36
that led to the wider inculcation of union ideas. For instance in Libya, a former Fascist of populist inclinations turned Communist named Cibelli began after the Allied liberation of this territory in World War II to organise Arab workers. (Norman 1965) In North Africa, the proximity of Europe and the relative frequency by which Arabs crossed the Mediterranean to work made for a myriad crosshatch of influences.
Most of the time they faced an extremely hostile administration in North Africa but in 1936 the astonishing victory of a Popular Front government in France friendly to unions and hostile to formal racial barriers, provided a turn-around for two years that proved ultimately to be an important platform for organisational gains after the war. In Algeria, the CGT began deliberately the organisation of Muslim workers after 1936 along somewhat paternalistic lines. As in Libya, it was the Fascist defeat which led quickly to the emergence of a more substantial union movement in Tunisia at first under the wings of the CGT. (Ahmed 1966)
By this time, Egyptian unionism had already advanced if in a stuttering way. Even before World War I in sectors in the modern economy, railway workers, tramway operators, gasworks and electrical plant workers began to organise unions. A big step occurred when the Wafd Party came to power in 1924-30.
Wafd was a largely middle class formation with a strong nationalist focus on the complete independence of Egypt. The 1919 disturbances it instigated involved many organised workers in an essentially nationalist cause. Wafd was prepared to tolerate and even encourage trade union formation in what was still a country almost totally lacking in substantial modern industry. It needed the support of workers but, by contrast to nationalists in independent Africa several decades later, Egypt was not fully self-governing and the Cairo regime lacked the ability to control them. Moreover the British became willing to set up a system of negotiations with workers that would deflect inflammatory actions. Behind the scenes, this dependence on nationalist fervour pushed the General Federation of Labour Unions in the Nile Valley towards dependence on relatively well-off patrons. Indeed with the nationalists under wraps and Wafd back on the streets in the 1930s, it was rather a committed member of the royal family, ‘Abbas Halim, who served as generous patron to much of what union militancy existed. (Beinin and Lockman 1988)
By contrast to these ambivalent and complex stories, even under the apparently democratic rule of the first republic, the Portuguese government was not prepared to tolerate strike action at all by the União Ferroviário in 1925/1926 where an individual dispute blossomed into a long strike that was mercilessly crushed. The union, actually quite long-standing, was destroyed, workers at best retired and at worst sent into exile and a completely new authoritarian work order restored. This in fact heralded the end of republican democracy in Mozambique and Portugal itself. (Pennevenne 1985, 86-87)
37
The continental strike wave of the middle 1940s both represented a dramatic change itself but also contributed to the beginning of the end of European colonial systems significantly. The place for narratives of strike history lies elsewhere; here some general themes will be gathered together. The modern economies of African colonies were very substantially affected by the Great Depression which drastically cut the demand for industrial raw materials (although not precious metals). From about 1935, however there was a notable revival in mining and secondary industry that went together with the growing wave of rearmament in Europe. Poorly-paid African workers (almost always male) now had an unprecedented opportunity to make their potential strength heard. This demand for especially mineral products and the concomitant pressure on transport systems bore up into the 1950s. Although there was obviously a difference between colonies, in general, it cannot be said that an African working class was replacing the world of cultivators and pastoralists in general. Workers existed within a world of partly self-sufficient agriculture and a burgeoning informal commercial sector; they were not proletarianised in the classic Marxist sense comparable to the fate of European workers in the 19th century. However, the very heart of these economies did rely on African labour, at least accustomed and partly trained, to make offices function, run the transport services, particularly the railways but also the telegraph and post offices, and to dig gold, copper and other minerals which were at the heart of the economy of the day.
Thus their bargaining position was surprisingly strong and especially in the hands of agile and determined leadership.
As to the mass of workers, it is not really possible to reduce their sense of anguish at what remained of crude racialised colonial culture, and their sense of hope at the start of change, to the conventions of collective bargaining. Thus Ken Vickery writes that ‘…at its heart, the 1945 Rhodesia Railways African strike was not so much about human grievances as it was a desperate assertion of basic human dignity.’
(Vickery 1999, 63) Jasper Savanhu, an early union leader in Southern Rhodesia, declared that the strike
‘had proved that Africans were born…The days when a white man could exploit us at will are gone and gone forever.’4 (Lunn, 1987, 139) Carolyn Brown points to the persistence into the late 1940s of employed
‘hammock boys’ on the Enugu coal mines who physically carried white supervisory staff into work each day; these humiliating distinctions were deeply resented. (Brown 2003, 291) Carolyn Brown attributes the deaths associated with the 1949 coal miners’ strike in Nigeria to the incompetence and poor judgment of British non-commissioned officers, completely unable to grasp the outlook of Igbo miners, their considerations and perspectives, albeit here a miners’ union had some purchase on the situation. A key factor in the great French West African rail strike was the demand for the end of distinctions between white and black employees.
The common feature of this period is the intervention of forces outside the labour workforce which set in place the systems of industrial relations that have taken root since that time in Africa with obvious variations in individual cases, notably the colonial governments. These were alarmed at the potential, sometimes activated, for anarchic and destructive labour revolts. From 1935 a British Conservative government underwent the shock of labour unrest in various parts of the empire, often outside Africa. For instance in 1938 a big cane workers’ strike affected the sugar island of Mauritius. It is from the strike really that labour organisation and indeed a Labour Party, arguably the most successful within the African Union, took off from this juncture. With the war over, the British economy was in poor shape and depended heavily on colonial exports and the defense of the pound zone. Officials worked hard to create predictable labour systems with acceptable conditions and hierarchies and rising levels of productivity and that meant recognising trade unions. Particularly during the period of Labour Party rule in Britain (1945-51), this involved sending to Africa experienced trade unionists who would teach their African counterparts the right way to go about structuring an organisation and working towards a rational bargaining system.
4 A later but aligned perspective should be considered in assessing the great strike of South West African contract workers in 1971. This was really a revolt against the entire contract labour system which was thereafter somewhat reformed. However, the most salient result was the creation not of a trade union federation, although this did happen in exile conditions but of the Ovamboland People’s Organisation soon after renamed the South West African People’s Organisation or SWAPO. This is still the governing party of Namibia. There was no repeat of this great industrial movement and the unions that gradually established themselves have no reputation particularly for militancy or impressive organisational capacity. In other words, a labour movement fed directly into a successful formative nationalist movement. (Bauer 1998;
Jauch in Beckman et al 2010) The first president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma was a former railway worker involved in these events although not as leader; he was never a trade unionist. (Bauer 1998)
38
Reforming the rules governing the civil service and work for the government itself often came top of the list and after that were dealings with big corporate entities, notably those which managed major mine resources. Top of the list was surely the Copperbelt, where the 1935 and 1940 strikes found organisation in beni dance societies and the Watchtower Movement derived from the Jehovah’s Witnesses rather than even nascent unions.5 In 1947 William Comrie was sent from the British Trade Union Congress to help create a non-political, bargaining orientated union for African miners capable of effective negotiating capacity. The African Mine Workers Union was created in 1949 and the Trade Union Congress of Northern Rhodesia two years later. (Larmer, 2007, 33)
In Southern Rhodesia, African trade unionism took root particularly in the growing rail and industrial centre of Bulawayo. Tim Scarnecchia recreates some of this atmosphere and describes the careers of Charles Mzingeli, leader of the Southern Rhodesian branch of the ICU and a slightly later figure, Reuben Jamela. Mzingeli established an important friendship with a Labour Party politician, Gladys Maasdorp, who offered help to build African trade unionism. While Mzingeli could point out the injustices of African life in the country on the right occasion, he actually was a classic early figure who did not much take up national politics. (Scarnecchia 2008)
An important aspect of colonial intervention into the shaping of trade unions in Africa was the impress of Cold War ideology. The British were not shy in their willingness to violate any of their own rules to bring down Communists as they did in Cyprus or British Guiana but in fact the British colonies did not have so much potential subversion to root out. In France, by contrast there was a large functioning Communist Party which at first formed part of the government after the war. The CGT certainly influenced West African and especially North African unionists once the post-war dispensation allowed for the continuation of the reforms effectively permitting Africans to enter civil society in the colonies legally.
Communist links were very significant in the extent to which unions began to be able to function effectively. It was the West that broke off from the World Federation of Trade Unions to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in 1949 and it was a feather in the cap to get the increasingly important trade union movement in Tunisia to sign up early on. As a rather naïve American observer of Libya noted with a wink, ‘'…more than a few of the future political leaders of the nation are destined to emerge from the Libyan labor movement...'(Norman, 1965, 54), albeit the weakest in North Africa. Cold War politics strongly invested international trade unionism and played a corrupting role in Africa where individuals who took the right trips to the right conferences were supported and others effectively blackballed. This also removed them from the approbation or otherwise of the rank and file.
Indeed skilful manoeuvres between West and East could allow a leader considerable autonomy and headway.
The reform era which permitted trade unions to organise, wage strikes and earn respectability and clout also opened the door to a rapidly emergent African nationalism which moved quickly in key countries to force the pace of political reform into a process of rapid devolution, partly affected by the declining economic weight of the African resource economies. The relationship of trade unionism to nationalism, a major subject in the literature, became extremely important in this context.
African nationalists, albeit confronting different regimes in political outlook, were also deeply interested in exploiting new openings to advance their own agendas. Putting it simply, they were able to leverage timid colonial initiatives, intended in a gradualist spirit and often without endangering the interests of white settler communities, into major political concessions that could speed up the drive to independence that would proceed at a far faster pace than anticipated. Moreover they could fasten on the ability of strikers seriously to cripple the economic life of colonies, at a time when the halting post-war recovery of France and Britain depended on them to some degree. In the Gold Coast, the mine and rail strikes of 1947-48 paved the way for a rapid political advance. The Burns reform of 1946 had already opened the door towards self-government but a radical movement then undermined the idea of a slow transfer of power to a small, largely coastal, elite of professionals and businessmen. They were of course aware that to strike basic communications facilities and mining establishments, whether state or private, was also to strike right at the heart of the increasingly technocratic colonial state they dreamt of subverting.
Kwame Nkrumah was the man who would break away from the originally formed political party of this indigeous elite and enthuse a much wider public. In Nigeria, independence would not come before 1960
5 Until 1946, white unions hadn’t got really organised either on the copper mines.
39
with many issues to be settled outside the sphere of labour but Brown has noted that the Iva Valley massacre of striking coal miners near Enugu in 1949 initiated a wave of sabotage and violence in eastern Nigerian cities and that ‘most Nigerians cite the Iva Valley Massacre as a primary event ending British colonialism in Nigeria.’ (Brown 2002, 283) In both cases, union recognition and devolution were roads to a new kind of political order.
However in many, probably most cases, the path was more crooked, and there were important variations. In the French colonies, a complication was the role of the CGT and its links to the French Communist Party as the Cold War deepened. However, the PCF in France accepted the idea of a French Union and discouraged or opposed nationalist movements aimed at independence. Thus until the final collapse of French rule in 1962, it opposed Algerian independence and Algerian trade unionism played little role in the midst of a brutal ongoing armed struggle (Weiss 1970). By contrast, in Tunisia the main body of the trade union movement left the pro-Communist WFTU for the ICTFU in 1951 of which it became a steadfast and important member. An American observer considered it ‘a pilot movement for free trade unionism’. (Beling 1965, 101) A dockers’ strike sustained by an affiliate of the Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens sealed a crucial alliance between the union movement and the Neo-Destour Party which Habib Bourguiba would lead to independence. Once the UGTT joined the ICTFU, Bourguiba actually attended the next general meeting of the convention of the more conservative of the American labour federations, the American Federation of Labour. (Beling 1965; Ahmed 1966)
Near the other end of the African continent, the Southern Rhodesian government was anything but eager for a peaceful road to majority rule. From the late 1950s after some rather quiescent years the nationalist movement leapt ahead although it was fraught with divisions and the thrusting ambitions of new actors. In this context, the most senior trade unionists such as Mzingeli and Jamela were effectively bypassed and marginalised (Scarnecchia 2008). Here the historical course was more like that in Algeria than Tunisia; after the Universal Declaration of Independence in 1965 the nationalist movements were illegal and turned to an armed struggle. Although certainly trade unionists sometimes got involved and were imprisoned and tortured, the movement as a whole, which retained links to the ICFTU-- which did support African nationalism purged of any Red elements (Raftopoulos and Phimister 1997)--was rather weak and played little political role in the UDI years. The contrast to draw with Britain’s other major settler colonies, Northern Rhodesia and Kenya, is striking. In Kenya, while officials balked at dealing with radicals, they gradually came to terms with trade unionism. Cooper shows how a generalised sense of insurgency and discontent that would sweep Mombasa in waves gave way to a situation where the crucial port workers accepted for the most part a structured and licit trade union organisation with rights and a place in civil society. (Cooper 1987) Moreover in Tom Mboya, a leader who was respected in the West but was no stooge and able to assist in trade union development under some real condition of autonomy, a key figure was found with no equivalent at the time in Southern Rhodesia.
On the Copperbelt, the situation was somewhere in between. (Henderson 1973; Larmer 2007) The legal union movement, the African Mineworkers’ Union, also found a substantial but politically moderate leader in Lawrence Katilungu. Katilungu played an important role in tolerating the actual creation of a Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in 1953 but as Northern Rhodesian black nationalism took off, the union came into increasing tension with it, foreshadowing the important historic opposition between left nationalism and union organisation in this economically important hub. Still the union was prepared to join a United Trade Union Congress which itself in 1961 affiliated with the United National Independence Party led by Kenneth Kaunda, which would take Northern Rhodesia out of federation with Southern Rhodesia and create the republic of Zambia in 1964. Here the point was not the good will of UNIP but the fact that the AMWU had been able to steadily improve the prospects and wages of black miners and with them of the mining towns. At the same time, these miners jostled with the large minority of white workers who continued to earn far more in a racially defined workplace so they had themselves a deep commitment to nationalism. This is perhaps a key general comment to make as well: the ordinary worker, whether in Dakar or Bulawayo, was moved by nationalist rhetoric and did not understand trade unionism in this era as something apart from politics, deracialisation and an end to colonial rule.
Katilungu was sidelined and driven from office in 1960, sharing the fate of his less politically driven colleagues south of the Zambesi. Where colonial rule continued without plans for change, notably in Portuguese colonies of course, repression of worker movements inevitably continued.
40