“You cannot stop a river” quipped legendary sharecropper Kas Maine, describing the flood of protest and activism by the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the north-west of South Africa in the late 1920s. The union-cum-protest movement that was the ICU was indeed fluid and unfixed in character. Started in 1919 by Malawian migrant Clements Kadalie and characterised by a radical, charismatic politics focussed on the poor and dispossessed, the ICU spread rapidly across southern Africa and was the main movement for liberation in the region during the 1920s and 1930s.
The North-West Province still feels the pinch of land dispossession and the legacies of changes in the countryside that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Small towns now have declining rural economies and the townships surrounding them are overcrowded. The failure of the African National Congress government to sufficiently transform the economy in the interests of the poor has left black people and those living in rural areas vulnerable. The ICU’s messages of freedom, including in the economic sense, continue to be of relevance today: a call for land redistribution, adequate housing, fair pay and an end to exploitation. This article asks: what were some of the features of the ICU’s character and politics in the North West? And what can we learn from them?
The ICU’s rapid growth in what was then called the Western Transvaal was sparked by the second largest strike in South Africa’s history: the June 1928 strike on the diamond diggings in Lichtenburg. Between 35,000 and 70,000 black workers on the diggings went on strike in response to a reduction in their wages. White diggers (mine owners) had reduced their workers’ wages because of manipulation of diamond prices by De Beers diamond company and new laws on diamond land ownership by the South African state. Unemployment, police hostility and poor living conditions, which were common in the locations where the black workers lived, meant that the composition of the strike was enlarged to include the unemployed and aggrieved. The ICU played a pivotal role during the first three days of the strike. They picketed, held meetings with workers and negotiated with employers and the state for better wages, ultimately leading to a less dramatic wage decrease. Owing to the large numbers of white farmers who worked part-time on the diamond diggings and black seasonal labourers, the message – and anxieties – of the ICU’s activity spread from the diamond mines in Lichtenburg to towns throughout the Western Transvaal.
The ICU introduced a new wave of protest and politics which connected to black people’s experiences of capitalist expansion in rural areas. Its growth in the Western Transvaal was spurred on by a ‘rural revolt’ in South Africa’s countryside districts during 1927-8, as described by Sylvia Neame. At the heart of the revolt were the issues of black people being dispossessed of their land by white farmers and the restructuring of labour relations on farms. In the latter case, labour tenants and sharecroppers – who enjoyed some access to land, farm animals and tools as well as paternal relations with farmers – were forced into wage labour. The regional focus of the ICU was one of its greatest assets. In the Western Transvaal, in rural and peri-urban areas outside of South Africa’s main urban centres, the ICU spoke to and fought on behalf of disenfranchised farmworkers, residents in crowded slums, and workers on the diamond diggings. The expansion of the ICU into the countryside strengthened their regional base, which can be contrasted to the disintegration of the ICU at a national level.
In towns like Ottosdal, Makwassie, Schweizer-Reneke, Bloemhof and Wolmaransstad in the South-Western Transvaal (see the map above), the ICU was able to give a voice to people’s daily struggles and gained a large following. Speaking to a crowd in Bloemhof, ICU organiser Jason Jingoes emphasised unequal relationships on farms:
You whites eat butter forgetting that it’s the black man who is milking for you, herds your cattle. He has not time for rest, he stays out in the storm, in the rain, you care less when he gets wet out in the rain.
In the Western Transvaal, ICU organisers stood on top of wagons-turned-stages and preached to people, inspiring ordinary people and workers through their words and oratory. Throughout small towns in rural regions, the ICU engaged the public in political discussions and provided legal support as well as domestic and civil counsel to its members.
At meetings, ICU organisers spoke to farmworkers about freedom; freedom from oppression and economic freedom, especially relating their messages to the land question and wages. At one meeting in Mafeking, in the northern Cape Province, Kadalie urged a crowd of workers to organise against poor wages:
Without us things would be at a standstill, no trains would run. Let us organise and through organisation we will get bread and butter … Don’t work for the whites, let them do their own work […] Look, your wives and children are starving. If you joined the ICU you would not have to work for a starvation wage.
ICU organisers ridiculed white people in their speeches and wowed audiences with their creative and bombastic oratory. George Lephadi, interviewed during the 1980s, remembered the organisers ‘swearing at whites wherever they go’.
Although the ICU was also active in towns like Klerksdorp, Potchefstroom, Rustenburg, Mafikeng, Vryburg and Taung (see the map above), it failed to make real inroads because of the different economies and alternate politics of rural residents in these areas. For example, in Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom, many workers worked on the Rand gold mines. This meant that their economic issues – relating to conditions in the mines like low wages and poor living quarters – played out there rather than in these towns. Towns like Rustenburg, Taung and Vryburg, meanwhile, were next to reserves, which meant that African people to a certain degree were shielded from wage and farm labour through limited access to land.
Racist and Nationalist-aligned local administrations despised the ICU. Throughout the Western Transvaal, local administrations policed movements of workers between farms and towns and used rehashed, outdated legislation to prevent the ICU from holding meetings and stop ICU organisers from entering towns. The violence of white farmers also prevented workers from joining the ICU and attempted to dampen the union’s influence. Nationally, from 1924, the ICU was up against the Pact government, a coalition of the Afrikaner nationalist National Party and the Labour Party. The Pact government was committed to segregation, enacted via the 1923 Urban Areas Act, and to the elimination of political dissent through the Native Administration Act of 1927.
The ICU’s activism helped change the spatial divisions of the segregationist period, transforming the politics of the Western Transvaal’s farming districts from one of individualised protest on farms to collective protest in towns. In the South-Western Transvaal, workers flooded into towns to attend meetings and listen to the ICU, with the meetings placed strategically after Sunday church services to engage the travelling traffic. In Lichtenburg, by combining the struggles of workers and slum residents, the ICU challenged enforced spatial divisions between the workspace (diamond digging) and the home (slum / township), mobilising workers against a wide set of issues including low wages, pass laws and police violence.
Across 1928-9, the ICU declined at a national level, linked to internal splits, corruption, the impact of white liberals entering the movement, and ideological tensions, mostly in relation to communism. To a certain extent, the ICU managed to avoid this organisational decline in the South-Western Transvaal, not least thanks to the commitment of individual leaders (see biographical profiles here) like Keable ‘Mote and Clements Kadalie, whose oratory ability generated excitement among workers. Organisers like Doyle Modiakgotla and Henry Tyamzashe, did research on local towns and Robert Makhathini, Henry Maleke and Jason Jingoes fought local battles against oppressive town administrations and wage labour and for better conditions in the slums surrounding towns. In general, however, dependence on these individual leaders left them vulnerable to the oppression of local administrations as well as their own personal faults and ambitions.
The ICU displayed a complex and many-sided character in the Western Transvaal. During the Lichtenburg strike, it did the work of a traditional trade union, but it looked more like a rural movement when fighting against wage labour and paternalism on farms. Its character stretched beyond these two markers; ICU organisers also fought everyday political battles, trying to improve living conditions in poor areas, resisting unfair police treatment, and fighting against the segregationist pass laws. The language of skilled organisers appealed to many residents in small towns, calling for the radical expansion of political and economic freedoms and ridiculing the state and their white oppressors. Crucial to the ICU’s success was its fluidity and attention to the complex and highly local situations faced by ordinary people and workers. Today, rural districts in the North West are some of the most ignored and degraded in South Africa. The ICU’s messages, politics and activism offer a radical history to draw upon.
This research is based on the MA Dissertation: ‘“I see you” in the soil: the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the Western Transvaal, 1926- 1934‘.