Read about the history of the Durban harbour

PROFESSOR Peter Cole chats about his book ‘Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area’.

Cole is a winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize (US) in 2019.

The Durban harbour is now considered one of the most important and busiest harbour in South Africa. How important was cheap black labour in the formation of the Durban harbour we have today?

Durban has been South Africa’s most important port since World War I. It served as the primary port for exports, in particular. Cheap Black dock labour proved critical from the start of British colonialism. Before 1977, when containerisation launched, the key to shipping industry profits was the massive labour surplus of Black men forced to remain in “homelands” until state-controlled labour bureau funneled workers to Durban as white employers needed. Until recently, the workforce was all-male and mostly Zulus along with some Pondos, all of whom were paid well below the poverty line before 1994. In recent decades, highly skilled, unionised workers’ wages have greatly improved.

How do you think the dynamic changed between then and now in terms of worker unions in SA (and even abroad)?

SA dockers started forming unions during apartheid, but only in 2000 was the SA Transport & Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) founded. Along with most South Africans, members of SATAWU, affiliated with COSATU, had such high hopes in the mid 1990s! Alas, in today’s SA vast numbers of unemployed along with so many in the informal sector drive wages down to the benefit of employers who exploit this reality to pay workers less and act with more hostility to unions. However, since SA ports are owned by Transnet, i.e. the state, dockers are somewhat protected.

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Plus, their jobs cannot be “outsourced” to other countries. While workers have been hammered by neoliberalism, dockers remain one of the more heavily unionised industries in SA and worldwide.

In the book you use the word “communist” to describe some people, most of these people activists. The word ‘communist’ back then and now elicits a lot of fear among people, so I am interested in the context that you used the word and what’s your understanding of it?

Communism is not a major focus of my book but, some were active on the waterfront. Durban’s first great Black Communist was Johannes Nkosi, who organised dockers. Tragically, while leading a passbook burning campaign on December 16th, then called the Day of the Covenant and now Day of Reconciliation, local police killed him. Another example of Communist support for dockers occurred in 1949.

After Zulu Phungula, Durban’s first great dock leader and originally from Ixopo, was arrested for leading a strike on May Day (now Workers Day), the white Communist lawyer Rowley Arenstein defended Phungula. Of course, the apartheid regime labeled anyone who critised the state a “communist.” While few dockers belonged to the CPSA/SACP, communists supported docker organising.

Your book, to me, describes a lot of present day realities of contracted, precarious employment which goes under the euphemism of “gig work” nowadays. What do you think are the lessons we can learn from the past and have we learnt those lessons?

The parallels between past and present are profound. Dockers were among the many precarious occupations before the “gig” economy. Before 1960, dockers never were guaranteed a job or wage—they reported to the waterfront and were lucky to be hired.

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Despite this reality, which greatly undermined worker solidarity and drove down wages, dockers repeatedly organised to demand better wages and conditions. It was widely understood that, anytime Black workers demonstrated power, it was an implicit threat to apartheid. The most basic lesson is that only through collective action can ordinary people exert power.

What role did the police play in relation to worker protests?

The police acted in clockwork fashion to destroy any and every collective effort by Black dockers: Dockers struck or threatened to do so, employers called friends in local government, followed by the dispatching of police. Not only was Nkosi killed by the police, not only was Phungula arrested, numerous other Black and Indian working-class organisers also were. Curiously, the police proved unable or unwilling to suppress the legendary Durban strikes of 1973. What few now recall is that dockers struck six weeks prior and—as I argue—proved pivotal to the Coronation Brick workers who launched the Durban Strike wave. They copied the strategy dockers pioneered after Phungula was banished–refusing to elect leaders who could be persecuted–instead, demanding employers negotiate with everyone on strike. Coronation workers used that same tactic.

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