Interviews with and by the ZACF
Autonomous Action (Russia) interviews the ZACF
Answers by Michael Schmidt, International Secretary of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa) to questions put by “Situation”, newspaper of Autonomous Action (Russia), December 2008.
1. The history of worker and anarchist movement in South Africa began more than 100 years ago. Could you tell Russian comrades about the history of your struggles (about organisations from the beginning of the 20th century like International Socialist League etc)?
South Africa would have remained an agrarian backwater colony similar to Kenya if it were not for the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and of gold in 1886. These two events saw a massive influx of capital, infrastructure and of a mostly white industrial working class. The new white working class was overwhelmingly race-protectionist, what was called “White Labourite” and early trade unions were built on those lines. But a small radical tendency with strong anti-racist, anarchist and syndicalist leanings (starting with the Socialist Club of Port Elizabeth in 1900) eventually saw the establishment of a local section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1910. It was operative mostly among tramway workers in the gold-mining town of Johannesburg, the old Boer capital of Pretoria and the British-dominated port of Durban but despite its anti-racism did not manage to break out of the white ghetto. But although the IWW (SA) shut down in 1913, rank-and-file syndicalist ideas spread during the general strikes of 1913-1914, within the anti-war movement during World War I, and by 1917, the Indian Workers industrial Union (IWIU), organized among Indian indentured stevedores, hotel workers and cane-cutters in Durban, was established along IWW lines. The IWIU was backed up by the formation later in 1917 of the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), also based on the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalist, anti-racist class-struggle concept. The IWA is believed to have been the first black trade union in British-colonised Africa and by 1919 was flanked by similar syndicalist unions, the mostly “coloured” (mixed-race) Horse-Drivers Union in the diamond-mining town of Kimberley, and various unions in the port city of Cape Town. These revolutionary syndicalist unions were established by a group of white, black, coloured and Indian syndicalist militants from the Industrial Socialist League, a 1915 revolutionary splinter from the reformist socialist International Socialist League, and the IWA, IWIU and associated unions were so influential that for a period, they shifted the Transvaal section of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later renamed the African National Congress, ANC) in a syndicalist direction. By 1921, these unions formed the core of the new syndicalist-oriented Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU). Although the ICU’s constitution was also IWW-based, it was amore ideologically mixed union, and its radicalism was compromised by elements of black nationalism, Garveyism and communism. The first communist party in Africa, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was established by syndicalist militants in 1920, but like the first communist parties in countries such as Brazil and France was very libertarian and syndicalist. A rival Bolshevik CPSA – Communist International (CPSA-CI, the fore-runner of today’s South African Communist Party, SACP) was established the following year, adhering to Lenin’s 21 points and attracting many original CPSA militants. The revolutionary remainder of the CPSA renamed themselves the Communist League. The ICU peaked in 1927 with about 120,000 members. Importantly, it spread beyond South Africa to establish branches in South-West Africa (Namibia), and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). The Southern Rhodesian branch survived well into the 1950s, but the South African parent organization disintegrated in the late 1920s, bringing an end to South African anarchist-influenced syndicalism. Neighbouring Mozambique (like Angola, the Azores, and Portuguese Guinea) was a place of exile to which many Portuguese anarchists were deported in the 1890s and early 1900s. Some of them established an exile anarchist organization, the Revolutionary League, in the port capital of Lorenco Marques (Maputo) in the early 1900s. By the early 1920s, a significant syndicalist element had arisen among Mozambican workers under the influence of the powerful anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in Portugal (the Portuguese movement was proportionately larger than the Spanish movement). But the Mozambican movement apparently had no contact with the South African movement because of the language barrier, appeared not to have broken out of the white worker ghetto, and was suppressed from 1927 by the Salazar dictatorship. So ended the “glorious period” of anarchist and syndicalist organizing in South Africa. Most dissidents expelled from the Bolshevik CPSA in 1928 for their syndicalist sympathies became Trotskyists instead of returning to the anarchist and syndcalist fold. But rank-and-file syndicalism (usually called “workerism” by the communists) reappeared from time to time as a minority strain. In the 1950s, for example, a South African section of the tiny libertarian Marxist international called the Movement for a Democracy of Content (MDC) was established and played a key role in the Alexandra bus boycott. Some dissidents from the SACP who left over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary moved in an anarchist direction (one of them, Alan Lipman, is close to the ZACF). The rise to power of the National Party in 1948 took what was an already polarized racial situation and divided people further. A whole raft of repressive legislation was introduced that outlawed the Communist Party, geographically carved up the country into ethnic enclaves (the infamous Group Areas Act), racially segregated public amenities such as parks, beaches, buses and toilets, and made mixed marriages and inter-racial relationships a crime. This was an extension of segregationist laws which had been in operation since colonial times. Between 1910 and 1960, in real terms, black wages stayed static and the black working class was mostly resigned to its fate under racial capital – except for the 1949 miner’s strike, the 1950s passive resistance campaigns aimed at the pass laws (which restricted the movement of black men, and later, black women) and other apartheid legislation which culminated in the signing of the 1955 Freedom Charter, and the 1961 turn of the ANC (desperate after its attempts at legal, peaceful reform failed) towards a limited, ineffective armed struggle (an ANC propaganda tool rather than proper armed resistance) led to the arrest of Nelson Mandela and other middle-class ANC/SACP leaders.
ZACF Interviews two Libertarian Activists from Zimbabwe
A member of the ZACF poses the same set of questions to two activists from Zimbabwe.
The first interviewee, Biko Mutsaurwa, is an anarcho-communist from the Uhuru Network and facilitator for the Toyi Toyi Artz Kollektive in Harare.
The second interviewee is Comrade Fatso, AKA Samm Farai Monro, a cultural activist and artistic facilitator for Magamba! The Cultural Activist Network.
The interviews were conducted in Johannesburg on 21st of June, 2008 – the day before MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai announced his decision to not participate in the June 27 presidential election run-off.
Anarchism in South Africa
An interview with Michael Schmidt of the ZACF by Alternative Libertaire
The ZACF is one of the most active libertarian formations in the southern part of the African continent. In order to better understand its history, its intervention in southern African society and the fights which it impels and supports, we interviewed one of its militants, Michael Schmidt.
Alternative Libertaire: Could you tell briefly in which conditions/context and how Zabalaza, and then the ZACF, were built?
Michael Schmidt: The roots of what became the ZACF are to be found in the anti-apartheid struggle of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the formation of two semi-clandestine anarchist federations, one in Johannesburg and another in Durban, within the anarcho-punk movement. So the initial conditions were one of low-intensity civil war between the white and black nationalist organisations, and the organised anarchists took a strong stand against neo-fascism, nationalism and military conscription. From this came the Workers’ Solidarity Federation in 1995 (a year after the first democratic elections). The WSF was the first national anarchist organisation and developed a more comprehensive platform of positions on race, class, gender, imperialism etc, most of which remain the ideological foundation of the movement today. The WSF had a significant number of trade union & shop-steward members and was 50/50 black and white. It was dissolved for tactical reasons in 1999 as the ANC began to move rightwards and trade unions became difficult to operate in. In the interim before the ZACF was founded in 2003, we ran the independent Workers’ Library & Museum (working-class meeting-place) in Johannesburg and the Zabalaza Books propaganda unit. The rise of the radical new social movements from about 2000 saw us help found the Anti-Privatisation Forum, and later form the ZACF to participate directly in social movement activism. So in practice, we have moved from semi-clandestinity to syndicalism to social activism, depending on objective conditions within the working class.
South African Anarchists interviewed by Black Flag
August 2004
1. First, perhaps you could say something about yourself and the organisation you are part of?
This interview was done with Sh. And St. of the Durban-based Zabalaza Action Group (ZAG), Joe Black of the regional Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), who is the ZACF acting regional secretary, and Michael Schmidt of the Johannesburg-based Bikisha Media Collective (BMC) who is the ZACF acting international secretary. Joe and Sh. Are also involved with Zabalaza Books (ZB), while Michael is also involved with the ABC. The collectives we are members of are among the founding collectives of the ZACF. Some of them, like ZB, originated as underground collectives a decade ago in the twilight of apartheid.
NEFAC Interviews the BMC
South Africa is a country where platformist influence has had a huge impact on the burgeoning anarchist movement. The Bikisha Media Collective is a young platformist organisation that formed out of the remnants of the Workers Solidarity Federation, which dissolved in 1999. They have a very active presence in numerous social movements and popular struggles, and continue to provide an inspiring example of what can be accomplished when anarchists get organised. Those of us from NEFAC have always maintained good relations with comrades from the BMC, and we are very pleased to be able to include them in this series. Below is an interview with Michael Schmidt, who is the group’s international secretary.
– interview by MaRK,
Class Against Class (NEFAC-Boston)
Could you start by giving a general history of class struggle anarchism in South Africa?
BMC: The first known anarchist activity in southern Africa occurred in the 1870s when the black flag flew over the Kimberley diamond diggings during an industrial dispute. It is thought that several exiled Communards participated in this uprising. Between 1896 and 1905, anarchist militants deported from Portugal spent time in jails in Mozambique. It was there, in the early days of the 20th Century, that the anarchist printer Jose Estevam, having been released from prison, established the first known anarchist organisation in the region, the Revolutionary League (RL) of Lourenco-Marques, a city which today is the capital Maputo.
Anarchism and the ‘New’ South Africa
An Interview with the South African WSF *
Q. Most readers of Red and Black Revolution will be familiar with the main organisations on the left in South Africa, such as the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Can you tell us something about the tradition of libertarian ideas and struggle?
A. Anarchism and Syndicalism do (or at least did) have an important place in South African history, although this is typically hidden or obscured by official and “radical” versions of the past. Before the founding of the SACP in 1921, libertarian ideas were common on the revolutionary left. A section of the US syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World, was established here in 1911, growing out of an organisation called the Industrial Workers Union . The Industrial Workers Union, in turn, was set up by the conservative craft-dominated (and, one must add, racist) Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council (WTLC) at the behest of Tom Mann, the British revolutionary, who visited South Africa in 1910. The IWW (SA) was aligned to the Chicago (anti-parliamentary section) of the IWW (US), and the Voice of Labour – a radical local paper with which it was closely associated – carried articles by American anarchist-syndicalists like Vincent St. John. The IWW (SA) mainly organised amongst unskilled poor Whites (and also among groups like the bookmakers). They launched several strikes but collapsed in or about 1913. Some syndicalists were also active within the WTLC, although it must be stressed that they opposed that organisation’s racist politics – for example, they organised amongst Black miners as well as White.
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