence of cash crop production in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of workers rose. In this farming area, and other parts of eastern Botswana, such as the Tati, shortage of labour was reported to be prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s. Farmers in the eastern protectorate faced a serious competitor, the South African mines, which (as already indicated) was the major employer of migrant labour from Botswana. The problem of labour shortage seems to have plagued the freehold farmers in the Tuli and Tati areas even before a sizeable proportion of young adult males from the reserves undertook migrant labour in the 1930s. At one stage, the problem became so acute that farmers in the Tuli Block contemplated engaging migrant labourers from Northern Rhodesia. The shortage of labour at this juncture has been explained by the fact that the available labourers were too mobile. Most of them had just managed to wrest free from their positions of servitude, clientilage, marriage or juniority. Most of them were also tax
defaulters or those who had otherwise outed authority. They were, thus not the kind of labourers to undertake long-term employment for a single employer. Even in the late colonial period, labour turnover remained a problem on many farms, especially in the Tuli Block (Croston 1993:287-288). In this part of Botswana, labourers had options such as migrant mine labour, industries and even farms in the more developed South Africa. This was not the situation in western Botswana where Basarwa had no options except to provide labour or squat on the farms. Thus, the geographical location of the two freehold farming areas played a role in shaping the farm labour market. Turning to the nature of work, labour in both Ghanzi and the Tuli Block involved cattle related activities such as herding, trekking, watering, branding and dipping. There was little specialisation in the two areas during the 1930s and 1940s and much of the work was still related to cattle (Silberbauer 1965:119; Croston 1993:276). The 1940s saw farmers in the Tuli Block turning more to crop production and intensifying the production of maize and crops such as cotton, groundnuts and oranges. With this increase in the adoption of cash crops more labourers were needed (especially women) for sowing, weeding and harvesting. Cotton was a particularly labour-intensive crop, and thus the few farmers who undertook cotton production needed many workers. It should be noted that in the Tuli Block the situation was more complex than Ghanzi because the labour needs of farms varied greatly, with some farms being sites of both cash crop production and ranching, while others largely concentrated on cattle ranching (Croston 1993:276). In Ghanzi labour involved predominantly cattle related activities because the area was dry sandveld, and not suitable for crop production. It was largely from the late 1940s to the 1960s that farmers required labourers to carry out specialised tasks. This was caused by the growing and changing needs of agricultural production, which, in some cases, required special technology. Hence labourers with special skills such as tractor drivers or those with knowledge of veterinary science were employed (Croston 1993:276). The Tuli Block farmers also began to use irrigation technology and (later) harvesters, which needed specially trained workers. It is in this light that one should read the 1951 resident commissioners report, which referred to a farmer having trained his natives, (apt pupils as they were described) to work a mechanical milking plant. He had also taught his herdsmen how to run and repair pumping machinery (BNA S.224/5). Workers with specialised training in cattle vaccination were also employed on farms in this decade (Croston 1993:276). In the late 1950s and early 1960s some farmers in the Tuli Block had advanced to such an extent that they employed specialised cooks to feed the large numbers of farm labourers working over long periods on duties such as weeding and harvesting. In some enterprises, there were also specialised labourers for washing clothes, house cleaning and, sometimes, for gardening (Croston 1993:278). Workers had been used domestically in the earlier period, but at that time, they had carried out numerous other tasks and had not concentrated specically on domestic work.
Such a degree of specialisation and change did not take place in Ghanzi. Cattle herding did not require many specialised functions and economically the Ghanzi farmers were not on the same plane as their counterparts in the Tuli Block. However, in the late 1950s, some of the labourers in Ghanzi also started operating water-boring machines. Moreover, the type of labourers needed tended to differ in the two areas. The Tuli Block needed a sizeable amount of women labourers because of crop cultivation, while Ghanzi labour was predominantly male due to it being mainly required for ranching, with a few women performing domestic duties. Labourers engaged in crop cultivation in the Tuli Block had more bargaining power because of the farmers need for them during seasonally crucial periods. It has been observed that such labourers were paid slightly more than those engaged in other jobs (Croston 1993:263). The difference between the Tuli Block and Ghanzi was that farmers in the former employed many women and children as seasonal labourers in crop production, while at Ghanzi labour was largely male and adult. These different labour needs further indicate how the African division of labour was carried into the freehold farming regimes.
Conditions of work
a) Employment contracts and treatment of labourers
It has been observed that conditions of work in the farms of Southern Africa were largely abysmal. Evidence from early twentieth century Botswana indicates that the employment of farm labourers did not involve any formal or written contracts. The method of recruitment was that a farmer could send some of his workers to nd labourers for him, or he might venture into a village and look for interested people. A villager in the peripheral areas of the Tuli Block or Ghanzi might also go to a farm and offer his/her services, sometimes accompanied by one of those already working on the farm. Julia Croston describes the situation as having been very causal with no documentation whatsoever to identify the labourer (1993:287). An effective recruiting strategy was, according to Mazonde, centred on the familial networks of African families. By this system, employees on a farm were used to acquire new seasonal and permanent wage labourers who were in most cases relatives and friends of the existing employees (Mazonde1991:84). The farmers clearly trusted the workers they sent out as scouts, who would have been employees of long service and good record. There was no written agreement on the duties a labourer was going to perform, how she/he would be remunerated, nor how other aspects of work (such as leave and duration of employment) would be regulated. Labourers would simply be told what they would be doing and how much they would receive in terms of pay. This, however, does not mean that workers would not be called upon to perform other duties something which was to the advantage of the farmers who could utilise labourers fully by requesting them to switch to different jobs as required.
The contract or agreement that was entered into between freehold farmers and their labourers continued to be very casual in the period after 1930 and remained so (according to oral testimony collected) up to independence and beyond. Xaabae Xashe of Ghanzi put it thus: Ga go kwalwe sepe sepe le gone jaanong jaan. (There is nothing nothing written even now now.) According to Samson Banda of Lerala in the Tuli Block periphery: Tumalano ya eng? O bolelelwa tiro le madi. O a dumela kana o a gana. (What agreement? You are told your job and pay. You accept or refuse) (Interviews: Xashe 1994; Banda 1994). The contract hardly involved anything beside the spoken word. There were rare instances where a written agreement was struck, but in most instances the process was verbal. Informants who worked in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s in both Ghanzi and the Tuli Block maintain that there was no agreement with their employers on working hours and other terms of service such as leave, sick leave, termination of contracts, compensation for injuries or pensions. George Silberbauer has also found that the period of service was not stipulated by either of the contracting parties, they depended rather on mutual satisfaction: If the labourer dislikes the employer, he leaves and if the employer nds the worker unsatisfactory, he summarily dismisses him (Silberbauer 1965:118). Although the situation just described pertained to Ghanzi, it was probably also prevalent in the Tuli Block because interviewees mention how labourers were dismissed for no apparent reason. This arrangement (of summary departure or dismissal) could theoretically favour either party, depending on the circumstances. However, it was obviously biased towards the farmers who were, after all, the payers of wages. And in a situation of surplus labour such as Ghanzi, a farmer could dismiss a worker quite easily, while in the Tuli Block, the fragile nature of some crops meant farmers had to adopt a cautious approach. The situation also favoured farmers who preferred not to pay their labourers their due wages on dismissal. In addition, if either party could violate the verbal contract in most cases it was the labourer who suffered because it was difcult to redress any wrong committed by the employer. According to a former long-term serving labourer, Go ne go sena boikuelo fa leburu le go kobile. (There was no appeal if a Boer dismissed you.) (Interview: Lemme 1994). From the early 1900s, when Batswana started working for white farmers, there was (and still is) no legislation stipulating that farmers and their employees should enter into any written agreements. The administrators regarded agricultural labourers as insignicant and it was even stated that Botswana and other High Commission Territories were not covered by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) rulings on agricultural labour (BNA S.575/3). More attention was paid to documenting migrant labour, and sections dealing with farm labour in annual reports merely provided approximations on the numbers of agricultural wage labourers and wage estimates. On the other hand, in South Africa, Alide Kooy noted that in most Karoo farms there were exible arrangements about
sick leave on farms. Some farmers held that they paid full wages for a few weeks, while others paid full wages indenitely in cases of genuine illness. Other farmers also recognised incapacity resulting from accidents at the workplace. Conditions also varied from farm to farm and they were also determined by the attitude of the farmer (Kooy 1977:105). Whilst conditions also varied from farm to farm in Botswana, it seems the situation in South Africa was more formal and it recognised critical aspects of the labourers welfare such as leave, although enforcement was a different matter. This difference could be explained by the earlier industrialisation of South Africa where commercial agriculture became a critical component of the economy earlier than in Botswana. As for workers rights, agricultural wage labourers, as distinct from any other wage earners, have been the most politically neglected in colonial and postcolonial Botswana. It was only in 2006 that proposals for a minimum wage were made in parliament. Furthermore, agrarian workers do not enjoy the rights enjoyed by other workers in mining, industry and the civil service such as sick leave, old age pensions, insurance and workmans compensation. The pitiful state in which some of the subject [Basarwa] people of Botswana (the so-called serfs), who formed the majority of agricultural wage labourers, found themselves in some of the reserves in the 1930s has been the subject of a study by Michael Crowder and Suzanne Miers. These writers describe the type of relationship that existed between Batswana and their servants especially the Basarwa, who were in effect owned by the Bangwato. The serfs were inheritable and lacked rights to own property, to represent themselves or bring their masters to court and they were tied to their masters in an almost slave-like situation. Miers and Crowder describe how the colonial government gradually eroded this situation (Crowder and Miers 1988:172200).
b) Management and supervision
In the management of farms and daily supervision in the two areas, some farmers employed farm managers who were initially whites although Africans were employed in the later period to run the farms and supervise labourers. Sometimes, however, the owner managed the farm himself. The farm foreman, when he was African, usually came from a different ethnic group from that of the labourers. In fact, one reason for this practice was to ensure rmer control of labourers by dividing them from overseers along ethnic lines (Croston 1993:283; Silberbauer 1965:118). Certainly, on the Ghanzi farms supervisors were, in most cases, Bakgalagadi or Baherero presiding over Basarwa. The supervisors were thus mostly from a superior morafe. Interviewees maintain that the supervisors were strict and the baas (boss) applied the sjambok (hide whip) on numerous occasions. The klap (a blow delivered with the backhand) former labourers called it the Kafr clap was also administered when one was accused of not working hard enough. Women maintain that they were sometimes beaten in front of their husbands, and when the latter complained, they too would be beaten (Interviews: Shiko, Paul and Lemme 1994).
A similar situation was reported in the Bethel district of South Africa where, throughout the working day, labourers had to work hard and were continuously urged to push hard. Here also, the native foreman, and frequently white overseer, riding a horse followed behind the gangs of eld hands, invariably with whips or some instrument in their hand (Murray 1997:79). On many farms of South Africa, farmers determined punishment that could be ogging with a sjambok or, in some instances, even the murder of a worker. Here, the perpetrator would be charged for the lesser offence of common assault (Marcus 1989:50). Thus, the physical abuse of farm workers was a common feature in the freehold farms of Botswana and South Africa. It is obvious that such practices could affect labour supply and, in 1957, the district commissioner at Machaneng in the Tuli Block stated that although labour was generally easy to obtain, he regretted that a gradual deterioration in [the] master-servant relationship was causing the supply of farm labour to decrease in proportion to its demand (BNA S.568/6). The district commissioners statement implies that labour shortage on the farms was constructed from below, that is, by labourers who tended to avoid those masters who were harsh. This situation was somewhat similar to that which was reported in the Transvaal at the turn of the century where the most energetic farmers and harsher landlords had difculties in obtaining labour (Krikler 1993:214). Much of the work on freehold farms was intensive and strenuous. My informants in the Tuli Block maintain that the planting, care, and harvesting of groundnuts was a laborious and heavy task. The women tell of working from sunrise to sunset, only stopping for a midday meal. Labourers spoke of the omnipresence of the master throughout the working day, and of labourers who dared to rest for fear of being reprimanded (Interviews: Shiko, Paul and Lemme 1994). Samson Banda relates how: Babereki ba ba neng ba tlhelwa ba ikhuditse nako le nako ba ne ba bilediwa kwa khichining mme leburu le ba betse tota. (Workers who were found resting were time and again summoned to the kitchen where the Boer would really beat them.) (Interview: Banda 1994). Interviewees who worked in different decades in the Tuli Block constantly referred to the existence of physical punishment, other forms of harsh treatment, and the arduousness of the labour: the weeding and harvesting, usually done by women, were exhausting tasks and the usual working day was excessive (Interview: Banda 1994; Croston 1993:276). In Ghanzi too, labourers were engaged in heavy work, with the branding of cattle, cutting of poles for fencing and bush clearance obviously involving much physical exertion. Moreover in Ghanzi, the trekking of cattle along the long and sandy Ghanzi/Lobatse road was not only strenuous, but also dangerous, since it was the site of attacks by lions upon attendant workers (Silberbauer 1965:118). This arduous working situation prevailed in most farms in southern Africa. Crush and Jeeves relate that labour relations on southern African farms and mines were
characterised by violence and brutality. They aptly capture the mood thus, White farms were places of unrelenting cruelty (Crush and Jeeves 1997:25). Martin Murray presents the working conditions graphically in the maize belt of the Bethal district from 1910 to the 1950s when he states that there was rigid regimentation of the working day. Farm work was backbreaking labour that, depending upon time of the year, went from 5.00 a.m. till after 7.00 p.m. Workers were organised into gangs to accelerate the pace of work and the old, young and sick had to keep pace with others. The foreman frequently withheld the wages of those who could not keep the pace and complete their quota. Labourers worked with hand-held instruments and animals were used for heavy work. Murray sums up the situation thus: A corollary to a labour regime that depended principally upon sweat and labour and primitive tools was the extensive use of force and violence (Murray 1997:79). On the Ghanzi and Tuli Block farms, the working hours were not xed and varied with the type of work and the season. Some duties, such as fencing and building, usually took about eight hours per day, but the jobs that were regular on the farms rarely involved a labourer for more than four hours a day (Silberbauer 1965:119). What seems to have occurred, however, was that after a labourer had completed a regular job for the day, he or she would be asked to carry on with other outstanding farm work. Existing farm labour was fully utilised and this enabled farmers to avoid further expense on additional labourers. Similarly, as late as the 1970s in the Karoo farms Alide Kooy found that farm labourers were exposed to long working hours. The farm owners defended this situation by arguing that farm labour was not similar to working in the manufacturing industry, construction or mining. To them, work began and ended with the sun and the hours of work were determined by the kind of work. They maintained that farming was a twenty-four hour a day job, and seven days a week for both the farmer and his workers. Kooy comments that:
This idea, that the worker is on duty at all times and can be called from his house at any time if there is a crisis on the farm or a job to be nished urgently, has important implications. It means that the worker cannot control his own leisure, far less his work (1977:104)
In Ghanzi, physical punishment and other forms of ill treatment were more pronounced than in the Tuli Block throughout the period under study, especially punishment meted out to Basarwa labourers. This situation was made possible by the remoteness of Ghanzi, which was without district ofcers for many years during this period. Basarwa were not accustomed to the labour rhythm of commercial cattle keeping, and the farmers sought to get them used to it rapidly (and often violently) to effect rapid progress on their new farms. Similarly, in the South African sugar, cotton and wattle plantations of Natal and the citrus farms of the Transvaal, mistreatment of farm labourers was rampart. Here, labour relations remained primitive for a long time. Labourers worked in mealie sacks from dawn to dusk and some farmers even extended this period into the night. They forced workers
to begin work before daylight and to continue after sunset and even to work on Sundays. Labourers had their meagre wages withheld if they were ever paid and the wages were also frequently reduced to cover the cost of pass fees, transportation and recruitment (Crush and Jeeves 1997:25; Murray 1997:79). Interestingly, in Ghanzi the white farmers adopted in regard to their labourers some ` of the practices of the Batswana vis-a-vis their Basarwa serfs. Thus, before the fencing of farms, white farmers in Ghanzi kept cattle in the cattle post system, in a way very similar to the Batswana. In this system, cattle supervised by Basarwa herd boys were let loose during the day and kraaled at night. These Basarwa herders were treated abysmally, with District Commissioner Sinclair in the late 1930s lamenting that: The circumstances of the employment of Bushmen on cattle posts are deplorable. They could fairly justly be described as domestic slavery. In the same period, the district commissioner (with seeming exaggeration) reported that: Relations between Europeans and natives [i.e. non Bushmen Africans] are good and the attitude of most Europeans to their native employees is benevolently paternal (BNA DCGH 3/5). Notwithstanding the exaggeration, what seems to emerge is that the masters were harsher to Basarwa labourers as compared to Bakgalagadi and Bahereo, and this must in part have resulted from pre-existing relationships amongst Bantu speaking Africans and Basarwa. As to the treatment of labourers, that of Basarwa was particularly severe. Interviewees from both the Basarwa and Bakgalagadi ethnic groups mention several instances where Basarwa labourers were severely beaten and tied to trees. Xarae Daosha displayed scars from whippings, and another man only known as Xam also showed scars, which he said had resulted from whippings on the farms. Other interviewees referred to instances (that prevailed until recently) in which they would be perched on top of trucks to ensure the safety of cattle being transported along the 600-kilometre road to the Lobatse abattoir (Interviews: Serole and Daosha 1994). The harsh treatment of Basarwa labourers prevailed for the whole period under study; it has continued up until recent times as evidenced by the testimonies of labourers who were recently employed, and can be seen in the results of two surveys carried out in the 1970s and early 1980s (Childers 1976:92; Mogalakwe 1986:25).2 As indicated, the Bakgalagadi and Baherero workers were not subjected to such brutal treatment and this was largely because they were regarded as ethnically superior to Basarwa. The working conditions on freehold farms in Botswana were poor and they have continued to be so in the postcolonial period. In spite of these conditions and the sometimes brutal treatment meted out to them, many labourers i.e. the nonseasonal ones remained on farms. However, because they were bafaladi, the socioeconomic and political hierarchies of Botswanas society gave them inferior status. Thus, although bafaladi were welcome to settle on land belonging to the other merafe, including those who had earlier welcomed them, they were expected to pay allegiance to their hosts and were not on an equal footing with them in
respect of key rights, such as that to land. There is little doubt that the overlordship of the superior merafe was a source of concern for the bafaladi: the Babirwa disliked both British and Ngwato imperialism after losing the Tuli Block to the British South Africa Company and preferred to remain on settler farms and offer their labour to the new masters (Croston 1993:291-295). Similarly, the Basarwa could not leave the farms and stay amongst the Bakgalagadi because the latter would assign them duties as herd boys, while in most cases not giving them any better rights to land than that which they had on settler farms. The nature of labourers as bafaladi served the interests of farmers because they were utilising workers who, having few options, had to provide cheap labour. Bafaladi remained attached to their ancestral lands even after these had been parcelled out to white farmers. Not surprisingly, the labourers found it difcult to appeal to any authority for help when they had problems with farmers. To take an example: the headmen of Babirwa and Batswapong who worked in the Tuli Block were nominally under Bangwato chiefs, and it would have been difcult for the former to appeal to the latter because of the historical animosity between the two merafe. It was also, as one interviewer put it thata thata go repota lekgoa mo go le lengwe (very very difcult to report a white man to another white man) (Banda 1994), that is, for instance, to report a freehold farmer to the district commissioner. This was both for fear of reprisals and the belief that a white ofcial would never reprimand a fellow white man. Neither could labourers readily present their grievances to their headmen because employers could humiliatingly chastise them in front of the headmen (Interviews: Motlalamadi and Tlhalefang 1994). Thus there was little workers could do to have their grievances addressed. In such conditions, ight or resignation to ones fate were the usual options. Flight or avoiding harsh farmers should be seen here as a weapon employed by labourers against the powerful farmers.
Shelter and remuneration For shelter, labourers in Ghanzi and the Tuli Block tended to provide for themselves by constructing thatched wattle and daub huts. Even most of the regular farm labourers in the Tuli Block who resided on the farms constructed their sleeping quarters in the form of rough shacks made from empty grain sacks (Croston 1993:265). Former labourers speak of having used poles, mud and old discarded iron sheets to make what they called mekhukhu (Interviews: Motlalamadi and Tlhalefang 1994). In fact, shelter for farm labourers has only made modest improvements since the 1930s, as demonstrated by the fact that, as recently as 1981, a survey in Ghanzi found that about sixty per cent of the workers lived in hovels and shacks (Mogalakwe 1986:25), and that accommodation for workers in the Tuli Block was made from sacks and old corrugated iron sheets (Croston 1993:265; Maruatona 1988:30). Thus, generally, it would appear that accommodation for farm labour in Botswana farms was sub-standard.
The question of remuneration on the freehold farms is a complex one. The wages paid labourers differed from farm to farm and the available records only offer approximations of them. Some of the employers gave rations in addition to wages, and this also makes it difcult to nd out the precise magnitude of remuneration. The value of rations in most instances was not detailed, and the frequency with which rations were given also varied markedly from farm to farm. There are other hurdles in trying to assess wages. Some of the former workers interviewed could not remember the exact amounts they were paid, or the precise periods in which they were paid specic wages. The situation concerning payment of wages in the 1930s and 1940s in Ghanzi is unclear. Some reports indicate that some wages, however low, were paid, while others maintain that no monetary wage was paid at all. In 1937 one rather prejudiced ofcial in Ghanzi stated that the majority of Bushmen received shirts, blankets, milk and tobacco in lieu of wages because it was pointless to give them money, since they allegedly did not know its value:
They do not receive cash wages, but clothes to the approximate value of in many cases from 3 to 5 per annum, as much milk as they want, and rations of mealies when milk is scarce. When given money, the Bakgalagadi dispossess them in exchange for trash or dagga. (BNA S.182/5)
Remuneration also depended on the whims of farmers, making it difcult to construct averages. However, despite these difculties, comments by colonial ofcials on wages, the views expressed by former labourers, and the existing scholarship enable us to draw some conclusions. In general, studies of farm labour in Botswana agree that labourers were overworked and under-remunerated (Croston 1993:263278; Maruatona 1988; Mgadla 1976:19 36). However, farmers engaged in commercial crop production had to pay slightly better wages if they were to avoid shortages of labour, which did occur at times in the Tuli Block (Croston 1993:263). What is certain, however, is that wages on the protectorates farms remained below those paid to farm labourers in the Transvaal Province of South Africa (Croston 1993:280), and although wages for cultivators might have been slightly higher than those for other labourers, the difference was not signicant. As the above statement shows, while the Bantu speakers received some wages, Basarwa in Ghanzi were only paid in kind, because of their ethnicity, which condemned them to the status of serfs in Botswanas society. Labourers in the Tuli Block were in a better position as compared to their counterparts at Ghanzi since they could also work on the other side of the border in the Transvaal where better wages were paid. The ofcial reports indicate what was considered to have been the general level of wages and, for some years, they reveal the difference between wages paid to Africans and whites. The estimates provided in colonial annual reports regarding the general wage levels in the country, and the gures or estimates
provided by ofcials from areas such as Ghanzi, differ in some cases. I have used some of the scant and varying ofcial data available to construct Table 1. From Table 1 it can be seen that if ofcial records are reliable then there were some signicant wage increases for Africans in the 1940s. Wage increases could have been due to labour competition arising from the opening of new mines in South Africa, or the higher wage levels prevailing in the neighbouring Transvaal after the Depression, which compelled farmers to increase the wages for farm labourers in Botswana. Most of the European employees, it would appear, were managers or supervisors, while the Africans were general labourers, and the wage differentials between them were extremely wide, with the remuneration structure heavily discriminating against African labourers. It might also be noted that, in the Tuli Block, wage levels appear to have been far below the national averages, as is suggested by Table 2. Evidence from the Tuli Block suggests that, once more, wages and fringe benets differed for Europeans and Africans. In 1959 the district commissioner at Machaneng, who had jurisdiction over the Tuli Block area, reported that in addition to their wages, European employees got free farm produce and often a share in the prots. The African general labourers, cattle herders and foremen on the other hand received from 30s to 5 a month and some food (BNA S.577/6). The picture generally therefore, is one of severe racial discrimination and also indicates disparities between ofcial records, which in some cases show relatively high wages for Africans, such as 5 per month, and those found in the oral sources provided by Croston, which indicate levels to have risen from 1 in the 1940s to 3 in the 1950s and 1960s. Although it is difcult to state what could have been an appropriate wage, it appears the general picture was that of low wages for farm workers in the period under study. For much of this period, farmers in the Tuli Block also operated stores and provided rations for labourers. Some of the rations were from the farmers own stores, while others were produced on the farm. The rations included items such as coffee, tea and sugar, and, at times, beasts might be slaughtered for labourers (Croston 1993:265). However, rations given to underpaid workers probably served the interests of the farmers because they ensured the physical strength of
Table 1. General wage levels in Botswana Years 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s Wage (Europeans) 60 320 per annum 96 240 per annum 15 40 (per month) N/A Wage (Africans) 6 14 per annum 12 24 per annum 4 per month 4 per month
Source: Blue Books 1931 1945, and BNB 41-50. BP Colonial Annual Reports, 1950 1960
Table 2. Wage levels in the Tuli Block, Botswana Years 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s Wage per month (African labourers) 1 (about 4s in some cases) 1 (about 17s 9d in some cases) 2 (Europeans 15 40) 3
Source: This table was constructed from data provided by Julie Croston 1993:265 281
the labourers (Mazonde 1991:84). Although they supplemented low pay in instances where they were handed out regularly, rations could also have been used to depress money wages. There were also labourers who resided permanently in the Tuli Block, and who were allowed to keep a certain number of stock and (sometimes) cultivate a plot. These seem to have received lower cash wages (Interviews: Motlalamadi and Banda 1994). It was not possible to establish at any point the number of workers, permanent or not, who were accorded rights to land, or the amount of land so allocated. Normally, one was told not to graze cattle beyond a certain area, and also instructed not to allow stock to mix with the employers cattle (Interview: Malapela 1994). This makes it difcult to draw conclusions as to how widespread the practice of allowing labourers to use land was, and what its precise effect on the freehold farming system was. In Ghanzi, the situation concerning remuneration was in some ways different from that in the Tuli Block. At a session of the European Advisory Council (EAC) in 1939, the government secretary informed members that the usual practice in Ghanzi was to employ a Damara or Herero herd boy to preside over a varying number of Bushmen who supervised anything from 150 to 1,400 cattle. The herd boy got about 10s to 15s, while the Bushmen cowherds received rations, milk and an annual pay in the form of an item such as a blanket, shirt, coat, or a pair of trousers (BP EAC 1939). The government secretary was here echoing a statement similar to that made by an administration ofcial at Ghanzi in 1937, and despite knowledge of the prevalence of such a situation by senior colonial ofcials, they did not take any concrete action to remedy this situation of abysmal remuneration, and it amounted to blatant exploitation and abuse of farm workers. This further reinforces the argument that Basarwa were under-remunerated and exploited because of their ethnicity and servile status in Botswana. The labour and life situation of Basarwa also deteriorated over time. There were few farmers in the 1930s and 1940s, the farms were not yet fenced, and Basarwa had some access to land. But, a new wave of immigrant white farmers arrived in the early 1950s and extended to the settlement area. The new farms had been advertised in newspapers in South Africa where they were described as lucrative vacant land. Incentives to develop the farms were also offered for those who
wished to take up the offers. This area was occupied by Basarwa (Russell and Russell 1979:94). This settlement exacerbated the expropriation of valuable hunting, gathering and grazing land, turning more Basarwa into squatters on their traditional land (Thapelo 2003:96). In the 1950s and early 1960s, Afrikaner nationalism started asserting itself in Ghanzi as Afrikaners called for the removal of Basarwa squatters from their farms, as well as the Bantu speakers on the periphery of the farming area. The farmers declared that Ghanzi district belonged to them (Russell and Russell 1979:2021). During this period the farmers preferred employing the Bantu speakers as against Basarwa, driving the latter into deeper misery. Whereas conditions for the Basarwa were progressively deteriorating, those of the now preferred Bantu groups were improving, as commercialisation of agriculture gathered momentum. The Bantu speakers in both farming areas had access to land in communal areas and hence the possibilities of accumulation by engaging in both crop production and livestock keeping. They could thus be accorded better working conditions because they could withdraw their labour and subsist on their own production. This could have adverse effects on farmers especially during peak seasons such as harvest time. On the other hand, Basarwa were squatters on farms with no access to land and no possibilities of accumulation and maintaining an independent subsistence. With increased range degradation due to an increase in livestock population, even foraging became difcult. Hence they depended on the whims of the farmers and could do nothing to better their working conditions. The wage situation in Ghanzi was the least attractive in part because, unlike their counterparts in the Tuli Block, farmers here did not compete for labour with the mines or industries. The Basarwa were the main source of labour on Ghanzi farms during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. It is likely that fewer of them were needed once fencing of the farms began in the mid-1950s and there was no longer any need to employ large numbers of herders to keep cattle from straying. For the labourers, the situation must have been bleak because the reduction in the availability of farm employment was not compensated by the availability of land or better wage opportunities elsewhere. The Basarwa, who had played a crucial role as cheap labourers in ensuring the prosperity of white farmers, were now losing their positions to Bantu groups, notably Bakgalagadi and Baherero who were experienced cattle keepers (Silberbauer 1965:118). In instances where Basarwa did receive wages, they were the lowest in the agricultural sector in Botswana. In 1954, the district commissioner informed the government secretary that the average wage paid to a Mosarwa labourer it was estimated that there were then about 12,000 Basarwa living in the freehold farming area (BNA S.556/11) was about 1, though sometimes it ranged from half to double this gure (BNA S.556/6). However, wages of 1 and 2 per month would have been rare, and it was extremely rare for wages in Ghanzi, and especially those for Basarwa, to have been equal to wages paid in
areas such as the Tuli Block. The most plausible gure is that provided by a concerned district commissioner in 1955, who complained about the lowness of the 10s monthly wage paid to Bushmen in Ghanzi (BNA S.116/5). However, despite inconsistencies in pay levels, and in the regularity with which payments were made, it seems there was a steady trend towards payment of monetary wages, however low, in the late 1950s and the 1960s (BNA S.116/5). This situation seems to have been brought about by the commercialisation of agriculture that was taking place at the time, and by the imposition of taxation on Basarwa by the colonial government. In fact, the payment of taxes by Basarwa, and not their welfare, was the main concern of the administration ofcials. In 1954, District Commissioner EH Midgley stipulated that Bushmen who had not hitherto done so were to pay tax. Those of the Basarwa who owned stock, or those earning 1 or more per month, would pay the normal 1 8s basic tax plus 5s or more graded tax. Those who did not own any stock, were unemployed, or working for irregular periods would pay a graded tax of 5s per annum, while non stock-owners in regular employment earning less than 1 per month were to pay the basic tax of 1 8s (BNA S.116/5).3 This imposition of tax was a further burden on a community that was already impoverished by land alienation to white settlers. The wage situation of the Basarwa labourers in the Ghanzi freehold farms was, indeed, a miserable one. Compared to other agricultural labourers elsewhere, they were in a desperate situation, one vividly described by the district commissioner in a dispatch to the government secretary in 1955:
I have been concerned to make Bushmen wage conscious. Ive been collecting graded tax and in some cases basic tax. Some farmers object saying they have never paid a wage or given a regular ration. Ninety percent of stock thieves were employees who claim that they have worked as much as fteen years for Mr Burton and have never been paid a wage. Payment has only been a blanket, a coat or shirt or shorts a year, a bag of mealies perhaps once a year and a handful of tobacco once weekly. (BNA S.116/5)
He continued to lament that these slave labourers lived mostly on milk at the cattle posts of Burton, a man who owned about 15,000 head of cattle and who was reputed to be one of the richest men in the country (BNA S.116/5). Throughout the 1930s to the 1950s, the colonial government recognised that Basarwa were oppressed, and the fact that they could not do anything about it shows that they served the interests of the ruling classes, both white and Bantu. The position of the Basarwa was not to improve with the growth and expansion of ranching activities in Ghanzi. Indeed, with the gradual introduction of new technologies and the spread of commercial agriculture, the condition of the Basarwa labourers and even the squatters deteriorated. By 1964, it was estimated that of the 4,000 Basarwa living in the freehold farming area of Ghanzi (Silberbauer 1965:118), few remained as labourers, and the wages of those who did so
varied from R1.10 to R6 per month, the average wage being R3 with a ration of mealie meal, meat, tobacco, salt and sometimes tea, coffee, and sugar (the South African currency, used in Botswana, changed in 1961 to the decimal rand). Silberbauer estimates that the value of rations was about R5 per month at the maximum (1965:118). However, rations were irregular and differed from farm to farm and even pay was not regular (Childers 1976:92; Mogalakwe 1986:15 31; Morapedi 1989:14 21). The ofcial data on rations and wages was probably supplied by those white farmers who paid their labourers. Some farmers were astounded by a call in the 1950s that they should pay their labourers monetary wages, a clear indication that on many farms the adoption of wage payments was a painfully slow process. One must note, however, a few instances where labourers were given better remuneration, including in-kind payments. Some relatively considerate farmers effectively pensioned old labourers off by continuing to feed and clothe them as well as giving them money periodically. Labourers viewed as hardworking were given bonuses in the form of livestock, although this practice was less widespread than Silberbauer supposed:
In addition to wages, rations . . . most farmers have the practice of giving regular bonuses of small stock to labourers who prove satisfactory. A few Bushmen have kept these and have built up fair-sized herds, which they are permitted to graze and water on their employers farms, but the majority are less far sighted and eat the animals as soon as they are received. (1965:119)
Silberbauers interpretation of the immediate consumption of the animals does not take into account the fact that Basarwa were short of food. After the farms were fenced, it was no longer possible for them to hunt, and the increase in livestock was gradually making foraging difcult for them. Moreover, the extermination of game on the farms meant that Basarwa could not supplement their rations from that source (Silberbauer 1965:118). Little wonder, then, that bonus livestock was so often immediately slaughtered. Some Bakgalagadi and Baherero interviewees admit to building herds from their bonuses, but they state that the grazing of the livestock (the numbers of which were limited) on the farmers land was considered part of their pay (Interview: Serole 1994), thus diminishing the value of the bonus. These were workers who came from villages far from the farms, but they had access to land in the communal areas so the accumulation of stock, which might later be taken home, was an option available to them that was not open to the Basarwa. What is difcult is the calculation of the value of these practices to the labourers. Although it may appear that there was a tinge of paternalism in the relations between farmers and labourers in Ghanzi, this was nowhere near the close paternalistic attitude between Kas Maine and white farmers as portrayed by Charles van Onselen (1996). The wage differentials and other conditions of work in the two farming areas was also a result of class differentials in the white farming community. In Ghanzi,
many of the whites in the 1930s and 1940s and even those who came later were described as poor whites who had to be assisted by being given cheap property (land) (Russell and Russell 1979:34 35), while in the Tuli Block, the farmers were, from an early stage, a well established commercial bourgeoisie. Most were absentee landlords who either had many other farms in the Transvaal, or held political and administrative positions in the cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg. Many of them also operated trading stores in the reserves or at their farms. They had easy access to markets across the border in South Africa and could utilise the developed infrastructure there. The farmers took advantage of this situation, which Mazonde terms Bordermanship (1987:456). They could thus afford to pay better wages than their counterparts at Ghanzi who were about 700 miles away from South Africa and experienced marketing problems.
Conclusion This comparative study on freehold farm labour in the Tuli Block and Ghanzi areas of Botswana has revealed the complexities of the labour process in the two areas. Although there were numerous similarities such as abysmal remuneration of labourers, brutal and violent treatment and poor living conditions in those areas, the study shows that there were ethnic, economic and social factors that resulted in the Basarwa labourers being the worst affected. The ecological differences between Ghanzi and the Tuli Block meant that the two had different labour needs, as the Tuli Block needed labourers in both crop production and the cattle sector, which meant a sizeable number of women, while Ghanzi labour was predominantly male engaged in cattle activities. The Tuli Block was also economically advanced and its proximity to South Africa enabled a commercial bourgeoisie to emerge, which could pay its labourers better and adopt more specialised production techniques, while Ghanzi lagged behind. The displacement of Basarwa created a pool of squatters who had no option but to provide cheap labour on the farms. Their super-exploitation on the farms also emanated from the pre-existing social systems of Botswana, which accorded them servile status. The two cases show opposite ends of Botswana, not only in geography, but also in society. In the Tuli Block there was development and labourers had some options. In Ghanzi, the worst sort of white South African farm exploitation had been glued on to the worst features of indigenous Botswana ethnic discrimination and the result was something close to slavery. Further detailed case studies on the relationships that existed in different farms could reveal more interesting scenarios.
Notes 1. The white settler farming blocks of Tuli Block, Gaborone and Lobatse were lands ceded to the British South Africa Company (BSAC) to build a railway line by Batswana dikgosi (chiefs) in the 1890s. The Ghanzi farming area was ceded to the BSAC to settle white farmers after Cecil
Rhodes had failed to acquire Bechuanaland, and the Tati area was carved out for white settlement in 1911. 2. Interviews with William Babish, 10 December 1994 and Rakanang Mabung, 6 December 1994. They emphasised the fact that they knew of many incidents of ill treatment of workers from the 1940s to the present. In the 1930s, the fact that the district commissioner showed concern by stating that the condition of Basarwa on farms could be described as domestic slavery indicates that ill treatment was prevalent then. 3. Resident Commissioner to High Commissioner, 11 April 1957. Later the district commissioner informed the government secretary that, there appears to have been a slight improvement in wages paid to Bushman in the Ghanzi district. Newcomers to the district have been prepared to pay higher wages and the oldtimers are coming round very slowly to their obligations, 23 September 1957. Newcomers were those farmers who moved in after the advertisement and sale of new farms in the 1950s. The district commissioners statement is difcult to conrm since the records are imprecise and his report was based largely on what farmers told him.
References
Childers, G. 1976. Report on the Survey Investigation of Ghanzi Farm Basarwa Situation. Gaborone: Government Printer. Croston, J. 1993. An Economic and Social History of the Freehold Land Tenure Districts of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), 19031966. PhD thesis, Boston University. Crowder, M. and Miers, S. 1988. The Politics of Slavery in Botswana: Power Struggles and the Plight of Basarwa in the Bangwato Reserve, 1926 1940, in S. Miers and A. Roberts (eds), The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Crush, J. and Jeeves, A. 1997. Introduction, in Crush and Jeeves (eds). Crush, J. and Jeeves, A. (eds). 1997. White Farms, Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa, 1910-1950. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 1 28. Kooy, A. 1977. Farm Labour in the Karoo, in M. Wilson, D. Hendrie and A. Kooy (eds), Farm Labour in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Krikler, J. 1993. Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcus, T. 1989. Modernising Super-Exploitation: Restructuring South African Agriculture. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. Maruatona, T. 1988. A Historical Analysis of the Conditions of Farm Labourers in the Tuli Block, 1930 1975. BA dissertation, University of Botswana. Mazonde, I. 1987. The Development of Ranching and Economic Enterprise in Eastern Botswana. PhD thesis, University of Manchester. 1991. Social Networks in the Social Enterprise: A Study of Life-worlds of Farmers in Eastern Botswana. Unpublished manuscript.
Mgadla, P. 1976. A History of the Town and Area of Lobatse from Pre-colonial Times to 1975. BA dissertation, University of Botswana. Mogalakwe, M. 1986. Inside Ghanzi Freehold Farms: A Look at the Conditions of Farm Workers. Gaborone: Government Printer. Morapedi, W. 1989. The Boer Trekker Settlement in Ghanzi and its Impact on Indigenous People 1898 1966. BA dissertation, University of Botswana. Murray, M. 1997. Factories in the Field: Capitalist Farming in the Bethel District c.1910 1950, in Crush and Jeeves (eds), pp. 75 93. Russell, Margo and Russell, Martin. 1979. Afrikaners of the Kalahari: A White Minority in a Black State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silbarbeuer, G. 1965. Report to the Government of the Bechuanaland Protectorate on the Bushmen Survey. Gaborone: Government Printer. Thapelo, T. 2003. Public Policy and San Displacement in Liberal Democratic Botswana. PULA, Botswana Journal of African Studies 17(2):93 104. Van Onselen, Charles. 1996. The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894 1985. Oxford: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Archival sources
BNA S.(Botswana National Archives, Secretariat Files)564/12, Annual Report, Ghanzi District 1956. BNA S.224/5, Resident Commissioners Tours, 2951. BNA S.575/3, International Conventions, ILO Convention 101. BNA S.568/6, Annual Report, District Commissioner Machaneng 1957. BNA S.182/5, Handing over Report, Ghanzi District 1937. BNA S.577/6, Annual Report, Tuli Block 1959. BNA S. 556/6, Annual Report, District Commissioners Reports 1940 1960. BNA S.556/11, Annual Report, Ghanzi District 1954. BNA S.116/5, International Conventions, Fixing of Minimum Wages. Cases dealt with under Proclamation 20. BNA DCGH 3/5, Note from District Commissioners Ofce. BP EAC, Bechuanaland Protectorate, Minutes of the European Advisory Council 1939.
Oral interviews Lerala (Tuli Block), 4 December 1994: Mr Banda
Mr Motlalamadi Mr Tlhalefang Mr Malapela Mrs Shiko Mrs Paul Mrs Lemme Ghanzi, 10 December 1994: Mr Serole Mr Xhashe Mr Daosha
Out of Time: The National Union of Metalworkers Pursuit of Power: 1989 1995
Kally Forrest
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was widely acknowledged in the South African labour movement in the 1980s as one of the boldest and most strategic unions. Its creative and exible approach to confronting obstacles had led it previously to take surprising departures. Joining the industrial council for the metal industry in 1983 had been one such moment. By 1988 it had built considerable power in such national centralised forums in its main sectors, auto and engineering, chiey through an adversarial relationship with employers. Now it was again poised to take a radical departure in its attempts to augment workers power. This article discusses this new vision and the forces that militated against its successful implementation. At the end of the 1980s for the rst time Numsa embarked on serious thinking around the question of attaining systemic power. The union was attempting to formulate implementable policies that would signicantly advance workers control in a future democratic South Africa where in all likelihood the African National Congress (ANC) would take power. Within Numsa concerns about the ANCs commitment to socialism and working people had always existed. As Numsas national education secretary, Alec Erwin, expressed it, There was a great deal of scepticism about the ANCs style of operating with workers, and scepticism about their support for very weak unions, [the so-called United Democratic Front (UDF) and general unions] and whether they truly did understand workers struggles.1 In consequence the 1987 Numsa National Congress had adopted a compromise position on the adoption of the Congress Alliances (with the ANC being the dominant partner) Freedom Charter. It adopted the Freedom Charter as a set of minimum political demands, which would be complemented by the development of a more detailed working class programme at a later stage.2 Supported by national bargaining and campaign structures, Numsa was poised to shape working conditions within its industry and within the macroeconomy. It was now in a position to engage employers on restructuring its industries in order to improve work conditions and increase production through the mechanisms of augmenting worker control and creating sustainable jobs in an environment of large scale job loss (particularly in engineering). This was a signicant departure for the union.
In order to prepare for such engagement Numsas education department embarked on a bold experiment to more fully understand its sectors and the macroeconomic environment. An opportunity to engage around the issue of worker training was to provide the trigger for the establishment of Research and Development Groups (RDGs). This involved tapping into workers detailed knowledge of workplace operations. After discussion and analysis of this bedrock of worker knowledge, the research team used the information as a departure point for conducting further research. This involved the introduction of specialised knowledge through presentations by experts and site visits including investigations of overseas models. Further discussion would result in the production of a detailed set of policies, which were forwarded to constitutional structures for endorsement.3 In Numsas 1989 Congress, and in central committee meetings during 1990 and 1991, delegates adopted resolutions based on a wide range of proposals that emanated from the RDGs. Once adopted, it was the task of union structures to implement the policies through collective bargaining and campaigns.4 Over time the union established RDGs in a range of areas, but it was the Training RDG that would have the deepest impact on Numsas new bargaining approach. In 1991 study tours took worker researchers to various countries to investigate training systems. Here the Australian system had the most impact. The group continually returned to the ideas embodied in the Australian training model, which was at core a skills-based grading system whereby workers were remunerated in terms of the skills they utilised. This resonated with Numsa researchers because black workers frequently employed a wide range of skills on the job but were not remunerated on this basis.5 By 1992 the RDGs that had emerged in 1988 were defunct.6 This creative strategy was over-ambitious, and ultimately moved ahead of members and even worker leadership. The ideas generated by these groups however were to linger on in the unions memory and would inform its future policy-making. Recommendations would later be reintegrated in a different manner into the unions strategies.
Watershed: 1992 engineering strike A strike in 1992 was to prove a watershed for Numsa when it waged its rst national action across the engineering industry. By 1992 the leadership was committed to bargaining at the Nicisemi (National Industrial Council for the Iron, Steel, Engineering and Metallurgical Industry), but membership still viewed the institution with considerable scepticism especially in respect of its ability to deliver increased wages. Numsas leadership may have been developing a more consensual relationship with employers on the Nicisemi, but membership did not view employers as cooperative partners.
Union leadership had for some years been expressing doubts about the advisability of waging industry-wide strikes but, as it grew more cautious, so its memberships
Out of Time: The National Union of Metalworkers Pursuit of Power: 1989 1995 367
militancy, sense of entitlement, and desperation in a recessionary environment, grew. Excluding 1989, every year since the 1988 Witwatersrand strike, Nicisemi negotiations had deadlocked and the union had balloted membership on industrial action. Each time union leadership had raised objections, which although genuine, reected a deeper concern. It had raised concerns around the risk of conducting an industry-wide strike in a recessionary environment and a declining economy, which made membership vulnerable to large-scale retrenchments. It was fearful that this coupled with high levels of political contestation and violence, was an incendiary combination. Certain engineering negotiators also began to express a deeper unease about the efcacy of the adversarial wage-based disputes that had characterised the unions strategy for so many years.7 The union leadership was for the rst time embarking on serious thinking around the question of attaining systemic power. Lukes has dened such power as concerning the formation of wants, which are linked to the nature of the social system that an organisation wishes to realise (Lukes 1974, 1986). Later neo-Marxist theorists have built on Lukes concept of systemic power and have distinguished this form of power from less radical forms in particular that of institutional power. Institutional power is seen as the ability for organisations to dene what they want and to get it on the public table of political deliberations, but it does not envisage fundamental changes to the nature of the existing social system. Wright expresses the political differences that accompany these forms of power thus,
Reformist versus reactionary politics are conicts at an institutional level of power over attempts to transform the rules within which situational conicts occur; and revolutionary versus counter-revolutionary politics are conicts at a systemic level of power over which game to play. (Wright 1994:539)
Numsa had attained a level of institutional power in relation to collective bargaining arrangements where it now had the power to participate in and shape these institutions. It had not, however, yet attained signicant levels of institutional power in relation to the shaping of industrial relations legislation or in the political process. Numsas approach had always been one of gradual, incremental change rather than of revolutionary rupture, but this approach nevertheless envisaged profound systemic transformation in the manner that Wright describes,... it is possible that reformist struggles cumulatively could have revolutionary consequences. This is the vision of certain strands of reformist socialism (Wright 1994:539). The union thus turned its attention to formulating practical and implementable policies that would signicantly advance workers control in a future South Africa. Most Numsa intellectuals did not believe that a revolutionary seizure of power could be enacted by striking a single decisive blow at the heart of the capitalist system. Crouch sees unions as engaging in two broad areas of contestation, namely, those of pay (substantive issues) and those of control (procedural issues)
and sees the area of control as where issues of relative power are most pertinent (Crouch 1982). The latter is generally viewed as the more radical and inherently political as it is easier for capital to make economic concessions than to compromise on relations of domination and subordination that enter into systemic arenas of power. Giddens concurs, Struggles over control are political struggles ... since they necessarily involve attempts on the part of working class associations to acquire an inuence over, or in the most radical context to gain full control over, the government of industry (Giddens 1973:205). Control demands can of course vary considerably in their political and economic impact from, for example, the control over the speed of a machine, to control over whether or not to do overtime and how much, to a highly signicant demand to have a major say in how the company distributes its prots. Control demands can at the extreme of the spectrum entail workers running their own factories and ultimately the economy, or control demands can be more modest in their aims and simply entail various degrees of control over the work environment. Issues of control constitute the central battle ground because they are in essence the means by which workers attain better work conditions or improved material goals. Numsa, on a national level, was now attempting to demand signicant levels of control where it aimed to negotiate the restructuring of its industries and ultimately of the macroeconomy. The union leaderships growing shift away from adversarial wage-based bargaining to issues of attaining increased control was however not in tune with the aspirations of its membership. Numsas leadership was caught in a conundrum as it had always operated on the democratic principle of workers control expressed though mandates and report-backs. It was a union that in the last analysis was sensitive to the mood of its members, and its membership left leadership with little room to manoeuvre. Beyond that, membership was fuelled by the political optimism and the heady power of the early 1990s. It was on one course and that was for a confrontation with capital. Accordingly the strike demands focused mainly on wages, and the necessity to close the apartheid wage gap by raising the wages of the low paid to reect a more appropriate proportion of the rate paid to skilled artisans. The demand was for a R5.50 per hour minimum in the industry.8 The union justied its demand by arguing that rates of ination were expected to increase by forty per cent by year-end in a context of almost fty per cent black unemployment. Employers quickly rejected the demand and offered an eight per cent or 38c across the board increase.9 The strike demands reected little of Numsas emerging restructuring agenda, which membership clearly had not yet internalised. A prolonged strike involving about 100,000 workers in 782 factories ensued until three weeks into the action, Seifsa (Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa) sent Numsa a letter detailing that the strike was non-functional to collective bargaining.10 The same afternoon, a court interdict preventing the
strike was issued alleging that the union had not followed correct balloting procedures. The strike proved a terrible defeat and many workers were dismissed. Chris Lloyd, an Australian metal trade unionist who had joined Numsa immediately prior to the strike, gave an outsiders view of what he considered a series of blunders by Numsa leadership. He was puzzled that the union had committed itself to a strike in the middle of a major recession because in his experience this was an invitation to retrench. Furthermore, in such a context he could not comprehend the nature of Numsas demands. He believed that conducting a high wage strike, where the union was demanding at least twenty per cent above what employers would pay was madness in a recessionary environment. He also contended that demands bore little relation to what was transpiring in the country and in the absence of such a context the unions all or nothing approach left it with no plan with which to retreat.11 These were damning criticisms, but Numsas base was largely not attuned to such logic. The leaderships shift from resistance to reconstruction had not yet ltered down to membership that was still focused on the destruction of apartheid, which was under negotiation at Kempton Park. For workers, who had suffered the dehumanising system for years, there was no inevitability to its collapse. If anything, worker consciousness was xed in a nihilistic mode where its aim was the destruction of apartheid no matter the consequences. Furthermore, the union had been operating in a recessionary environment for years and had grown in power and numbers throughout this period despite conducting illegal strikes that carried a high risk of dismissal. Workers struggles were as much a struggle for dignity and human rights in the workplace, and the exhilaration of asserting such rights in the face of the white man, as it was about the desperation to earn a decent wage. In this context Lloyds comparison to strikes conducted by Australian labour that enjoyed full citizenship was, on one level, simplistic. On another level however it was clear, as Lloyd pointed out, that the union leadership could not continue to pursue a strategy where its memberships job security and income were further threatened. Numsas leadership believed it had no option but to redirect the unions agenda and to explore alternative strategies for securing jobs and decent working conditions in the context of an emerging liberalised economy where global competition further threatened jobs and working conditions. In addition, with the dawning of a new political dispensation there was the possibility of spaces opening up for labour to exploit (Von Holdt 1992). The union leadership had been thrown into the paradoxical position of attempting to engage employers in a more creative process of building a viable manufacturing industry, whilst experiencing continuous pressure from below to enter into adversarial bargaining. The 1992 strike ended this untenable balancing act. By the end of the strike it was apparent to employers and the union that there had to be a different approach to industrial relations. Neither side could risk the recurrence
of such devastating action to their industries or to their membership. As national organiser Bobby Marie commented,
Now the key issue is not 50c across the board. The rst research data showed that the industry was declining. Youve got to change your strategy. And Bernie [Fanaroff] became unpopular for that, and he argued against the militancy. He said you cant go on striking, youre going to destroy this industry.12
The union turned to revising its bargaining strategy in accordance with these insights.
Review of bargaining vision It was in this context that the union returned to ideas that had been percolated in the Training RDG. The groups discussions crystallised into ideas, which although based on the Australian system took account of South African specics. The formulation of the new training model, as previously mentioned, had been deeply inuenced by strategies current in the Australian trade union movement. The integration of this training strategy into a new vision for the union owed much to what has been described as strategic unionism as it was developed by Australian unions (Joffe, Maller and Webster 1993). Strategic unionism was a response to the globalisation of capital and to the industrial restructuring that was contributing to job losses and declining standards in working conditions worldwide. It focused on the forging of an alternative industrial policy and appropriate workplace change to build workers power in the face of this onslaught. According to the Australian Congress of Trade Unions in 1989 four features characterised strategic unionism: union involvement in wealth creation and redistribution; proactive rather than reactive unionism; participation through bipartite and tripartite institutions; and a high level of union capacity, education and research.13
In summary the ideas Numsa adopted from the Australian model were that education and training should be geared towards economic growth, higher living and working standards, jobs for all at a living wage in the context of increased productivity, and the production of a better quality of goods. Education and training would be open to all workers and would constitute a continuous part of any working persons life. This would guarantee greater job security, which the union captured in the slogan training not retrenchment. Training would be linked to an industry grading system, which would progress from the acquisition of broad general skills along a continuum to specialised skills. On completion of a module, a worker would receive an industry certicate. Modules would be linked to an industry grading system, and workers would be remunerated according to their skills. Thus, an increase in skill would lead to an increase in pay. In addition, the system would allow for the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) whereby employees would receive both recognition, and appropriate pay, for the skills they had already acquired and were utilising on the job. Workers would attain
skills that were useful in their specic workplace, but such skills would also lay the basis for further training. In consequence, black workers could move up the industry ladder, develop a career path, and attain promotion that had always been denied them. As the union phrased it, workers could progress from sweeper to engineer. If workers were retrenched, they would have portable skills that could be utilised in other parts of the manufacturing industry and which would be accredited by employers through an industry recognised national certicate.14 The Australian system had evolved in a Westernised industrial context where high levels of basic education prevailed. This was not the case in South Africa where sixty-six per cent of black people had only attained Standard Three (ve years of schooling) or less15 and where low literacy rates prevailed. This rendered it impossible for thousands of workers to enter an industrial training programme. In this context, the RDG evolved ideas around a system of Adult Basic Education (ABE) that would include training in literacy and numeracy and which would be integrated into Numsas vocational training system.16 A training resolution incorporating these ideas was adopted at Numsas third National Congress in June 1991. Numsa leadership observed that its employers were increasingly pursuing the route of lean production in response to competitive pressures, which involved cutting costs wherever possible including, most crucially, the cost of labour through the reduction of the labour force. In contrast, the unions goal was to transform the workplace and to introduce a democratic, non-racial order that was based on intelligent production. Numsa began to engage in a number of bi-partite forums (government and union) and tentatively embarked on more open discussions around the industry with employers. Such an approach had no precedent in any developing country (Baskin 2000). Co-determination which takes a number of forms, of which corporatism and concertation are the most well known, was primarily associated with trade unionism in developed nations. Corporatism seeks points of cooperation for mutual gain in bargaining and involves the state if it occurs at a national level. It assumes that the state cannot ignore a signicant group which is making decisions about the economy and that a democratic government will be concerned to pursue policies such as full employment. As Crouch observes, Unions engaged in this national level of activity have moved out of ordinary collective bargaining into the eld of politics (Crouch 1982:208/9). Concertation on the other hand exists alongside, but separate, from the collective bargaining forum and attempts to exclude conict by focusing on areas that are available for consultation rather than bargaining. Such matters are often more complex and require time to investigate and discuss and thus attitudes on both sides are more open and exible (Crouch 1982:208/9). By 1993 Numsa was participating in a large number of national, regional, and local forums together with the state and/or business, which involved discussion
and negotiation on policy formulation in what Baskin has described as bargained corporatism (Baskin 1993). As concerns concertation the union had established a number of sub-committees in its various national bargaining forums to discuss more complex issues that were available for resolution, but which had previously delayed collective bargaining negotiations. Nevertheless the co-determination route was still a radical departure for the union. In pursuing the consensual model the union was attempting implementation in a low-trust situation where employers had a history of providing minimal information about their companies operations. A conict model of union/employer relations is known to exist in such an environment. A co-determinist model requires high levels of trust and where this does not exist members are likely to view such an approach with deep suspicion. The other possibility also existed however, that a union operating in low trust relations with employers may break this pattern through the adoption of a more co-determinist approach and thus gain better access to information about its industries (Crouch 1982). Numsa, however, was operating against a history of sustained conict between management and labour and the lesson workers had learnt to trust was that militant resistance had delivered substantial gains. The Numsa leadership, while not discarding the strategic use of conict, opted for a more cooperative approach and in 1993 the union embraced an integrated programme of reform. At the shopoor level, inuenced by Japanese work systems, the union aimed to replace the racially segregated, authoritarian workplace with a democratic alternative where worker power would be enhanced through the development of skills and through the devolution of decisionmaking to the shopoor. In Numsas assessment its industries were over staffed at a supervisorial level, and remuneration was excessively skewed towards the top. It believed that where workplace restructuring enabled employers to cut costs, they should reward the whole workforce. It aimed to negotiate a attening of company structures to allow for greater participation in the management of the shopoor by workers. Ultimately it believed workers should supervise their own labour. It proposed that companies establish a work team in each department, which consisted of skilled workers who supervised themselves and who were led by a team leader. Team leaders would be elected on a rotational basis to ensure broad development of leadership skills.17 In this manner an unskilled dispensable workforce would become integral to production and thus protected from the danger of redundancy whilst management would benet from the increased involvement in productive issues by its workforce. Numsas new approach would replace the annual round of adversarial bargaining with a three-year plan whose objectives would be negotiated and endorsed. Militant mobilisation around wage demands would be replaced by a planned restructuring of the workplace, and wage demands would be linked to industry growth and job creation. The unions successful struggle for strong centralised bargaining
institutions would allow for the negotiation of such a programme which would be supported by employers in return for predictable wage outcomes and stability in the workplace.
Programme of integrated demands In 1992 Numsa forged a programme that integrated the various issues it had been exploring. Lloyds entry into the union was an important moment because according to national negotiator Alistair Smith he brought the basic elements of the strategy . . . around wage differentials, job creation, training and re-structuring and job security . . . into an integrated structure.18
The rst issue in the integrated structure, which Numsa had originally encountered in Australia, was the skills-based grading system. At the time, in most of Numsas industries, grading systems were linked to tasks and responsibilities and not skills, and it was thus difcult to assess how workers could move to a higher grade. This was compounded by the almost complete absence of training for black workers and the fact that low-skilled, low-grade workers earned low wages. Thus Numsas rst set of demands related to the development of training in the industry in order to establish career paths for black workers. These entailed the development of a new grading system the logic of which was the reduction in the number grades, which in turn would be linked to the artisan rate of pay in an attempt to close the apartheid wage gap between unskilled and skilled workers. Payment would be based on skill qualication rather than a rate for an actual job performed and thus, as workers enhanced their skill, so wages would rise. The union demanded a reduction from the racially dened thirteen grades to ve grades up to artisan level, and the creation of two new grades above artisan level to allow these workers the opportunity to improve their skills and position further. The gap between wages in each grade, it demanded, should not be greater than ten per cent whilst the percentage difference between the lowest grade, and the highest grade (two grades above artisan), should be no more than sixty per cent.19 The union realised that raising the wages of low paid workers would involve employers in considerable costs, which might prevent them from considering the unions demands. Thus in order to circumvent a deadlock, it proposed that for three years workers in the bottom grades should receive higher wage increases than workers at the top. In this manner it would reach its goal of a decreased differential in wages. The overall increase in the wage bill to employers would amount to a cost of living increase, plus a ve per cent improvement factor. At the time, thirteen grades up to artisan level existed in engineering. The union proposed to reduce this to ve grades by merging all grades into a broad band of skills. This would open the way for exibility and team work based on multi-skilling and would allow for a more productive, and hence competitive, environment as well as provide workers with greater job satisfaction. The benets to employers
would be predictable increases and an end to national industrial action on the issue of wage hikes.20 In the area of training the union demanded one Industry Education and Training Board (IETB) in each sector. IETBs would assess the skills needed for each of the new pay levels, or grades, which would be described through skills-based denitions. Following this broad banding exercise, the IETB would research what mix of skills workers required at each level. In this it would utilise such guidelines as what work had to be performed and when, whether the work was routine and repetitive or if some level of decision-making was required, if workers were supervised, or if they supervised others, and whether the completed task required checking by a more senior worker. Numsa demanded the completion of these skill-based denitions by 1994, and that the IETBs should develop courses that would provide the framework for a career path within the industry by 1995. Furthermore, it demanded that all companies conduct a skills assessment based on agreed broad banded skills to establish each workers existent skills in order to implement the RPL principle. After such an assessment, workers would be remunerated for all skills utilised on the job.21 The three-year strategy was agreed to in the 1993 Numsa Congress, and negotiated during the 1993 bargaining year.22 The union established deadlines for the implementation of this package at industry level with the proviso that all aspects should be in place by the end of 1996.The package of demands was the most ambitious programme ever assembled by the union and represented a signicant strategic shift in both the style and content of its bargaining goals.
Implementing the three-year programme How did Numsas bold vision fare? This section examines its attempts to implement the three-year bargaining programme across its main sectors (auto and engineering).
Numsas auto industry was the most homogenous and highly skilled and covered a limited number of large factories. It was in this sector that the union was most successful in implementing the new programme. The 1993 auto National Bargaining Forum (NBF) focused chiey on reducing thirteen task-based grades incorporating over 300 classications to ve skills-based grades.23 This was a mammoth task, recalls national negotiator Gavin Hartford. We went through every job in the industry and we allocated them into ve levels. Hundreds of meetings with every employer disagreeing on the levels ... It wasnt a complete success but we did it.24 The nal agreement also gave substance to the 1992 in-principle settlement to establish an Auto IETB. Agreement was reached on RPL, career progression, an education and skills audit of each employee at plant level, an audit of available training resources, the development of a broad framework which included core,
specialised and plant specic modules, the development of competency outcomes and resources to facilitate literacy and numeracy training.25 Simultaneously the union engaged the state on ideas for restructuring the industry in the Motor Industry Task Group (MITG), which the Minister of Trade and Industry had appointed in late 1992. In the wake of the strike the union introduced the concept of a statutory Motor Industry Authority (MIA) located in the Ministry of Trade and Industry as an appropriate vehicle for facilitating the different views of various stakeholders in transforming the industry.26 The 1994 bargaining round was not as consensual despite pressure on the union to nalise the outstanding elements of the three-year programme before its target implementation date of 1996. A dispute soon erupted which centred around the time-frame for narrowing the apartheid wage gap, the implementation of skills development programmes, as well as an ination-linked wage combined with a small improvement factor. Ultimately unresolved differences escalated into an industry-wide strike supported by 25,000 workers over ve weeks. At the end of the day, employers retreated and a settlement of a 10.5 per cent wage increase was reached. During the strike, the gap between the employers and the unions vision of restructuring the industry was starkly illustrated and the union struggled to move beyond this impasse. Employers wanted a moratorium on industrial action, wage restraint and more productive workers, whilst Numsa aimed to curtail management control over production, increase skills, and to lay the basis for industrial democracy. Furthermore, both the union and employers were struggling to comprehend the implications of the unions demands. A gap in membership and leaderships approach was also in evidence (Desai 1994).27 Numsa was now confronted with the realisation that its demands were highly complex involving links between training, career-pathing, reducing wage-gaps and the restructuring of work organisation. It was apparent that such proposals would necessitate a number of years to negotiate and implement. Membership however wanted to see immediate results and such long-term programmes made it difcult to mobilise worker support, especially as auto employers had not fully embraced the new proposals. The 1995 negotiations and nal agreement took the training issue further. Employers agreed, by the end of the year, to assess all workers for their level of skill, which would culminate in nationally recognised certicates. What became apparent, however, was that some employers did not require more highly trained workers and this led to tensions on the NBF with employers who required a highly trained, multi-skilled workforce. The union was concerned that those employers who needed a less skilled workforce by not making provision for training would disadvantage workers in the case of retrenchment as they would have few portable skills. In consequence agreement was reached on a guarantee that every employee would be entitled to four modules (160 hours) of training by 1996 (Von Holdt 1995b).
The union was not successful, however in reaching agreement on guidelines for how work-teams should operate, where for example, it recommended the election and rotation of team leaders. It also did not succeed in securing an agreement on guidelines for performance-based pay systems or in negotiating an industry-wide framework for plant level restructuring (Von Holdt 1995b). Thus the landmark agreement left unaddressed the important issue of how workers could wrest further control over their working lives. In reality there was still enormous confusion at national level over how to restructure the workplace. There was evidence to show that post-Fordist teamwork did not necessarily improve productivity or retain jobs and that some Fordist-type production lines had better productivity records. Toyota, for example, ran its company in South Africa in a classic Fordist manner.28 It appeared that there was no one model to follow even in the auto industry where factories produced similar items. Experience seemed to indicate the need for diverse approaches in maintaining and protecting jobs.29 It also became evident that the expansion of workers skills often entailed an employer shift to multi-tasking. While this averted some of the tedium of workers monotonous labour, it also held dangers as it gave employers the exibility to deploy people in a number of positions and to thus replace other workers.30 It was clear that Numsas new policies entailed a vigilance far exceeding the monitoring of a simple recognition agreement. In 1991 the union had negotiated a moratorium on retrenchments to reduce auto workers vulnerability to redundancies. This agreement had however soon created problems for members. It had put new pressures on management to compensate for its inability to deal with falling prots through retrenchment. Raising levels of worker productivity in order to compete on global markets was employers response.31 It became clear the workers at company level would, for example, have to mobilise around the right to negotiate the line speed, cycle times, and manning levels. As global competition grew and protective tariffs declined so the pressures to produce more at a faster rate would increase. A shopsteward on a tour of car plants in Australia and Europe turned to Chris Lloyd and said, I dont mind what you say, what money you pay us, wed never work this hard.32 Lloyd was critical of what he saw as the low productivity levels of South African metal workers. For him, better conditions accompanied the terrain of harder work. In the shopstewards comment to Lloyd, however, was embedded a critique that questioned at what point the pressures of capitalist competition ended, and at what point human labour could simply not work any faster without severely compromising the quality of its working life. Besides these issues, which were specic to auto, a number of obstacles at a union and broader political level militated against the success of the bargaining programme in all its sectors, but most markedly in Numsas largest engineering sector.
Implementing Numsas programme in engineering was to prove more difcult than in auto. In engineering the union was confronted by a diversity of sub-sectors unlike the auto industry which, assisted by the government-backed tripartite Motor Task Team that involved all auto stakeholders, had permitted the emergence of a more cohesive strategy. By contrast, in engineering, the union was plagued by employers inability to act in the sectors common interest. The diversity of the sector made it difcult for any coherent intervention by government except on a sector by sector basis. Without the resources and economic will of the state in engaging this sector, most engineering employers showed little inclination to cooperate with the unions restructuring agenda. The union was plagued by employers refusal to share relevant information or to consult with Numsa. Initially employers on the Nicisemi were not willing to discuss the programme seeing in it a union attempt to squeeze more money out of them.33 Slowly, however, elements of the programme were accepted by some larger companies through engagement in Industrial Council sub-committees. Over time negotiations resulted in an in-principle agreement on the adoption of ve skills-based grades to replace the thirteen task-based grades. This was however on a voluntary basis. There was also agreement on restructuring the industry training board, and adopting the modular training system. This entailed laying down standards for twentytwo sub-sectors in the industry. Finally, agreement was reached on a productivity framework to guide plant negotiations in this area.34 Besides the unions inability to persuade the Council to enforce the ve-grade system, other pivotal elements of its bargaining strategy were missing. Employers refused to agree to the indexing of non-artisan rates to the artisan rate although there was agreement in 1995 on higher percentage increases for lower-grade workers.35 Union negotiators also began to feel the weight of worker dissatisfaction. Loud complaints from Numsas members concerning the pace and nature of negotiations was voiced especially as they were seeing few concrete gains. Many members had no knowledge of the unions participation in a range of forums where it hoped to advance their interests more generally in the new democracy. This was not an issue that members necessarily grasped. The union was aware of the need for thorough education on its changed bargaining direction, but it did not have the capacity to do this in a systematic manner. This was exacerbated in the months preceding the 1994 democratic elections when Numsa education was mobilised almost solely around winning the worker vote for the ANC (Ginsberg 1997). Union leadership recognised this educational neglect but pursued the programme believing that time was simply not available before a new democratic government was in place. This lack of education was accompanied by the progressive attenuation in union report-back structures. Discussion on its new policies was often not possible because factory general meetings and local councils were not convening. Written communiques from head ofce to the regions were also not effective,
and regular meetings between the general secretary and regional secretaries did not occur.36 During the 1993-4 period the union failed to coordinate bargaining campaigns or to convene National Bargaining Conferences. In addition, aspects of the three-year programme were negotiated with employers in specialist Nicisemi working groups where issues got buried (Von Holdt 1995a). The consequence was that over time members felt they had lost control of negotiations. Other union capacity problems were also emerging. Numsas engagement with numerous tripartite forums substantially increased its workload. Thus leadership who most clearly understood the unions new strategy, were frequently not involved in bargaining. Marie, reecting on the period, believed that it could not have been different because of major political events unfolding in the country at the same time. Many of Numsas initiatives, he believed, could not have come to fruition without engagement in national policy forums.37 They also could not come to fruition because policies decided on in these forums took much longer than expected for the state to implement. In education and training, for example, the South African Qualications Authority (SAQA), the body responsible for setting countrywide standards took much longer than expected to create.38 In addition, between 1993 and 1995 Numsa lost a substantial number of its experienced leadership at every level of the union. Many pivotal unionists moved into positions in the post-apartheid government, or into institutions drafting policies to guide future legislation in the new South Africa. Also many senior shopstewards who had long been frustrated by the lack of mobility in their companies started to enter management structures. As people left the union many of its more experienced organisers and shopstewards moved from the local level into national positions. This meant that good national agreements were not being implemented at plant level. The exodus took valuable trained leadership out of the union, but more specically it removed leaders who most clearly comprehended Numsas policy shifts. New leadership headed by general secretary, Enoch Godongwana, was not familiar with the logic of the programme nor did they have the knowledge of how to negotiate such a complex range of issues. Thus, they tended to negotiate the programme as a series of isolated activities such as grading reduction, training or RPL.39 Many employers, who witnessed union weaknesses, took the opportunity to reinstate the control they had lost in the late 1980s. In many cases this control involved a reversion to the former apartheid workplace regime (Von Holdt 2000; SALB 1990). Workplace change was a central tenet of the three-year bargaining programme, but it was here that the programme went most seriously awry. In general Numsas membership was still narrowly focused on money gains. Only a small number of senior shopstewards were attempting to advance the unions control. Many ofcials and shopstewards were also struggling to come to grips with the new issues
on the factory oor and initiatives to restructure the factory oor were met with varying responses by workers and employers. Many of Numsas larger engineering companies were also only willing to implement elements of the programme without consideration for the unions total strategic vision for the industry. Scaw Metals, for example, rejected the vision because it believed the engineering industry was too large and diverse to implement a single strategy. It also had problems with the reduction of grades and the broadbanding concept. It believed the concept was inappropriately imported from sophisticated rst world Australia where the metal industry was technologically advanced and machine-driven.40 In South Africa, however, pockets of technological sophistication co-existed with labour intensive processes in different companies, and in some companies different processes required different degrees of technical and labour intensivity. Thus, promotional opportunities could be rare even where a worker had acquired further skills (Kgobe 1997). Scaws human resources director, Allan Murray, also believed Numsas logic was faulty. For him, efciency, exibility and modernising the factory oor in the way the union framed it, meant job losses. By 1990 the engineering industry had shed 450,000 jobs. The new strategy, he believed, would accelerate this trend. In order to provide people with training opportunities the factory needed more technologically advanced and complex processes. Surely, he argued, such training opportunities entailed job losses because new equipment doesnt need a hundred people, it needs ten.41 In yet other companies, such as Iscor, managements attempts at introducing a less hierarchical mode of operation caused deep divisions that precipitated violence amongst workers.42 It was evident that the issue of trust was crucial for the implementation of a successful restructuring exercise. This was not only a question of trust between management and union membership, it also meant trust between workers. Numsa sometimes miscalculated on the sensitivity of the political context. It was in reality almost impossible to engage in a restructuring exercise in the fraught political climate of the early 1990s. The union was to learn that it should either fully engage in restructuring efforts and inject concentrated resources and support leadership, or leave it alone. Partial restructuring lent itself to opening up cracks for division and violence to enter. The difculty for the union was that restructuring attempts presented themselves in different forms and guises in different factories. Often management restructuring initiatives hid ulterior motives or a faddish interest in new production techniques. In other cases top management supported new approaches on the factory oor but such initiatives were thwarted by lower levels of management. Membership was left to muddle through such initiatives sometimes with disastrous consequences. By 1995 the union had not succeeded in its aim of democratising the apartheid workplace and augmenting workers participation and control at the point of production. Membership, except marginally in auto, had no more
power than before the introduction of the three-year programme, and in fact many had experienced a disempowerment because of the confusion around the implementation of the programme. Changes taking place in the country allowed for the possibility of forging a new ideological consensus, but it was an opportunity the union, and indeed the labour movement, missed and thus the possibility of introducing a new vision, such as the three-year bargaining programme, without such consensus was doomed.
Notes 1. Interview: Alec Erwin, Johannesburg, November 1996. 2. University of Witwatersrand, William Cullen Library, Historical Documents Department, Numsa Papers AH 2555/B69, The Freedom Charter and the struggle for socialism, NC May 1987 in Numsa Policy File June 1987 March 1992. 3. Numsa Education and Research Occasional Publication 1, February 1990, personal copy. 4. Ibid; Numsa Bulletin Education Research, April 1991, personal copy. 5. Interview: Adrienne Bird with Matthew Ginsberg, March 1997. 6. Discussion: Jenny Grice with the author on collective bargaining in Numsa, August 2004. 7. Interview: Alistair Smith, Johannesburg, November 1996. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Discussion: Shopstewards from Africa Zinc (Brakpan), Springs Numsa Local, October 1997 with Tom Bramble. 11. Interview: Chris Lloyd, Johannesburg, October 1996. 12. Discussion: Author with Bobby Marie, Karl von Holdt, Jenny Grice on collective bargaining in Numsa, 1996. 13. ACTU/TDC Mission, 1989. 14. Numsa Education and Research Occasional Publication 1, February 1990, personal copy; Numsa Vocational Training Project, March 1991, personal copy. 15. Numsa Vocational Training Project, March 1991. 16. Ibid. 17. Numsas joint bargaining demands, Numsa News 1 June 1993, personal copy. 18. Interview: Alistair Smith, Johannesburg, November 1996. 19. University of the Witwatersrand, William Cullen Library, Historical Documents Department, Numsa Papers, Numsa Collective Bargaining Box AH 2555/B11; Numsas joint bargaining demands, Numsa News 1 June 1993; Numsa Info 6, 1993; Living Wage Campaign: The new bargaining strategy 1993-1996; Numsa organiser and shopsteward handbook, Guidelines for negotiating the Numsa three year strategy. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Recent trends in collective bargaining, The Shopsteward Apr/May 1996, personal copy. 24. Interview: Gavin Hartford, Johannesburg, October 1996. 25. University of the Witwatersrand William Cullen Library, Historical Documents Department, Numsa Collective Bargaining AH 2555/B11, Collective Bargaining Assessment of Implementation of 3-Year Bargaining Strategy. 26. University of the Witwatersrand William Cullen Library, Historical Documents Department, Numsa Collection, Motor Industry Task Group AH 2555/B50, Motor Industry Task Group, 20 November 1992. 27. Numsa, The Shopsteward Oct/Nov 1994, personal copy.
28. Discussion: Sociology of Work seminar Globalisation from Below: Worker Responses to Restructuring in the Motor Industry, Franco Barchiesi, 10 October 1997. 29. Interview: Gavin Hartford, Johannesburg, October 1996. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Interview: Chris Lloyd, Johannesburg, November 1996. 33. University of the Witwatersrand William Cullen Library, Historical Documents Department, Numsa Collective Bargaining AH 2555/B11, Collective Bargaining Assessment of Implementation of 3-Year Bargaining Strategy. 34. The Road Ahead, Numsa, 13 October 1994, personal copy. 35. Ibid. 36. Interview: Bobby Marie, Johannesburg, 1997. 37. Discussion: Bobby Marie, Karl von Holdt, Jenny Grice and Kally Forrest on collective bargaining in Numsa, 1996. 38. Learning about training, Numsa News November 1995, personal copy; Interview: Victor Kgalima, Johannesburg, August 1997. 39. Discussion: Bobby Marie, Karl von Holdt, Jenny Grice and Kally Forrest on collective bargaining in Numsa, 1996. 40. Interview: Scaw Metals human resource director Allan Murray, Johannesburg, March 2003. 41. Ibid. 42. Interview: Jeffrey Ndamase, head shopsteward Iscor, Johannesburg, August 1997.
References
Baskin, J. 1993. The Trend Towards Bargained Corporatism. South African Labour Bulletin 17(3/4). 2000. Labour in South Africas Transition to Democracy: Concertation in a Third World Setting, in Glenn Adler and Eddie Webster (eds), Trade Unions and Democratization in South Africa, 1985-1997. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Crouch, C. 1982. Trade Unions: The Logic of Collective Action. Great Britain: Fontana. Desai, A. 1994. Auto Strike: So Near and Yet so Far. South African Labour Bulletin 18(4). Giddens, A. 1973. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson. Ginsberg, M. 1997 Trade Union Education: Its Past and Future Role in the Development of the South African Labour Movement. MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand. Joffe, A., Maller, J. and Webster, E. 1993. South Africas Industrialisation: The Challenge Facing Labour. Paper delivered at symposium on Work Class and Culture, University of the Witwatersrand. Kgobe, T. 1997. The Wrong Path? The Skills Training Debate. South African Labour Bulletin 21(5). Lukes, S. 1974. Power. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1986. Power. Oxford: Blackwell.
South African Labour Bulletin (SALB). 1990. Our Factory has been under Worker Control since 1987, says MBSA Head. SALB 15(4). Von Holdt, Karl. 1992. The Future of Wage Bargaining: Interview with Bernie Fanaroff. South African Labour Bulletin 16(4). 1995a. Numsas Three-year Programme: Addressing the Question of Power. South African Labour Bulletin 19(2). 1995b. The Auto Sector: Numsa Signs rst Post-apartheid Agreement. South African Labour Bulletin 19(4). 2000. From Resistance to Reconstruction: A Case Study of Trade Unionism in the Workplace and the Community (1980-1996). PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand. Wright, E.O. 1994. Political Power, Democracy and Coupon Socialism. Politics and Society 22(4).
Contributors
Peter Alexander is Professor of Sociology and director of the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg. Recent books include Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid (James Currey 2000), and Globalisation and New Identities, co-edited with Marcelle Dawson and Meera Iccharam (Jacana Media 2006). Phillip Bonner trained in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has supervised numerous masters and doctoral theses on African and South African History. He specialises in pre-colonial South African history, and South African urban and labour history, and heads the Wits History Workshop. Allison Drews research has focused on the movement for democracy in South Africa, particularly the inuence of socialist ideas within the national liberation movement. She has published Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873 1936 (2007), Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (2000, 2002) and South Africas Radical Tradition: A Documentary History (1996 97) and numerous articles. Her current project is a comparative study of the role of Communism in South Africa and Algeria entitled Communism and Colonialism: African Ambiguities. She teaches Politics at the University of York. Kally Forrest was a trade unionist in a Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) transport union in the 1980s and early 1990s. She is now editor of the South African Labour Bulletin. She has written and edited a number of popular trade union histories and has completed a doctorate on the history of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa). George Gona lectures in History at the University of Nairobi. He obtained his PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His area of speciality is labour history, and his doctoral dissertation was entitled Workers and the Struggles for Democracy in Kenya, 1963-98. He has great interest in urban and social history and biography. Karen Hunt is Professor of Modern History at Keele University, United Kingdom. Her publications explore the historical gendering of politics, particularly of socialism. These include Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 18841911(1996) and, with June Hannam, Socialist Women. Britain, 1880s to 1920s (2002), as well as a wide range of essays on subjects as diverse as the politics of consumption and socialist masculinity. Her interests stretch from local studies (of Manchester) through
Britain (1880s to 1930s) to the international arena, particularly the phenomena of early twentieth century transnationalism. She is currently completing a biography of Dora Monteore as a study of gendered politics in a life. Jonathan Hyslop is deputy director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is a longstanding member of the Wits History Workshop and has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth century South African social history. He has been awarded membership of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University for 2007 2008. Wazha Gilbert Morapedi is lecturer in History at the University of Botswana. His research interests include agrarian issues in colonial and postcolonial African societies with emphasis on South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, farm and migrant labour in southern Africa, and the chieftaincy and its encounters with the colonial and postcolonial state and its role in the past and the present. Jeremy Seekings is Professor of Political Studies and Sociology at the University of Cape Town and Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Macmillan Centre for International and Area Studies at Yale. He is currently conducting research on welfare state-building in the global South in the twentieth century and on the reproduction of disadvantage and inequality in contemporary South Africa. His previous books include The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983 1991 and Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa (co-authored with Nicoli Nattrass). Sumit Sarkar, who recently retired from Delhi University, is one of Indias most distinguished historians. His books include The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903 1908, Modern India 1885 1947, Writing Social History and Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu fundamentalism, History. Marcel van der Linden is research director of the International Institute of Social History and Professor of Social Movement History in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since 1987 he has been the editor of the International Review of Social History. He is currently president of the International Social History Association (2005-10). His recent books include Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Ashgate 2003) and Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Brill 2007). He just started a research project on the transfer of cash-crop production systems from the Americas to Asia (eighteenth to twentieth centuries). Lucien van Der Walts research interests lie in the history and the sociology of the labour movement in southern Africa, in the history of anarchism and syndicalism, and in contemporary political economy, with a focus on neoliberal restructuring, and in the history of anarchism and syndicalism. He has published on these issues in a range of local and international journals, newspapers and bulletins, and has recently submitted his PhD on the history of anarchism
Contributors 385
and syndicalism in South Africa in the early twentieth century. He is currently wrapping up a project on the global history of anarchism and syndicalism over the last 150 years, entitled Counter-Power (in two volumes: Black Flame forthcoming 2007, Global Fire forthcoming 2008). He teaches in Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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African Studies, 66, 2 3, August December 2007

Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context

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Labour History: The Old, the New and the Global

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Women and Coal Mining in India and South Africa, c1900-1940

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Indian coal mining and women miners

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b) Women miners and their exclusion

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism 225

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