In 1973, fifty years ago, South Africa experienced a historical turning point. From 9 January 1973, workers of the Coronation Brick and Tile factory in Durban came out on strike. Eighteen months before workers and students in South Africa’s colony South West Africa (today’s Namibia), took dramatic and radical action. Heike Becker writes about how workers made their demands heard across Southern Africa in the early 1970s.
By Heike Becker
50 years ago, South Africa witnessed a historical turning point. On 9 January 1973, workers of the Coronation Brick and Tile factory in Durban came out on strike. Immediately thereafter they were joined in strike by workers from small packaging, transport and ship repairs companies, and women working in the textile and clothing sector.
Between January and March 1973 almost 100,000 workers were on strike in Durban. Through songs and marches workers made their demands heard – the first public mass action in South Africa since the anti-apartheid activism of the 1950s. This was labour action, and at once a political revolt, where workers exercised the power of factory-based mass action. The strikes signalled both militant non-racial trade unionism and an invigorated spirit of rebellion.
What led to this seemingly sudden eruption of resistance during the heyday of apartheid rule?
The upsurge of defiance was not very surprising. Despite brutal repression in the 1960s, circles of anti-apartheid activists had continued forging links in underground networks (Suttner 2008). ‘New-left’ Marxist thinking was resurging among a new generation of intellectuals and activists. Lastly, there was also a significant influence of the Black Consciousness movement in what became known as the ‘Durban moment’; the expression coined by academic and activist Tony Morphet (1990) to suggest a convergence of different radical movements and intellectual activists in the city in the early 1970s.
New repertoires of student and community activism
During the late 1960s and early 1970s Southern Africa saw the emergence of new repertoires of resistance. They first became apparent in student protests that combined counter-cultural forms of activism with more overtly political protests, from the sit-in occupation of a campus building at the University of Cape Town (UCT) through to the public burning of neck-ties at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Ideologically, the Black Consciousness movement and a renewal of Marxist approaches stand out in the South African student movements, which became significant in the resurgence of broader resistance and left politics (Becker 2018).
Central to these developments were links between young activists and intellectuals. Of special significance for the events that unfolded in Durban was the political, intellectual and personal friendship between Steve Biko, the intellectual and activist leader of the radical 1970s Black Consciousness movement and co-founder of the South African Student Organisation (SASO), and Richard (‘Rick’) Turner, a lecturer in political philosophy at the then University of Natal (UND). Turner was a researcher into labour issues, and a community and labour organiser who had also been involved in student protests in Cape Town after his return, in 1966, from Paris where he had completed a doctoral thesis on the political works of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Biko and Turner signify the importance of the conversation of increasingly radical Black Consciousness ideas, and new-left non-sectarian Marxist thought for the resurgence of resistance politics. In the early 1970s both Biko and Turner were based in Durban, where they influenced student politics, labour and community organising in creative, new ways.
In an extensive interview with their friend and comrade, the activist and photographer Omar Badsha, I learnt that from 1970 Biko, ‘Indian’ black consciousness activists, as well as Turner, and Badsha himself, worked together in running community-based ‘work camps’ at Phoenix Settlement in Durban. This settlement, originally founded by Gandhi in the early 1900s had been a site of experiments with communal living, social and economic justice and nonviolent action. In the early 1970s Kamla Pillay, a resident of Phoenix Settlement, initiated a series of community ‘camps’. Among others, Biko and Turner, who according to Turner’s biographer William Hemingway Kenniston (2010: 87) did not view Black Consciousness and working class activities as incompatible, were for some time both involved in an associated study group for young political leaders. This community-based mobilisation contributed to a groundswell of defiance. And then there were new alliances forged between black workers and a few radical white students in Durban.
Student-worker alliances
Rick Turner was an extraordinary teacher. He challenged the entrenched patriarchal notion and practice in South African universities, that teaching would mean imparting knowledge. He insisted on asking questions. This made him popular with those students who were already leaning towards anti-apartheid and anti-establishment thinking. He thus helped them to develop an understanding of capitalism and a commitment to involve themselves in opposing South Africa’s racist political economy (Kenniston 2010: 85).
Turner encouraged his all-white students to get involved with the black working class, which he saw as the key factor of change. In 1971 students formed the Student Wages Commission (SWC) in Durban. They started interviewing workers at the university about wages and labour conditions. Then they called a well-attended meeting of the workers at UND. The aim was to assist workers to advocate for better conditions of employment (Kenniston 2010: 88).
Soon the students took their commitment to support Black workers beyond the university. Together with organisers from the then legal (white, Indian and Coloured) unions, students became active in the establishment of the ‘General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund’ that attracted workers into a mutual social benefit association where workers contributed a small monthly payment and could access financial support in the event of sickness, death or firing. The Benefit Fund has been described as “a proto-union and brilliant organizing tool in an environment in which unionism was not yet possible” (Cole 2018: 116). SWC students also established a newspaper, mostly written in isiZulu, called Isisebenzi (‘The Worker’).
Importantly, students started getting involved in challenges to the institution called the ‘Wages Board’. As black (African) workers were not allowed to unionise, this government board set the wages of workers for specific industries. Students involved in the Wages Commission presented their research findings to the Board to advocate for a raise of wages. More importantly even, they encouraged Black workers to attend meetings of the Board in their hundreds and speak for themselves (Cole 2018: 118).
Similar alliances emerged in the early 1970s in several South African urban centres, where small, but vocal numbers of ‘new left’ students and intellectuals engaged a radical critique of the multi-racial liberal politics that had previously dominated (white) opposition. They assessed ‘race’ and its relation to class in apartheid society and explored different forms of Marxist and socialist critiques (Moss 2014: 150). In Durban however, their connections with workers and other new radical movements were stronger than anywhere else in South Africa and made a significant contribution to the turning-point of January 1973.
In Durban underground mobilisation resurged in 1971 and 1972. When I interviewed Badsha, he emphasised the cross-fertilizing energies of the different players in the Durban moment. This was, he said, a moment of tremendous fluidity and convergence. Durban’s mostly young worker and student activists were part of a wider resurgence of mobilisation in the early 1970s.
Namibia: ‘Breaking the Wire’
Eighteen months before the Durban strikes, a reinvention of protest and labour action had already erupted into full public view in South Africa’s colony South West Africa (today’s Namibia). As early as June 1971 (high school) students in northern Namibia took up political mobilisation. More protests and walk-outs happened from August 1971. Students also played an important part in what became the massive Namibian contract labour strike of December 1971 and January 1972.
On 13 December 1971, more than 10,000 contract workers went on strike with the key slogan, “Odalate Naiteke” (“Break the wire”, ie., break the contract system that ties the workers to their bosses – like a wire (odalate, oshiWambo, from Afrikaans ‘draad’). By January 1972, the strike involved about 13,000 to 13,500 workers in 21 towns and 11 mines. These were about half of all Namibian migrant workers at the time.
Collective resistance of Namibian contract labourers against dreadful labour conditions and inhuman treatment had a long history. A key complaint was the essentially forced labour conditions. No hours of daily or weekly work were stipulated; instead, the worker was required “to render to the master his services at all fair and reasonable times” (cited in Ngavirue 1997: 234). Workers did not see their families for 18 months. Meanwhile women in the rural north had to take care of agricultural production and raise families on their own.
Resistance against the contract labour system had been at the heart of the formation of SWAPO in 1960. Following the brutal repression in the 1960s, the flight into exile by many of SWAPO’s founding generation, and the 1967-68 ‘Terrorism Trial’ in Pretoria, where many of the remaining internal leadership were sentenced to long-term incarceration on Robben Island, the spirit of resistance had seemingly been broken.
Upsurge of mobilisation against the contract labour system
In the early 1970s things changed. A young South African who worked as a journalist at Namibia’s then only English-language daily, the Windhoek Advertiser, Stephen Hayes, commented that in 1970 black Namibians had appeared fearful, subservient or bewildered. By late 1971, however, he wrote: “Blacks are becoming conscious of their humanity, and they are walking tall in the streets. …, and the word ‘baas’ has disappeared from their vocabulary.”
Political developments had contributed to the enhanced confidence. In June 1971 the International Court of Justice declared South African occupation of Namibia illegal. This ruling encouraged a sense of impending change.
Central to this upsurge of mobilisation were high school students. As the court sat in The Hague to ponder its ruling, students from the Anglican high school at Odibo near the Angolan border wrote a petition addressed to the International Court of Justice. Thirty Odibo students, together with about 680 from a government school took part in a demonstration at the northern government offices at Ongwediva, and handed over the petition to representatives of Jannie de Wet, then the Commissioner General of Ovamboland.
According to Antoinette (Toni) Halberstadt, in 1971 a young South African teacher at Odibo, plain-clothed policemen circulated among the students, interrogated them and took photos, then bombarded them with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Widespread student demonstrations in northern Namibia exhibited heightened defiance in August 1971. In their aftermath numerous activists who were expelled from government high schools for ‘talking politics’, took up labour contracts. They immediately set out to mobilise against the contract labour system and, cooperating with local worker activists and SWAPO branches, established contact with students and contract workers across Namibia.
The energetic student activists became a key factor in the mobilisation. Mobilisations laid groundwork, however the walkouts happened without a hierarchical leadership, and workers refused to identify individual leaders. Instead, they met and expressed their demands collectively in mass meetings, calling for the abolition of the contract worker system and an end to influx control.
In Owambo the strike turned into an open revolt. It shifted from being merely a challenge to the contract labour system to addressing other issues, such as apartheid, the homeland policy and the Bantustan authorities. Rallies were held in many locations. School strikes continued. For the first time women actively participated, and started attending and addressing rallies. Government’s cattle vaccination points were burnt down since people suspected that the vaccinations administered by the colonial apartheid state, rather than protecting from disease, killed their animals.
Implications of the Namibian strike for South Africa
The Namibian strike played a critical role in the revival of radical politics and resistance. Observers, such as the Namibian political scientist André Du Pisani (1985: 215) noted that, “the political implications of the strike were also felt in the Republic of South Africa when a series of strikes broke out in Natal”. The Namibian strike was widely reported in the South African press. Activists in South Africa keenly picked up this news.
Omar Badsha told me that the workers in the Namibian harbour of Walvis Bay had particularly impressed the Durban dockworkers, especially the refusal of the Namibian workers to name individuals as representatives to speak with the bosses. They insisted that everyone was present during negotiations, where the workers shouted their demands collectively. Badsha said that this strategy was then also adopted by the Durban strikes in January 1973.
These were close links. In the early 1970s Namibia was never far from the minds of South African activists. When ‘new-left’ (white) students at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) started a campaign for the release of all political prisoners, they even invited a recently released former Namibian Robben Island prisoner, Gerson Veii, to speak on the Johannesburg campus (Moss 2014: 121-146). The Black Consciousness South African Students Organisation (SASO) also officially condemned the presence of the Apartheid forces in Namibia (Becker 2018).
The legacy of 1973
While the Durban strikes of 1973 have been widely credited for the upsurge of trade unionism in South Africa, the new forms of activism employed by students and workers in South Africa and Namibia, deserve more attention. Of special interest seem the spontaneity and, even experimental forms of activist mobilisation, such as the insistence on tactics of ‘flat leadership’, to use a term employed more recently by the ‘Fallist’ movements of the 2010s.
Both by necessity and choice, the movements that erupted onto the political scene in the early 1970s were non-sectarian and typically of a remarkable openness in their social and political strategies and alliances. Unsurprisingly, their politics could not be sustained due to the brutal repression exerted by the regime. Activists were ‘banned’ from public life, teaching and publishing. Steve Biko and Rick Turner were murdered in 1977 and 1978 respectively.
So, what could be considered the legacy of the strikes and resurging resistance movements 50 years later?
A conference on 50 years of the Durban strikes
A fitting point of departure for considering the legacy of the Durban strikes was a three-day conference that took place in Durban in January 2023. The event’s tight programme included presentations by researchers and activists, among those some who had been part of the 1973 moment.
Inspired by Omar Badsha, the conference was hosted on the campus of the Durban University of Technology. The venue of the conference, skirting the Durban CBD, was well chosen. As some of the veteran activists remarked, we congregated close to where some significant strike action took place 50 years ago.
The conference brought together the generation of 1973 with academics and activist-academics, as well as activist organisers and trade unionists of different generations. Young Black researchers and activists were a minority among the attendees, which was noted with some regret. However, young Black women certainly made their voices heard clearly. June Rose Nala, described by Badsha as “one of the most militant of our [1973] comrades” could not attend the conference due to ill health but sent her United Kingdom-based daughter instead. Younger Black women researchers, such as Lebogang Mokwena (UWC) and Bianca Tame (UCT), presented some of the most inspiring papers.
The three conference days moved from the past to the present and the future. An opening roundtable brought together memories, nostalgia and numerous controversies about 50 years of South African trade unionism and politics. Speakers included former activists whose political trajectories had taken divergent routes. There was Alec Erwin, an activist in the early trade union movement who served post-1994 as an ANC government minister. There was also David Hemson, an activist with the Student Wages Commission, a lifelong self-defined socialist, who voiced fiery critique of the neoliberal directions of post-apartheid governance. Women trade union activist speakers of the later 1970s and 1980s, Nomonde Mgumane and Nomarashiya Caluza, made poignant critical observations about the current state of trade unionism and politics, and also raised relevant concerns about gender issues in the labour movement.
Panels on the politics and legacy of the Durban strikes, on trade unions, power, popular politics and policy in the 1980s and post-1994 raised intense debates, especially where memory turned into contested nostalgia. In contrast, presentations engaging the everyday, masculinities, and the intersection of workers’, students’ and intellectuals’ struggles convinced with future-oriented vibrancy. The conference was at its most exciting, moving, and forward-looking in moments of personal story telling, and the themes that connected performance, arts and culture.
A highlight was an inspiring musical performance. ‘1973: The Story of a Strike’ gathered storytellers, performers, and musicians. They included Sazi Dlamini, described as ‘Durban’s living musical legend’, and the guitarist Reza Khota, currently artist in residence at the University of the Western Cape, who has played rock, classical music and jazz. Tina Schouw, Malika Ndlovu, Mpume Mthombeni and Lungile Dlamini brought to voice the narrative meticulously researched and written by Ari Sitas and Sazi Dlamini. The play focused on three women who worked in Durban’s once foremost clothing and textile industry. Their stories drew on the oral histories and memories of at least 13 women who decided in January and February 1973 to say “enough is enough”.
Exhibitions of photographs and documents from the 1973 action were on display at the conference venue (curated by David Hemson) and at the Kwa Muhle Museum (curated by Omar Badsha). Also included were items from the Namibian general strike, including a poster featuring the portraits and names of the Namibian strikers who were charged in the Windhoek magistrate’s court as so-called ‘ringleaders’ with ‘intimidating’ the workers to stayaway from work.
The poster offered a robust reminder of the resistant solidarity that connected the resurging struggles across Southern Africa in the early 1970s. While the transnational ties of solidarity later declined, younger activists in both countries have recently raised thought-provoking voices against the perpetuated coloniality and inequality in their post-apartheid homelands, from the South African student-led Fallist movements to the intersectional decolonial activism by young Namibians (Becker 2018, 2020, 2022a; 2022b; Mushaandja 2021; Van Wyk 2023).
The present and future of trade unionism, social movement activism, and related (activist) research loomed large during the conference. Repeatedly, the question was raised by speakers: “who is a worker?” in “the world [that] has changed”. The industrial labour force that played the key role in 1973 has shrunk by three decades of neoliberal politics in South Africa. One participant emphasised that the idea of ‘the working class’ was “last century nostalgia”. Many discussants seemed to concur. What about the new precariat, one incisive panel investigated, from the informal sector and domestic labour through to, the widespread consultancy work in the public sector? What about young people, their “gigs, hustles and hope beyond the wage” (Cooper and Dubbeld 2023)?
The parting question thus was: What now? Provisional propositions included delinking activism from (party) politics, and responding actively to young people’s vibrant interests in arts and culture. In the end conference participants strongly agreed that it was critical to attract young people to join and renew South Africa’s labour movement.
Heike Becker is an activist and writer focusing on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). Heike teaches at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and is a regular contributor to roape.net.
A version of this article with first published as ‘50 years of the Durban strikes‘ by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in South Africa.
Featured Photograph: Graffiti in Kayamandi, Stellenbosch, South Africa (25 October 2014).
References
Becker, Heike. 2018. Dissent, disruption, decolonization: South African student protests, 1968 to 2016, International Socialist Review, Issue 111 (Winter 2018-19): 31-47.
Becker, Heike. 2020. ‘#ShutItAllDownNamibia: Young Namibians are hitting the streets against gender-based violence and colonial legacies’. Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Online Dossier Namibia@30, 27 October 2020.
Becker, Heike. 2022a. ‘‘A Curt Farewell’: decolonizing public space in Namibia’. Review of African Political Economy website, 3 November 2022.
Becker, Heike. 2022b. “Youth speaking truth to power”: intersectional decolonial activism in Namibia. Dialectical Anthropology.
Cole, Peter. 2018. Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
Cooper, Adam; Bernard Dubbeld. 2023. ‘Gigs, hustles and hope: work for young South Africans beyond the wage’. Presentation, Durban, 28 January 2023.
Du Pisani, André. 1985. SWA/Namibia: the politics of continuity and change. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.
Kenniston, William Hemingway. 2010. ‘Richard Turner’s contribution to a socialist political culture in South Africa 1968-1978’. Bellville: University of the Western Cape (MA History Thesis).
Morphet, Tony. 1990. Rick Turner Memorial lecture. University of Natal.
Moss, Glenn. 2014. The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.
Mushaandja, Nashilongweshipwe. 2021. Critical Visualities & Spatialities: Protest, Performance, Publicness and Praxis. Namibian Journal of Social Justice Vol 1 (July 2021): 192-201.
Ngavirue, Zed. 1997. Political Parties and Interest Groups in South West Africa (Namibia): A Study of a Plural Society. Basel: Schlettwein Publ.
South African History Online. 2014. ‘1973 Durban Strikes’.
Suttner, Raymond. 2008. The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study.Johannesburg: Jacana.
Van Wyk, Bayron. 2023. ‘#ACurtFarewell & inclusive Namibian memory landscapes’. 11 January 2023. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southern Africa.
Interview
Omar Badsha, 18 September 2019, Woodstock, Cape Town
