Local 10 delegation marks 50th anniversary of the Durban Strikes
Wave of worker shutdowns revived anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa
More than a dozen members of ILWU Local 10 recently traveled to South Africa to learn about the country’s incredible history, as well as to connect with dockers and other activists. They flew, by way of Johannesburg, to Durban on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. At the country’s third largest city and most important port, they attended several conferences to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Durban Strikes,” a massive wave of worker shutdowns that revived the struggle against apartheid and thereby changed the course of South African history. Strikes also have been central to the making of the ILWU, from 1934 to 1948 and 1971-72, so attending events to remember and celebrate South African workers’ power was too good an opportunity to ignore.
If Americans know of one person from South Africa, it is probably Nelson Mandela, a Black South African man imprisoned from 1964 to 1988, for fighting for racial equality. He, along with tens of millions of other South Africans of African and Asian descent, suffered under a brutal racial system called apartheid, which might be described as Jim Crow segregation on steroids. The long, hard, and noble struggle against apartheid made Mandela and many other South Africans heroes around the world. Black workers played a major role in fighting white supremacy in South Africa.
ILWU’s historical ties to anti-apartheid struggle
On multiple occasions across three decades, members of ILWU Locals 10 and 34 as well as Local 6 and other ILWU locals supported the global struggle against apartheid. First in 1962, again in 1977, and most importantly, for 10 days in 1984, rank-and-file dockworkers refused to unload South African cargo in the Port of San Francisco. Bill Chester, then an ILWU International Vice President, was active, as was the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee, a rank-and-file committee established inside Local 10, in 1976. Leo Robinson, Larry Wright, Charlie Jones, Billy Proctor, Leron “Ned” Ingram, Howard Keylor, Jack Heyman, Dave Stewart, and Archie Brown were among those active in those years. These rank-and-file driven work stoppages were unprecedented in the United States, though workers in some other countries also engaged in similar actions in solidarity with the struggle against apartheid. In 1990, Nelson and his then-wife, Winnie Mandela, visited Oakland, the last stop on their first tour of the U.S. At a packed Oakland Coliseum, Mandela devoted the first ten percent of his speech to thanking ILWU Local 10 for standing down in solidarity with Black workers in South Africa.
Because of Local 10’s longstanding solidarity with the struggle of Black workers in South Africa, it’s not entirely surprising that Local 10’s Executive Board voted to send a delegation to South Africa to remember the historic Durban Strikes. The weeklong trip was a tremendous opportunity to engage with dockers, other unionists, and activists in South Africa, among the important countries in Africa and the Southern Hemisphere. Ultimately, 14 current members and pensioners made the trip, part of a long tradition of sending rank-and-file members to attend conferences and visit dockworkers across the world.
South Africa’s long legacy of white supremacy
Before 1994, South Africa was notorious for being among the most racist and oppressive countries on earth. For centuries, going back to the 1650s, a white minority — composed mostly of Afrikaners (people of Dutch descent) and Anglos — ruthlessly exploited the large majority of the people who come from many different African ethnic groups (Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, and more) as well as Asian Indians and so-called “Coloured” people (a separate legal category for mixed race people).
The fight for freedom
As far back as the 1910s, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds worked separately and together to overturn the brutal white supremacist regime. Shortly after WWII, the government formally instituted apartheid — doubling down on racism and fascism just three years after the defeat of the Nazis. The anti-apartheid movement spent decades trying to peacefully gain equal rights before adopting “armed struggle” in the early 1960s. By then, Nelson Mandela was a leader in the largest and best-known anti-apartheid organization, the African National Congress (ANC).
Sharpeville Massacre
Starting in 1960 with the Sharpeville Massacre, when about 70 peaceful Black protesters were killed by the police, and continuing for the next four years, nearly all domestic opposition was wiped out due to ferocious government repression. Activists were imprisoned, killed, politically banned, driven underground and into exile, or otherwise silenced. The ANC and Pan-African Congress were banned, and the Communist Party already had been. Mandela went underground for several years but, ultimately was captured and, in 1964, along with other leaders, was sentenced to life in prison on the barren Robben Island, six miles off Cape Town on the Atlantic Coast. He would not be seen in public for decades.
Durban Strikes
After nearly a so-called “quiet decade” in the struggle against apartheid, the Durban Strikes erupted in January 1973. These strikes involved upwards of 100,000 Black and Asian workers from more than 150 companies. This uprising shocked the nation and reignited the anti-apartheid movement that mostly had been quiescent due to earlier repression. Importantly, though not widely known, dockworkers in Durban, then and still at the heart of the economy, had primed the pump by striking in 1969 and, again, in late 1972. In other words, by shutting the harbor for days, dockers “set the table” for the Durban Strikes. While it would take another twenty years of intense struggle, inside South Africa and globally, apartheid ultimately was beaten.
Commemorating the 50th anniversary
While those who know South African history appreciate the Durban Strikes’ significance, the average South African on the street doesn’t. So, the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Durban Strikes was not exactly a huge event, at least as measured in numbers. But those who came together to remember this history and, at times celebrate it, included some of the foremost scholars and activists of labor and political economy in South Africa. In addition to discussing the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1970s and ’80s, participants also discussed the ways this history might help us understand the troubling times of 2023 to chart a better future.
Current crisis
Despite its incredible, inspirational history of struggle to achieve multiracial democracy, South Africa faces serious problems. The ANC has lost its way, many of its leaders widely seen as corrupt, a once-great liberation party gone astray. Unemployment is rampant, and half the population lives in poverty. The country suffers from high crime, and climate change already is causing great problems. Economic inequality is rampant and deeply racialized. Electricity is shut down for hours a day, called “load shedding,” which disrupts people’s lives and the economy. Add Covid-19 and 350 years of racist colonialism, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that South African workers are struggling.
Scholars and activists converge
Local 10’s delegation joined two conferences in Durban over the course of four very full days. The first was sponsored by South Africa History Online and hosted by the Durban University of Technology. Dozens of scholars and activists — many from the trade union movement and involved in the struggle since the 1970s — participated. Some people discussed their roles in the heady times of the 1970s, when the state regularly murdered activists and even assassinated activists in exile in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and England. Some presented their research on labor, race relations, poverty, and politics. One night, the conference hosted an incredible musical performance by the 10-member Insurrection Ensemble, who performed the history and legacy of the Durban Strikes through the stories of a handful of women who struck a textile factory in 1973.
There also was a second, parallel conference organized to remember 1973 and reflect on how it could reenergize the labor movement, locally and globally, in 2023. This conference was cosponsored by the Revolutionary Trade Union of South Africa (RETUSA), a breakaway union from the South African Transport & Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), which represented nearly all dockers and other logistics workers across the country until the split, which mirrored other fissures in the South African labor movement. Joseph V. “JV” Dube previously led Durban’s dockers in SATAWU before leading them into RETUSA. Hosted in the old harbor neighborhood at the BAT Centre, an important community and cultural arts space, this conference’s main organizer was Dave Hemson, who was an important dock union organizer in the 1970s. Hemson, a white university student in the late 1960s , developed close relationships with the all-Black dock workforce—much like Harry Bridges did during the Big Strike of 1934.
On the first morning of this second conference, Hemson led a wonderful historic bus tour of The Point, the old waterfront neighborhood where many thousands of Zulu and Pondo dockers had once lived in nearby company-owned housing and loaded and unloaded ships in Africa’s busiest port. When containers arrived in the late 1970s, the port “moved” to another part of the harbor, leaving The Point — right by the Ocean and near downtown — as prime for wiping out the old working-class area in favor of wealthier, and whiter residents. Sadly, the (old) Point has been entirely gentrified, much like is at risk in Oakland, where a scheme to enrich the A’s sports franchise risks wiping out part of the Port.
Legacy of solidarity
One of the other parallels between the ILWU and Durban dockers was that both have demonstrated a willingness to stop work in solidarity with liberation struggles in other countries. On April 21, 2008, the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang docked in Durban, carrying millions of rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades. Zimbabwe’s then-president, Robert Mugabe, purchased this arsenal to retain power amidst a highly contested election while his military and police beat thousands and killed hundreds of Zimbabweans. Mugabe’s forces also brutally assaulted his rival, who had won the election’s first round and served as Secretary-General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Instead of unloading those weapons, the Durban branch of SATAWU embargoed the ship in solidarity with Zimbabwean workers. Subsequently, dockers in other southern African ports joined this boycott and the ship returned to China with its deadly cargo.
This action was not the first time that Durban dockers used their position at a choke point in support of social justice in another nation, and it echoed the ILWU’s earlier efforts in the long struggle against apartheid, including the refusal of Local 10 and 34 members to touch South African cargo for eleven days in 1984. ILWU members also refused to load cargo for imperial Japan after it invaded China in the late 1930s.
These and other parallels forged deep connections between ILWU members and the dockers they met in Durban. Both sides very much were mindful of the need to build international networks that strengthen unionists and all workers. It should come as no surprise that, like the ILWU, the motto of most unions in South Africa is “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
“The more that we can connect and build relationships with other workers around the world, the stronger we will be,” he said. “It’s one thing to read about what’s happening, and another thing to see it for yourself. Delegations like this help to build international camaraderie.”
“The Durban trip was educational,” said Local 10 member Stanley Scott. “We learned about the 1973 dockworker strike from researchers, and the cultural aspects of the strike from poets, singers, and musicians at the BAT Centre.” When we got to the Port of Durban and saw all of the ships, I understood that we are the same dockworkers that unload these ships all over the world. That made me proud to be a longshoreman. We change the world every day.”
Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University and a research associate in the Society, Work, and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His books include Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area and Ben Fletcher: The Life & Times of a Black Wobbly.
