Early battles of workers Yours for the Union Baruch Hirson Zed Press, £32.95 hardback, £9.95 paperback
Reviewed by Charlie
Van Gelderen. This book by Baruch Hirson could easily have been titled The Making of the South African Working Class as it is a panoramic and well-researched survey of the growth of the black working class in South Africa in the period 1930-47.
These were the years which saw the rapid industrialisation of South Africa and its inevitable consequences - a huge increase in the working class and the uncontrolled urbanisation which resulted in the sprawl of vast shanty towns all around the big industrial centres.
The book is particularly valuable because it emphasises the organic link between the struggles in the mine and factory with the parallel conflicts in the urban ghettoes and rural reserves. The unity of the struggle in South Africa and the surrounding territories is emphasised.
The indigenous black work force was supplemented by workers drawn from what are now Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, and from the now independent countries north of the Limpopo - Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi.
Hirson concentrates his study on the Transvaal and particularly the Witwatersrand, the centre of black trade unions during the period, marking the significance of the gold mines in the economy. While white trade unions flourished and enjoyed legal protection, black workers who wanted to organise were faced with enormous difficulties.
Their organisations were not illegal as such, but they had no legal status either. After 1937 Page 38
REVIEWS South Africa's black they were permitted to give evidence before the newly established Wages Boards, but strike action was forbidden:
*The most elementary matters presented new problems: Africans had no right to occupy premises in the town and subterfuge was needed to rent offices, without which it could not survive. Financing the union was even more daunting, Wages were so low that subscriptions were not always forthcoming and the unions were starved of funds.."