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A 67 page pamphlet detailing the Policies and Politics
of the Workers’ Solidarity Federation

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WORKERS SOLIDARITY FEDERATION SAYS:

THE BANKS HAVE RAISED THE INTEREST RATES!

THIS MEANS: MORE EXPENSIVE FOOD, TRANSPORT AND SERVICES!

THIS MEANS: HIGHER CHARGES ON LOANS!

THIS MEANS: WORKERS SUFFERING AND PLENTY OF PROFIT FOR THE EXPLOITERS!

THE BANKS ARE DEMANDING THAT THE POOR PAY BACK THEIR LOANS- NOW!

THEY ARE AFRAID THEY WILL LOSE MONEY!

THEY WANT TO VICTIMISE PEOPLE WITH EVICTIONS!

WE, THE WORKING CLASS, THE POOR AND SUFFERING PEOPLE SAY NO!

THIS BOSSES’ SYSTEM, CAPITALISM, PUTS PROFITS BEFORE PEOPLE, IT PUTS PROFITS BEFORE FOOD, IT PUTS PROFITS BEFORE HOUSES!

SOME PEOPLE ARE SAYING THAT THE BANKS “COLLUDED” ON RAISING THE RATES.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT! THE BOSSES DO NOT MAKE SECRET DEALS TO EXPLOIT US, THEY DO IT OPENLY EVERY DAY! THE BOSSES DO NOT HAVE TO SECRETLY GANG UP AGAINST US, THEY ARE ALWAYS AGAINST US!

THE BOSSES WILL NOT BE TAMED BY USELESS FORUMS LIKE “NEDLAC”. THEY DO WHATEVER THEY LIKE! THE ONLY THING THAT WILL STOP THE BOSSES IS MASS ACTION! NOT “SOCIAL ACCORDS”, NOT WORKPLACE FORUMS AND NOT PARLIAMENT!

WE MUST COME TOGETHER, ALL OF US, AND ALL OUR UNIONS AND CIVICS AND FIGHT THEM!

TRADE UNIONS MUST TAKE ECONOMIC POWER!

WE MUST FIGHT THIS CAPITALISM UNTIL WE WIN. AND WE, THE WORKERS AND THE POOR, MUST TAKE ECONOMIC POWER! WE MUST TAKE THIS POWER DIRECTLY, THROUGH OUR UNIONS. NATIONALISATION IS A FAILED SYSTEM EVERYWHERE, AND ELECTIONS DO NOT BRING DEMOCRACY WHERE WE WORK.

TO DO THIS WE NEED TO KEEP UP THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT IN THE UNIONS AND WE NEED UNION DEMOCRACY. ABOVE ALL, WE NEED THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT. STAND FAST AND FIGHT TO THE LAST! FORWARD TO WORKERS DEMOCRACY! FORWARD TO STATELESS SOCIALISM (ANARCHISM)!

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WORKERS SOLIDARITY FEDERATION.

FOR FREE INFORMATION WRITE TO WSF, PO BOX 1717, ROSETTENVILLE, 2130, JOHANNESBURG.

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WHAT WE BELIEVE

AGAINST CAPITALISM AND THE BOSSES

The struggle of the Black working class in South Africa is a struggle against the slave bondage of capitalism. Capitalism is based on the ruling class minority (capitalists, generals, top officials, professional politicians) exploiting and oppressing the working class majority (workers of all grades, their families, rank and file soldiers, the unemployed, and the rural poor). The two classes have totally different interests – they are locked in class struggle.

APARTHEID BUILT CAPITALISM

Capitalism in South Africa was built through apartheid oppression- land dispossession, the compound system, migrant labour, the pass laws, and denial of basic worker and human rights to Black workers.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Apartheid was defeated by workers struggle. But the legacy of apartheid lives on. The elections of 1994 did not remove the cause of apartheid oppression, which is capitalist exploitation. The struggle must continue against both capitalism and racism: one enemy, one fight!

ONLY THE WORKERS CAN FREE THE WORKERS

Only workers revolution can end the nightmare of racism and capitalism, creating freedom and equality for all. Only the workers and the poor can create a free society because only they have the organisational power, will, numbers and class interest in overthrowing this system. We oppose alliances with any section of the bosses.

AGAINST OPPRESSION AND DISCRIMINATION

We oppose all oppression: racism, sexism, imperialism, environmental destruction, discrimination against gays and lesbians. We are for real equality for all. Only the workers revolution can end all oppression; only the fight against oppression and for working class power can unite the workers. Oppression and discrimination are against the interests of workers. They divide and weaken the struggle.

FREEDOM CANNOT COME FROM GOVERNMENT

Workers freedom cannot come through parliament or the seizure of State power. The State (judiciary, government bureaucracy, police force, parliament etc.) is a tool of capitalism and the bosses. The use of the State can only lead to corruption, defeat or dictatorship over the workers movement. The economic disaster and political tyranny of the Marxist-led Soviet Union shows this clearly.

INSTEAD – REVOLUTIONARY TRADE UNIONISM

Socialism must come from below- from mass action.

The trade unions must take over the land and the factories and put them under direct workers control in a revolutionary general strike based on the occupation of workplaces.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD – UNITE!

To be successful the revolution must be based on workers movement united across colour, sex, and national lines. Capitalism is international, and therefore the revolution must be spread internationally by the workers.

INTERNATIONAL UNITY, LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

The revolutionary general strike will establish a non-racial international working-class democracy: libertarian socialism. This will be based on federations of grassroots workplace and community councils, and defended by a workers army. We want a society without bosses, rulers and oppressors of any description. We want a democratic economy under the direct control of the working class. We are anti-authoritarian: the only limit on individual freedom should be that it does not remove the freedom of others.

THE AIMS OF THE WSF

The WSF does not stand in elections or aim to take State power. The WSF is not a trade union. The WSF is a political organisation for militants who aim to encourage the self-activity and political consciousness of the mass of the people -the workers and the poor- so that they can make the revolution for themselves. Our role is to promote the struggle, but in the end, only the workers can free the workers!

Tomorrow is built today. We support all struggles against oppression. We support the progressive student movement We support existing trade unions, but fight for workers control, a revolutionary programme, and the formation of “One Big Union”.

A FIGHTING TRADITION

We proudly stand in the mass tradition of libertarian socialism (anarcho-syndicalism). Our movement has historically attracted millions world wide, because it serves the needs of the workers and the poor, not the power-seekers and exploiters. Today it is growing across the globe.

If you agree- JOIN the WSF.

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CONTACT ADDRESSES

POST: NEW ADDRESS: WSF, Suite no. 36. Private Bag X42, Braamfontein, 2017, South Africa

PHONE (leave message): 088-122-0416

E-MAIL: wsf_sa@geocities.com

WEB-SITE ON INTERNET: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7017/

This article was published by Lucien van der Walt in Direct Action (Australia, Summer 2001) as “Many Races, One Union! The IWW, revolutionary syndicalism and working class struggle in South Africa, 1910-21.” It was reprinted in Bread and Roses (Britain, Autumn 2001) as “A History of the IWW in South Africa.”

Note: An incomplete version has also appeared on the internet under the title “1816-1939: Syndicalism in South Africa,” described as “a short history of radical trade unionism, class struggle and race in Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.”  The dates are wrong (there was no syndicalism anywhere in 1816, and while the IWW-influenced ICU would last in Zimbabwe into the 1950s, there was no syndicalism in South Africa in 1939) and several paragraphs are missing, in that version.

For PDF of scanned Direct Action version: click here

For PDF of scanned Bread and Roses version: click here

Lucien van der Walt, Autumn 2001, “A History of the IWW in South Africa,” Bread and Roses

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the ideas, goals and organisational practices for which it stood, had an important influence on the early labour movement and radical press in South Africa. It also had an impact on neighbouring Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Furthermore, at least five unions were founded on the IWW model in this period. Four of these unions pioneered the organisation of workers of colour, most notably the Industrial Workers of Africa, the first union for African workers in South African history

Memory is the Weapon

Much of this history has been forgotten, both in South Africa, and elsewhere, including within the contemporary IWW movement, and, unfortunately, most writings on this history have tended to be inaccurate and incomplete. Both the hostility of liberal and Marxist writers,  and over-enthusiasm and simplification by anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists.

It is therefore an essential task to set the record straight. The history of the IWW’s role is important for more than simple academic reasons. It is vitally important to understand our own history, learn from it, and yes, take pride in our accomplishments as anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists.

The First IWW

Founded in the United States in 1905, the IWW spelt out its aims in unmistakeable terms in the Preamble of the IWW:

 “…The working-class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, and abolish the wage system…“

For radical workers around the world, this sort of vision proved immensely attractive. Tired of continual betrayals by workers parties and elected politicians, and often excluded from even the semblance of political rights represented by bourgeois electoral processes, millions of working people joined revolutionary trade unions that were committed to direct action and the replacement of capitalism and the state by workers’ control of production between the 1890s and the 1930s.

Race and Industry

South Africa’s industrialisation was begun by the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867, followed by gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. Hundreds of thousands of workers from Australia, America, Europe and from throughout southern Africa were drawn into vast new cities such as Johannesburg and Kimberley almost overnight.

For white workers, conditions were poor and dangerous, but they at least had basic civil and political rights.

Not so the Africans who entered the cities as a conquered people, their lands under imperial authority, their chiefs colluding in labour recruitment to the mines, and their working lives shackled by pass laws preventing free movement, indenture laws banning strikes, and residential laws condemning them to all-male hostels or grim ghettos.

Conditions for Indian workers, descended from indentured farm labourers brought out in the 1860s, and Coloureds, descended mainly from the old Cape colony slaves, were a little better, but both groups suffered national oppression under a succession of white supremacist regimes that were finally consolidated as the Union of South Africa in 1910.

The Voice of Labour

By 1910 the Voice of Labour had become a leading forum for revolutionary syndicalist views. For radicals alienated by the brutalities and racism of South African capitalism, the segregationist reformism of the South African Labour Party, and the sectionalism of the craft unions, the IWW vision was attractive.

Local anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists wrote into the paper to praise “direct action over… Parliamentary politics” which acts to “chill and paralyse natural energy and initiative.” They were also the first to call for racially integrated trade unions: the “only logical thing for white slaves to do…is to throw in their lot with the black wage slave in a common assault on the capitalist system.”

On the tracks

In March 1910, a pro-IWW Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was founded in Johannesburg, and the founding of a South African section of the IWW followed in June. The vocal and militant blacksmith A.B. Dunbar was soon elected general-secretary of the union.

Despite the sectarianism that dogged the early Johannesburg left, the various left groups rallied behind the IWW when it led white Johannesburg tramway workers out in a lightening strike in January 1911.

The strike – against the appointment of an unpopular inspector – was won in less than day, and led to a rapid growth in the IWW in Johannesburg and the founding of an IWW section, the Municipal Industrial Union. An IWW local was also set up on the Pretoria railways that year, and there are reports of a “Durban IWW” operating in that port city in 1912.

However, the Johannesburg municipality soon launched an enquiry into the January 1911 strike. The strike had not followed the restrictive labour laws, and the central government was worried about the example it set for the railways, where strikes were prohibited.

After the IWW boycotted the hearings, the municipality fired two key IWW tramway workers, Tom Glynn and W.P. Glendon in May.

As a second strike broke out in response, the municipality recruited strikebreakers, sent armed police to surround the tram works and main power station, and had Glynn and Glendon arrested. Workers and their families then set up barricades, clashes with the police followed, and public meetings were banned; Dunbar and John Campbell of the SLP, among others, were arrested for addressing a rally after the ban was in place.

Nonetheless, the strike was broken. Seventy workers were fired, and Glynn sentenced to three months hard labour. He subsequently left for Australia that year, where he became editor of the IWW’s Direct Action and was one of the “Sydney twelve” tried for treason in 1917.

A second crippling blow against the local IWW came from within: in early 1912, the union was hijacked by members of a local socialist sect intent on starting a “workers’ party,” and Dunbar was expelled. The IWW seems to have withered by the middle of that year.

The 1913 General Strike

Thus, when the great July 1913 strike by white workers broke out across the Witwatersrand, neither the IWW nor the SLP had any visible presence. The government nonetheless blamed the militant strike – in which imperial troops killed more than 25 protestors, and strikers and their supporters rioted in Johannesburg – on a “syndicalist conspiracy,” “Anarchy masquerading as Labour,” and the “ravings of the syndicalists” which were “appealing both to the poorer Dutch and to the Natives”.

Some IWW-type ideas were in evidence amongst sections of the strikers, with the SA Labour Party finding it necessary to campaign against a wave of “syndicalist talk.” One example was R. Waterston, who not only reportedly called for a “a general strike and a revolution,” but tried to bring African mine workers out on strike as well.

Nonetheless, such perspectives do not seem to have been dominant. By the time of the January 1914 white miners strike (suppressed under martial law) the South African IWW was clearly defunct.

The International

Nonetheless, IWW ideas got a second lease of life in South Africa with the founding of the International Socialist League (ISL) in September 1915.

The ISL was founded by anti-war dissidents from the SA Labour Party, who left over that party’s support for World War One. Many of these had been radicalised by the brutal repression of the 1913 and 1914 general strikes, and had broken also with the Party’s “White South Africa” policies. They included militants such as G. Mason, W.H. Andrews and S.P. Bunting.

Veteran IWW and Socialist Labour Party militants – notably Dunbar and Campbell- also joined the ISL, where they soon wielded a decisive political influence. By 1916, the ISL’s weekly, The International, described the organisation’s aim as the establishment of a “new movement,” One Big Union that would overcome the “bounds of Craft and race and sex,” “recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour,” and destroy capitalism through a “lockout of the capitalist class.”

The ISL consistently condemned racism, and insisted that “an internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the native working-class is capable of claiming, will be a sham.”

The ISL set out to promote these sorts of ideas through The International, through innumerable leaflets and public meetings, and even through the standing candidates in elections on a platform of equal rights for white and black, and the abolition of capitalism and the state through the One Big Union.

Red and Black

Initially rooted, like the South African IWW, amongst militant white workers, and focussed on the white trade unions, the ISL increasingly turned its attention towards workers of colour, the African, Coloured and Indian wage slaves who formed the bedrock of South African capitalism.

Unlike the South African IWW, which was open to all workers, but based, in practice, amongst whites, the ISL was able to unionise workers of colour into syndicalist unions on the IWW model.

Not only were links made with nationalist organisations such as the African Peoples Organisation and the African National Congress (ANC), but African workers were also drawn into ISL study groups set up in Johannesburg in July 1917. Dunbar was the main speaker at these study groups, which focussed on the need for revolutionary trade unionism, for mass civil disobedience against racist laws, and for the abolition of the capitalist system.

In the port city of Durban, ISL militants like Gordon Lee founded an Indian Workers Industrial Union in March 1917 “on the lines of the IWW.” Whilst “the Indian Workers Choir entertained the crowds by singing the Red Flag, the International and many IWW songs,” plans were put in place to translate ISL materials into in Tamil, Hindi and Telegu.

The key organisers of the Union were R.K. Moodley and Bernard Sigamoney, who seem to have been very effective: according to the local Indian Opinion, the “fame of the Indian Workers Union, and Comrade Sigamoney’s activities therein reached Lahore in India” where a local paper was quoted as asking: “Is there no lesson for this to the working classes in India”?

In 1918, noting a “great awakening of industrial solidarity” amongst coloured workers in the diamond mining town of Kimberely, the ISL dispatched Sam Barlin to unionise workers.

An ISL office was set up, and Barlin organised a Clothing Workers Industrial Union, which set up a branch in Johannesburg in June 1919. Twenty-seven Coloured workers subsequently joined the ISL, including Fred Pienaar (the union’s secretary), and Johnny Gomas, later a prominent communist. Barlin also set up a Horse Drivers’ Union in the town, again amongst Coloured workers. Both unions struck in 1919.

Meanwhile, in Cape Town, the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL), a second revolutionary syndicalist group founded in March 1918 on the basis of the IWW Preamble, organised mainly Coloured factory workers into a Sweet and Jam Workers Industrial Union, and promoted IWW ideas in its monthly The Bolshevik.

For Africa

In September 1917, the Johannesburg ISL study group for African workers was transformed into the Industrial Workers of Africa, the first African trade union in South African history. Rueben Cetiwe, a key African militant in the new union, and part of its all-African executive, set out the union’s aims in unambiguous terms:

“We are here for Organisation, so that as soon as all of your fellow workers are organised, then we can see what we can do to abolish the Capitalist-System. We are here for the salvation of the workers. We are here to organise and to fight for our rights and benefits.”

Within the ANC on the Witwatersrand, key Industrial Workers of Africa militants – such as Cetiwe and Hamilton Kraai – were central to the formation of a formed part of a left, pro-labour, bloc that helped shift the sleepy and middle class ANC to the left for in 1918 and early 1919, as an unprecedented wave of strikes by black and white workers broke out.

When the hard-line Judge McFie jailed 152 striking African municipal workers in June 1918, the ANC called a mass protest rally of African workers in Johannesburg on the 10 June. At the rally, members of the Industrial Workers of Africa moved for a general strike by African workers across the Witwatersrand to protest the repression.

An organising committee composed of ANC, ISL and Industrial Workers of Africa militants was set up to investigate the issue and report back. “The capitalists and workers are at war everywhere in every country,” the committee told a mass rally a week later, and so it was only right that workers should “strike and get what they should.” A general strike by all African workers against the arrests, for a 1-shilling-a-day basic wage, and “for Africa, which they deserved.”

On the Docks

Weak organisation- and maybe nerves and inexperience- led the committee to call off the strike. Nonetheless, the government soon arrested seven activists – three ISL militants, three activists from the Industrial Workers of Africa, and two from the ANC – for “incitement” to public violence in what became South Africa’s first-ever multiracial political trial.

After the case fell through, protest continued, with Cetiwe and Kraai playing a leading role in the ANC’s March 1919 protest against the pass laws, and African ISL militant T.W. Thibedi reviving the Industrial Workers of Africa with a “gratifyingly large attendance” of several hundred supporters and members.

Once the ANC right-wing regained the upper hand, it closed down all such mass protests, returning to its traditional tactic of petitioning the British Crown and liberal white opinion.

Cetiwe and Kraai then moved to Cape Town to set up a branch of the Industrial Workers of Africa. Organising amongst African and Coloured dockworkers, the two syndicalist militants helped organise a joint strike by the Industrial Workers of Africa with two other unions – the Industrial and Commercial Union and the (white) National Union of Railways and Harbour Servants- in December 1919. Supported by the IndSL, more than 2000 workers struck for better wages and against food exports (which workers blamed for massive post-war inflation).

From Cape Town to the Zambezi

Although the strike was not won, it did lay a basis for cooperation on the docks, and by 1921 the Industrial Workers of Africa, the Industrial and Commercial Union and several other African trade unions had merged to form the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (or ICU). Not a true revolutionary syndicalist union – the ICU was influenced more by nationalist and traditionalist ideologies than anti-capitalism, and was run from above by a parasitic, weak, and sometimes crooked, layer of middle class officials – the ICU remained influenced by the IWW. It called for One Big Union, and its constitution included a version of the IWW Preamble.

The ICU peaked in 1927 with 100,000 members. By the 1930s it had also established loosely linked sections in Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Internal splits, strategic confusion, a lack of internal democracy and state and vigilante repression all led to a rapid decline of the organisation to a shadow of its former self by the early 1930s. Still, the ICU was the largest mass African movement in South Africa until the ANC’s “Congress Alliance” campaigns of the 1950s.

Race and anarchy

The IWW had had an important impact on the radical left, militant white workers, and workers of colour in South Africa in the 1910s, an influence that persisted into the 1920s in a diluted form in the ICU, and even spread into neighbouring colonies.

Can we say, then, as our detractors do, that classical anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism “ignored” race? Not at all!

Within a white dominion, within the British Empire, within colonial Africa, the IWW and the revolutionary syndicalism it exemplified and promoted had played a pioneering role in organising workers of colour, in defending the rights of African labour, in organising civil rights activities, a militancy that spilled into the African working classes of neighbouring countries.

In its “glorious period,” between the 1880s and 1930s, anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism were not just a European phenomenon. The anti-authoritarian left was an international movement. It was also internationalist and anti-racist.

These principles remain burned into our hearts as we enter the twenty-first century. Can we do any less than our forebears?

The Cape Town docks in 1919, site of the joint strike between the syndicalist Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU).

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This paper examines the development of anarchism and syndicalism in early twentieth century Cape Town, South Africa, drawing attention to a crucial but neglected chapter of labor and left history. Central to this story were the anarchists in the local Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and the revolutionary syndicalists of the Industrial Socialist League, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), and the Sweets and Jam Workers’ Industrial Union. These revolutionary anti-authoritarians, Africans, Coloureds and whites, fostered a multiracial radical movement – considerably preceding similar achievements by the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in this port city. They were also part of a larger anarchist and syndicalist movement across the southern African subcontinent.

Involved in activist centers, propaganda, public meetings, cooperatives, demonstrations, union organizing and strikes, and linked into international and national radical networks, Cape Town’s anarchists and syndicalists had an important impact on organizations like the African Political Organization (APO), the Cape Federation of Labour Unions, the Cape Native Congress, the CPSA, the General Workers Union, and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU). This paper is therefore also a contribution to the recovery of the history of the first generation of African and Coloured anti-capitalist radicals, and part of a growing international interest in anarchist and syndicalist history.

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Revolutionary syndicalism - the strategy of bringing about a stateless socialist society through a revolutionary general strike in which organised labour, through its trade unions, seizes and places under self-management the means of production – played a central, but today, largely forgotten, role in the early twentieth-century South African labour movement.

Before the 1920s, it was revolutionary syndicalism, which is rooted in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, rather than the dry Marxism of the Second International, which dominated the thought and actions of the radical left in South Africa. And so it was, ultimately, classical anarchism that pioneered labour organising and anti-racist work amongst workers of colour in South Africa: the nationally oppressed Coloured, Indian and African proletariat.

This pamphlet examines some of the history and legacy of the “red-and-black tradition” in the South African working class. One reason is simply to recover an important part of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist history. Little is known about the history of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in Africa generally, and in the British Empire, particularly.

More importantly, however, there is much to learn from the history of revolutionary syndicalism in South Africa. While the local movement was never as large as many other “third world” anarchist/revolutionary syndicalist movements, it did have some very important accomplishments, not least of which must be counted founding of the Industrial Workers of Africa in 1917: the first trade union for African workers in South African history.

This union was only one of a number of revolutionary syndicalist unions established in the 1910s by South African revolutionary syndicalists on the model of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States. These unions included an official South African section of the IWW (1910), the Indian Workers Industrial Union (1917), the Industrial Workers of Africa (1917), the Sweet and Jam Workers Industrial Union (1918), the Clothing Workers Industrial Union (1918), and the Horse Drivers’ Union (1918/9). This young revolutionary syndicalist union movement was distinguished by its focus on organising workers of colour labouring under racist and colonial rule.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the ideas, goals and organisational practices for which it stood, had an important influence on the early labour movement and radical press in South Africa. It also had an impact on neighbouring Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Furthermore, at least five unions were founded on the IWW model in this period. Four of these unions pioneered the organisation of workers of colour, most notably the Industrial Workers of Africa, the first union for African workers in South African history.

Source:  Ainfos, 5 March 2002

THE international anarchist movement will be saddened at the belated news of the death of Wilstar Choongo, founder of the Anarchist & Workers’ Solidarity Movement (AWSM) of Zambia.A self-taught anarchist activist, Wilstar first came to the attention of the movement in 1996 through his lone battle to improve the salaries of employees at the University of Zambia (UNZA)where he worked as a librarian — and where he built up a formidable collection of anarchist works for the use of students.

Zambia, a former British colony, gained its independence without much of a struggle in 1964. The 30-year African socialist regime of Kenneth Kaunda proved disastrous. The economy remained essentially extractive, agriculture shrivelled as farmers flooded into the cities because of urban food subsidies. Then the collapse of the copper price in the mid-1970s put paid to any hoped-for recovery.When Kaunda was defeated by the former Zambian Congress of Trade Unions general secretary Frederick Chiluba in the first democratic elections in 1991, the stage was set for the neo-liberal dismantling of an already drastically weakened country.

Although Chiluba had climbed to power on the back of a pro-democratic working class, his Movement for Multi- party Democracy soon revealed its true colours. Every organised group of citizens has to be annually licensed by the police and executions and torture resumed after a seven-year reprieve.

Although Zambia had played host to many African national-liberation exile and guerrilla groups (including the ANC/MK) during the Kaunda era, the inertia of never having fought for its own independence meant there was no tradition of grassroots protest, and only a tiny Left represented by the Socialist Caucus, a Marxist-Leninist discussion group at UNZA.

People in the shantytowns literally eat mud for the mineral content. In a two-week period that I was there, five employed UNZA workers were buried after having died of malnutrition – and this as the well-heeled employees of neo-liberal NGOs managing the structural adjustment of Zambia sported about with satellite dishes and Toyota Landcruisers.

It was against this background that Wilstar alone took on the entire varsity administration in an attempt to get a pay rise for the staff.  Wilstar was taken to court, but he was unbowed, and he won the pay rise, which encouraged the starving workers to fight for more. That fight brought him onto the “organise” anarchist e-mail discussion list and established links with us at the Workers’ Solidarity Federation (WSF) of South Africa.

Wilstar was born at Kalomo, a town in Southern Province, the son of small-scale farmers. He joined UNZA as a librarian. In 1995 and 1996, he contributed critical articles in the opposition The Post newspaper on the new Zambian constition [sic.]  that was then being drawn up, arguing for the decentralisation of power. In 1996/97, he was the mainstay of support for a group of students who had been kicked out of UNZA for daring to call a non-party-sectarian meeting.

I first met Wilstar when he invited me to Zambia in August 1998 as a WSF delegate to give a public talk on the common enemy facing South African and Zambian workers. He was a friendly, shambling man with a ready grin. I well recall sitting on the bed in his cramped apartment eating a meal of eggs, bread and oranges and engaging in fervent discussions on anarchist strategies.

Shortly after my visit, he and most of the youths of the Socialist Caucus’ UNZA-Cuba Friendship Association, who had converted to anarchism, set up the AWSM (sometimes referred to as the Anarchist Workers’ Group – Zambia), the first known anarchist organisation in Central Africa, and one which linked students, staff and workers.

Wilstar decided against the AWSM becoming a WSF section because of the great distances involved, but hoped to maintain regular contact and material and ideological support. In early 1999, WSF proposed that the AWSM become a WSF section, the South African and Zambian sections to be federated horizontally.As things turned out, the WSF dissolved in September 1999 because of the ineffectiveness of its organisational method, and the far more productive Bikisha Media Collective, Zabalaza Books and Anarchist Union sprang up in its stead.

But we last had contact with Wilstar on July 15, 1999. Unknown to us, he died shortly afterwards, aged 35, following a bout with malaria that brought on meningitis. Uncomplaining to the end, he had not even mentioned his illness to his comrades.

He left a wife and three young children. This obitiary [sic.] was delayed due to the critical problems of communication among workers in Africa. The AWSM is believed to have collapsed as a result of his death.

But although death cut short efforts to build a Central African anarchist movement, Wilstar’s direct-actionist example of anarchism in practice is still remembered as a great contribution to the ethics of the emergent Left in the region.

A Socialist Caucus activist described him so: “He wasn’t prepared to make things convenient for himself. His death is an extremely big loss to the whole fragile Left and UNZA is still reeling from it.” As we say in South Africa when a militant dies: “Hamba kahle (go well) Comrade Wilstar!”

– Michael Schmidt (Bikisha Media Collective, South Africa)

The anarchist-led Social Democratic Federation (SDF) of Cape Town held rallies in protest; Harrison wrote the anti-imperialist leaflet below. With fellow SDF members D.L. Dryburg and William Green,  who also spoke at the rallies, he was successfully prosecuted. An appeal later overturned the convictions.

Source: 28 June 1921, Cape Times

MURDER! MURDER! MURDER!!!

THE BULLHOEK MASSACRE.

Christians Slaughter Their Christian Brethren. Great Empire Day Celebration.

How appropriate and how much in keeping with the Matabele Massacre and other of their brutal empire-building tactics. And the Bullhoek tragedy was either by fate or circumstances enacted on their very Empire Day.

We accuse the responsible Government, whose forces are headed by a brutal assassin, of murdering unarmed strikers in Johannesburg, 1913, slaughtering unarmed Natives in Port Elizabeth, 192o, and their latest debauch is the gruesome mutilation of hundreds of Natives who were Christians and a passive community.

Hence this brutal invasion is truly symbolical of Governmental tyranny their hysterical efforts to exploit the workers, irrespective of their particular colour or religious beliefs, and to maintain their position functioned by an idle and parasitic class. Their armies are ever available to suppress any libertarian effort from the oppressing yoke of Capitalism. A condemnation meeting will he held on the Parade at 11 a.m. Sunday morning; Sunday evening, Adderley Street; St. Mark’s Schoolroom, Tennant Street, Monday evening, 30th.

Source: 25 April 1919 , The International

THE BOLSHEVIKS ARE COMING
To the Workers of South Africa — Black as well as White
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Bolshevism!What is this Bolshevism that the ruling class is so much afraid of?
Why do they send British Armies to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks?
Have they not had enough killing? Or is it thirst for righteousness that makes them pack Tommy Atkins off to freeze in the snows of Archangel, just when he was looking forward to Home and Blighty?
The Czar massacred half a million nomads in Southern Russia in one swoop. They did not send an army against him.
Why then are they so scared of Bolshevism? Why do they turn pale at its shadow as at the ghost of murdered men? Why?
We will tell you why!
The Great War of Nations is over, and the Class War against Labour has openly begun.
Bolshevism means the rule of the working class! And where the workers rule, the Capitalists cannot carry on their Robber System any more.

A Campaign of Lies
Workers! Do not be misled when the Capitalist Press reviles the Bolsheviks. They slander the Bolsheviks because they have lost the fat money bags they lent to the Czar to crush the Russian people.
They slander the Bolsheviks because they have lost the rich mines and factories which the Russian workmen are now working for themselves; and the land, which forty million peasants are farming in common under the Soviet Republic.
They slander the Bolsheviks because they fear you will follow suit. They are afraid the workers in South Africa will also become free and independent.
They are losing their hair over Bolshevism because they see a prospect of losing their Profits.

Bolshevism Means Labour on Top
The workers of Russia and Germany are forming themselves into Soviets — that is: Councils of Workmen.
They are taking over the control of the country into their own hands —the hands of great wage-earning proletariat. That means the end of the Profiteering System, the end of the Capitalist exploitation of wage-labour for profit.
Why have the workers of Russia and Germany to shed their blood?
Because the Capitalist Class of all countries will sooner tear the people to pieces with their cannon rather than let the people rule. The workers are the people.
Remember the massacre of the workers in Johannesburg in 1913, and inBloemfontein last February!
Down with British Militarism! It is the weapon to crush the workers.
Down with Allied intervention in Russia!!
Down with the Capitalist Class in all countries!!
The hope of the workers is coming from Bolshevism. The free commonwealth of labour is the actual fact in Russia today.
Bolshevism means the victory of the wage-earners. It will soon spread to Britain, France, America and throughout the world.

Get ready for the World-Wide
Republic of Labour.
The way to get ready is to combine in the workshops. Combine as workers, no matter what colour.
Remember that an injury to one is an injury to all, be he black or white.
While the black worker is oppressed, the white worker cannot be free.
Before Labour can emancipate itself, black workers as well as white must combine in one organization of Labour, irrespective of craft, colour or creed.
This is Bolshevism: The Solidarity of Labour

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
You have nothing to lose but your Chains.
You have a world to win!!