Paper short abstract:

During and after WWII, thousands of rural black men migrated to work on the Durban and San Francisco docks. Building on Philip Bonner's research of comparative black migration in South Africa and the USA, I examine these dockers who organized for both their own benefit and black freedom struggles.

Paper long abstract:

From 1940 through the 1960s, thousands of black men migrated from their rural homes to work on the Durban and San Francisco docks. Famously, Mahmoud Mamdani drew bright lines, in African societies, between urban citizens and rural subjects, using migrant workers from rural KwaZulu to (D)urban as a crucial case study. However, Ralph Callebert questions Mamdani (and David Hemson) regarding just how urban black dockers became. The US situation was different as African Americans did not need ask white authorities to migrate from Southern states for life in Oakland and San Francisco whereas Zulus, Pondos, and other Africans needed permission from Native authorities. Hence, although rural blacks in SA and the US shared much in common—notably, systematic racial oppression and poverty—as motives for migration, their experiences also proved quite different. Thus far, precious little comparative research exists on black migration during the eras of apartheid and Jim Crow segregation. Phil Bonner noted that, despite clear similarities, black political activism in each society evolved quite differently during and after WWII. Yet once on the Durban and SF waterfronts, black male dockworkers shared much in common; they both organized on the job where they used direct action tactics. These black workers possessed real power, as they performed vital work at a logistical choke point in each city's most pivotal industry and became well organized. Thus, despite racial oppression, black migratory workers periodically used their newfound leverage for their own benefit and on behalf of black freedom struggles.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the backbone of the new Black South African unions of the 1970s were workers who while legally defined under apartheid as “migrants” developed a consciousness of themselves as settled proletarians rather than temporary urban sojourners.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the place of "migrant" labour in Durban's industrial development, 1950-1975. First, it examines the simultaneous growth of an industrial belt around Durban's urban core and the expansion of nearby African townships situated inside the "borders" of the KwaZulu "homeland." These migrant labour reservoirs remained within daily commuting distance of the factories that came to be the primary workplace for the city's expanding African working class.

The paper considers evidence of African employment and residence status drawn from local research conducted in Natal by economists and sociologists in the late 1970s. This evidence suggests that by the early 1970s a majority of African manufacturing workers in Durban were settled urban residents rather than long-distance migrants.

Drawing on archival material documenting union organizing drives in Durban's textile belt during the 1970s, the paper argues that the backbone of the new independent Black unions of this era were these workers who while legally defined as "migrants" developed a consciousness of themselves as settled proletarians rather than temporary urban sojourners. .

The paper concludes that a process of proletarianization under apartheid helped constitute African workers as "citizens", who sought to expand their rights by building democratic trade unions and tight-knit shop-floor structures. This is in contrast to Mamdani's thesis that these workers remained "subjects", whose primary consciousness, identity, and political loyalties remained bound to rural structures of authority and ethnic affiliation constituted by apartheid and rural homelands.

Paper short abstract:

My paper presents the history of Lonrho’s ownership of Glendale's sugar mill between 1969-1996. It considers the international corporation's claims about care for the community and modernisation of the mill amid changing labour relations during Apartheid's last decades.

Paper long abstract:

In 1969, the London-Rhodesia Company (Lonrho) bought the sugar mill at Glendale in South Africa. Situated about 30km inland from KwaDukuza, Glendale was one of the few mills that was not in the hands of the dominant South African families producing sugar—dubbed the Sugarocracy by Lincoln (1985), having been owned by an Muslim family, the Paruks, for more than forty years. But with sugar and other industrial interests across Africa, Lonrho represented the entry of international capital into a local market long shielded from international competition. In this paper, I tell the story of Lonrho in Glendale, presenting accounts of competition with the local industry, their upgrading of the mill, as well as the "care" managers and workers claimed the corporation showed to the community in Glendale. Analytically, I suggest that the story of Lonrho in Glendale is akin to accounts of the company town (cf. Ferguson 2006), and ask how, under conditions of late apartheid, we understand "care" for black workers undertaken by an international corporation.