CHAPTER 18: The rising tide

CHAPTER 18

The rising tide

THROUGHOUT 1980, BLACK WORKERS CHALLENGED THE GOVERNMENT’S attempts to control them under the guise of reforming Wiehahn legislation, with strikes in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. The victories of the workers at Fatti’s & Moni’s in Bellville and at Ford’s Cortina plant in Port Elizabeth held out hope for change. The latter strike had occurred as the result of the dismissal of a trainee draughtsman, Thozamile Botha.1 Significantly, Botha was also president of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization (PEBCO) and openly addressed large crowds on how workplace issues affected family and community life. If a worker was underpaid or lost his job, the effect was felt well beyond the factory.

Although not all strikes were successful, employers’ hopes and government plans for taming workers through factory liaison committees, registration and industrial councils were in tatters. In Johannesburg, for instance, a municipal strike involving 10 000 workers paralysed city services for a week at the end of July. The council was only able to crush the strike ‘by using methods that left the reform plan’s image in ruins’.2 Yet, in whatever way each strike was resolved or crushed, the message to employers was plain: deal with leaders chosen by the workers themselves, or expect trouble. Even then, negotiating with union leaders was no panacea. A new consciousness and confidence was rising among workers, emboldened by a battle-hardened younger generation who had experienced the resistance of 1976 and who were now joining the workforce. The ferocious assaults of the police had left them deeply angry, not cowed. A new emerging union in the eastern Cape embodied this defiant spirit. Before 1980 was over, Neil was helping its leaders establish an office in Johannesburg.

The South African Allied Workers’ Union (SAAWU) had opened its doors as a non-racial union in Durban in March 1979. Within a year, its centre had moved southwest along the coast into the eastern Cape, with its East London branch, bordering the Ciskei homeland, headed by the dynamic young Thozamile Gqweta. A former OK Bazaars salesman and rugby fly-half for Winter Rose in Mdantsane, he was just 26, like Neil. Thozamile had been a Black Consciousness activist until coming into contact with Oscar Mpetha during one of Oscar’s visits to organise AFCWU members in East London. As with Neil, Oscar became a mentor. The effect on Thozamile was to embrace more of an ANC outlook appropriate to a non-racial union. Seven months after SAAWU opened its East London branch in March 1980, membership had swelled from 5 000 to 15 000, encompassing almost half of the small city’s African workers, and with membership still growing. The SAAWU office also organised AFCWU workers in the area, which became especially necessary after Oscar’s arrest and detention in August.

SAAWU made no bones about mobilising workers around joint industrial and political issues. It was more of a union-cum-social movement. The area’s geography made the politics explicit. East London, where most factories were sited, was in ‘white South Africa’, while Mdantsane, where black workers lived, was assigned to the Ciskei, run largely as a fiefdom of the Sebe brothers. Lennox Sebe, the homeland’s chief minister, and Charles Sebe, head of Ciskei’s political police, were widely regarded as profiting from the use of the Ciskei as a labour reservoir that catered for the needs of white South Africa. Thozamile’s first arrest had been by Ciskei police at a rugby match in April 1980, soon after the opening of SAAWU’s East London office. This initiated a brutal campaign of persecution by the Ciskei as well as the East London security police – the same unit that had been responsible for Steve Biko’s death.

By October, at least ten companies had experienced strikes where management refused to recognise SAAWU, even though the union had recruited more than 60% of the workers. Employers hoped that Thozamile and the SAAWU workers would cave in under police harassment, mass arrests, detentions and torture. One East London security policeman, Captain Phillipus Olivier, became so involved in trying to suppress the work stoppages that on one occasion he even fired the strikers himself. Having appointed himself ‘unofficial labour adviser’, he had stern words for employers who seemed to be softening, reminding them of the part they were expected to play against the ‘total onslaught’ of which SAAWU was the current front line.3

The government was forced to revise its strategy. Open repression of trade unionists played badly in the world media and with overseas investors, who prized stability above all. In September, Labour Minister Fanie Botha signalled a change in policy away from the edifice of registration and industrial councils. All of a sudden, he urged employers to deal with ‘whatever leadership group has credibility among the workers’.4 White South Africa shouldn’t fear that the onslaught was coming from all unions per se, but from those unions that moved beyond shop-floor industrial concerns into wider political issues. In other words, unions like SAAWU.

SAAWU’s early spectacular success in the eastern Cape encouraged it to expand. When university graduate Sisa Njikelana joined Thozamile, Sisa quickly developed into another fiery young leader. Both were to be repeatedly arrested and tortured, although the police were to reserve their most horrific methods to destroy Thozamile. Even so, none of the charges laid against either of them in court ever stuck, probably thanks to Oscar’s tutoring. In hindsight, it seems no accident that, despite the great distance between their cities, Neil’s path would intertwine with theirs and that they would end up as fellow detainees at John Vorster Square. Oscar’s own fate signalled that the police would stop at nothing. On 4 December, he was charged, along with 17 young people, on two counts of criminal murder and a further count under the Terrorism Act following the events at Nyanga.5

By the end of 1980, SAAWU had decided to expand to Johannesburg. In November, Neil welcomed SAAWU’s General Secretary, Sam Kikine, to the AFCWU office and took him to a local factory to meet the workers. Both sides were happy to work ‘hand in hand’.6 SAAWU would share office space and expenses and would look for another office on the East Rand that would also be shared on an equal basis. Although the general outlook of both unions was similar, the AFCWU had established itself through solid, steady organisation while SAAWU’s recent meteoric rise had more to do with catching the mood of eastern Cape workers.

A local SAAWU organiser was appointed in Johannesburg, and both Thozamile and Sisa would visit over the following months, staying with Neil and Liz. Although the relationship was to last barely a year, for Sisa it was ‘one of the most unique ones, very short, very intense but extremely enriching’. Sisa was convinced that Neil must be an underground operative and a communist to be so dedicated. What other white person, he thought, would come to the union office early in the morning and doze on a bench for an hour because he was tired out from working all night at the hospital? Neil gave him Marx’s Capital to read. Sisa found it heavy going, describing himself then as ‘nog ’n laaitjie’ (just a youngster), but the fact that the security police and the state had it in for communists made him to want to understand more: ‘It seemed to me this communism must be good if it can actually make whites who are privileged so dedicated.’

Neil probed the young SAAWU leaders about the political situation in East London and heard first-hand about torture and interrogation methods. Gavin and Sipho had already discussed their experiences with him, including strategies for surviving. Neil would have known that sharing the AFCWU office with SAAWU would further notch up security police attention. It’s impossible to know at what point he finally began to think of detention as a real possibility. White radicals who needed to steel themselves against fear would no doubt remind themselves how their black compatriots suffered daily surveillance and could be thrown into jail on the slightest pretext. Violence hung over black South Africans, not only from the police but from brutalised fellow inhabitants who turned to criminal attacks, the results of which Neil continued to witness on his Friday and Saturday night shifts in Casualty. While Neil’s calmness earned the trust of colleagues and comrades, to Liz the rising pressure by 1981 was exacting an increasing toll, hidden beneath the composed exterior of the dedicated unionist-cum-medical worker.

1 More commonly spelt today as Tozamile Botha.

2 Friedman, Building Tomorrow, p216.

3 Friedman, Building Tomorrow, p220.

4 Friedman, Building Tomorrow, p225.

5 Despite international protests, the case went ahead, with Oscar Mpetha finally sentenced to five years after losing an appeal. His diabetes led to one of his legs being amputated and he spent much of his sentence in hospital.

6 Minutes of Branch Executive meeting, Lekton House, 10.2.81, FCWU Archive.