![]() ![]() Cities were seen as sites of white modernity in which Africans could only be present as strictly subordinated and segregated workers. The attempt to exclude Africans from any autonomous presence in urban life was central to the logic of apartheid. This was also the case in Durban, which, largely as a result of its dockworkers’ tenacity, became a key node of militant trade unionism. The federation played a leading role in the wave of national strikes, which picked up frequency and militancy in the late 1950s. ![]() Sactu was aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) and sought to connect labour organising to the struggle for national liberation. The communist-led African Mine Workers’ Union, which had organised the strike, gave birth to the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), formed in Johannesburg in 1955. Although the strike was crushed, it had an enduring impact on struggles for freedom and provoked a shift towards more direct confrontation with the state. ![]() They continued the strike for a week in the face of police terror, which killed nine workers and wounded another 1,248. On 12 August 1946, there was a new moment of rupture as African mine workers in and around Johannesburg struck, demanding higher wages. Between 19, workers on the Durban docks organised another five strikes. In 1930, Johannes Nkosi, a dockworker organiser and powerful presence in the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), which was known to workers as abantu ababomvu (‘the red people’), was murdered by the police after he led a public burning of pass books, the documents that the apartheid government required Africans to carry in order to access cities. Dockworkers in Durban went on strike again in 1920, and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, which was formed on the docks in Cape Town in 1919, became a major force in the city in the late 1920s 1 Zulu Phungula, a charismatic worker leader, led another period of confrontation on the Durban docks from the late 1930s. In 1913, Indian workers on sugar cane plantations, most of them indentured, organised a massive strike. Led by Bhambatha kaMancinza, the rebellion took the form of guerrilla attacks launched from the sanctuary of the Nkandla forest near Eshowe, a small town to the north of Durban. African dockworkers first struck in 1874, and in 1906 many workers, including those labouring in white homes, walked off their jobs to join the rural rebellion against a new poll tax. Black workers had a long history of organisation and mobilisation in Durban and its surrounding areas. The 1973 Durban strikes were part of a wider political ferment in the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a generative site of political experimentation and innovation. This dossier is a contribution to recovering that part of South Africa’s history. Workers led the way against entrenched forms of domination that not only exploited them, but also oppressed the people as a whole, and the democracies to come were first incubated on the shop floor. The strikes were led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then president of the ABC Metalworkers’ Union and the current president of Brazil. In Brazil, the 1978-1981 strikes in three industrial cities in greater São Paulo-Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul-are often said to have marked the beginning of the end of the military dictatorship. In South Africa, the 1973 strikes in the industrial port city of Durban began the process of building a militant trade union movement that would, by the second half of the 1980s, have the apartheid regime reeling from its blows. ![]() On the contrary, in both countries, the struggles of workers were central in bringing down odious regimes. (Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.) Striking Frame Group workers meet for a report back on negotiations with management in Bolton Hall in 1973. ![]()
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