Participants in the Southern Africa Labour Congress in 1943 regarded the gathering of white trade unionists and labor MPs from across South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Belgian Congo as a historic occasion. During three successive annual congresses, delegates sought to secure their place in the postwar world and ensure that the white labor movement would have its say in what this world would look like. Collectively, they developed, articulated, and then disseminated internationally a racialized understanding of class intended to be acceptable for the postwar period. Although white workers comprised only a small proportion of the working-class in the region, white labor representatives considered white workers to be the legitimate working-class, an assumption based on hierarchical notions of work that were not peculiar to them. Historically, some types of work have been considered more valuable than others, and the labor of some has been judged as more valuable than labor performed by others. In southern Africa, the white labor movement regarded skilled work performed by white men as the defining characteristic of who was, and who was not, working-class, a definition that had some circularity as work performed by white men was often defined in law as skilled. On this basis, organizations of the white labor movement were authentic representatives of the working-class.
The Congress has since been forgotten and, to my knowledge, has not attracted a single mention in the considerable secondary literature on labor in the region. Yet its participants, who were at the center of the white labor movements, considered the meetings to be of major significance. Two related reasons help explain why the Congress has been overlooked. The first is the shape of archives, which tend to adhere to the structure of the nation-state and into which transnational organizations do not easily fit. When the Congress ceased to exist in 1946, there was no one national organization that could lay claim to its documents. In this sense, the transnational character of the organization was a weakness as well as a strength. The Congress had no independent existence outside of the national-level organizations that comprised it. When they disintegrated in 1946, so did the Congress. No single collection of documents relating to the Congress has survived and accounts of its proceedings are scattered across the archives of its constituent organizations, personal papers of prominent participants, and contemporary newspaper reports. Correspondence, minutes, and reports derived from these form the basis of this article.
The second reason also relates to the transnational status of the Congress: much of the vast and detailed body of work on labor history in the region have been national labor histories.Footnote 1 As Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop, and Lucien van der Walt note in the case of South Africa, “activist and revisionist scholars tended to take South Africa as the unit of analysis, and to examine labor history as South African labor history.”Footnote 2 This is part of what Keith Breckenridge regarded as the implicit view in South African historiography “that South African history is sui generis, completely distinct from any other society, and disconnected by its history from both its neighbours and distant colour peers.”Footnote 3 Van der Walt developed the argument further and noted that the same is true for other parts of the region, where a national labor history is “presented as taking place within a distinctively national context where organizational and political boundaries correspond with the administrative borders of the state.”Footnote 4
This article will explore an integrated regional labor history, one in which representatives of the white labor movement sought to organize across borders to strengthen their own movements, tackle common problems, and reach out to the wider labor movement. In doing so, this article will utilize the insights of one innovative approach to understanding South African labor history in a transnational context: the concept of “white laborism.” This was an ideology in which radical critiques of economic exploitation were intricately linked with the establishment of racial hierarchies in the workplace and white domination.Footnote 5 As will be seen, the politics of the Southern Africa Labour Congress represented a similar combination, though advocates of white labor were sensitive to the shifting international context and avoided crude racism or making demands for inclusion on the basis of whiteness. Principles of self-determination and antiracism that ran counter to this racially exclusive vision came to the fore during the Second World War and made it all the more important for the white labor movement that they secure a central role for themselves in the postwar world.
This article also intends to offer a historical comparison to contemporary discussions about class and the rise of right-wing populism. In these discussions, the term “working-class” is commonly used to refer to manual jobs predominately performed by white men—Virginia coal miners, factory workers in Nord-Pas de Calais, or white van-driving builders from Essex—even though the numbers employed by these industries in developed economies have shrunk substantially in the last forty years. Conversely, retail workers or care-workers, whose numbers have swelled over the same period, are discussed in terms of class much less frequently.Footnote 6 In essence, the language and popular understanding of class has become decoupled from the structure of the real economy. In southern Africa during the 1940s, there was a concerted effort to do the same: to present white male workers as the natural working-class in the region, even though the large majority of wage work was performed by African workers. This goal motivated, and found its clear expression in, the formation of the Southern Africa Labour Congress.
Revival of the White Labor Movement and the Formation of the Congress
White labor organizations from across southern Africa greeted the call for the formation of the Congress in late 1942 with enthusiasm. Support for the idea of holding the Congress was rooted in three developments: the revival of the white labor movement, a growing sense that an Allied victory in the war was assured, and the increased assertiveness of African workers. The first of these was critical. Following an upsurge of militancy after the First World War, heavy defeats were inflicted on the white labor movement in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, and it took many years for the movement to recover.Footnote 7 By the early 1940s, however, white labor representatives had grounds for optimism, as the size, importance, and unity of their movement grew. In South Africa, membership of registered trade unions rose dramatically from 89,000 in 1934 to over 250,000 by 1942, a large majority of whom were white workers.Footnote 8 The South African Trades and Labour Council (SATLC), a national trade union federation based in Johannesburg, increased its number of affiliates, notably attracting the re-affiliation of the South African Mine Workers’ Union, one of the largest white unions in the country, in 1940, and merging with the Cape Federation of Labour Unions, a rival national body, in 1945.Footnote 9
Unlike in Britain, trade unions in southern Africa were not organizationally linked to national labor parties, though prominent individual trade unionists were often members. This changed in the early 1940s as the SATLC and South African Labour Party (SALP) sought closer cooperation. These efforts came to fruition in April 1942 when the annual congress of the SATLC voted overwhelmingly “to bring about the closest collaboration with the political wing of the labor movement, namely, the South African Labour Party.”Footnote 10 Notably, the proposer of this motion, Ben Weinbren, was subsequently a delegate at the first Southern Africa Labour Congress. That same year, five more white trade unions affiliated directly to the SALP.Footnote 11 Contemporaries regarded the Congress as the outgrowth of growing unity at a national level. Reflecting on the third Congress, Fred Tyler, the British-born General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Woodcutters, noted that the SATLC's involvement “was the natural outcome of a resolution … that the industrial labour wing collaborate with the political labour wing.”Footnote 12
A similar process of growth and consolidation was underway in Southern Rhodesia. In 1938, white unions on different mines merged to form a single white mineworkers’ union: the Associated Mine Workers’ Union.Footnote 13 The union quickly established itself across the colony and reached an agreement with the Chamber of Mines in 1940 to create bargaining and conciliation machinery for the whole industry.Footnote 14 The establishment of the mineworkers’ union was followed by the creation of an umbrella organization for the colony's white trade unions in 1939: the Southern Rhodesia Trades and Labour Council, which sought to establish close links with the SATLC.Footnote 15 At the same time, the fortunes of the Rhodesia Labour Party (RLP) revived. Electoral support for the RLP had grown steadily during the 1930s and in the April 1939 elections the party emerged as the official opposition, winning thirty-three percent of the vote and seven of the thirty seats in parliament.Footnote 16
Success for the newly-formed Northern Rhodesia Labour Party (NRLP) was even more dramatic. The whites-only party was only formed in February 1941, yet all five Labour candidates who stood in the 1941 legislative council elections won their seats.Footnote 17 The same year, the colony's largest white union, the Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers’ Union (NRMWU), secured a closed shop and an industrial color bar on the mines through strike action. NRMWU members were also closely involved in efforts to form a white mineworkers’ union in Belgian Congo in 1941 as the copper mines in Katanga Province were located directly across the border from the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt. Most white mineworkers in Katanga quickly joined the new union, the Association des Agents de l'Union Minière et Filiales, and unions for white railway workers and civil servants soon followed.Footnote 18 The colonial authorities and employers in Belgian Congo made sustained efforts to crush the nascent white labor movement in 1942 and so white workers in the colony sought external support to bolster their position.Footnote 19
The onset of the Second World War provided another boost to labor parties in all three territories as they were granted positions of political power. Following the example of Britain, the South African and Southern Rhodesian governments formed national governments and invited labor MPs to join the Cabinet. Walter Madeley, a British-born engineer who had sat as a SALP MP since 1910, joined the South African government as Minister of Labor, while in Southern Rhodesia RLP leader Harry Davies was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs.Footnote 20 In Northern Rhodesia, where the Legislative Council remained subordinate to the Governor, NRLP leader Roy Welensky was appointed to the territory's Executive Council in 1940.Footnote 21
Davies accepted his ministerial position without consulting his party. His subsequent refusal to resign from government, as well as that of appointed minister Jack Keller, British-born General Secretary of the Rhodesia Railway Workers’ Union (RRWU) who reveled in his nickname “the Lenin of Rhodesia,” triggered a split in the party. Both men resigned from the RLP and formed a new party, confusingly known as The Labour Party.Footnote 22 Relations between the two parties were extremely acrimonious yet such was the appeal of the Southern Africa Labour Congress that both sides attended.
Consolidation of the white labor movement cannot be disentangled from the growing demands of African workers in this period to be recognized as such. African workers and trade unionists had long made efforts to puncture the self-image of the white labor movement as the authentic representatives of the working-class. This was occasionally expressed in terms of disbelief at the effrontery of white trade unionists in claiming the mantle of “working-class” since African workers performed almost all manual work. “We are the workers. We make houses and lay roads. Any reasonable person can see that we are the workers,” argued Masotsha Ndlovu, Secretary General of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in Southern Rhodesia, in a 1929 speech attacking the RLP, “[yet RLP MPs] spoke for the white people as labour leaders.”Footnote 23
Under the Industrial Conciliation Acts, the legislation governing industrial relations in both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, Africans were excluded from the definition of “employee” and African unions were excluded from industrial bargaining machinery. Furthermore, this legislation had been supported, or, in the case of South Africa, introduced, by the white labor movement, which mostly continued to support the color bar that this legislation formalized. Although the SATLC supported a policy of non-racialism and full legal rights for African workers from 1930, it had taken little action in pursuit of these aims.Footnote 24 Other components of the white labor movement made their positions clear. The RLP's 1938 Statement of Policy stipulated that “in the white areas … the native will be confined largely to the performance of the unskilled work.”Footnote 25 Similarly, the SALP confirmed in 1943 that it recognized “the existence of and necessity for a colour bar” and did not campaign for its immediate removal.Footnote 26
Challenges by African workers intensified during the 1940s. In November 1941, a conference of African trade unionists established the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU) from existing unions. One of the main demands that emerged from this conference was recognition of African workers as employees under the Industrial Conciliation Act.Footnote 27 The white labor movement was well-aware of these demands. In June 1942, Madeley had been personally informed by Dr. Alfred Xuma, president of the African National Congress, that African workers would not accept “anything short of recognition under the Industrial Conciliation Act.”Footnote 28 Madeley would then have heard this same demand reiterated when he opened the CNETU annual conference in October 1942. Legislative industrial color bars did not exist in Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia but there was still a clear racial hierarchy in the workplace: African workers performed the toughest jobs for the lowest pay, though Congolese workers undertook skilled work restricted to whites elsewhere in the region. There were major strikes by African mineworkers on both sides of the border in 1940 and 1941, which were violently suppressed.Footnote 29
Conceptions of Class and the Organization of the Congress
The initiative for the Congress came from Roy Welensky, a Southern Rhodesian-born trade unionist who rose to prominence representing white railway workers and who subsequently became a prominent settler politician. Welensky wrote to Colin Henderson, SALP General Secretary, in September 1942 to suggest a meeting of all labor parties in the region. Henderson was enthusiastic about the idea and promised to place it before the party's National Executive Committee at their next meeting.Footnote 30 The committee was equally enthusiastic and soon began distributing invitations to white labor organizations across the region. Welensky's suggestion was a timely one. While arrangements for the Congress were underway, the tide of the war turned against the Axis powers and confidence in an Allied victory grew. In May 1943, German and Italian forces surrendered in Tunisia, bringing to an end the campaign in which most white troops from southern Africa had fought.Footnote 31 Now was the time to plan for the postwar world.
The suggestion was also timely as the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, in June 1941, had healed a breach in the white labor movement. Communists, who had initially opposed the war, now swung whole-heartedly behind the war effort and official suspicion about their activities dimmed. For a brief period, the Soviet Union enjoyed unprecedented prestige among whites across the region and, partly by dint of association, there was a revival of support for the Communist Party of South Africa, the only communist party in the region.Footnote 32 Communist trade unionists were active participants in the Congresses and attempted, with occasional success, to push delegates leftwards.
Members of the white labor movement were not the only ones who sensed that a new era of possibility was beginning in the 1940s. Many other sections of South African society recognized that the onset of the Second World War “shook up established certainties” and this “proved a powerful stimulus to new thought,” as the edited volume by Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves argues.Footnote 33 The discussion in that volume is limited to South Africa, however, and the competing vision of the future advanced by the South African labor movement was not conceptualized and sought by them alone but in conjunction with white labor activists from across the region.
Participation in the Congress was deliberately restricted to racially exclusive organizations or trade unions which were formally multiracial but in which Africans, Indians, or Coloured workers played, at best, a nominal role. Invitations were sent out from Johannesburg far and wide to small white trade unions—the largest white trade unions in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the NRMWU and RRWU, had only 2,052 and 1,678 members respectively in 1941—while larger African trade unions on the Rand were ignored.Footnote 34 This was based on a highly racialized and gendered understanding of class. Productive skilled work was, it was thought, work which was carried out by white men, and almost all white men in South Africa and Northern and Southern Rhodesia worked. Eighty-seven percent of white men over the age of fifteen in South Africa were economically active in 1939, while in Southern Rhodesia the figure was around eighty-four percent in 1942, and in Northern Rhodesia, eighty-six percent of white men were economically active in 1946.Footnote 35 African workers were considered unskilled laborers, regardless of the work they actually performed, whose role was to assist white workers and who properly belonged in rural areas. Where white female workers performed the same jobs as white male workers, such as in the South African metallurgical industry during the Second World War, white trade unions considered them “temporary workers,” their employment a necessary wartime expediency, and deserving of lower pay.Footnote 36
Welensky's proposal was likely motivated by a perception that the position and presence of the white population in Northern Rhodesia was particularly precarious. The territory's white population was small and virtually non-existent outside the main industrial centers and the powers of the Legislative Council they elected were limited. Real political power lay with the Colonial Office and there was little possibility that the British Government would accede to vociferous demands by white settlers to amalgamate Northern and Southern Rhodesia as a self-governing colony.Footnote 37 White domination over the territory could not be assured by their own efforts. Urgency was injected into demands for amalgamation by the publication of a short pamphlet on colonial policy by the British Labour Party, which circulated widely among the white labor movement in southern Africa. This pamphlet pledged that a future Labour government would uphold the principle that African interests were considered paramount in Northern Rhodesia and ruled out further constitutional change for the colony.Footnote 38
White labor advocates across southern Africa possessed a conviction that criticisms emanating from the British Labour Party resulted from misunderstanding or lack of knowledge and could be rectified within the labor movement. This conviction stemmed from the personal experience in, or close ties with, the labor movement in Britain and elsewhere in the British Empire of many participants in the Southern Africa Labour Congress. They considered the labor movement in Britain to be their movement. White labor publications from across the region regularly reprinted articles from British Labour MPs and trade unionists alongside news and analysis from the labor movements in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. White labor organizations shared a common language (English) and a sense of a common history as “the initial organisation and growth of South African trade unions … can be attributed to the efforts of immigrants, largely from Britain and Australia,” and the same was true in Northern and Southern Rhodesia.Footnote 39 Belgian Congo is seemingly the outlier as the white workforce there overwhelmingly originated from Belgium but, as mentioned above, white mineworkers from Northern Rhodesia were involved in the formation of trade unions there. Information about Belgian Congo's white workforce, their organizations, and their struggles was largely transmitted to the white labor movement elsewhere by NRMWU members.Footnote 40
Yet the largely English-speaking male leadership of the white labor movement did not even reflect the structure and attitudes of the white working-class in the region, let alone the working-class as a whole. In South Africa, growing numbers of Afrikaners had left the land during the interwar years and joined the ranks of the urban working-class. Many of these Afrikaner workers opposed South African involvement in the war. Afrikaner workers, however, tended to be clustered into the unskilled and semi-skilled tiers of the white workforce and were therefore mostly excluded from craft unions.Footnote 41 There were trade unions with an overwhelmingly Afrikaner membership, notably die Spoorbond, the South African Mine Workers’ Union, and the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU), but these played no part in the South African Labour Congress.
English-speakers’ dominance over the white labor movement had not been uncontested. From the mid-1930s, figures associated with the Afrikaner Broederbond, a shadowy organization devoted to the advancement of Afrikaner nationalism, had made a determined effort to take control of existing unions or form separate unions under their control. These efforts met with dismal failure before the late 1940s, with the exception of die Spoorbond.Footnote 42 This was a union of white railway workers founded in 1934, which grew rapidly, reaching twenty-nine thousand members by 1942, though it aroused the ire of craft unions, which successfully restricted the union to representing only the lowest grades of white workers.Footnote 43 The craft unions on the railways were affiliated to the SATLC and it is likely that die Spoorbond leaders were never even invited to attend the Congress.
The South African Mine Workers’ Union was established by English-speaking white miners and they continued to dominate the union's leadership even though by 1936 around ninety percent of its twelve thousand members were Afrikaners. The war intensified a vicious struggle for control of the union between the existing leadership and Afrikaner nationalists, a struggle involving numerous court cases, suspension of internal democracy, government enquiries into corruption, unofficial strikes, attempted assassinations, and the murder of the union's general secretary.Footnote 44 Immersion in this power struggle likely limited the active involvement of the union's leadership in the wider white labor movement, with the exception of H.J. Cilliers, who had been the union's vice president before being elected a SALP MP in 1943 and was a delegate at all three Congresses.Footnote 45
Similarly, although founded by English-speaking male tailors, by 1938 the bulk of the GWU's seven thousand members were Afrikaner women, as were almost all major officer bearers in the union. Importantly, the GWU also organized African and Coloured workers in the garment industry. However, the GWU's political stance was significantly at odds with the rest of the white labor movement. Solly Sachs, the union's firebrand general secretary, opposed the war and argued that the labor movement should adopt an anti-imperial, republican stance that would encompass Afrikaner national aspirations.Footnote 46 These political positions alone would have been enough to make the GWU an unlikely presence at the resolutely prowar Congress, but this was compounded by the GWU's decision, taken shortly before the first Congress, to launch an Independent Labour Party and issue a fierce denunciation of the SALP.Footnote 47
The First Congress: Johannesburg, July 1943
The first Congress saw a gathering of eight labor MPs and twenty-eight delegates representing most white labor organizations of significance in the region: the SALP; both labor parties in Southern Rhodesia; NRLP; SATLC, as well as its local committees in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Bloemfontein; Cape Federation of Labour Unions; Southern Rhodesia Trades and Labour Council; Rhodesia Railway Workers’ Union; Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers’ Union; Fédération des Associations Syndicale du Katanga; and Union Generale des Associations Professionelles Congolaises.Footnote 48 At least two Communist Party members attended as SATLC delegates as well. Delegates from Southern Rhodesia's white mineworkers’ union were unable to attend due to a protracted dispute following the sacking of L.T. Smith from Shabanie Mine, where he had been employed as an electrician, after he was elected a labor MP, but the union's journal carried a lengthy report of the proceedings.Footnote 49 “This was,” declared Forward, a left-wing newspaper aligned with the SALP, “a truly representative assembly of Labour and Trade Union representatives from the Union of South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and the Belgian Congo.”Footnote 50
Delegates had an ambitious agenda for the two-day Congress. Walter Madeley opened the proceedings by declaring that “I am one of those who believes that it is absolutely inevitable that Labour will be ruling the world and that being so, we must prepare ourselves that we may be able to rule the world.” With that end in mind, the fundamental principle for the conference to work toward was to “abolish the profit-making system” and establish socialism.Footnote 51 SALP delegates in particular could enter the Congress with confidence and purpose. The 1943 general election, held immediately prior to the Congress, had seen the number of SALP MPs increase from four to nine and the party had won all six mining constituencies on the Rand, mostly with large majorities.Footnote 52
Much debate at the Congress focused on identifying and resolving common problems faced by the white labor movement in each territory. Two considerations dominated these discussions: the establishment of a better system of social security to avoid a repeat of the economic slump that occurred after the First World War, which many delegates had personally experienced, and what Harry Davies introduced as “the problem common to all … the racial question.” Demographics featured in almost every contribution, focusing on the fact that Africans vastly outnumbered whites in each territory. Nevertheless, there was a keen awareness of the changing international context, and the Atlantic Charter issued by the Allied powers during 1941 was discussed. Efforts were made to portray the racialized division of labor as normal and several delegates compared the situation with the Soviet Union, where it was argued that equality had not been achieved among different ethnic groups.Footnote 53
Two seemingly incongruous resolutions were passed in response to these debates. The first affirmed “that Socialism offers the only possible solution to the securing of Social Reconstruction,” while the second called for “a greater flow of selected productive immigration after the war to the colonies” to assist postwar reconstruction. There was some debate about specifically calling for greater European immigration, but this was thought unnecessary as “productive immigrants” was considered synonymous with “European immigrants.” Ben Weinbren, a SALP member and former communist, spoke against the inclusion of “European” but argued that: “We can do with a few more million people in South Africa, preferably British workers … I am in favour of a flow of immigration with a preference for British working-class stock.”Footnote 54
The link between these two resolutions was the shared assumption among delegates that more white workers were required for postwar development and prosperity as they were the ones who performed real, productive work. In this way, an increased white settler population would “serve the best interests” of the African population, who were deemed incapable of improvement through their own efforts.Footnote 55 This formed what Josiah Brownell termed a “fundamental tenet of white settler ideology”: that white settlers were necessary to bring about dynamic change “on largely static indigenous populations.”Footnote 56 Some speakers at the Congress directly attacked the idea that Africans were workers in any meaningful sense compared to white workers. Jimmy Briggs—SALP chairman and a trade unionist with personal experience of the labor movement in Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States—drew on his experience as a bricklayer to claim “Many [Africans] who work in this country perform their work in the most inefficient manner possible. Their labour is of little real value.” Some delegates did denounce racial discrimination, notably Isaac Wolfson, the South African-born Communist Party treasurer and leader of the Tailoring Workers’ Union. However, Wolfson also specifically warned Congress about the danger of African workers undercutting whites by undertaking skilled work, noting: “What can happen in Belgian Congo today can happen in South Africa tomorrow.”Footnote 57
The other major task of the Congress was to successfully present themselves internationally as the legitimate representatives of the working-class in southern Africa and secure agreement for their vision of a postwar world. Leading Rhodesia Railway Workers’ Union, members Roy Welensky and Tommy Grey, who was born in Britain and emigrated to Southern Rhodesia as a young man, suggested inviting a delegation from the British Labour Party to southern Africa so they could understand the situation in the region and thereby be persuaded that the politics of the white labor movement were acceptable and suitable. It was necessary to clear up misunderstandings within the labor movement as:
Labour must speak with one united voice at the Peace Conference; in order to achieve unity on all outstanding issues, e.g. colonial policy, it is felt that immediate steps should be taken for the calling of an International Conference of Labour Parties.
Delegates closed the Congress with a rendition of “The Red Flag,” significant not only because of the choice of song but also because the delegates all knew the words.Footnote 58
There was consensus that the Congress had been highly successful. Delegates therefore sought to repeat the Congress as an annual event and establish a permanent organization with a constitution, an executive, and a standing committee that would meet regularly between the annual Congresses.Footnote 59 One immediate aim of the executive was to strengthen links between organizations across the region and facilitate the flow of information, so it was with this in mind that Duncan Burnside, a SALP MP, was sent on a speaking tour of Northern Rhodesia in September 1943.
Burnside, the SALP reported, “will visit all the larger centres, and will address workers on the mines … to stimulate greater interest in the principles of the Labour Party.”Footnote 60 This, of course, meant that Burnside addressed crowds of white railway workers and mineworkers, to whom he stressed the necessities of amalgamating Britain's colonies in the region to remove “the incubus of Colonial Office domination,” and emulating the progressive social security policies of the New Zealand Labour Party.Footnote 61 Developing links were reciprocal. The following month, NRMWU General Secretary and NRLP MP Marthinus Visagie, who was from South Africa and had previously worked on the Rand, visited Johannesburg and was given a fact-finding tour of the city so the NRLP could emulate SALP policy in Northern Rhodesia.Footnote 62 It was originally proposed that Burnside would visit Northern Rhodesia and Belgian Congo, though the second leg of this trip never happened. Meanwhile, white workers in Belgian Congo were attempting to duplicate the organization of the white labor movement elsewhere in the region, with white unions in Katanga forming an umbrella body, the Fédération des Associations Syndicales du Katanga, and discussing using this as a basis to form a labor party.Footnote 63
The Second Congress: Bulawayo, July 1944
Bulawayo, in Southern Rhodesia, was an obvious choice to host the second Southern Africa Labour Congress. The city “was the stronghold of white trade unionism” and the birthplace of the RLP.Footnote 64 By 1944, the colony's white labor movement was also in a better position to organize the Congress. In October 1943, Davies and Keller were sacked from the government and, along with pressure from Rhodesia Railway Workers’ Union branches, this paved the way for reunification of the labor party. The party was reformed as the Southern Rhodesia Labour Party (SRLP) in January 1944.Footnote 65 It was a measure of wartime radicalization that the new constitution of the reunified SRLP quoted the British Labour Party's Clause IV—which called for the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange—as its principal policy clause.Footnote 66 Moreover, the colony's Trades and Labour Council used the occasion of the Congress to announce it was now considering supporting the SRLP.Footnote 67
By July 1944, it was clearly only a matter of time before the end of the war, bringing greater urgency to post-war planning. Colin Legum, a South African journalist who served as congress secretary and as a SALP city councilor and who later became an anti-apartheid activist, wrote to all constituent organizations to point out that the next congress would occur only a few months before the Dominion Labour Congress, which would bring together the labor movement from across the British Empire, so:
it is of the utmost importance that a common policy should be formulated by the various labour organizations in Southern Africa, so that our views on the post-war problems shall be unanimous. This is particularly important in view of the differences of opinion which exist between the Southern Africa Labour Movement and the British Labour Party over Colonial Policy.Footnote 68
The Southern Africa Labour Congress was part of a broader process of the strengthening and deepening of ties within the international labor movement. In mid-1942, the British Trade Union Congress began preparations for a conference of trade unions from the Dominions and invited delegates from South Africa. Delegates exchanged information on trade union organization, wages, working conditions, and plans for postwar reconstruction and resolved “that closer contact should be established between the British Trade Union Movement and the respective Dominion Movements.”Footnote 69
The 1944 Dominion Labour Conference, however, was thought to be more important. The 1943 conference had been relatively poorly attended as Australian delegates could not attend and the New Zealand delegate was killed en route to London when his ship was torpedoed. Moreover, the 1944 conference was being organized for labor parties from the Dominions, rather than trade unions, and would address plans for postwar reconstruction more directly. It was therefore crucial for representatives from southern Africa to attend. Although the British Labour Party had rebuffed the invitation in 1943 to send a delegation to southern Africa, Congress delegates were not unduly disheartened. If the British Labour Party would not come to them, then they would go to it.
At the second Congress, a clearer picture emerged of what the white labor movement sought in the postwar world, and it was one where white domination over the region would be secured with the agreement of the international labor movement. Again, ideas of white domination were mixed in with radical critiques of the existing order. Congress delegates reaffirmed their support for socialism and pledged to complete “the task of ensuring that the promise of a better world after this war will be translated into reality.” The “minimum criteria of economic justice” was “a comprehensive scheme of social security … for all sections of the population” and delegates vowed to impose as much taxation as necessary on “excessive wealth … until the results aimed at were achieved.”Footnote 70 This vision of a “better postwar world” would also involve a strengthening of white political power over the region:
This conference agrees that the time has come for a regrouping of territories in Africa on the basis of economic and social unity which will promote the interests of both the civilised and indigenous populations.
Radical arguments were deployed to support this proposal. C. Onclynx, a Belgian mineworker, argued “that the boundaries in Africa had been set up by capitalists. The workers of the Congo recognized no boundaries.” Similarly, Duncan Burnside saw this regrouping as a blow to “the vested interests of Imperial masters and their local exploiters” as well as the first step to unification with South Africa, a logical step as the “three territories were all British territories.” Jim Purvis, an Australian mineworker and Northern Rhodesian delegate, perhaps with the changing international context in mind, “believed that this was the last chance the white races were going to get.”Footnote 71 The Congress was not out of step with wider opinion in settler society. Proposed territorial mergers corresponded closely to the ideas of South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts who believed in enlarging South Africa to encompass several neighboring colonies and had advocated this in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1943.Footnote 72 Discussions on amalgamating Northern and Southern Rhodesia at the Congress also prefigured the creation of the settler-dominated Central African Federation in 1953, and helped popularize the idea by bringing whites from across the region together and stressing their common interests.
Sections of the labor movement elsewhere in the world had to be convinced that this vision of the postwar world was legitimate and the Congress regarded one of its main tasks as drafting “a practical colonial policy in so far as Southern Africa is concerned” for submission to the upcoming Dominion Labour Conference.Footnote 73 Delegates clearly had great faith in their own powers of persuasion as another aspect of this colonial policy was “that native development be fully encouraged within the native reserves,” effectively anticipating what would become a cornerstone of apartheid policy in South Africa.Footnote 74
The next step was to ensure that sufficient delegates attended the Dominion Labour Conference to make the arguments. Rhodesian delegates had not been invited—Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing colony but not a Dominion—and Donald Macintyre, a British-born SRLP MP, suggested approaching other labor parties around the British Empire to secure their support for the inclusion of Rhodesian delegates.Footnote 75 This approach was partially successful as Canada's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation responded positively, but such entreaties, and those of the SALP, were rebuffed by the British Labour Party.Footnote 76 Instead, the SALP pledged to “put forward the views of the Constituent Bodies of the Southern Africa Labour Movement” and requested other organizations send them points to be raised.Footnote 77
South Africa's three delegates encountered a mixed reception at the Dominion Labour Conference in September 1944. Explanations from the South African delegates regarding their preferred colonial policy produced a restatement of British Labour Party policy as outlined in the 1943 pamphlet from Arthur Creech Jones, a Labour MP with a close interest in African affairs. Other labor parties present made no explicit criticism of the South African delegation but essentially the ideas of the Southern Africa Labour Congress were rebuffed. While the manifesto issued by the conference supported the formation of regional organizations, it also stated that the interests of Africans, not white settlers, should be paramount in Britain's colonial possessions.Footnote 78 It is worth noting that, in other ways, the SALP delegates were more radical than others present at the conference. For instance, they had unsuccessfully sought to include a paragraph in the conference manifesto blaming “the Tories and capitalist economics for the outbreak of war.”Footnote 79
The Third Congress: Johannesburg, August 1945
The proposed locations of the three Congresses provide an insight into the mental geographies of the participants. Each was scheduled to take place amongst the highest concentration of white workers in each territory: first Johannesburg, then Bulawayo, and, in 1945, Nkana, the largest town on the Northern Rhodesia Copperbelt. However, plans to hold the Congress on the Copperbelt were frustrated by the lack of preparation by Northern Rhodesian organizations and the Congress reverted to Johannesburg.Footnote 80
Although thirty-one delegates gathered for the third congress, regional participation was diminished. No delegates from Belgian Congo or Northern Rhodesia were present. White unions in Belgian Congo had organized their own national conference on the same day, while Northern Rhodesia's delegate, Hedley Priest, NRLP MP for Livingstone, simply did not turn up. No Northern Rhodesian white trade unionists attended either.Footnote 81 The second Congress had taken place during a wave of wildcat strikes by white mineworkers on the Copperbelt but solidarity from the Congress amounted to a suggestion that a delegate travel to the Copperbelt to obtain more information.Footnote 82 Instead, assistance was sought, and obtained, from British trade unions. The Congress was of little use to striking workers.
Participation was further diminished by the renewed rift in Southern Rhodesia. In September 1944, the SRLP split along the same lines as previously. On this occasion, however, the disagreement was over the party's small African membership who were grouped in a single branch in Salisbury. A majority on the National Executive Committee supported the African branch—though they envisaged it as remaining in a subordinate role and developing “under European help and guidance”—but Davies, Keller, and their supporters in the railway workers’ union and the mineworkers’ union refused to countenance this.Footnote 83 They formed another new party, which became known as the Labour Party of Southern Rhodesia. This new party endorsed a policy of “the socialization of the means of production and distribution” and a membership criteria prohibiting any “member of the aboriginal tribes or races of Africa, or any person having the blood of any of the aboriginal tribes or races of Africa” from being admitted as a member.Footnote 84 Members from both labor parties arrived at the Congress but SRLP delegates successfully passed a motion recognizing the SRLP as the sole body “representing the Political Labour Movement in Southern Rhodesia.” Compounding matters, the Southern Rhodesia Trades and Labour Council announced that, due to the split, they might stand their own candidates at the next election.Footnote 85
Despite the reduced turnout, ambitions remained high. War was over in Europe and the unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party in Britain's general election the previous month suggested to some delegates that all now seemed possible. Closer to home, a SALP delegate reported that the party had been able to make “the first big break … in the walls of capitalism” through the passage of the Workmen's Compensation Amendment Act, which increased payments to injured workers.Footnote 86 The Congress confidently asserted that its purpose was to “co-ordinate the efforts of its member organisations in their common aim to achieve, by constitutional means, the establishment in their several states of a Socialist system of Government.”Footnote 87 There were calls to expand the Congress “to include all Africa, and particularly Kenya,” a significant emphasis as Kenya contained the only other sizeable population of white settlers in Britain's African colonies.Footnote 88
Lengthy discussions took place on the financial and monetary arrangements contained in the Bretton Woods Agreement. Opinions ranged from outright hostility to mild skepticism. A compromise was eventually reached that Bretton Woods should be “given a trial” after Colin Legum argued that international institutions could be taken over by the “Socialist countries of the world who would stand up to America.”Footnote 89 Given how far the white labor movement was from power, the Congress giving approval to Bretton Woods seems a little absurd. Witnessing the proceedings of the Congress was, in the words of Jack Allen, a prominent SRLP member and former Rand miner, like watching “a precocious schoolboy secretly trying on his father's trousers to see what sort of man he would make.”Footnote 90
Yet the significance of these debates lies not only in their grandiose pronouncements. It was decided that a summary of the debates on Bretton Woods should be sent to other labor parties around the British Empire and their own views on the subject sought. This was duly carried out and replies were received from labor parties in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.Footnote 91 White labor representatives were making a concerted attempt to insert themselves into international debates as equal participants whose interests and opinions should be considered.
Predictably, another major point of discussion was developing “a common native policy” with another proposal for segregation on a grand scale by removing Africans to rural areas “to develop on their own lines.”Footnote 92 There were delegates present who were firm opponents of racial discrimination in the labor movement, including the Mayor of Salisbury, Gladys Maasdorp, who defended the existence of the SRLP's African branch, and the Mayor of Johannesburg, Jessie MacPherson, who played a central role in efforts to remove the color bar from official SALP policy.Footnote 93 MacPherson was close to the Communist Party of South Africa and her attitudes may have been influenced by this association, but Maasdorp was a staunch anticommunist. However, their marginal position in the Congress, and the limited space for these politics in the white labor movement, became clear when SRLP delegates asked the Congress to issue an invitation to “Delegates from Organisations and National Bodies which represent Non-European Labour in Southern Africa.”Footnote 94 “If there is a grain of truth in our talk of representing united Labour,” argued Charles Oliver, an SRLP member from Umtali, “we must admit representatives of non-European workers.”Footnote 95
The motion was not even debated. In an unambivalent indication of the balance of power and opinion at the Congress, it was ruled out of order on the grounds that it would necessitate an amendment to the constitution. That this was a specious argument, but one that was nonetheless accepted, is apparent from the fact that the previous day delegates at the Congress had voted to expel the two MPs from the breakaway party in Southern Rhodesia, even though the constitution stipulated that all labor MPs should be represented. Instead, a sub-committee was established to draft a new constitution, to be discussed at the next congress.Footnote 96 This constitution never saw the light of day.
Dissension and Decline in the White Labour Movement
The fourth Congress scheduled for August 1946 in Salisbury never took place as the organization established to organize it disintegrated. Importantly, the Congress did not fail because its politics were repudiated by the international labor movement. In fact, some white labor organizations from the region proved surprisingly effective at independently representing themselves, and were acknowledged as part of the international labor movement. The best, and most extraordinary, example took place at the World Federation of Trade Unions conference in London in February 1945 where a white miner from Northern Rhodesia's Copperbelt, Brian Goodwin, attending the conference in his capacity as president of a whites-only union, was elected to the organization's executive as the representative for Africa. Astonishingly, Goodwin's candidacy was supported by the West African trade unions present at the conference, who also elected Isaac Wallace-Johnson, a trade unionist from Sierra Leone only recently released from internment, as his alternate.Footnote 97
Goodwin's opponent for the position was SATLC General Secretary William de Vries, who was incredulous to find that although the SATLC “had affiliated to it several Native and Coloured workers’ organizations,” West African delegates argued “that the South Africans could not speak on behalf of the thirty million Blacks” and thus supported Goodwin, who was himself originally from South Africa. The vote was close, though, and the SATLC was endorsed “as being the most representative group in Africa” by many delegates, including the British Trade Union Congress.Footnote 98 However, protestations from de Vries that the SATLC was a multiracial body must be seen in the context of preparations for the World Federation of Trade Unions conference when the Council of Non-European Trade Unions approached the SATLC to ask for assistance in securing representation at the conference. Even though the Council of Non-European Trade Unions claimed to represent 119 unions with a combined membership of 158,000, the SATLC rejected their approach on the grounds there was “one national trade union” and this was the SATLC. Any assistance for African unions would be provided by them.Footnote 99 The white labor movement had to occupy center stage.
The white labor movement was, for the most part, still recognized as the legitimate representative of the working-class, and white trade unionists continued to represent the region at major international conferences. For instance, in July 1946, around the time the fourth Southern Africa Labour Congress was due to be held, three white trade unionists represented South Africa at a meeting of the International Labour Organisation in Montreal, two of whom had previously been delegates at the Congress.Footnote 100 Earlier that year, in January 1946, Canada's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had suggested that another Dominion Labour Conference be held in Canada during 1946 and invited the NRLP, pledging that delegations from all British colonies would be sought.Footnote 101 Although this fulfilled a longstanding demand of the Southern Africa Labour Congress, that same month the standing committee of the Congress met for what turned out to be the final time.Footnote 102
While the position could be maintained internationally, it could not be sustained domestically. The proposed fourth Congress never took place as many of the component organizations were either embroiled in bitter internal struggles or had effectively collapsed. Infighting was primarily related to a struggle over who exactly the organizations represented: whites only or a wider constituency of African and Indian workers. Most leaders of the white labor movement were simply not prepared to accept non-white workers as members of the working class, a class in which they would then be a small minority. The impact of this on the functioning of the Congress can be seen by examining what happened to the individuals elected to the Congress executive in August 1945: Walter Madeley as chairman, Gladys Maasdorp as vice chair, Colin Henderson as secretary and Colin Legum as treasurer.Footnote 103
In 1946, the South African government—the SALP having resigned from the coalition government in October 1945—introduced the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill. The bill tightened restrictions on land ownership by Indians in South Africa but offered a limited franchise for Indians at the national and provincial levels as a kind of recompense. Although the SALP endorsed residential segregation, the party was divided over the extension of the franchise.Footnote 104 The party's leadership endorsed the bill but Madeley and M.J. van der Berg voted against it in Parliament, precipitating an internal crisis. Madeley resigned from the party while van der Berg defected to the National Party. In a resignation letter leaked to the press, Madeley expressed amazement that leading party members “are blind to the danger to the white race … [of] Indian franchise penetration.”Footnote 105 He was, he declared, “a white man before he was a socialist.”Footnote 106 For the same reason, Henry Pereira, who had been appointed to draft a new constitution for the Congress along with Maasdorp and Henderson, resigned from his party positions shortly afterwards in protest.Footnote 107 Days later, Henderson was suspended from the party and subsequently resigned.Footnote 108
In Southern Rhodesia, the organization Maasdorp represented collapsed during 1946 and its rapidly dwindling membership did not have the capacity to organize anything like the Southern Africa Labour Congress. The split in the white labor movement in the colony had proved irresolvable as reunification talks foundered over the issue of African membership. Both parties, which otherwise had virtually identical policies, put up candidates in the April 1946 general election. Predictably, both fared dismally and they were eclipsed by the newly founded Liberal Party as the main opposition force in white politics. The SRLP faired particularly poorly, winning just 5.6 percent of the vote and electing only two MPs, both of whom defected to other parties.Footnote 109
In Northern Rhodesia, the NRLP had ceased to function during 1945. Prominent NRMWU members nursed an intense dislike of party leader Roy Welensky, suspecting, correctly, that Welensky had connived in the arrest and deportation of the union's general secretary, Frank Maybank, in 1942. In mid-1944, the party's vice president, Martinus Visagie, was ousted from his position as NRMWU General Secretary and then removed from the union, and white mineworkers withdrew from NRLP branches on the Copperbelt.Footnote 110 The result was a dismal showing for the party in the September 1944 elections. Only two candidates were elected and, embarrassingly, NRMWU president Brian Goodwin stood as an independent labor candidate on the Copperbelt and defeated the NRLP candidate.Footnote 111 Moreover, by the proposed date of the fourth Congress, the Copperbelt's white mineworkers were embroiled in yet another trial of strength with the mining companies as wildcat strikes in July 1946 resulted in most of the union's membership being sacked.Footnote 112
Conflicts at a national level fatally undermined efforts to establish a permanent organization for the white labor movement across the region. Visions of a postwar world in which the white labor movement would exercise considerable power and implement a racialized social democracy dissipated. National and imperial political developments did strengthen white domination over the region in the immediate postwar period but the Southern Africa Labour Congress expressed a different kind of white supremacy: one that was outward-facing, supported by transnational links, and with a legitimate place in the international labor movement and the postwar world.
The commitment of white labor representatives to what they understood as socialism was not superficial, a radical burnish to what was otherwise unreconstructed white supremacy. Most were aware that the world was changing, and welcomed this change, as they saw a central role for themselves and their movement in the postwar world. The labor movement would come to power in the aftermath of the war, and they were the labor movement. Delegates at the Congresses saw themselves as part of an international movement, alongside white workers in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. All this was predicated on a racialized and gendered understanding of class in which worker meant white male worker participating in a labor movement ideally composed of “men of action, men who will hit and hit hard, and damn the consequences.”Footnote 113
Identification with international labor was, in part, reciprocated, and the white labor movement was acknowledged as the legitimate representative of the working-class in the region. White labor representatives were confident that disagreements—mainly criticisms emanating from the British Labour Party whose support for African interests was regarded as somewhat mystifying—could be resolved within the movement. What was important, then, was to improve these transnational links and to repackage conceptions of white domination in a historical moment when ideas about race and empire were changing. Although delegates at the Congresses did not have homogenous politics, and some were principled and dedicated opponents of racial discrimination in the labor movement, dissent from the politics of white laborism was limited.
The Southern Africa Labour Congress brought together the leadership of the white trade unions and labor parties but there was little engagement from the members of these organizations. Leaders of the white trade unions and labor parties were out of step with the class they claimed to represent. The victory of the National Party in 1948 was anathema to English-speaking trade unionists, yet a large portion of the white working-class clearly voted for the party. Political developments emanating from outside the white labor movement protected the position of white workers in industry and solidified white domination. In South Africa, this was the onset of apartheid; in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, this was the creation of the Central African Federation in 1953, fulfilling the aim long sought by white settlers. The appointment of Roy Welensky, who had disavowed his socialist politics, as federal prime minister in 1956, illustrates that the ends sought by the Congress were achieved by other means. The politics of the white labor movement were not the postwar future, they were the past.
