Jan Theron book extract
Extract from Solidarity Road, The Story of a Trade Union in the Ending of Apartheid, by the former general secretary of the Food and Canning Workers Union JAN THERON
Part 1: Beginnings Private road (Pg 20-22)
Although we told ourselves we were not going to be cowed by threat of force, it was noticeable how few were present as darkness began to fall that Friday. When there was still no sight of Stellenbosch students, our spirits started lifting. Then we heard what can best be described as baying, and through the windows of the Council chamber we looked down at a crowd of more than 1 000 massing in front of the building, many of them doubtless drunk. “Get away from the windows, it is only provoking them,” someone said. We were not going to resist if they got in, was the line; but when a window shattered, I went with others to investigate. If there was going to be any break-in, it would surely be at the back entrance, out of sight of any passing police patrol. Not that we would have called for police protection. Out of the rhododendrons at the back of the building, a phalanx of police emerged with dogs. I could see an officer out of the corner of my eye orchestrating the manoeuvre. It was magnificently executed. Thanks to the police, the betogers were saved in the nick of time from the wrath of their fellow students. The irony was not lost on me. Not long afterwards, I was approached to stand for the Students’ Representative Council, and elected the following year.
This was my first exposure to people who delight in the pursuit of power, and the schlenters they resort to: underhand manoeuvres to secure positions, which had more to do with gratifying their egos than with those they were supposed to represent. I decided I was not a pure politician, and had no interest in becoming one. Also, our position as a student leadership was a false one. We were trying to take those whom we represented in a direction the majority did not want to go, as if we represented a vanguard. But our freedom to do so, as the police had so eloquently demonstrated, was consequent on our being the beneficiaries of white privilege.
Black students were to make a similar point. My first encounter with black student leaders was through the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). It was government policy that “nonwhite” students attend a university or college for their own racial group, except if there was a course these universities or colleges could not offer. The South African Students’ Organisation (Saso) had recently been established to bring together African, coloured and Indian students into one organisation.
Turfloop, as it was then known, was the only black university still affiliated to Nusas. Its representative was Abram Tiro. If Nusas were to lose its last black affiliate, its aspiration to be a non-racial organisation would be doomed.
I remember the hand-wringing and anguish this prospect provoked among Nusas congress delegates, as well as my irritation at the fawning attitude some displayed toward Tiro. It was an attitude I was to encounter often in later years, among whites desperate to prove they were not racist: so much so that they jettisoned their own self-respect and what was of value in their own tradition. The Saso leadership, by contrast, seemed self-assured and clear. They did not want our help. Our problem, of being politically relevant, was not their problem. A group of us met them at the Phoenix settlement, outside Durban, one evening. Steve Biko was the person they all deferred to, as we stood outside in the half-light, because the building was probably bugged, and chatted briefly. Someone suggested we should focus on our own. That, at any event, was the line taken by Saso towards white students.
I met Biko on another occasion, when he visited Cape Town, with Barney Pityana. I was at this point the very young president of the SRC, and must have seemed politically naive and impressionable, as indeed I was. When Pityana asked me “What do you think of Lenin’s theory of revolution?” he might have been putting me down, in the kindest way. Even if there was an element of posturing in his talk of revolution, Pityana had put his finger on the issue: while white students like me might say they wanted political change, black students were not interested in the kind of incremental reforms we had in mind. Reform and revolution were then seen as mutually exclusive projects, and “real change” could never come about by operating within the law. Not long afterwards I jettisoned the idea of practising law, although I would complete my degree.
A couple of years after doing so, Tiro was blown up in Botswana. Biko would be murdered three years after that.
As long as the situation in South Africa was conceived of in black and white terms, whites remained politically irrelevant. If it was conceived of in terms of class, rather than colour, other possibilities opened up. Class was not merely a social hierarchy, as I think my mother conceived it. It was the product of the prevailing economic system, capitalism, and your perspectives were determined by your position in this system. Material conditions determined consciousness. Those who embraced capitalism, like the Progs, argued that economic growth would bring about an eventual withering of apartheid. Yet there had been an economic boom throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, and apartheid was more entrenched than ever.
At about this time, in circles of which I was part, a variety of documents began to be circulated among us: copies of published papers, extracts from dissertations, reading lists, roneoed documents, barely legible copies of handwritten notes. All went to show that some of the worst aspects of apartheid, such as the migrant labour system and pass laws, originated long before the term was coined, as a means of controlling African workers and to facilitate the development of capitalist production. “Real change” was therefore scarcely conceivable unless African workers, and the class they belonged to, were organised. The idea of an alliance between students and workers had been popularised in May 1968, when the students in Paris called on the workers to join them. The question was whether such an alliance was possible in South Africa.
“Most black South Africans are workers,” begins an undated document someone passed on to me. It expresses the kind of assumptions I and others subscribed to at the time. “We believe, therefore, that to understand the problems facing black South Africans we must begin with the labour situation. It is the situation in which there is the greatest potential for forging new organisations through which blacks can reclaim their human dignity.” It was not clear what kind of “new organisations” these should be, but “workers” referred to those employed in production. They were part of the working class, comprising people with no other means of subsistence than to sell their labour. Unlike elsewhere in Africa, traditional farming was no longer a factor in South Africa, and there was no peasantry to speak of.
For the most part, the workers we had in mind were also men. The situation of the women that stayed at home, wherever home was, was not our concern. We were also not concerned with those engaged in subsistence activities. They were in any event not part of the working class, most would have said, even if they depended on the wages earned by the men. Ours was a quiet narrow idea of class. It was also not informed by experience. The nearest anyone I knew had got to actually linking up with real workers was the Wages Commission, established under the auspices of Nusas to investigate workers’ wages. No one I knew was involved in the organisation of workers, and the working class, when I left for Europe. Oupa had left each of his grandchildren some money and I had decided to “blow” mine by going to Europe. It seemed necessary to say I was not leaving for good.