Their weapons were union cards, strike demands and something colonial governments feared almost as much as guerrillas: the power to bring a railway, factory or harbour to a standstill.
Across Southern Africa, the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s are usually remembered through guerrillas and battlefields. But alongside the armed struggle was another front: workers challenging the same racial order from compounds, workshops, mines and docks.
By 1977, trade unions across Southern Africa were beginning to organise across national borders, seeing the struggles of workers in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa as part of the same fight.
That year, trade unionists gathered in Luanda, Angola, for the Pan-African Trade Union Conference of Solidarity with the Workers and Peoples of Southern Africa, held from 31 January to 2 February. Representatives of South Africa’s South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), Namibia’s National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) and the Zimbabwe African Congress of Unions (ZACU) pushed for the creation of a permanent international trade union solidarity committee.
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Their ambitions went well beyond wages and working conditions. The conference’s Programme of Action called for financial and material assistance to be channelled through SACTU, NUNW and ZACU. More significantly, it openly backed the armed liberation struggles being waged by the ANC in South Africa, SWAPO in Namibia and ZAPU in Zimbabwe.
The distinction between the labour struggle and the liberation struggle was becoming increasingly difficult to draw. A strike could challenge an employer, but it could also disrupt the colonial economy. A union could fight for better wages while mobilising international support for a liberation movement.
For these trade unionists, the workplace had become another front in the struggle for freedom.
Namibia: When the compounds stopped working
On 13 December 1971, contract workers in Windhoek went on strike against a migrant labour system that controlled where they worked, separated them from their families and severely restricted their freedom of movement.
The action spread to Walvis Bay, mines and other workplaces. Estimates differ, but participation ran into the tens of thousands. Labour researcher Herbert Jauch calls it “one of the most significant strikes in Namibia’s history”. His study estimates that about 13,500 workers took part, bringing 11 mines and 23 other workplaces to a standstill. Other accounts put participation even higher.
The workers were challenging okaholo, the contract labour system. They demanded freedom to choose their employment, better pay, an end to racial discrimination and the right to live with their families.
The settlement that followed abolished the South West Africa Native Labour Association (SWANLA) recruiting agency and changed the contract system, although researchers caution that many controls over migrant workers remained.
The strike also exposed how closely labour and nationalism had become connected. A decision to establish NUNW in exile was taken in April 1970 following SWAPO’s Tanga congress. Among its tasks was representing Namibian workers internationally.
South Africa: The “punching arm”
In August 1946, about 60,000 African mineworkers on the Witwatersrand downed tools, demanding better wages and working conditions.
The state responded with force. Nine workers were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The strike was crushed, but the anger that drove it did not disappear.
Nine years later, in 1955, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was formed in Johannesburg. Established as a non-racial trade union federation, it soon became part of the ANC-led Congress Alliance, linking the workers’ struggle directly to the broader fight against apartheid.
By 1959, SACTU represented about 46,000 workers through 35 affiliated unions. But after the 1960 massacre and the banning and repression of liberation organisations, the space for open political and trade union activity narrowed dramatically.
SACTU leaders were banned, arrested, imprisoned or forced underground and into exile. Some became directly involved in the emerging armed struggle.
But SACTU did not disappear. Its struggle simply moved onto another front.
From exile, its leaders mobilised international trade union support, raised awareness about apartheid and kept organised labour connected to the wider liberation movement.
Former SACTU general secretary John Nkadimeng later summed up that relationship in striking terms: “SACTU was the punching arm of the liberation movement because it organised the strikes. It paralysed the capitalists.”
Zimbabwe: Before the guerrilla war
In April 1948, African workers in Bulawayo walked out amid low wages, rising prices and poor urban conditions. The unrest spread to Salisbury and several other centres.
Historians Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos trace its roots to “urban squalor and rampant inflation of the immediate post-war era”.
They also cautioned against reducing 1948 to a simple nationalist legend. Organisation was uneven, local grievances differed, and rank-and-file workers sometimes moved ahead of established leaders.
Still, the political shock was enormous. The colonial authorities expanded labour-board mechanisms and introduced reforms covering wages and employment conditions.
By the 1960s and 1970s, labour politics had become deeply entangled with nationalist politics. ZACU aligned itself with ZAPU and operated in exile from Lusaka.
Research into Zimbabwe’s labour movement says one of its principal functions was to mobilise and recruit in support of ZAPU’s liberation effort. ZACU leader Aaron Ndlovu himself described the union as having the task of “educating the broad masses of the working people” about Zimbabwe’s political, social and economic future.
The guerrilla with a rifle mattered. So did the worker who stopped a mine, organised a compound, built international solidarity or carried the liberation struggle onto the factory floor.
Southern Africa’s liberation war had a battlefield front. It had a diplomatic front. It also had a third front: labour.
And without it, the story of the region’s freedom struggles is incomplete.
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