Solidarity stuck in a dark, white Sasol era
Trade union Solidarity changed the world on August 14 1980. I was in the middle of my first high school year at St John’s College in Umtata. Growing up under apartheid, Poland’s Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa, inspired a number of us in the student movements the Congress of SA Students and Azanian Students Organisation.
Those sacrifices and a belief in mass protest, boycotts and strikes changed SA into a nonracial, nonsexist and democratic country belonging to all who live in it. However, the SA trade union Solidarity, led by Dirk Hermann, is embarking on a total shutdown of Sasol to protect and preserve white Sasol workers’ privilege.
The Solidarity of Hermann is very different from Walesa’s, and also somewhat different from SA’s 1922 white workingclass strikers, who fought for better working conditions and a decent wage. Their strike was violently crushed by the Smuts government in cahoots with the Chamber of Mines, with no work-related gains.
White privilege was entrenched in the aftermath of the 1922 strike through the colour bar, reinforcing statutory patterns of job reservation based upon race. I should emphasise also that the 1922 white working-class strike was also a reaction to some losing their jobs to black workers who were considered racially and socially inferior by white workers then.
Is the Sasol strike by Solidarity a rejection of our constitutional order of redress and the closing of the gap between white and black employees? Or is it a common belief among some white South Africans that Sasol is a product of “n Boer maak ’n plan met olie” and therefore the strike by Solidarity is protecting what is theirs, an apartheid project?
University of Cape Town sociology professor Deborah Posel describes the apartheid project as an explicitly modernising one. According to Posel, there are two versions of the concept of modernity, which is a discourse of power, shaping the aspirations, norms and expectations of rule. The first is its version of the passage of time, as a narrative of progress from that which was not modern (“tradition”), with clear markers along a linear route of social, economic and political advancement. The second is more about spatial situating, a self-conscious positioning within the wider world.
Modernity has been a globalising cause, exporting originally western notions of governance across other parts of the world. The claim to being modern involves a certain kind of worldliness: a recognition of, and aspiration to, linkages with other similarly modern regimes and societies. Sasol embodies all these values. What Solidarity and white workers at Sasol will not admit is the history of privilege of white workers at Sasol, as reflected in a doctoral dissertation by Stephen Sparks of the University of Johannesburg. Sparks explores the relationships between apartheid and modernism, focusing on the Sasol project and the company town Sasolburg (and the township of Zamdela) as key sites for the elaboration of Posel’s “apartheid modern”.
He shows that SA interest in synthetic fuel technology as an alternative to conventional crude-oil refining predated apartheid. It reflected emerging “national capitalist” interests in SA and was typical of nationalist preoccupations with fuel, sovereignty and autarky elsewhere at the time, such as in Franco’s Spain.
What then is the Solidarity strike about? I think it has to do with the protection of white privilege and a longing for a dark past that has led to black workers being at the bottom of all economic indicators, whether it is board representation, poverty or unemployment.
I therefore reject Solidarity’s action and call upon white workers to work towards building a constitutional state that fights for equality, nondiscrimination and a better life for all, not just whites.