A true champion of workers
THE news of the death of 69-year-old Alice-born veteran trade unionist and ANC stalwart Boyce Soci has shocked the struggle community.
Soci was a towering figure in the politics of the Eastern Cape at the time when the apartheid state and its homeland puppets were escalating their repression in the Border area of the province.
He located himself very quickly into the centre of that conflict.
He played a crucial role in the intensification of the struggle, when he moved to Port Elizabeth in the early 1980s.
He was always happy with direct confrontation with the dreaded security branch police.
Soci was never welcomed with the fanfare reserved for heroes who came from a long-drawn-out battle.
We saw him operating alongside us as if he was always with us.
What was known about him was scant, other than the knowledge that he was battle-scarred from his involvement and participation in the marathon Wilson Rowntree strike and the Ciskei bus boycott of 1981 and 1983 respectively.
Soci, though relatively older than many of my colleagues in the Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage areas, became a central point for those who believed and practiced strict marxist codes of conduct.
Soci was one person who professed to be a communist and who was widely admired.
He lived what he was preaching, a communist and a warrior of the working class.
In the turbulent mid-1970s up to the end of the 1980s, there were scores of people who claimed to be marxists, and yet their behaviour and conduct were nothing more than that of a signpost, that is pointing in a direction they did not walk.
Soci made marxism acceptable even to those who did not subscribe to it.
According to ANC veteran and stalwart Africa Maqolo, Soci was an influential unionist leader in the Eastern Cape at the time of his arrival in Port Elizabeth and due to his exemplary conduct as a strong workingclass leader, he was accorded at all times huge respect across the board.
Maqolo said the arrival of Soci among the militant and radical youth of Port Elizabeth shaped the tempo, scale and pace of the struggle.
According to Maqolo, the politics of resistance in the Eastern Cape were still shaped by the philosophy of black consciousness, a flow-over from the 1976 pupil uprising.
Soci provided desperately needed “ideological clarity” for the youth, especially in those trying times of the 1980s, Maqolo recalled.
Vusumzi Matikinca, one of the enduring leaders of the 1976 uprising and now a practising lawyer in Johannesburg, remembers Soci as follows: “I knew Comrade Soci relatively well from Mdantsane during my visits there and this was before he moved to Port Elizabeth, where he became a union activist, before and during the build-up to the formation of Cosatu in 1985.
“Although he was much older than our generation, he interacted with us as his equals, politically and otherwise.”
Soci came to Port Elizabeth at the time when solidarity between the activists of the Border area and the Eastern Cape was at its highest.
This solidarity was built around the time of the Saawu-led strike against the British-owned company Wilson Rowntree of 1979 to 1983.
In those days Saawu’s heavyweights included Captain Ngabase, Jeff Wabhena, Sisa Njikelana and others who frequented Port Elizabeth to garner support for the strike.
Thozi Maneli, a very skilful young trade unionist from the Saawu stable, was permanently stationed in Port Elizabeth, mobilising moral and material support.
At the time the Cosas activists dubbed Maneli Saawu’s “roving ambassador-at-large”.
The security police hated him and threw every blackmailing tactic at him. Nothing worked against that comrade.
After Maneli, Soci arrived on the political scene ostensibly as a trade union organiser.
With the arrival of Soci around 1983, the independent and progressive trade unions gravitated very fast towards the community-based organisations.
This strategic move by people like Soci, of refusing to divorce factory struggles from the community’s daily problems, assisted very quickly in building the platform for mass mobilisation that was to follow.
Soci’s message was easily and quickly received by the strong and militant youth formation Peyco (Port Elizabeth Youth Congress).
Mthwabo Ndube, then secretary of Peyco, says, “Cde Soci was the most versatile comrade that I have ever seen.
“He operated on every level of the struggle, true to his communist values and principles.
“Soci believed that the people were the crown jewel of the struggle.”
Ndube, who became involved in the underground activities at the insistence of Soci, found himself in Lesotho, among such giants as Chris Hani, Tony Yengeni, Humphrey Maxhegwana and others.
All of that was meant to consolidate the relationship between the internal and external struggles so as to avoid ideological deviations. Soci was strongly influenced by Sactu’s objective, though this organisation was banned a long time before.
He kept close contact with it, and worked towards influencing other trade unions to adopt a militant and radical political approach against the racist apartheid regime.
Soci believed that various struggle formations had to unite, hence he was happy to work with workers, youths, cultural religious, sporting groups and many others.
During the Black Weekend total shutdown of 1985, Soci was one of the few unionists who stuck his neck out and supported that boycott and strike, while other sweetheart trade unions professed narrow workerist tendencies.
Soci will be buried tomorrow at Twecu village near East London.
He is survived by his wife, Nothembile, his daughter, Phumla, and his brother, Mitchell.
Hamba kakuhle Msebenzi.