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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 stewards trying to run some kind of learning …
We used to have some quite good debates, but they were all in these vast general meetings, but people were doing them because they were desperate for information and desperate for any kind of help …with the battles they were fighting in the factories. They were usually three or four days. We used to run them in the Germiston office where the alleyways always smelt of dagga and urine … you took your life in your hands to go to the toilets! … People sat in these great lines of benches, and then there weren’t enough so people would be sitting around on cupboards.90
This hunger gave rise to marathon sessions called ‘siyalalas’ (‘we sleep’), where delegates would continue throughout the night. These evolved partly because of the lack of late night public transport and partly because workers had limited time for education, as time off work to attend training was rare.
Matthew Ginsberg describes formal union education as technical in nature and designed to impart skills and improve political understanding; and he asserts that the role of white intellectuals was contested by grassroots black intellectuals in leadership.91 The political input was indeed contested, but on technical matters there was a high degree of consensus. They agreed, for example, on the principles of workers’ control and strong factory floor organisation under shop-steward leadership. In highlighting areas of dissent, Ginsberg misses an important strategic goal underlying the input of technical skills: Mawu was keen to bring improvements to the factories, both as an end in itself and as an organising and recruiting tool, and shop stewards required practical skills to do this – politics alone would not grow the union. The nature of the political input provided by white intellectuals was at times controversial, but there was a meeting of minds on the need for the union to keep a low political profile so as not to attract state attention. Even Kubheka, a strong critic of the anti-populist, anti-ANC/Sactu position advanced by white intellectuals, was comfortable with the union’s organising strategies. ‘The comrades did a lot of good work under the circumstances. By drawing a line between labour and politics, for a period, the state did not closely watch and interfere with those people … That period gave comrades time to build very strong structures
