labor and development || namibia's general strike

Namibia's General StrikeAuthor(s): Barbara RogersSource: Africa Today, Vol. 19, No. 2, Labor and Development (Spring, 1972), pp. 3-8Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4185227 .

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Namibia's General Strike

Barbara Rogers

A year ago few people realized it was possible. Those who had heard of Namibia (South West Africa) saw it as a primitive country whose people lacked political consciousness and whose workers, denied any right to organize, were docile and impotent.

A general strike with political motivation behind it is a highly sophisticated weapon. It depends on a high level of political awareness, a sense of solidarity among the workers and a fairly cool calculation of the likely effects. It also generally requires that the workers be sufficiently skilled as to be difficult to replace easily. Over the last decade, many of the workers, although on twelve to eighteen month contracts after which they returned to Ovamboland, had repeatedly returned for further contracts. And given the shortage of skilled white workers, they had moved into many of the semi-skilled and a few of the skilled posts. A substantial number had thus become a semi-permanent, fairly skilled labor force, not readily replaceable.

Namibia's strike started on about 13 December 1971 in Windhoek and Walvis Bay; spread quickly to the Tsumeb mine; and soon crip- pled all but one of the mines and much of the other economic activity in the territory. The 13,000 striking workers, representing some twenty- five percent of the contract workers in the white "Police Zone," in- cluded a substantial group of the more highly skilled. Presumably in order to keep the strike from being broken, the strikers insisted on returning en masse to Ovamboland.

A world that was not expecting anything to happen in Namibia was nevertheless jarred into recognizing the significance of this act of passive resistance. Later, South Africa closed the borders of Ovam- boland, ostensibly because of sporadic violence, and all journalists were kept out. The strike is no longer "news; " so the press does not tell us that it is still apparently going on, with probably well under half the strikers having returned to work under the new agreement signed by the South African Government and the Ovambo and Kavango Legislative Councils on 20 January 1972.

Formerly with the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Miss Rogers is a member of the Friends of Namibia Committee, London. Her UN testimony based upon travel in and research on Namibia was published in Objective: Justice, Vol. 4, No. 1, Jan. 1972.

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What really is happening? Several of the workers returning to Windhoek, finding conditions no better than those they left, have walked out again, or complained publicly; one group of workers ac- tually burned down their compound. Every effort is being made to recruit new people within South West Africa, but economic activity is still hampered. For example, the Newmont Mining Corporation reports that although they had signed on a full complement of workers mine production as of mid-March was only eighty percent of capacity. "Because most of the workers are new and must be trained, it may take some time before Tsumeb's normal rate of operation can be restored."' If this experience is general throughout the economy - and it appears to be worse in non-mining sectors - it is sufficient in- dication of the strikers' ability to act with serious effect.

But that is far from the end of the story. At least one more strike has started, quite separately from the general strike, this time at Walvis Bay in a dispute over shift allocations. It has brought the fishing industry to a halt in the middle of the season and left fish rotting on the dock-side. The workers are beginning to smell their power.

Most important, however, are those mysterious events of which we hear only travellers' tales. Various reports suggest that eighty miles of the border fence with Angola - a double barbed-wire fence, about four feet high - were completely demolished; that there has been widespread violence, involving clashes between police and strikers and the killing of at least one headman working for the authorities. The number of casualties is unknown; there are almost certainly at least twenty, and some estimates go up to a hundred.

As a result of all this, the prisons are crammed with Africans picked up on raids and detained without trial. One observer in Wind- hoek told me that new prison buildings had been hastily constructed for the extra inmates, and that the people crowded in them were subjected to the intolerable heat of a corrugated iron roof - in semi- tropical country, at mid-summer. There have also been reports of people in Oshakati, the new (white) capital of the Ovambo "Ban- tustan," being disturbed by screams from the police cells there. I was given personal descriptions of the torture used as matter of course on detainees in Oshakati. The system has not changed; the South Africans merely apply more of the same in a tense situation. So much for past descriptions of how contented the "natives" were in Ovamboland and how many facilities a generous administration was providing for a grateful people. The South African guided tour for journalists just after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion, was a spec- tacular success in terms of good publicity for South Africa. It took a massive strike on the part of the people of Ovamboland to prove the journalists who had participated in the charade to have been grossly

1. Newmont Mining Corporation, Annual Report, 1971.

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Barbara Rogers

misrepresenting the real situation. Peter Younghusband, who had been one of those to report a state of tranquility in Ovamboland, now reports: "The Ovambo strike has dealt a serious blow to South West Africa's (Namibia's) industry and throws into confusion the South African Government's policy."2

The general strike was very much concerned with wages and working conditions; but it was far more than that. It was clearly a political strike, directed against the whole system built on contract labor, and specifically against the "Boers" and their alien occupation. At Oranjemund, the diamond mines in the south which are totally isolated from the rest of the country and have a semi-permanent work force which labors under relatively good conditions, several hundred Africans did walk out. It is reliably reported that the rest made it clear to the management that if there were no change in the contract labor system, they would all strike together.

Extracts from the notebooks of the 12 men accused at the capital, Windhoek, for striking and inciting others to strike reveal something of the reasoning behind the massive work stoppages:

"We are having problems with the white man J. de Wet [who announced that the Africans liked the contract labor system, otherwise they would refuse to sign on]. You are having similar problems. He said we ourselves want to be on contract, because we come to work. But we must talk about ending system."

"Contract breaks family - no chance to go home if there is trouble. Why do whites not leave wives behind when they stay in a place, but Ovambo must leave wives for 12 months or more."

"1) Love your neighbour as yourself. 2) We don't want contract - it does not allow us to be seen as men... We want the right to free movement in Namibia [sic ] to work where we want to."

"The Bible said that Christ died to free all men, but I am not free under contract."

"Letter from Walvis Bay received and read by residents of Windhoek compound. How to end the slavery of contract. They began to write letters advising people to consider this matter. Everyone wrote as the spirit led him."

These ideas do not emerge out of nowhere. They are easily recognizable as owing much to the teaching of the churches, to the ideas of freedom and equality expressed in, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (first made familiar to Windhoek

2. Sunday Times (Johannesburg) December 19, 1971.

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Africans by one of the missionaries), and to the Africans' own spirit of resistance to alien occupation, expressed in uprisings first against the Germans and later against the South Africans during the period of the Mandate. They also indicate that in their independence of judgment and critical attitude the Namibian Africans - most of them Ovambos in this case - have their own highly developed traditions of politics and law. It is the introduction of the "Bantustan" concept that is threatening to break down the administration of Ovamboland, which was formerly left entirely to the Ovambos. Now, pliable Government- appointed "representatives," with little or no formal education, are sitting in the "Legislative Assembly" and doing what their white administrators tell them; and the system is breaking down.

Not long after their return to Ovamboland, the strikers prepared a list of their grievances and demands. These were apparently well communicated in Ovamboland and publicized in the South African press. In mid-January, spokesmen of the workers met with the full Ovambo Legislative Council (OLC). The press reported that virtually all of the members of the Council endorsed the demands of the workers. The next week, representatives of the OLC met with representatives of the South African Government and signed an agreement in which, while some of the workers' demands were met, a number of the most important ones were not.

The influence of the outside should not be ignored. The first pur- chase by any contract worker in the south is often a shortwave radio. This is the major means of communication, and there can hardly be a more devoted audience for the Voice of America than in Ovamboland. Because the language of the outside is English, there is great eager- ness to learn it instead of Afrikaans.

The importance of international interest and efforts to pressurize South Africa can hardly be exaggerated. In Ovamboland, which I visited a month after the International Court of Justice's Advisory Opinion of June 1971, people not only knew all about the Opinion and its significance, but were delighted about it and impatient for something to happen. Even in the most remote villages they were apparently celebrating this announcement of support for their freedom.

This is the difference between Namibia and South Africa. There is plenty of below the surface unrest in South Africa, underground cells and potential flash-points. But there is no particular hope, whereas even to fly from Cape Town to Windhoek makes it obvious that the Namibians have a different, more defiant attitude to their work, their employers, white people in general. They are ready to talk about their problems and resentments, their political meetings, their memories of SWAPO (the South West African Peoples' Organization) before many of its leaders were jailed or escaped abroad. SWAPO itself was rooted in a labor constituency. And it is now recognized that the International Court's opinion fanned expectations and nourished grievances which helped to create the preconditions for a general strike.

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Barbara Rogers

The significance of this strike is as a major landmark in a long history of resistance to alien occupation (expressed in the form of violent uprisings, earlier strikes, and attempts to gain contact with the outside world through petitions to the UN), an avid interest in outside news, and a perhaps fatal faith in the ability of the world community to back up their statements of support with some positive action. I was told several times by both blacks and whites that if the United States really wanted South Africa to leave Namibia, they would have their independence tomorrow.

Latent "Labor Power" in Southern Africa

Although peculiar to the Namibian situation, this strike obviously has implications for the whole of occupied Southern Africa. Bishop Muzorewa of the African National Council (ANC) in Rhodesia (Zim- babwe) said during his recent visit to the United States that the ANC was watching the situation in Namibia with the greatest of interest. He also spoke of the economic dislocation that could be caused in Rhodesia by the Africans withdrawing their labor - although he refused to use the word "strike." It was of course a strike at the Shabani asbestos mine that sparked off the first serious violence in Rhodesia - coin- ciding with the first sign in years that the outside world was interested in what they thought of the white regime. There have been two further recent strikes: 1,600 miners at the Trojan nickel mine, February 6; and 440 at the Banket gold mine, February 8.

In South Africa, there are quite serious strikes from time to time, such as the Durban dock-workers' strike last year. Apart from being illegal, however, they take an enormous amount of solidarity among the workers, since any striker is promptly replaced. It is perhaps noteworthy that in the case of the Namibian strike, for the first time the South African Government seemingly acknowledged a strike as legitimate and made at least a semblance of negotiating a settlement.

Without venturing to predict anything, I would think it well within the bounds of possibility that the use of strikes in Southern Africa could increase significantly; both because this is the only weapon im- mediately available to the Africans and other non-whites, and because the economy of South Africa, on which the others depend to some degree, is becoming increasingly vulnerable to any form of economic pressure. A combination of international and domestic pressures on foreign companies to disengage from Southern Africa could well inhibit the economic expansion which is so vitally needed to keep the system going. And the gold mines, which traditionally have helped to pay for apartheid, are wearing out and becoming less profitable, in

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spite of huge Government subsidies and favorable short-term trends in the gold price.

One thing is clear: the Namibia issue will never be quite the same again because of this strike, which could have profound repercussions on how we see the whole of Southern Africa. For far too long, we have seen this territory as somehow invulnerable to ordinary pressures. The strikers have shattered that illusion and sparked off new international interest, with the possibility of effecting meaningful change. It was opportune moreover that a major international conference, an ambitious project aimed at consolidating support for the liberation movement in Namibia, was convened by SWAPO just at a time when many new people - especially in West Germany, Britain, Belgium and other European countries - were becoming involved in this issue.3 In the United States a Namibia Support Group, a coalition of several organizations, has recently been formed to provide basic information and co-ordination.4

Few people would claim that the Namibian problem can be solved by outside pressure alone. However, the interaction of international and domestic events is obvious; if nothing else, it is important that the achievements of the strikers should be publicized abroad. In the end, the future of Namibia, and perhaps the whole of Southern Africa, could depend on whether there is an increasing tendency to disrupt the economy by strikes. Strikes do not happen in isolation in a situation like that in Southern Africa; they are part of total African resistance, and might well be accompanied by violence such as the sabotage of a South African railroad which recently took the lives of thirty-eight and injured one hundred seventy-four. 5 It is now dramatically clear that the enforced absence of legal African labor movements has not per- force deprived Southern Africans of the weapons of the general strike.

3. The SWAPO conference was held in Brussels, May 26-28. It was sponsored by a number of Heads of State, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), political parties and labor unions. The address for inquiries is: Namibia International Conference, 26-28 Rue Haute, 1000 Brussels.

4. The address of the Namibia Support Group is: 47 Claremont Avenue, New York 10027.

5. New York Times, April 1, 1972.

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labor and development || namibia's general strike

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