Metal that Will not Bend. Kally Forrest
and giving support and solidarity.
Imbongi Lawrence Zondi, a worker at BTR Sarmcol (Debbie Bonnin)
Education and union growth
Education was hugely important to the process of recruitment and of retaining membership in the early and mid-1980s. Some of it came through formal union structures, but much took place in a less didactic way. Workers were hungry for knowledge as a means of informing and transforming their oppressive conditions.
Sidney Tarrow comments that contention takes different forms which can be ‘inherited, rare, habitual or familiar, solitary or part of concerted campaigns’. He notes that groups have a memory of contentious forms. ‘Workers know how to strike because generations of workers struck before them.’77 In a study of how a collective ‘struggle’ consciousness evolved among BTR Sarmcol workers, Debbie Bonnin noted the educative power of the grassroots intellectual or ‘imbongi’ (praise poet). These intellectuals provided a bridge between the battles in the factory in the 1960s and later recruitment and recognition struggles in Mawu in the 1970s and 1980s. The imbongi Lawrence Zondi played the role of ‘sage, philosopher, poet, recorder and interpreter of history by consent of the rest of the community … and offered advice on the future.’78 He was the first to join Mawu at Sarmcol in 1974 and he drew in younger workers by ‘absorbing and intertwining individual experiences from the past with community experiences’ thereby welding together a ‘common history’.79 This continuity between past and present was important in shaping younger workers’ consciousness. Zondi, and a number of older workers, told stories of strikes waged by the Rubber and Cable Union,80 a Sactu affiliate, where workers successfully won protective clothing and wage increases in 1961.
Greg Ruiters contends that ‘On the East Rand the thread of continuity between the East Rand ANC activists of the 1950s and the radicals of the 1980s had withered. In the 1970s black consciousness ideas were on the rise attracting thousands of militants … the imprint of the 1950s was not discernable.’81 Yet it would seem that the role of grassroots intellectuals at Sarmcol was not an isolated one. There are many stories on the East Rand of workers being influenced by the testimonies of older workers from the ANC/Sactu and PAC traditions. Ruiters appears to be supporting what Raymond Suttner describes as:
Academic Phil Bonner conducts a workers’ education seminar (Wits archives)
… a paradigm that gripped academics in dealing with the post Rivonia period [1960s]. It is the paradigm of an overwhelmingly powerful apartheid state, omnipresent and a shattered liberation movement. Silence is said to have reigned, quiescence, absence of ANC, political dormancy. The reality is that not everyone went to jail who was ANC. There were all sorts of ways that people bore the message of ANC … The rupture was visible, but the continuity had to be more or less invisible because of the conditions of the time.82
Sipho Kubheka recalls meeting ‘a very interesting guy’ at the factory. ‘He had done ten years on Robben Island. He was a member of the SA Congress of Trade Unions. He started introducing labour politics to a few of us. We did not have anything to look at as a mirror, except the oral history that Manci had given us.’83 In the early 1970s, a number of IAS workers were ANC or Sactu members, including Pindile Mfeka, Jeanette Curtis and Joe Gqabi. Peet Pheku, a Mawu/Numsa organiser was a former Sactu textile unionist who vividly recalled the terror of a police attack on strikers at Amato in Benoni in 1958.84 Petrus Tom, who established Mawu’s Vaal branch, once belonged to a Sactu union, while Baba Kay (Nehemia) Makama, a Mawu/Numsa organiser, had also been a Sactu/ANC member. At Volkswagen, older African workers who held allegiances to the ANC and PAC were also important influences in the unionisation of African workers.
Such influences were not, however, common to all workers. Many workers of the 1976 generation had grown up under the influence of the Black Consciousness Movement, while others, such as future Numsa president Daniel Dube, had had no previous contact with unionism or politics, or with activists from the past.
Mawu organiser David Sebabi and Taffy Adler, Naawu Education Secretary (Wits archives)
Experiential learning was also taking place amongst Fosatu and Mawu shop stewards and organisers. The assessment of tactics, evaluation of failures, accruing relevant information and debating future moves was ongoing. Organisers were particularly important, as they helped to disseminate legal, economic, strategic and technical information in tactical discussions with shop stewards and factory workers. Such learning reached new heights in shop stewards councils, and this was acknowledged in the appointment of an education secretary, first (in the late 1970s) in Fosatu and later also in Naawu and Mawu to coordinate educational functions.85
These organic educational experiences developed alongside the more formal education provided initially by Fosatu and later by the unions themselves. Initially, a working committee oversaw education, but this was replaced in 1980 by the more structured Fosatu national education committee (Nedcom) and regional education committees (Redcoms). They consisted of a worker and an organiser from each union, who guided a full-time national education officer accountable to the education sub-committee of Fosatu’s central committee.86
Fosatu provided regular education for all affiliates through seminars and group meetings. Alec Erwin, appointed national education officer in 1983, prepared material, ran educational projects and coordinated seminars across regions for shop stewards and organisers, sometimes with the help of specialists from the University of the Witwatersrand and Natal University. Courses for organisers covered areas such as the history of worker organisation, trade unionism and the law, and organising and bargaining practices.
Regions staged courses and seminars for organisers, office-bearers, shop stewards and general membership.87 Joseph Meso, a former Mawu member and Samancor shop steward, remembers the programme as ‘basic’. ‘We discussed topics like what is a union, what are shop stewards, procedures to follow for taking up cases, grievance procedures and negotiating skills. Halton Cheadle, they were lecturing us, as well as Peter Harris, Eddie Webster. We studied at night as well, travelling back from Jo’burg to the Vaal.’88
Naawu also made use of Fosatu programmes which, Dube recalls, were focused on improving the factory environment as a way of bringing workers into the union and keeping them there. He described how the courses highlighted:
… daily issues like a worker coming in under the influence, and the foreman wanting to either dismiss him or to give him another penalty, and you coming in to argue in favour of the worker. And the idea there is to gain the confidence of the workers first, so that they can start listening to you. And then you can start teaching them other things. It was to teach people how the trade union organisation can be used to defend the interests of not only the working people, but also the working class.
In those days, a worker inside the plant would understand that this is an organisation that is there for his or her interests … What is paramount to them, it is the working conditions in their plant. And if you can start improving those, they will get confidence in you or your organisation. Then you can start talking to them about the broader issues like what can we do for our community; what can we do for the unemployed.89
By the mid-1980s, unions were conducting some of their own education, which covered basic skills but was less formal and was influenced by the free-flowing discussions in shop stewards councils. Adrienne Bird was appointed Mawu’s Transvaal educator in 1985 and Taffy Adler Naawu’s education secretary. Bird described the hunger for information in shop stewards courses:
They were bizarre events. You would phone up the companies and get four or five per company, but because there were so many companies and so few of us, you’d pack people in. You’d have three or four hundred shop