In this piece, Pedro Mzileni reclaims International Workers’ Day from Eurocentric origins by calling for recognition of African contributions to global worker history. He does this by celebrating the life and politics of South African Communist leader Chris Hani, who was tragically assassinated in 1993. Mzileni presents Hani as a revolutionary thinker committed to the idea that only international workers’ struggles against capitalism could end Black oppression in South Africa.
By Pedro Mzileni
There remains a contested history on how the 1st of May became an International Workers Day. Euro-American Marxists such as Philip Foner trace its origins, as expected, from Euro-American labour resistance that began with the first permanent formation of trade unions in the late 1790s, in Philadelphia; where carpenters mainly went on strike in 1791 demanding a 10-hour working day, under exploitative capitalism that required 14-hours of labour at the time. By 1864, labour transcended the local factory for global solidarity with the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), which campaigned for an eight-hour day of labour. The IWA was endorsed by the Geneva Congress in the same year – a gathering popularly recorded as the First International.
The next two decades, at least up to 1886, featured a series of labour movements from that part of the world, who mobilised to select a specific day in the year to withdraw their labour to participate in the eight-hour day’s labour campaign. The 1875 Industrial Congress in Indianapolis selected July 4th for these mass demonstrations, which was also the same day preferred by the British working class as early as 1844. However, the Edmonston’s resolution of the Labour Federation convention of 1844 selected 1 May 1886 as the day to begin the eight-hour day’s labour, through a mass parade that featured more than 10,000 demonstrators. The rest was history.
As important as this abridged version of Western-orientated literature on labour is, which I do not want to underestimate, it is however an incomplete story that excludes the rest of the world’s contributions to the birth and maturity of the Workers International. The remaining part of the story should begin with scientific recognition that by 1492, capitalism was obtaining a global footprint specifically through colonial rule. When Marx and Engels open their Communist Manifesto essay with an admission and concession that the bourgeoisie only started obtaining fresh ground for its unprecedented and rapid development, and an impulse it had never known before through the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape; they were actually acknowledging the significance of colonialism in the international development of capitalism.
In other words, the bourgeoise as the core of the colonial world system, zoned Europe and Western society as the exclusive boundary of capital; that views the rest of the world as the periphery to colonise and exploit in extracting its raw material from its dehumanised people reduced to being disposable cheap labour. Frantz Fanon’s observation of French colonial rule in Algeria was therefore accurate: “Europe’s scandalous opulence was founded from the soil of the underdeveloped world and from slavery and the dead bodies Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and yellow races”. These historical, antagonistic, and international labour relations between the North and the South moved former history lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Walter Rodney, to reveal how Europe underdeveloped Africa; where he specifically underscored that racism is the ideology of modern capitalism.
When Marx, Engels, and indeed Foner decide to present the history of Workers International as the sole invention of Western thought, where the rest of the world is either erased or appears as footnotes, we have an obligation to reveal how philosophers in other parts of the world like Africa witnessed and theorised these questions from the colonies as important contributions to global literature. Martin Thembisile Hani, commonly known as “Chris” in the liberation struggle, is one such philosopher and revolutionary leader in the international history of workers from the colonies that I want to invoke on this May Day for the world to remember. Chris was assassinated on the morning of 10 April 1993 outside his home in Dawn Park, Boksburg, South Africa; in front of his 15-year-old daughter Nomakhwezi, by Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis; two white racist European settlers who were representing the broader white far-right apartheid project, administered by the Conservative Party (CP), and the National Party (NP) running apartheid South Africa.
Nelson Mandela, on the evening of Chris’s assassination, addressed the national broadcaster calling for peace on a clearly provoked population, and described Chris as “an erudite scholar who could have chosen a less arduous path, he nonetheless selflessly chose the often thankless task of being a freedom fighter … loved by millions, hated only by those who fear the truth”. Cuban revolutionary President at the time, Fidel Castro, also made a public statement concerning Chris’s assassination: “the survival of sectors and forces contrary to the elimination of racial segregation regime, even at the price of such a heinous crime, also confirm that although the future looks promising, the anti-apartheid movement will have to wage great battles and face unforeseeable obstacles”. Cuba was the last international visit by Chris Hani outside South Africa, when he led a solidarity delegation of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in February 1993, which was welcomed by Fidel Castro in Havana.
Chris Hani was a revolutionary philosopher who had an astute appreciation of theory and practice as key and simultaneous pillars of struggle. He was a communist with an international consciousness, who understood that the oppressed racialised Black and gendered women in the colony of South Africa were part of a single world system of colonial rule driven by capitalism; and it was only an internationalist workers struggle for a socialist democracy that will liberate humanity. An intellectual biography of his life and thoughts clearly outlines these attributes about him. I will only highlight three aspects of his intellectual life that attach him to the global family of revolutionary philosophers of the Workers International in modern history.
Firstly, Chris obtained academic and intellectual training on the broader anti-colonial strategy. He graduated with a BA from the prestigious University of Fort Hare in South Africa; one of the only three universities in the world that have produced four or more State presidents. The other two universities to have done that are Harvard and Yale. It is at Fort Hare where Chris was exposed to Marxist literature in journals such as The Torch and New Age written underground by world-renowned anti-colonial thinkers such as Govan Mbeki and Ruth First. Afterwards, he went for military training in the USSR, where further Marxist conscientisation was inculcated on him, to advance the option of the armed struggle as a revolutionary path to seize state power for independence. Chris also received political training in Pan-African philosophy from frontline states in Africa at the peak of political decolonisation in the 1960s, whilst exiled in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Angola, Tanzania, Lesotho, and Botswana.
It is crucial to put the intellectual value of the armed struggle in context and in connection with Chris. The region of Southern Africa was uniquely undergoing settler colonialism: the most brutal version of colonial rule. In economic terms, settler colonialism was the process by which a large population of European origin invaded the region, dispossessed the indigenous African population off its land, and converted the dispossessed African population into disposable and enslaved cheap labour that creates wealth for the occupying European settlers. It was racial capitalism in the colony. In social terms, settler colonialism saw the European settlers destroy and replace all indigenous social systems with those of the metropole to make themselves feel at home, whilst alienating the dispossessed indigenous population. The only method of resistance against colonialism of this kind becomes the armed struggle; mainly for land restoration to end the settler-native relationship, to end racial capitalism, and to bring justice, peace and independence. Fanon calls this method: revolutionary violence for decolonisation. In other words, the oppressed are defending themselves by all means necessary against unprovoked colonial violence to free themselves and to rebuild their nation themselves. The armed struggle therefore is a necessary and scientific tool of resistance to end settler colonial violence to bring peace; which is the reason why this method of struggle is protected today under international law as Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Secondly, beyond the academic and intellectual training Chris obtained that facilitated his internationalist consciousness; his upbringing and socialisation also committed his life to the struggle of the Workers International. Chris is born in the Transkei homeland in 1942, in the proletarianised village of Sabalele in Cofimvaba near a settler town called Queenstown; from parents, Gilbert Hani and Nomayise Hani, who were cheap migrant labourers. Gilbert, his father, earned 16 shillings per week as a construction worker in Cape Town and supplemented his income as a street hawker. But, they still managed to raise Chris as a bright schoolboy who obtained distinctions, that qualified him for the United Transkei Territories General Council scholarship to go study at Lovedale College and University of Fort Hare in Alice. Biographers Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp reveal that in an extensive interview that Chris did with historian Luli Callinicos, a few weeks before he was assassinated, he underscored this early socialisation as being crucial in building his lifetime commitment to the Workers International: “Now I had seen the lot of Black workers, extreme forms of exploitation. Slave wages, no trade union rights, and for me the appeal of socialism was extremely great. Workers create wealth, but in the final analysis, they get nothing. They get peanuts in order to survive and continue working for the capitalists. So it was that simple approach, that simple understanding which was a product of my own observation in addition to theory. I didn’t get involved with workers’ struggle out of theory alone”.
Thirdly, Chris was a grassroots organiser and public teacher for community self-reliance and people’s power. Chris reluctantly returned from exile to South Africa on 28 April 1990, as part of the secret talks between the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Intelligence Services (NIS) of the apartheid state in Switzerland, a month after the release of Mandela on 11 February 1990; where broad agreements where being made between the two parties for the release of political prisoners and return exiles to begin formal negotiations for a postapartheid order. The “talks about talks” eventually began inside South Africa between the two adversaries, the NP and the ANC, on 4 May 1990 and they produced the first ceasefire agreement called by the Groote Schuur Minute that was signed by both parties, followed by a joint press conference. The NP did not honour this ceasefire agreement, including many others signed by both parties and more role-players from 1990-1993. Instead, it continued with its political assassinations, genocidal mass killings, and detentions without trial of all thinkers, journalists, activists, and civilians opposed to apartheid rule. This impunity of the apartheid state was its indirect strategy to prolong white rule, maintain apartheid property relations in post-apartheid society, and sabotage the post-apartheid state’s capacity to pursue total liberation.
The 17 June 1992 Boipatong massacre, the 7 September 1992 Bisho massacre, and indeed the 10 April 1993 assassination of Chris, were all standout unspeakable crimes amongst many other known and unknowns massacres and assassinations during this period, which demonstrated how irreparable and consistent the apartheid state was on its original mission to execute Black people. Chris used rallies, community meetings, popular interviews, and mass protests to conscientise Black people about the importance of maintaining the armed struggle, mass action, and revolutionary discipline to achieve total liberation. Chris continued wearing his military regalia as General Secretary of the SACP elected on 8 December 1991; communicating the revolutionary principle of maintaining the armed struggle and building the self-reliance of grassroots communities through the people’s self-defence units (SDUs).
One of the erased facts of history today is that the aspect of SDUs was a much-loved subject of popular conscientisation by Chris, and he attended most of his rallies and community meetings speaking to masses about this issue with his most-fond friend and fellow comrade of common ideas: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Whilst the apartheid state viewed the armed struggle as an enemy of its white liberal version of peace, Chris on the other hand viewed the armed struggle as a scientific prerequisite for a peaceful negotiated South Africa; that must be driven by the people’s popular demands in communities, not few elites in Kliptown boardrooms of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA). On 1 May 1992, Chris as General Secretary of the SACP, addressed his last Workers International Day rally at the Curries Fountain Stadium in Durban, Natal, alongside Nelson Mandela as ANC President, and John Gomomo as hosting President of the rally by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Chris used this address to make four crucial points:
- To mobilise the grassroots behind the mass democratic movement to end violence amongst Black people sponsored by the apartheid state in KwaZulu homelands in Natal.
- To intensify mass action around CODESA negotiations to centralise people’s power in the qualitative outcome of the ensuing post-apartheid breakthrough.
- To mobilise workers as community members to intensify shopfloor struggles and broader anti-capitalist campaigns for a socialist alternative that will deliver an industrialised economy, full employment, and socialisation of the commanding heights of the economy.
- To mobilise the international working class to reject the emerging neoliberal and unipolar offensive of the imperialist and war-mongering United States, European Union, and NATO – driven by the recent collapse of the Berlin Wall.
In all these mass gatherings, Chris addressed full stadiums at the height of the unemployment crisis, after the international economy sanctioned apartheid South Africa. The Workers International Day of 1 May 1992 was not an official public holiday under apartheid rule, but he managed to pull the grassroots together through popular stay aways. Beyond these outstanding attributes and his international stature and popularity that once placed him as a possible successor to Nelson Mandela; Chris was importantly a democrat who admired and respected the organisational discipline of his movement – the ANC. When the leadership of President Mandela made economic and defence-related concessions to the NP in exchange for the ballot; such as accepting a private property constitutional state on a colonial foundation, and suspending the armed struggle and demobilising a population majority; Chris was not consulted, but he accepted the decisions of the collective.
On 10 April 1993, an Easter Saturday morning, Chris gave his bodyguards special leave and shared holiday break as his personal commitment to workers solidarity, by asking them to go home to be with their families and not guard him that weekend. Walus approached a defenseless Chris inside his home yard, and the rest was history. Today, we remember Chris for living a life of total commitment and integrity to the cause of humanity. We therefore share the words uttered by his two daughters on media interview shortly after his death, Lindiwe and Nomakhwezi, who said: “my dad did nothing wrong to anyone, but God took him away. His crime was that he cared for people … I couldn’t understand why Walus had to come all the way to South Africa to kill one Black communist. I am sure it makes no difference at all to him, but to me, it’s a world of difference”.
Featured Photograph: (SACP) Chris Hani speaks at a press conference on the third day of the first SACP legal congress inside South Africa in 41 years in December 07, 1991 (historica fandom)
Dr Pedro Mzileni is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zululand in South Africa. His research areas are on Global Higher Education Studies, International History, Decolonial Theory, and Sociologies of African Thought.
