Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No.6, September/ October 1980
The wave of black revolutionary struggles against the apartheid regime in South Africa continued throughout July and August. During these two months, the revolutionary stage has been dominated by further massive black workers strikes for the right to organise democratic trade unions and for a decent living wage.
British imperialism and its agents — the Labour Party and the TUC — who have been so ready with their declarations of ‘concern’ and ‘support’ for striking workers in Poland, have in the case of black workers in South Africa been singularly silent. British imperialists have £7 billion invested in South Africa sucking profits from millions of savagely exploited and starving black workers. These profits can be made only because black workers have no right to organise trade unions and no right to strike. It is not therefore surprising that in defence of these profits, the representatives of British imperialism have stood by and watched as the racist apartheid regime has tried to break black workers strikes with mass sackings, police terror, mass deportations and murder.
Amongst the hundreds of strikes the largest and most significant was that of black municipal workers. Beginning on 24 July black municipal workers in Johannesburg struck for recognition of their union the Black Municipal Workers Union, for an increase in wages from R33 to R58, for weekly as opposed to fortnightly payment of wages and a review of conditions of service. By 29 July 10,000 workers were on strike making it the biggest strike against a single employer in the history of South Africa. Bus drivers, sanitation workers, electricity workers, maintenance workers, technicians and clerks came out for their union and for an increase in wages.
The British-supported apartheid regime responded with all available weapons of oppression to break the strike. Within a day 1,350 workers were sacked after a declaration from Johannesburg’s electrical engineer
‘We will not be held to ransom by striking workers and we will dismiss them right across the board.’
This was only a first step. The BMWU telephone was disconnected and massive harassment of workers commenced. Mass meetings held by workers in their concentration camp-like compounds were surrounded by police armed with shotguns, machine-guns and with dogs. Food was not permitted to reach those at the meetings and entry and exit was prevented. Having failed to thus intimidate and break the workers’ spirit, the regime brought into play its most pernicious weapon — mass deportations. Thousands of strikers being migrant workers, were herded at gun point and like cattle into deserted compounds and forced to remain overnight in conditions too crowded to lie down, with no food or toilet facilities. The next morning they were forced into buses guarded by armed police and returned to the ‘home-lands’ — those reserves for cheap labour and dumping ground for the unwanted. When Joseph Mavi the leader of the BMWU tried to get an injunction against these deportations he was arrested and charged under the Sabotage Act for which the minimum penalty is 5 years imprisonment, the maximum death! The strike was broken and the regime is making every effort to smash the union.
These are the methods of the apartheid state, these are the weapons by which they seek to maintain the downtrodden conditions of the black working class, so that it continues to fill the coffers of imperialist banks and monopolies.
Since January 1980 we have witnessed the most determined revolutionary struggle by the black masses against the apartheid regime. These have been met with mass murder as in the Capetown Uprising of June 17, with the massacre of unarmed schoolchildren, with mass sackings and mass deportations to poverty stricken and starving homelands. British imperialism, the British Government and all its lackeys will issue no statement of denunciation about this savagery and barbarism. Without the massive terror apparatus of the apartheid regime British imperialism would not be making millions of profits. So in the interests of these profits, British imperialism will remain silent as hungry children are shot down, as starving workers are deported and as every stand of resistance is washed in blood. It will remain silent until the mighty movement of the black masses crushes it to dust … then it will scream about human rights, about democracy and justice. But then it will be too late for these hypocrites who declare ‘concern’ and ‘support’ for the Polish workers only in the futile hope that they can reduce the conditions of Polish workers to those suffered by the black workers of South Africa.
Eddie Abrahams
