The One Big Union Movement among Black Workers in South Africa

Abstract

Students of the black labor movement in South Africa have long been familiar with the history of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa, best known as the ICU, which was first told at length by the late E. R. Roux in his Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man's Struggle for Freedom. In 1967 S. W. Johns III furnished a considerable amount of additional information about the foundation of this union,' in particular its participation in an attempt in 1920 to establish a nation-wide black general workers' union. At Bloemfontein in July of that year, Johns tells us, a conference of representatives from various towns and organizations in the Union of South Africa was convened by H. Selby Msimang, who had led a movement for higher wages for unskilled workers in the Orange Free State capital and founded a union there, and Clements Kadalie, the secretary of the eighteen-month-old ICU, which had attracted attention at the end of 1919 with a dock strike of some importance at Cape Town. To that conference went among others Samuel M. M. Masabalala, a labor leader from Port Elizabeth, where the black and Coloured workers were also dissatisfied. At Bloemfontein the delegates established a new union to embrace the existing ones and called it the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa, distinguished from the ICU of Cape Town by the initials ICWU. But Msimang and Kadalie fell out; Msimang eventually withdrew from the movement, and after a period of collaboration with the Bloemfontein leader Masabalala threw in his lot with Kadalie.