CHAPTER 11: Arguments, debates and stepping stones
CHAPTER 11
Arguments, debates and stepping stones
It seemed absurd to suggest that these young romantics, bickering about the final goals of a tiny embattled movement whose very survival was in doubt, would one day help form strong worker organisations … But the debates were important for all that. For almost a decade, they shaped the divisions between emerging unions and determined how they would react to government reforms and events in the factories … Decisions affecting thousands of organised workers would hang on these esoteric academic arguments … As they grew, organised workers began to inject their own, more practical, perspectives into the debate.
Steven Friedman,
Building Tomorrow Today1
WHEN NEIL APPROACHED THE IAS, TAFFY ADLER PROBABLY had misgivings, given Neil’s association with the banned pair of ‘populists’. But as a doctor he had skills that could be useful. Liz Thomson, who had been one of a small number of radical students at Wits Medical School, along with Jenny Cunningham and Ian Kitai, recalls how all were keen to make a contribution beyond their purely medical duties: ‘Those were the days when you had to get in to the unions. You couldn’t just arrive. We spent a lot of time discussing – also about workers’ clinics and then we became quite friendly with Neil.’ So it was within this wider alliance of medical activists that Neil found his first point of entry into the IAS, offering medical advice regarding workers’ injuries and related compensation. Entry into an actual union like MAWU would be more difficult.
When Neil started assisting at the IAS, he also began working three nights a week at Baragwanath Hospital, a pattern he was to continue and intensify. Liz Thomson recalls how the young doctors would ‘work all night and then beaver off on our afternoons to go and work at the IAS’. It was mostly the non-union, unemployed, dismissed and unorganised workers who lined the corridor, waiting to be seen and looking for help. There was a complaints system, and a complaints book to be filled in, before issues could be taken up with the Department of Labour or an employer. Workers would be interviewed, and the doctors would be brought in on cases with medical problems. In hospital, the most they could do was to patch patients up while the system perpetuated itself. In the IAS, they hoped to assist workers in seeking some small redress for injuries and ill health sustained at work. Neil knew that this could only make a minimal contribution towards solving the bigger problems, but it was a stepping stone towards his goal of working in a union.
Once in the IAS, it wasn’t long before Neil came up with the idea of a medical scheme for MAWU, in which he and like-minded doctors could run sessions for workers on first aid and basic health problems, as well as training worker leaders. Another idea was to establish medical centres in the townships, run by local people. He envisaged that the IAS could buy medicines in bulk and employ doctors who would be prepared to work for very little pay. Gavin and Sipho were supportive, as were the other members of a special, carefully selected discussion group to which Neil had been introduced, in effect a political reference group. With Neil, there were seven, their secret sign for calling a meeting being to flick thumb against forefinger, making a ‘7’. Three others were workers at Heinemann, from where Sipho had been fired, and MAWU members: Mam’Lydia Kompe, Baba K Makama and Andrew Shabangu. The seventh member was David Dison, then a young trainee lawyer doing work for the IAS and also a member of Gavin’s Capital reading group.
The ‘Group of 7’ was a place where political ideas could be checked out among like-minded comrades. Having clarified a political line, when the time was right they would energise debate within the open unions. It was a way of Gavin and Sipho continuing to play a role despite what they saw as their double exclusion, first by the state and then by those leading the IAS and MAWU, intent on developing the union without being drawn into struggle politics. As Gavin put it, ‘there was no point for someone like Baba K or Mam’Lydia to speak their minds in the open [union] because then they’d just get closed down’. It was much better to go along with the general line in meetings while focusing on building awareness of issues in their conversations with shop stewards and seeing where links could be made between factory and township organisation. They regarded their strategy as one of ‘reformist face and revolutionary practice’. In the meantime, despite their banning orders, Gavin and Sipho would make secret trips to Durban and Cape Town, building links further afield in the emerging labour movement.
While Neil threw himself into learning about union issues, he probably pushed to the back of his mind questions about his relationship with Liz. Also pushed to the back must have been the matter of his impending conscription. He expected the papers to be sent to his parents’ house. In the first letter to his mother after starting at Tembisa Hospital, dated 25 October 1977, thanking her for a birthday card and money with which he had bought a pair of shoes, he had given a Cape Town post-box address, saying he was briefly down ‘on the farm’ with Liz. He had heard that Joy had experienced a fall and hoped that she had recovered. He was not sure what he would be doing the following year, ‘but I may go overseas’. He concluded his short letter with affection. There was even a message for his father: ‘Stay well Mom, and please don’t worry about me. Please give my regards to Dad. Fond love, Neil.’
Despite his proximity to Somerset West, however, Neil had not dropped in to see her. He made no enquiry about call-up papers, but had they arrived his mother would have felt obliged to hand them to him. Whether or not Joy suspected why he hadn’t come to see her, his ‘please don’t worry about me’ was unlikely to reduce a mother’s hurt and misgivings of what could lie ahead.
Eight months later, in June 1978, Neil wrote to Joy announcing that he was leaving ‘for Europe and perhaps America tomorrow’. He was sorry that he hadn’t seen her before his departure, but would keep in contact. He asked to have his regards passed on to Jill and Michael. Giving his address as ‘P.O. Box 46376, Orange Grove, Johannesburg’, he requested that his mother send his mail there, so a friend could send it on. Neil clearly hoped that when his army papers arrived, Aubrey would pass this news on to the authorities, even if his father thought that going overseas was cowardly.
The postbox was one that he had asked Liz to hire, and he had no intention of going overseas. But when his call-up arrived, at least he would have some warning, and the military police still wouldn’t know where exactly he was living. However, his plan went awry when he bumped into his brother on the steps at Wits. Michael, who happened to be visiting Johannesburg, was also taken aback. Always defensive of their parents, he was accusing: ‘I thought you were overseas!’ Whatever explanation Neil gave, the encounter was soon relayed and his overseas cover story was finished. The military police now only had to check with various hospitals to find out where he was working. As time went on, the matter would become more pressing. How should he respond when they caught up with him?
* * *
Working in the IAS, in the office next door to MAWU, Neil must have felt tantalisingly close to union work. The over-arching union-related debate throughout 1978 was around the issue of registration. In May the previous year, Professor Nicolaas Wiehahn, a former railway worker and now advisor to the Minister of Labour, had been appointed chairman of a commission to examine all labour laws. By the end of 1977, the vast majority of job reservation orders had been suspended. After decades of African workers being suppressed and denied rights, activists were further galvanised and bitterly divided over how to respond to the changes that the Wiehahn Commission was expected to recommend in its eventual report. African unions would now be allowed to ‘register’. However, the clawback was that a registered union was not permitted to link with any political group. The new plans also allowed for multiracial committees that would effectively put a brake on the growing strength of registered black unions, enabling white unions to control them.2
The anti-registration arguments were perceived as the ‘political’ and ‘populist’ SACTU and ANC-aligned position. Despite Neil having been mentored into ‘reformist face, revolutionary practice’ by Gavin and Sipho, he allowed himself to get into an argument about registration with Taffy Adler in the IAS office. It took Gavin to point out that he had just scuppered his hopes of MAWU, now led by Bernie Fanaroff, taking on his medical scheme: ‘Yes, you won the argument, but they’re now going to sideline you!’ Neil had revealed that he stood with a militant unionism linked with political struggle and would be ‘flushed out as a ‘leftist’. Gavin’s prediction came true. Having set his sights on getting into MAWU, Neil had blown his chance. Plans for a medical scheme came to a halt, and instead of action he was confined to talk.
Prevented from getting closer to union work, it seems that Neil’s earlier fascination with clandestine operations led him to contemplate the idea of ‘underground unions’. Gavin would have none of it. When Neil came up with the phrase ‘the underground union’, Gavin had laughed saying it was ‘a contradiction in terms’. But although Neil smiled back, at that stage he was entirely serious as he quietly explained that underground organisation was the way to keep the political line in the open unions. He had probably read about underground unions in the SACTU publication Workers’ Unity, as well as in the writings of Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party.3 But SACTU’s leaders were outside the country and, as Gavin knew, out of touch. It was against the very nature of democratic unionism to be reporting to an underground leadership instead of the executive being answerable to the members. Holding secret meetings in their Group of 7, to discuss and decide on what political line to take forward into open union debate, was not the same thing as an underground union. Gradually, Neil’s more romantic ideas were being challenged by comrades he trusted.
* * *
In the middle of 1978, Jan Theron, some two years into his post as General Secretary of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union, travelled up to Johannesburg with a union delegation. Their project was to try and re-establish a Transvaal branch of Food and Canning, as a parallel union, to organise African workers. Neil happily accommodated everyone at his house in Bertrams. Although Jan appreciated Neil’s enthusiasm, the memory of the amateur stuffing of clandestine pamphlets under the sofa still lingered. The job of organising African workers in an unregistered parallel African Food and Canning Workers’ Union (AFCWU) required not only solid work but solid judgment for walking a fine line. One of the Cape Town delegates was Oscar Mpetha, a veteran unionist who had been active, alongside Ray Alexander, as a Food and Canning organiser in the 1940s and who had recently come back to work with the union. A SACTU man, Oscar had been president of the Cape ANC until its banning in 1960. Banned and jailed, some of his early union exploits were legendary. But it was one thing to have the veteran Oscar working to revive the AFCWU. It would be quite another thing to appoint a young white man who, however sincere, Jan remembered as having his head somewhere in the clouds. So while Neil enjoyed the company, he remained simply their host, at the margins.
In the latter part of 1978, intense discussions among the emerging black unions about forming a federation led to a draft constitution being approved at the end of October, with agreement to launch the new Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) by Easter 1979. It was to be a ‘tight’ federation, with only those unions that shared its aims, including worker leadership, being allowed to join. It would accept registered and non-registered unions but intended to exclude any political links. Its purpose, as announced by its first General Secretary, Alec Erwin, was ‘to build a strong labour movement – and that’s all’.4 Significantly, FOSATU was committed to non-racialism and to a strong education programme for shop stewards.
With his personal relationship with Liz on the rocks, and with the doors to union work closed to him, Neil’s friendships within the Group of 7, Woodworkers and the Vegetable Garden, but above all with Gavin and Sipho, must have helped sustain him. Despite Liz having left him and still being very angry, he would visit the house where she was staying with Annie. They had friends in common and would meet at the Vegetable Garden as well as at ‘Bara’ Hospital, where they both worked. They were part of a small white left community that hung out together. But it was not just happenstance. Neil wanted Liz to come back.
Nevertheless, when a friend from Cape Town days, Bridget King, came up to Johannesburg, Neil offered her accommodation. He had room to spare in his little house. Bridget’s father was the Anglican Dean of Cape Town, who had vigorously defended the students against the police in their 1972 protest on the steps of St George’s Cathedral. Although Liz had made the Bertrams cottage a little more homely, Bridget’s memory suggests that, after Liz’s departure, it had returned to its earlier state. It was ‘amazingly spartan’. There was no hot water, so Bridget would shower at a neighbour’s. Neil was, however, delighted when she sewed cushions to brighten up the place. Their relationship was platonic, with Bridget finding in Neil a supportive friend. In her words, she was ‘a wild party girl, recently escaped from my first relationship with a very possessive man, and rather than disapprove of my frivolous lifestyle, he enjoyed my freedom and enjoyment of it’. When Bridget left for England with a new boyfriend, she felt Neil was sorry to see her go. It was not just that he would miss the companionship. Bridget had begun going to Marxist reading groups at Wits where she was working as a university librarian, and felt that Neil had wanted to see her develop her ‘political interest’.
Perhaps Neil’s medical work also sustained him more than he acknowledged, despite the fact that he was now working just enough to cover his basic financial needs. He would describe to friends, in the most matter-of-fact terms, gruelling scenes from the Casualty department, where he saw himself as simply a medical worker. After weekend night duty at Bara, he would stop over in Crown Mines with David Dison, who recollects how Neil would pop in for breakfast on Sunday morning and say, ‘Oh, I took about four axes out of people’s heads last night …’. Neil was not only ‘strong stomached’, he was highly effective as a doctor, developing a speciality in resuscitation. When someone arrives almost dead, and the doctor has to get a tube down the throat, it is a problem if the patient is still conscious and fighting. The skill is in doing it very quickly, without the conditions of an operating theatre and an anaesthetist. Neil was gaining a reputation for ‘cut downs’ and getting a drip up when a patient had already lost a lot of blood, was in shock and their veins had collapsed. With no vein or blood to see, the doctor has to cut the skin, dissect down, find the vein and put the knife in to attach the line. Dramatic and demanding, a successful procedure gave immediate satisfaction.
At the end of 1978, like many others, Neil escaped the heat of the city for a holiday. I gathered two versions of where he went – from Gavin Andersson and from David Dison – a salutary reminder of the fragility of memory. Each narrative added to my sense of Neil, and I am sure that both took place, though at different times. A photograph of a rugged-looking Neil with companions on a beach supports Gavin’s recollection of the December in which he broke his banning order, having refused on principle to ask the authorities for permission to leave the city. Nici was pregnant and they had slipped away to stay at a little farmhouse in the south of Natal belonging to Kathy Satchwell’s family. On a trip to a Wild Coast beach, Gavin was astonished to bump into Neil and Brian Cutler, another Vegetable Gardener, who were staying in a tent: ‘We played rounders … it took away all my paranoia of being a banned man being with friends.’ They all stopped in Durban to have a meal on the way back. Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’ was playing, the singer’s high voice telling of the end of the world from a nuclear disaster, with people gathering to watch the silver ships being loaded. They delayed their return by ‘playing some game and a lot of laughter’ until it was late and time for Gavin and Nici to drive back to Johannesburg, so he could ‘sign in’ at Hillbrow police station without being missed.
David Dison also recalls a holiday with Neil around the same time at the end of 1978. Whatever the date, the memory of driving to the eastern Cape gives us a vivid glimpse of Neil:
We buggered up my mother’s car. He [Neil] had strong connections in the Transkei – again he had stronger black connections than someone like myself had. He had doctors that he had met. He wasn’t sealed off. We were far more suburban. Going down to the Transkei with him, he had his toolbox. I mean he didn’t have a proper doctor’s bag okay. A toolbox with his medical instrument in the back of the car! That symbolised him, and he’d stolen all the medicines and stuff, he’d appropriated from Baragwanath Hospital. He couldn’t afford his own medical kit and we would treat people on the way down. It was the mad South African end-of-year rush. We were coming across scenes of accidents and he was treating people at scenes of accidents. That’s how South Africa is at the end of the year. People get onto these roads and they slaughter each other. It’s a different form of violence. So you know he was prepared.
Even on holiday, Neil sought purpose.