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Breaking the chains The Natal strikes of 1973 were a key episode in the re-awakening of the black working class after the repression of the 1960s. While in Militant Labour's General South Africa, Secretary, Peter Taffe, spoke to David Hemson, a prominent supporter of Congress Militant, the paper of Militant Labour's co-thinkers in South Africa. In the early 1970s David was a leading organiser of black workers in Natal, and was involved in the formation of a number of trade unions after the Durban strike wave of 1973.
Banned in March 1974 he went into exile in 1976. He returned to South Africa in 1990, receiving a hero's welcome at a mass ANC rally in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. He has spoken since on many occasions about the lessons of 1973, most recently at an anniversary dinner organised by COSATU. PETER TAFFE (PT): Tell us about your efforts to organise trade unions in the Durban area in the early 1970s.
DAVID HEMSON (DH): By the early 1970s very few of the unions that had organised African workers had survived from the 1950s. There was a feeling that unions led to people getting banned, harrassed, jeopardising your job and so on. Because of this, when I was a student at the university, we are talking about a group of students who formed something called the wages commission' we looked at ways of using whatever channels there were to try and get workers to be able to take at least certain legal actions in their own interests. So we started issuing pamphlets, informing workers in specific sectors that a wages board would be taking evidence and that in the past workers had been denied the right to present their case. Then we would explain where the sitting was, the date, the time and place and how to get there, The Durban docks, birthplace of the SA TGWU. and to bring demands to this meeting. For the first time for about 12 years workers were again present at these meetings.
I can remember a case when we had a wages board investigation into the docks. The employers were quite relaxed when I arrived, lolling around in their seats, chatting and joking. Suddenly the workers started coming in and in the end we had 400 workers at this wages board sitting. The employers firstly became irritable and then nervous. The wages board was sitting right against the far wall - as the meeting went on the employers were moving their seats closer and closer to them! PT: Were these dock workers organised into unions?
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DH: There were no open organised groups at this stage. There were underground groups of workers but even though I was close to the workers I didn't know who was in these underground groups. How I knew that they existed is because we put out a pamphlet inviting the workers to respond and, just before the wages board sitting, an eight page explanation of their predicament with about 12 demands, very clearly put, excellent arguments, was sent to our wages commission (which was really an action group. We had it translated into English and we presented it to the wages board. Now the employers were getting nervous because they had never encountered this number of workers at a wages board sitting. Normally these sessions only take ten minutes with a cup of tea and little chat with the employers. This took a whole day. Every worker who had a point to make insisted on his say. They had to take it all down in evidence. It was an enormous success. After that, and a few other meetings like that, we then called a meeting generally about wages in Durban and more than 2,000 workers turned up. That was despite the fear of organisation, the confusion of that time. We had a marvellous meeting in which worker after worker said now we are prepared for trade unions, we want to go back to the idea of struggle. Even then we were a little bit cautious because while some workers were for, others were still quite scared. There were different So we studied the British labour movement and found that in British labour history benefit societies had been set up, to provide unemployment benefits for the workers and so on. The workers wanted a death benefit fund, which sounds macabre but actually there were many deaths in poor black working class families and funerals were expensive. We were able to cover that and the workers were tremendously keen. Every Saturday Bolton Hall would be full of workers coming in to sign up. It became so popular that people who were not industrial workers wanted to come and join, even African small businessmen. But the core of it was industrial workers, the dockers, the abattoir workers, railway workers, metal workers and textile workers. From that we then selected people, or they selected themselves really, to come and help administer the fund. From then the development of the unions started to take off. All this was before the mass strikes of 1973 - we got a certain infrastructure going before the strikes. PT: When did this actually take place? DH: Between 1971 and 1972. By the end of 1972 the temper was beginning to harden. PT: Did you get harrassment from the state, the police and so on at this stage?
DH: What was so curious about it was that we 22 • Natal 1973 seemed to have gotten a formula which put them on the wrong foot. I had been a student activist and had organised many illegal demonstrations in Durban up to then and the state had come down with a heavy hand, a number of white students were banned and so forth. But there was a certain resistance on the white campuses and it was also beginning on the black campuses.
But when it came to the workers movement there was a certain hesitation before moving into mass action. Workers had to think of their jobs. Jobs were scarce - you lost everything when you lost your job. There was the labour Bureau pass system - if you lost your job you the didn't have the right to live in an urban area. What happened with the dockers, with were totally dissatisfied, was that when the wages board investigation eventually pronounced that have an increase, the workers said. this. We had deep discussions with the wile drew up a coherant set of demands and get a sympathetic journalist on one calf pers to slip them in on Sunday might on the Monday morning. They front page and the workers wee Wed. I don't know how it got past the edition it was brilliant. The workers were damcmg was a huge confrontatio the police rushed down.
Although there was force me the state, the strike went on for days.
treated. They didn't get all wanted but that was the swallow declam spring. Although it was not an all-out ate showed the mood was hardening and that prepared to put up with their I didn't expect what happened met in early February 1973. You could see th something was happening, an unusual mood developing. What took place ment some of the most oppressed layers of the mimig class leading a strike movement.
PT: Was it true to say that the action of the dockers and the publicity swowmding that acted as a spur and stirred up these hagers to go into strike action?
DH: For sure. Many of these tions with each other, don Nuthie docks to the brickfields. People had homes the rural areas and in the urban ame e it got into the newspapers and people, Wilking at the whites as a block, actually realised that the whites were divided. Once the wens semsed there was a division of opinion owen workers, rights, once they saw that the dock workers weme having their demands published, everything started to move. The brick workers came out and went to the huge textile mills - some off the largest textile mills in the Southern hemisphere. Those came out on block and from then on it spread into a period of
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rolling strike action which became in a sense a general strike in Durban.
PT: Could you tell us roughly how many workers came out?
DH: The official figures show that something like 77,000 workers came out in the period from late January to about May. Just to give a sense of perspective on that figure, when you had a working class of about seven million at that time...
PT: How many workers were there in the Durban area?
DH: About half a million industrial work- The important point was the dynamism of that strike. 77,000 in three months. In the twelve years prior from 1961 until 1973 only about 10,000 workers took strike action. You can see how history had been speeded up.
Let me give an idea of the atmosphere, the mood. During strikes the mood is usually quite high, a lot of celebrating, a lot of joking, although during a long drawn-out surike it may be different. This strike was a celebration, of breaking the chains. Workers would come out in one factory, they would march down the road, they would meet on the gates of the other factories. There would be a discussion and eventually they would come out and then they would march onto the next factory. It was a rolling struggle with extraordinary proportions.
One employer later told me that as soon as the strikes took place he immediately gave an increase of two rand which he thought would keep the workers quiet. But there was such a wave of strike action taking place that the workers at his plant actually came out two or three times after then, not making demands for anything more actually, although they were not satisfied, but simply out of class solidarity they came out and joined in the strike demonstrations up and dowm the streets. It developed an extraordinary momentum. Throughout this the press were stunned by the developments. We had TV crews coming from all over the world. For the first time it was clearly put onto the agenda that there was a black working class in South Africa and, more to the point, that this working class was going to determine the whole direction of the struggle in the future. PT: After this wave, the trade unions were formed Give us the details of that and an idea of your role in the formation of these unions. DH: I gave a picture of caution on the workers' side at the beginning. After the strike there was elation - everyone was prepared to go for it. We Domestic workers organise.
were looking for people who could actually take over and run the unions, people who would become officials, who would persist and organise, who would be prepared to accept something less than even a workers wage at the beginning. But there was such a pitable education system that very few people actually had the writing skills and even the "social skills, the confidence to pick up the phone and talk to a white manager and tell them, 100k - our demands are the following. I'll ring you back in half an hour to hear your response. They'd say "you do it, you do it. We'd say 'no, you've got to do it'. Things like that. We had to train people, because the phone system was so primitive in the African areas, to use the phone confidently. PT: You say 'we'. Was it predominantly people like yourself with a group of African workers or was it white and black involved?
DH: Let me explain how we got a kind of a cadre going in the beginning. First of all we, 'we' being the few white students who were serious about doing this, went to find the old stalwarts of the ANC. They were rather uninspiring at that time, many of them were demoralised, didn't really understand the role of the trade unions and so on. But we did make some connections through them to people who had been leaders of SACTU unions in the 1950s or who had participated in strikes. We drew up a list of them, found them and brought them into administering the benefit fund. Then we crystallised groupings within the benefit fund into unions.
We started with the textile unions because the mood of the women textile workers was the best. They were determined to change things and they also had confidence that they were the key to Natal 1973 • 23
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ple talk about the unions being economic | about which I was criticised for pushing the pho- South African miners on strike.
production. Those women were tough and were very independent. They became the core of the We wanted a former SACTU organiser to take over as the first black general secretary of a union after more than a decade of repression. The security police called in at the union office and said, 'we hear that you're going to have a meeting to convene a union. We want to tell you that this man has got a political record. He has committed political crimes in the past and he is not allowed to be a candidate for a union position'. They threatened him and warned him that if he took one step out of line that would be the end of him. We were in a very tight situation. We didn't want to stop the launch of the union and so we launched it with one of us taking the job. So we had a white general secretary though the former SACTU worker actually did much of the work, a brilliant organiser, someone who really understood what was taking place. From then we started to develop, but in very difficult conditions. People were always being harrassed by the security police. It was a reign of intimidation, of constantly wearing away any support the unions had. It needed a number of people to take quite heroic action, who could have been in deep trouble if the authorities had tried to get From then on also the political activity started. Immediately there was discussion about the revival of Congress in some form or other. There were debates about how to control the corrupt councillors in the townships and how to get rid of the council PT: So the development of the trade unions was a spur to the revival of political activity? DH: That's exactly it. People took a lot keener interest in the current political issues and what was happening in the ANC in exile and in having political discussion groups. You know, a lot of peo- 24 • Natal 1973 organisations. They were even criticised by the Stalinist leadership in exile as 'economistic' organisations. Firstly, tell me a union which shouldn't take up industrial issues. They would never have a mass base otherwise. But while formally they were economic instruments, and durmeetings the questions were mainly on industrial issues, the workers discussed politics, they knew what was going on.
In the townships the comrades of the guerilla underground would want to discuss with us - there was never any of this hostility to the trade unions, typical of the exile leadership, on the ground. All that had to be organised. The exile leadership had to try and fragment and divide what was already unified Now of course it is partly being re-unified again but it has taken decades of wasted effort. But anyway, come what may, the unions developed and from quite small beginnings the unions have really developed extraordinarily rapidly. One point - I was criticised in a book a while ago saying I was too slaphappy, too enthusiastic about forming one union after another. I was even condemned for putting someone who was just operating a photostat machine for the union in as an official, before he was fully equipped for the job. We should have had someone better trained etc. Of course we worked with who we had. The point was there was a sense of urgency. We had made a breakthrough and we wanted to push it further. We knew we could push it and push it but we didn't know how long the piece of elastic was before it was slapped back into our face. We knew that repression was coming at any moment. Every day we expected to be picked up by the security police. The original group had about mine months of industrial activity and almost every week there was a strike. Those were crazy days! PT: How many unions were you actually involved in the inital formation?
DH: First of all there was the textile union, which started of as the National Union of Textile Workers and is now called SACTWU. This was the first African trade union, or rather an open union but with African members, that was formed. I was involved in the preparation and launch of that union. I was involved in the launch of the Metal and Allied Workers' Union which is now known as NUMSA, which is actually probably the best organised with the best educated cadre of the unions in South Africa, with that tradition developed in Natal.
Then I was involved in the launch of the Chemical Workers' Industrial Union - that was the one
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tostat operator to be an official.
PT: How many people did you have at the beginning?
DH: With the Chemical Workers we started off with about 300 at the meeting...
PT: Who convened the meeting?
it but it was convened by DH: I helped convene the workers who came together in the benefit fund. Then we decided to break out of the benefit fund and become a fully fledged union.
And then there was the Furniture, Timber and Allied Workers' Union, which has been absorbed into another union now. And the Transport and General Workers' Union which organised the abattoir and dock workers and other transport workers. PT: Can I put it another way. Were there any unions which exist today which you weren't involved in?
the Mineworkers'
DH: Yes, I wasn't involved in Union which was a huge job, we recogmised that as a job of historic proportioms to organise the mineworkers. And I wasm? immolved in the Commercial Workers' Union although I was invited to but I wanted to become an official of that milom tham commercial organise industrial workers mathe workers.
PT: However, in relation to the INTUM it is true that Congress Militant supportems in exile were with people such as instrumental in discussing James Motlatsi who were there at the ginning of the revival DH: Yes, that's right.
There were all kinds of possibilities opening up and some of them were not going to lead in a good direc tion. We were able to diseuss with the unions in exile the kind of strategy and tactics that could be taken up and I think that the success of the NUM depended a lot on the courage of the people who were prepared to undertake dangerous activities but also on the kind of fund of experience theoretical and understanding that Congress Militant had to pass onto the unions. I was speaking to someone I hadn't expected to mention Congress Militant, or actually Inqaba Ya Basebenzi which was our theoretical journal, who was an official of the Transport and General Workers Union during the 1980s. She said that every moment she would be waiting to get her copy of the journal because all of the union's political education was geared around Ingaba. She said that if it didn't arrive she didn't know what to do because it guided her through the most difficult times, when there was a lot of infighting in the unions over this strategy or that strategy. And then the Stalinists tried to organise something which they called the populist unions, which were to organise all unions on a non-industrial basis as the way forward, and they criticised the other unions as being inherantly economistic. They had all kinds of these arguments.
Looking back now you can see that they were not well-founded but these arguments were intense then. They were important but to some extent they were artifically stoked up by the Stalinists to try and divide the movement and squash any opposition to their rule so unfortunately they were not as theoretically productive as they should have been. Fortunately in Congress Militant we were able to steer a path through all this muck.
The point about the unions is that they have to be involved in economic struggle, it's crazy to say otherwise, but where that ends up in a reformist attitude, that's something else. But by and large the unions that were set up in the 1970s kept their tradition of bridging the economic, industrial and political questions.
CHARE YOUR PROFIS A strike by Durban bakery and dairy workers, 1985. 25 Natal 1973 •
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