»I don't think the workers' struggle can be divorced
from the community's struggle because the workers
become community at the end of the day.«
The trade Unions have grown dramatically over the past decade in number of members, rights won, and political power—a success story revealed in all three of the following interviews with Florence de Villiers, Emma Mashinini, and Lydia Kompe. Mashinini was one of several women to articulate the view that »the trade-union movement is the most important part of the struggle in South Africa«. After all, she explained, »our political organizations are banned or in exile, so who else is there?« Even my hometown newspaper carried an article in 1987 written by Michael Parks, foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, declaring, »Black workers have moved into the forefront of the fight against apartheid« (p. 1). Parks cites as evidence of both the growing politicization and strength of the black unions the two-day general strike that occurred during the whites-only parliamentary elections in May 1987. I was conducting interviews with women in the coastal city of Durban at the time, and one of them canceled because of it (she was unable to get public transport to meet with me). An estimated 1.5 million workers participated in this strike.
Frank Meintjies, a top official of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), argues that workers are the vanguard of the anti-apartheid struggle because they »have the most muscle. Students can boycott classes for a long time, but that does not hurt the regime. Workers, when united and motivated, can take strike action that could be decisive« (Parks 1987, p. 4).[1] And even the South African minister of finance, Barend du Plessis, admitted in his budget address to Parliament in March 1988 that the number of strikes in 1987 had increased by 69 percent since the year before.
COSATU's increasing militancy made it the target of a damaging bomb attack on its headquarters in Johannesburg in May 1987, just a couple of days before the election. (This event is discussed by both Emma Mashinini in chapter 13 and Sheena Duncan in chapter 24.) Parks mentions that five of its regional offices have been bombed, set on fire, or burglarized since then.
Mashinini explained why it doesn't make sense for trade-unionists in South Africa »to limit our concern to the worker's rights in the workplace. That's all right in comfortable countries,« she observed. »But in South Africa we've got to follow the worker out of his place of employment to see how he travels home, where he goes to, where his children go to, that there is no adequate housing or education. Everything around him is distorted«.
Of the five women union organizers whom I interviewed, it is Lydia Kompe (chapter 14) who expresses the most concern about sexism in the union movement, f This is not to say that de Villiers and Mashinini did not see sexism as a problem in the trade-union movement. For example, de Villiers said, »It still is a man's world in COSATU«. And Mashinini stated, »I have attended several world conventions and have seen large international trade union organizations being led by men. This concerns me. Are we South African women still going to be led by men when we get our liberation although we were oppressed together with them and fought against this oppression together?«
In an interview with Kompe published elsewhere (Barrett et al., 1985), she pointed out:
No union has yet elected a branch chairlady. Offhand, I don't know even a chairlady of the shop-stewards committee... The women officials should have their own grouping to discuss the day-to-day problems that we encounter in the union. Having meetings of women is the first step. . . . We pay subs equally, we work the same shifts, we work the same jobs, we participate in the same way in the unions. I don't see why we can't have an equal say and equal rights!...
I think it's the time for women to come together and see this thing as a major problem for us... In Fosatu [the Federation of South African Trade Unions] we tried to have a women's group. But our male members felt very threatened... [T]he men are still taking the lead. It will take a few years for women to move towards proper leadership in the unions... These men feel threatened when we push to be equal. No feminist will be surprised by Kompe's criticisms. But why should South Africans be expected to solve a problem before people in other countries?
From Domestic Worker to Head of the Domestic Workers' Union
»If other people have to go through it [detention],
why should I be spared? I know that we won't get
our freedom on a silver plate«.
FLORENCE DE VILLIERS
...was in the audience on 8 March 1987, International Women's Day, when forty-six-year-old Florence de Villiers delivered a brief but fiery speech about the need for solidarity among women. Although I had interviewed this so-called Coloured woman nine years previously, I didn't recognize her. Since people referred to her affectionately as »Auntie Florrie,« her name also rang no bell for me. But mostly, I didn't recognize de Villiers because she had been transformed by her determined and successful efforts to build the Domestic Workers' Union to serve and organize the second biggest workforce in South Africa. In 1977, it was only a dream, conceived by de Villiers and Maggie Owies. Today it is a national organization with a membership of fifty thousand. »Auntie Florrie« is its general secretary, who now believes that »if it wasn't for the unions, I don't think we'd be where we are today in the anti-apartheid struggle«.
This is a phenomenal and moving story of the personal and social transformation of a woman who considers herself to be the »child of slaves"; a child who was so hungry for learning that she broke the law and endured her mother's beatings to pay for her schoolbooks. Later, de Villiers became a domestic worker who rebelled against the oppressive maternalism of her employers. Finally, there was de Villiers the wife, who realized she was in prison and broke out. De Villiers is also profoundly committed to trying to improve the lot of others, particularly domestic workers, farm workers, squatters, and women. Because of the Government's attempt to force Africans out of the cities or to prevent them from migrating there, in order to make cities a little whiter in complexion, many Africans are not allowed to live there. Illegal squatter communities emerged in many of South Africa's urban areas in the 1970s and 1980s because it was impossible for many Africans to survive in the impoverished rural areas where apartheid had consigned them. When the government moved against these communities, »it found itself challenged by organised resistance in the Western Cape for the first time since the 1960s« (Cole 1987, p. 9). De Villiers participated in this struggle as a dedicated outsider, and her vivid account of her work among the squatters in Cape Town depicts both the everyday horrors of apartheid as well as her own tenacity and courage in the face of it.
Although de Villiers was forced to leave school after completing standard six (eighth grade) at the age of fourteen, she has pursued several adult education courses in her later years. Her husband, who completed standard eight (tenth grade), works in a furniture factory. Their four children are now adults. De Villiers said that she encouraged them »to go the whole way with their studies«. The eldest is a teacher; the second, a radiographer; the third, a plumber; and the fourth, at eighteen, had just completed high school. She had promised herself that »my kids were not going to be slaves like my parents and I had been. I did everything possible to encourage them to stay out of trouble. And as much as I have worked and not been home, they've done well and never stayed out of school once,« de Villiers said proudly.
Growing Up Coloured
I am the product of two very proud slaves who didn't want to become beggars and who worked very hard. Seventy years ago my father was taken from his home when he was about seven years old and given to a white family so he could work for them as a farm laborer until he was eighteen. He earned next to nothing for all those years. After that he was allowed to find his own way in life.
After my mother's father died in the First World War, her mother got herself another man. When my mother became a problem to him, he gave her to some white people to work for them for a pittance. Like my father, she was only about seven years old. She did domestic work on a farm until she married my father and had us. She also became a midwife, and, as illiterate as she was, she was accepted by [the midwifery authorities in] Pretoria. Before he died, my father said to me with tears in his eyes, »You know, this was not the life that I wanted for you. But the white man knew better what was good for us«. I realized then that he had wanted a better life for us.
I come from a big family of nine kids, and I was squeezed into the middle as the fourth eldest. Both my parents were totally illiterate. They were wonderful parents and they taught me a lot, but to them religion was the answer to all problems. We had to get up at four o'clock in the morning to pray, and then we prayed again at night before we went to bed. We weren't allowed to go to bioscope [movies], to dance, or to play on a Sunday afternoon. It made me feel different from other kids.
I was born on the apple farm my father worked on in Elgin in the Grabouw area. There was no school on the farms there, so my father decided to move to a fishing village where there was an Anglican school. There my father made a living by selling the vegetables he grew, the wood he cut, and the fish he caught. He was a good farmer, and I was very proud when I saw what he grew.
Often my parents didn't have the money for my schoolbooks, but I didn't want to tell the schoolteacher that I didn't have a half a crown to pay for them. My mother's only brother would go to sell wild flowers along the road on a Sunday, which was against my mother's religious principles. But I would run away to sell flowers with him because it was important to me to be able to proudly say to my teacher, »Here is the half a crown I owe you for my book«. I knew I would get a hiding when I got home because I had sinned in my mother's eyes. Sundays were for church and Sunday school and that's all. It was also against the law for me to sell flowers at fourteen years of age. The people driving by felt sorry for me and preferred to buy my bunch of flowers than my uncle's. He would get mad at me and say, »If the police catch us, you'll get me into trouble«. When I got home, my mother would give me the expected hiding, but it was worth it as long as I could pay for my books. But eventually I decided to respect my mother's wishes, and I'd earn the money instead by washing nappies [diapers] and looking after children. I was obsessed with the idea that I had to have money like some of the other kids.
When I was only about ten years old, I very much wanted to have a professional job when I grew up. I loved history and would sit for hours with my history books. I found my school work easy and was always amongst the first in my class. In fact, I did better than my older sister and brother at school. My principal spoke to my mother about sending me to high school, but she told him she didn't have the money. So I had to go to work after finishing standard six [eighth grade] when I was about fourteen years old. I was very sad to have to leave school.
I never wanted to be a domestic worker. I did it after I left school until I married at nineteen. Then I continued doing it on a part-time basis. I always hated it. My human dignity was removed from me completely. I was told, »Do this. Do that«. I wasn't allowed to think for myself. I had to say, »Yes, yes, yes«. I could never say, »No«. Because I am black and my employer was white, I couldn't convince her that I had a mind of my own and that I wanted to use it. She kept telling me things that I knew. It was degrading. It made me want to do something to make these people realize that I have a mind that can develop in the same way as theirs if I am given a chance. I think that is why I got involved in organizing other domestic workers. I thought there must be many women like myself who hate the treatment I got from people. But for many years this was a painful thing I just had to live with.
I married at nineteen hoping to get out of the trap I found myself in as a domestic worker. I soon realized it wasn't all roses. My mother taught me that the husband is the head of the house, and at first I went along with this idea. When I married my mother used to say, »Now, you must always have a tray to serve your husband when he comes home«. I said, »No, he can make his own coffee«. She would get a fit and say, »It's not Christian. I didn't raise you like that«. Because that's how she used to behave. She was a slave to my father.
There is also a tradition that if your mother or your mother-in-law had eight or ten kids, you should have the same number. I said, »No! This is my body and I have the right to say how many kids I want«. My sister-in-law said to me, »But my mother had eight and your mother had nine«. I said, »Having one baby after the other without having any say? Not on your life!« Then I started asking myself, »Should I allow people to use me body and soul?« And I answered no. I told my sister-in-law, »Religion or no religion, I'll leave my husband before I do that!« But my husband also didn't want more than four kids. Even that was too much for my liking. Although we loved kids, it was tough wanting to give them everything in life but having very little money.
I found I couldn't do what I wanted to do when I married. It dawned on me that I was in prison. For example, I loved doing things, and my next-door neighbor told me, »The women are getting together this afternoon at the church«. I joined them, but my husband didn't like it. I realized I was actually a slave in my own home. After going to work, I'd come home and have to cook and clean all over again while my husband sat with his newspaper. And I thought, »To the devil with you! You've got to share this with me. You should wash the babies and assist me in washing and drying and cleaning the house«. He didn't accept this at first. He said that I might leave him later on if I carried on in this way. Finally I told my husband that he had to either divorce me or accept me as I am. I was not turning back. But it took time before I made this stand. I knew I had to get out of this situation so on top of raising my four kids and working, I also started taking night classes in math, English, and history, which I still loved. Later I did accountancy and typing. Sometimes I wouldn't finish cleaning the house until two in the morning. But my husband did come around to sharing the housework.
Then there was an uprising and people were killed at the night school I attended, so it closed.
The Black Women's Federation
I got involved in the Black Women's Federation when it started in 1975. To protest the increase in bus fares that year, we walked with placards from the townships to our workplaces many miles away. We kept this up for more than a month, and our efforts were quite effective. The following year we had rummage sales and cake sales and collected money to give to people to visit their families in detention. Then in 1977 our organization was banned along with all the other black organizations.
Working in the Squatter Camps
I worked in a very liberal organization called the Christian Institute from 1969 until October 1977, when it was banned. I worked in their restaurant for a while. When the people there learned about my involvement in the bus boycott, they asked me what sort of work I would like to do. I told them I preferred to work in a squatter camp than in a restaurant feeding people. Theo Kotze, the head of the institute, told me I could do that, so I worked in a squatter camp called Kraaifontein for a year, beginning in 1976.
Most of the people there came from the Transkei. Just like all human beings all over the world, they wanted their families to be able to stay together. I tried to teach the women there to be proud of themselves as women, that we cannot do things unless we become aware of ourselves and our woman-power. They were very responsive, and over the next weeks I'd find a women's committee, a health committee, and a food committee when I went back, and I'd see real growth. Women are a great encouragement to men, especially in our situation in South Africa. For example, I found a man sitting behind a bush at the squatter camp, crying. I asked him, »What are you crying about?« He said, »I've just lost my job. I've been a bricklayer and look where I've landed«. I said, »Hold it! Just get up. You are not going to cry. You've got a family to see to. Before the sun sets tonight, they must have shelter«. I brought that man's courage back. If given the chance, women are the most powerful force under the sun.
I encouraged men as well as women not to accept their squatter situation, but to fight for justice. I would look at whatever problems they were having and try to find ways and means to bring in other people to assist me in helping them. For example, when their shanties were demolished by the government, we would get more building materials and assist them in rebuilding their homes.
I didn't shed a tear in that camp, but I learned to fight there. I came across an old man of sixty-eight who was chopping through the jawbone of a cow. It was absolutely bare, so I asked him, »What are you doing?« He said, »I might get something out of it«. I thought, »Here is a man who has helped to build up this country over the years. He has been pushed into a squatter camp to wait for his dying day, and on one of his last days he has to try to get marrow out of bone on which there is no meat«. Then and there I promised myself that I will always fight for what is just. I got my degree in that camp to do the work I am doing today.
A huge complex called Brackenfell Hypermarket was built near another squatter camp where people weren't even given water. The people in Brackenfell were told, »If you give water to people in the squatter camps, you will have to vacate your council dwellings«. The women in the camp came to me crying, »Florrie, come and help us«. I would carry in water in plastic cans from where I lived and I would go to the ministers nearby and say, »Come and assist me«.
By then, the people were living in tents. All their building materials had been taken away from them in an effort to force them to go back to the Transkei. A woman with seven kids was living in a tent which we had provided. She was very ill and I was giving her pills when the police came to remove me from the camp. The police called me a terrorist and turned the car of the person who brought me into the camp upside down. The woman I had been giving the pills to died afterwards.
The police would normally demolish the squatters' homes during the heavy rains in winter. People would be crying around me so there was no time for me to cry. They needed help, and I had to get it for them. Some of them were actually living in the ground by then. Working in the squatter camps made me very determined to do everything in my power to help my people, even to give my life if necessary. I prepared my family for what might happen to me by showing them how people had to live in the camp. I said to them, »Don't shed a tear if I have to go to jail for this, because you will know what I am in there for«. Eventually the entire squatter camp was demolished, and we moved the people into Crossroads [another squatter camp with an awesome record of resistance].[2]
The Domestic Workers' Union
I met a woman called Maggie Owies at the Christian Institute when I was still working at the squatter camps. She was involved in organizing recreation for domestic workers, which I found interesting. When the institute was banned in 1977,1 immediately said to her, »Look I'm free now"—because the banning meant I'd automatically lost my job. »Let's start something for domestic workers,« I said. But I was interested in more than their recreational needs. »I'm prepared to work with you,« I said, »but I'm not prepared to assist in making better slaves of women like myself«. Maggie was trying to find accommodation for herself at that time, and I said, »Look, you can come and stay with me«. I had about one thousand rand [$500] saved at that time, and I suggested we try to get this thing off the ground by selling apples from my husband's brother's farm and baking bread to raise some more money. So this is how we started the Domestic Workers' Union.
Most people saw organizing a domestic workers' union as impossible. But with the help of a friend, we opened a small office in central Cape Town. All we had was a telephone in the corner on the floor. We started to talk to domestic workers on the streets and in the parks and at the shops. »Are you happy with your working and living conditions?« we asked. Some of them would invite us to their rooms. We'd ask them, »What do you want for your family? Do you have kids? Where are they? What do you want out of life? Are you happy with your life style?« Women would pour out stories about their experiences and how they so much wanted to do things that they couldn't do. And it would click with us because both Maggie and I went through the same kind of experiences.
One of the first things that I did was to teach people to read and write. We had meetings at our office on a nightly basis and at weekends. We had meetings in people's rooms, in church halls, wherever we could talk to people. We encouraged women to get involved, to become organized, to see themselves as women not as slaves. The women were very receptive because of the exploitation they had experienced.
When we got a little bit of money from overseas, I initiated our union becoming a national one. I said to the others, »Let's make do with what we can and assist the other regions«. By then, we had taken courses on trade unionism. So I went to Port Elizabeth to help them start a union there, and I did the same in East London and Durban. About seventeen hundred people attended the launching of the National Domestic Workers' Union in Cape Town on 29-30 November 1986. There were supposed to be two thousand but road blocks prevented many people from getting there. We now have a membership of fifty thousand. The head office is in Cape Town, and I've been elected general secretary. I really love this work and can't see myself anywhere else now.
We've drawn up demands for a living wage and better working conditions, nationally. If a woman wants to be a domestic worker, fine— but she mustn't be trapped in that choice. We don't want women doing domestic work when they don't want to do it. We also resolved that we would get involved politically as well as socially and economically, so we're affiliated to COSATU.
Sexual Harassment of Domestic Workers
Domestic workers are sexually harassed because some white employers think they can do whatever they want with these women because they are black. We know of endless numbers of cases where women are beaten up if they don't give in to their employers, and others are sacked [fired] and made to leave the premises immediately without pay. Sometimes it really disturbs the family life of the domestic worker as well. Some employers of husband-and-wife teams expect the husband to accept the harassment of the domestic worker as if to say, »This is my property. The job includes her working for me body and soul«.
In one incident a domestic worker came to the union office crying. She said her employer came home at lunchtime and made sexual demands on her. She refused him so he told her to get off his premises immediately. Fortunately there was a white student at the house that day (he was using the servant's quarters and the worker was sleeping underneath the stairs); otherwise, the employer might have forced her. I phoned the employer and got his wife. I said to her, »This person is here and she is making a serious statement about your husband, and your husband told her to get off the premises without giving her any notice money. She said she doesn't want to make a case against you as long as you pay her«. The woman was very shocked. She said absolutely nothing, but two days later the money arrived at the office by mail.
There is another case of a young twenty-year-old woman who did domestic work for a man and his son. They both had intercourse with her, and when she became pregnant she didn't know who the father was. Her whole life was messed up because of their demands and her fear of losing her job. We take such cases to a lawyer if the worker requests it. We feel strongly that this issue needs attention because it happens so often and has been going on for so long.
Harassment by the Security Police
I was detained overnight once in 1975 when I was on my way to the Black People's Convention to discuss the situation of black people in South Africa. The security police heard about it, put up a road block, and took us in. They called us terrorists and kept us overnight. Theo Kotze came to release us at about four o'clock the next morning. Some of our people had to appear in court the next day. We waited until they were released, and then we left for the convention in Pretoria, so we managed to attend it anyway.
The security police raided our union office this year [1987] for the third time. They just take what they want to, and there's nothing we can do about it. People in detention have told me that they've been questioned about me by the security police and told to give me the message that the police will get me. But I'm not afraid of detention. I've heard so much about it from other people that I will know what to expect if my turn comes.
Life As a Trade-Union Leader
»That was the most horrible day of my detention.
The whole day I could see my baby's face
and wanted to call her name, >Dudu<, >Dudu<,
but my mind was blank. I couldn't recollect it.
>Can a mother forget her baby's name?< I wondered«.
EMMA MASHININI
Like Florence de Villiers, the fifty-seven-year-old African Emma Mashinini also told a remarkable success story about how she started a black shop-workers' union in 1975, now called the Commercial Catering and Allied Workers' Union, and worked as its general secretary from its inception through to its emergence as the second largest union in South Africa, with a membership of seventy thousand.
Mashinini is married and has two daughters, one of whom is married with two daughters, and the other of whom is pursuing her education in the United States. Mashinini is currently writing an autobiography called »Dudu«—the name of one of her daughters— about her life and work in the trade-union movement. She lives in Soweto and, since her retirement from the union, now works for a church group called the Department of Justice and Reconciliation.
Mashinini is an Anglican; and since my twin brother David was about to be enthroned as a newly elected Anglican bishop, my relationship to him was a definite asset in gaining access to her. She holds strong views about what the church should be doing about apartheid. Just as she believes that the trade-union movement has to embrace political issues as well as economic ones, so she argues that »the church must also face that it has to be involved in the political situation. We are extremely lucky that the highest person in our church, Desmond Tutu, speaks out about injustices. When he was elected as a bishop, and then as archbishop, some people chose to pull out of the church because they thought that he was too involved in politics. But his being political is very important to us [black people]. Priests must not just stand in their pulpits and preach about the suffering of the people. They have to do something about it. The church must follow people out of church. It will suffer if it doesn't get involved«.
On 27 November 1981, Mashinini, then fifty-two years old, was detained in solitary confinement for six months along with other trade-unionists. In the interview to follow, she describes how traumatized she was by this experience. Although her spirit is not broken, she finally decided to resign from her union responsibilities a year ago in 1986 - »because I was so exhausted,« she said. Mashinini also describes how affected she was by learning of the death of Neil Aggett, a dedicated trade-unionist and medical doctor, and the first white person to die in detention. Although it could not be proven whether he was murdered by the Security Branch or committed suicide, people in the anti-apartheid movement do not regard this as a salient distinction. His death caused an international outcry, as Mashinini describes in this interview.
Mashinini said that she was surprised that her husband, not an outspoken person, became »very conscientized by my detention,« and turned into »a very active anti-apartheid fighter. The security people don't realize,« she observed, »that these continual detentions educate people. They harm the people detained, but they conscientize others«. Her husband was among the first people to become involved with the Detainees Parents' Support Committee (described by Coleman in chapter 5). »He stood as a lone demonstrator demanding my release in front of the Supreme Court and many other places,« she said. He traveled from Johannesburg to Cape Town to see the minister of justice and police to demand her release. Mashinini also describes the other ways he supported her during this difficult period of her life.
I interviewed Mashinini in her Khotso House office in downtown Johannesburg, the recently bombed anti-apartheid building where I also interviewed Lydia Kompe and Audrey Coleman.
Growing Up African
I was born in 1929 in the city center of Johannesburg, and have lived all my life in the urban areas. I am the one with the least education in a family of six. My eldest sister went to a boarding school and she managed to pass her matric exams there. I was the next eldest, and because my mother wasn't well, I had to assist her at home with my younger sisters, so I couldn't pursue my education any further than standard eight [tenth grade].
I am a product of many forced removals. My father was a dairy man, and he and my mother lived in the backyard of a white family when I was born. Then they moved to a place called Prospect Township—one of the first areas subjected to forced removals in the 1930s. People were forcibly removed from there to Orlando—the place which is called Soweto today. My parents, not wishing to go to Orlando, because it was like a very wild forest at that time, chose to go to Sophiatown. That's where I had my schooling. I went to Bantu High secondary school—the same school that our Archbishop Desmond Tutu went to. Little did my parents know then that they and others would again be forcibly removed from Sophiatown in the 1950s.
There was no separation in Sophiatown of people who were Zulu or Sotho or Coloured or Indian. The only people who didn't live in Sophiatown were the whites. My home was next to the veld, as was a white area called Westdene. Like the white children, we only had to cross the road to play in the open, green veld. We didn't realize then that one day we would all be separated and see each other as enemies.
I can vividly remember the bulldozers coming to destroy our home in Sophiatown. A big truck would come, and people threw our things and the belongings of other families onto it. When we got to the new place, we had to try to find the bits and pieces that belonged to us. After Sophiatown was demolished, there was no alternative for my parents but to move to Soweto. It's inhuman not to be able to choose where you want to live. I got married in Soweto, and my father, who is now eighty-six years old, still lives there.
I married quite young at the age of eighteen and had my first baby on my birthday when I turned twenty. I am still married, so I've had a very long marriage. I had six daughters, but three died of yellow jaundice at a very early age due to the poor conditions of health care in our area at that time. Nobody recognized what they were suffering from, otherwise they maybe could have been saved. My third daughter died in an accident when she was seventeen years old. I stayed at home with my children until I was twenty-seven, when I started working outside the home.
Becoming a Union Activist
Because I had little education, I had no training for a profession, so when I started working in 1956 I became a garment worker in the clothing industry. At first all I had to do was to clean cotton from the edges of the cloth. Then I was promoted to the job of machinist, and later I became a team leader and a factory supervisor. This factory was producing men's clothing, mainly uniforms for policemen, men at sea, and in the air force. I joined the union immediately. I started working there in 1956 and stayed there for nineteen and a half years.
I saw the white employers pushing [black] people around at the factory. I never used to keep quiet on these occasions. I always wanted to help in settling whatever problem arose. I spoke out from an early age, so the workers chose me to be their shop steward. After that I was elected to serve on the national executive of the union, which I did for twelve of the nineteen years that I worked there. I remember a time when we were earning only one penny short of the amount needed to qualify to be a contributor to the unemployment insurance fund. We actually went out on strike to get an increase of a penny because we felt that it was so important to belong to this fund.
There were not many unions at that time. I was invited on several occasions to start a union, but I wasn't ready at that point because of the promotions that I kept getting. Each time I thought, »Oh, now I've made it. I've got what I wanted«. But eventually I was approached by several people about the need for a union for black shop workers, and I myself also felt this need. Because this job had been reserved for whites in the past, only white shop workers had a union. Then Coloureds and Indians were hired as shop workers, so they also got a union. When a sprinkling of black [African] workers' faces started showing in stores like the OK Bazaars and Checkers, it became apparent that they needed a union, too.
The Industrial Conciliation Act had an exclusionary policy for unions. Black people were not regarded as workers, so the unions didn't accept us. If not workers, I don't know what we were supposed to be. Just objects, I suppose. Although joining a union with people of other races was forbidden, the law didn't stop us from forming our own union, so that's what we did. I resigned from my job in August 1975 to start a shop-workers' union for black people.
There were many strikes in Natal Province in 1973. After that there was a mushrooming of black trade unions, though not all of them were legally recognized. That is also when we started our union. I wondered, »Where do I get my first people from?« Shop workers are very difficult people to organize because they have canteens within the workplaces for their tea and lunch breaks. So I visited them at their homes and told them about the new union that they must join. The best time to approach them was in the morning before they went to work or at their homes after work. If you stand around a supermarket you see them stream by, so I found them mostly very near their work.
I had a colleague who belonged to the whites-only union, Morris Hagan, who helped me a lot in the formation of this union. We made leaflets which I distributed to the workers. These leaflets informed the employers immediately that a union was being organized, and I am sure that it was they who set the police on me. One time the police confiscated the leaflets I was distributing, and arrested me. They kept me at the police station for a while, but eventually they had to let me go because there was nothing they could charge me for. But their harassment made things very difficult. They had destroyed the few leaflets that I had, and it was an effort to get access to equipment to remake them. That was my first encounter with the police.
Another time I was distributing leaflets with my husband. He used to assist me in this way or by giving me a lift to the shopping centers on his way to work since we didn't have such centers in our black townships. We were arrested and told that we would be charged for trespassing because the supermarkets are built on private property. I wish I had asked in court, »Is it only private property when you are organizing a union?« because I have never been stopped there as a shopper and told I'm on private property. This kind of harassment continued.
When the employers realized that I wasn't intimidated, they came up with something they called the »Liaison Committee«. They said that the workers should belong to this committee instead of the union, and that there was no need for a union because the Liaison Committee would deal with the work conditions. Because some of the workers were taken in by this, the first thing I had to do was to track down who the Liaison Committee members were. Then I went to their homes and organized them into the union. Since the Liaison Committee people were already recognized by the workers on the shop floor as their representatives, it made my life very easy. The Liaison Committee members started organizing the union within the workplace which I had no access to. So the union started growing bit by bit, and then postal workers were included with the shop workers. I was so excited when I got the first rand [$0.50] in the post for somebody's subscription.
When I first started working for the union, the employers would refuse to talk to me. But I knew the day would come when they would want to talk to me. The workers finally forced the management to recognize the union, and today they sit down and negotiate with us for everything. There are agreements which regulate even how people must be dismissed from work. This union—now called the Commercial Catering and Allied Workers' Union—has become very powerful and now has more than seventy thousand members.
Detention and Solitary Confinement
The police came to fetch me in about ten cars. There were more than forty of them armed with rifles. As soon as the police entered our house, they ordered my husband out. I have lots of trade-union books, and when they had finished searching the house up and down, they collected piles of these books while my family was outside. Then they wanted my husband to attach his signature to confirm that they had removed the books. My husband refused, saying that he ought to have been present when the books were collected [to ensure none were planted]. They said, »You are making things worse for your wife,« but he still refused to sign.
I was kept in solitary confinement for six months. When they took me to John Vorster Square the first day, a policeman was standing next to a Bible and he said in Afrikaans, »Is jy 'n kommie? [Are you a commie?]« I'm not very good at Afrikaans and I thought he was asking, »Are you a communicant?« So I said, »Ja, ek is 'n kommie«. So he said, »Since you have admitted that you are a communist, you won't get a Bible«.
The police told me they detained me because of my political activities, but I believe it was because of my trade-union work. I can never know for sure why, because I was never brought to court. They interrogated me about my travels, about the people I had met when outside the country, about my behavior toward employers when I negotiated with them, about the strikes that had occurred in the industry. Little did they know that many more strikes were going to occur, proving that they didn't occur because of my telling people to strike. The workers chose to strike because of the frustrations that they experienced at work.
Being in solitary confinement was very bad. For the first three months, I just had my hands and fingers to help me pass the time. I had nothing to do, just nothing, nothing, nothing! It was only when I was moved to another prison that I managed to get a Bible and so had something to read for the first time. There was some elastoplast [elastic adhesive bandage] on the outside of the little window of my cell, and whenever the prison guards wanted to see me, they would peel it back. It could be quite frightening because I would see two eyes looking at me through the glass when I was least expecting it.
I slept on the concrete floor, and although it was summer, it was freezing cold. The cells themselves are designed by the South African authorities to torture you. In my first prison there was a laundry machine on one side and a lift [elevator] on the other. The laundry machine operated from about 4 a.m. right through the day, except for Sundays. I knew it was a Sunday the day that machine didn't run. The lift on the other side went up and down all the time, so I was entertained by this continuous noise. It drove me mad. In the other prison where I was lucky to find a Bible, the trains constantly ran overhead.
There was no chair. There was nothing to sit on but a small bundle of blankets. There was a day when I sat and thought about my family. I saw my husband, I saw my father, I saw everybody, and then I saw my baby's face. I wanted to call her by name, but I had forgotten what it was! That was the most horrible day of my detention. The whole day I could see my baby's face and wanted to call her name, »Dudu,« »Dudu,« but my mind was blank. I couldn't recollect it. »Can a mother forget her baby's name?« I wondered. That experience hurt me terribly. Mostly I worried about my dad when I was in detention. I wondered if he understood that I hadn't committed any crime, that I had not shamed my family by being detained. I knew my children understood this, but I wished I could talk to my father and make him understand it, too. I was so pleased when I came out to find out that he knew that I was detained because of apartheid.
They kept the fact that others were detained secret so that I would think I was the only one. One time when I was being driven to another place for interrogation, I saw newspaper posters saying, »Detainee Dies in Detention«. I knew that Neil Aggett, a friend and colleague and a trade-union organizer, had been detained because when I was escorted to the loo on the day I was detained, he walked out of the lift and said, »Hello, Emma«. For some reason I never said hello back to him, but it was an immense relief to know that, »Oh, my God. I am not the only one who is detained«. I regret to this day that I never responded to Neil's hello because I never saw him alive again. But he was so fit, so strong, I didn't think it could be he who had died in detention.
When I was returned to my cell, I became very furious and demanded to know who this dead detainee was, but the senior police officer wouldn't tell me. It was about two months later that I heard one morning on a transistor radio that Australian trade unions refused to offload goods from South Africa because of Neil Aggett's death in detention. That was the way I had to receive the news about Neil—a person whom I had worked with very closely. I was all by myself in my cell without anybody to share it with or ask about it. There are many deaths in detention in South Africa, but Neil was the first white to die in detention. He was a medical doctor who had sacrificed a great deal to assist the workers.
It was because of social pressure about prison conditions after Neil's death that we were eventually allowed to have these transistor radios in our cells, and to get love novels as well. The security branch maintained that Neil committed suicide, but many people came forward to testify that he was murdered. I can't imagine him committing suicide.
From the day I was detained in November, my husband sent me fruit and other food, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and so forth, but I never received these things. My husband only found this out after he visited me for the first time late in December.
I don't know if it was my husband's efforts that helped me to be released. It could have been pressures from others as well. Fortunately I am quite well known. When I came out, I saw copies of letters from all over the world that had been sent to the state president demanding my release.
I hadn't realized that another woman I knew—Rita Ndzanga [a very active trade-unionist]—had been in detention at the same time as me, also for about six months. When we saw each other on the first day of our release, we were both very surprised. Like me, Rita didn't have the money to get home. The police had fetched us from our homes, but they weren't going to take us back there. Fortunately I managed to send word to my husband, and I told Rita, who also lived in Soweto, that he could take her home. But Rita couldn't find her home. My husband, Tom, had to drive toward the station to see if this would remind her how she came home from work, but she still couldn't remember where her home was. Eventually Tom went to the superintendent's office, where we pay our rent, to ask him for the number of her house. Because she was known in the community, some people became excited when they saw her, so we asked them, »Can you tell us where Rita lives?« Then we took her home. This is how horrible detention can be.
I wasn't physically assaulted in prison, but I was psychologically assaulted. I was very ill when I came out. I had a terrible backache from sleeping on the concrete floor, and I suffered from a loss of memory. I had to go for treatment to a hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark.[3] At that time it was one of the only hospitals in the world that treated victims of detention and torture. I stayed there for about six weeks, but I think I didn't go there at the right time for me. They gave me the best treatment they could, but it was very hard having been separated from my family and home when in detention, then leaving them again so soon after my release. I didn't respond well because I was thinking of them so much and missing being home. Also, all the tortured people from different countries couldn't understand each other. So I wasn't cured. When I came back, I thought I was O.K. but I had lost my memory again. I have been admitted to the hospital several times since then. In December of 1982, I found myself in a hospital in Johannesburg without knowing how I got there.
These attacks of forgetting came on the anniversary of my detention each year. I had blackouts and amnesia every November/December. In 1985, I decided that I should go on leave and not be in South Africa during those months. I visited one of my daughters last year [1986] and it didn't happen, so I think I am outgrowing it. But the doctors say this sort of problem can persist for about ten years. There are others, however, who have suffered worse problems than I have as a result of detention.
I went back to work at the union because I wasn't going to be intimidated by the police to leave my work, but my concentration had become very bad. And you've got to be all there when you work for the union. The doctors advised me to work for two or three days in a week, but you can't work like that as a trade-unionist. Others said I should work for half a day, but then I would have to take the work home. During the time that I continued working, I paid dearly for it. I had to pay for treatment every fortnight to keep me going. I finally decided to stop working for the union because it was taxing me so much. I had to go back to the hospital about twice, but after that I had therapy with a private doctor.
The Commercial Catering and Allied Workers' Union
Our greatest achievement during my time with the union was that we made management talk with us as workers. Another great achievement is that we improved the workers' salaries. An annual salary increase has to be negotiated now by the union. The workers are still not earning enough because the basic wage was so low at the beginning, but there has been an improvement. My greatest joy of all is what we have achieved for women workers. We were the first union in South Africa —black, white, or Coloured—to have an agreement that protects women's maternity rights. It does not extend to women being paid during their maternity leave, except for what is required by law, but women cannot now lose their jobs or be demoted because of pregnancy. They can stay at home for up to twelve months and return when they are ready to work again.
Before this, pregnant women were moved from their jobs because they were considered an ugly sight. They would be dismissed or, if they were lucky, they would only be moved from view. If they were fortunate enough to work until their time of confinement, they couldn't return to their jobs afterwards. They lost their jobs for having a baby. If they were workers who were approved of, they'd have to start again with a beginner's salary when they returned. So having a family resulted in many hardships for women. The agreement we reached with one of the largest retail stores, OK Bazaars, covered all women workers, not just black women. So the very deprived black workers had achieved something which also benefited the comfortable white workers of South Africa. That was very fulfilling for me.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions
Another fulfilling experience has been my involvement with the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in 1985. I was involved in the unity talks that led to the inauguration of COSATU. So the union that I and the workers organized was in the safe home of COSATU before I retired a few months later. COSATU is very important because it is one of the largest federations of national unions in South Africa. It is a nonracial federation of unions that are worker controlled. There are other federations as well, and I look forward to the day when there will be only one federation in our country. I think the results of the recent election [in May 1987] show us that we must stand together and be united against our enemy because the situation seems to be getting worse and worse.[4]
The COSATU office in Johannesburg was destroyed by bombs last week [May 1987]. Before this happened, there was a siege on COSATU by police. They searched the building in which COSATU was housed during the two-day election stayaway, then claimed that people had been killed there. The next morning we learned that COSATU has been wrecked by bombing. According to the media, there has never before been that type of a bombing in South Africa.
The security nightwatchmen who were in the building saw a few policemen immediately after the first explosion, but the policemen said they didn't see anybody who could have planted that bomb running out of the building. So who put the bomb in COSATU? One can clearly see that the enemy of COSATU is the government. Now workers have no place to meet and discuss the problems they are faced with, and their printing press in the basement was destroyed. But I don't think the government's efforts to destroy COSATU will be effective. The more the police do strange things, the more the people are mobilized to get together.
If anybody in my age group is angered by what is going on, you can imagine what it means to the younger generation who are not afraid to die like we are.
Sexism in the Union and at Home
»It was very difficult for a woman to organize men...
Some of them would say, >If you don't make love with us,
we're not going to join your union.<«
LYDIA KOMPE
»You must try to meet Lydia Kompe,« advised the political activist and researcher Stephanie Urdang, one of the women I consulted about whom to interview in South Africa before I left the United States. Urdang proceeded to tell me about the important union-organizing done by Kompe, an African woman, adding that, »Lydia was the strongest black feminist I met on my trip to South Africa in 1986«. But when I asked Kompe, »Do you consider yourself a feminist?« she replied, »What's that?« Nonetheless, as her interview makes clear, Kompe is very concerned about women's issues: sexual harassment of working women; the sexism she has endured from her husband, workers, and her fellow union organizers; and lobola, the African custom that has become akin to buying wives. Had Kompe been familiar with the term feminist, however, she would probably still not have identified herself as one because of its negative connotations in South Africa. (For further discussion of this issue, see pages 197-199.)
Born in 1935, Kompe is a mother of three children—two girls and a boy—the youngest of whom will soon be twenty-one.
Since I was aware that Kompe had talked about the taboo topic of female »circumcision"—a practice feminists refer to as genital mutilation—in a previously published interview (Barrett et. al. 1985), I had hoped that time would permit me to ask her about this subject. Unfortunately, it did not. But Kompe mentioned in the earlier interview that she herself had not been circumcised, and thus it was hard even for her to find out about it. »My friends didn't tell me that they cut off their clitoris,« she said, but »I discovered that [this was done] when I worked in a hospital«. »Today, people don't see circumcision school as a first priority, but they still believe that it must happen,« Kompe continued. She said the practice is »very common« where she grew up in a rural area of northern Transvaal, so she and other women who are opposed to it »are very careful to prevent our children going [to circumcision school]. My daughters went to live in that area when they were quite big. So they could decide if they wanted circumcision« (Barrett et. al. 1985, p. 98).
Kompe's willingness to talk about the topics of genital mutilation and lobola publicly and in print—surrounded as they are by silence if not denial, at least as far as outsiders are concerned—reveals her considerable courage, as does her work as a trade-union organizer, which she describes in the following interview.
Kompe lives in Yeoville, a legally white section of Johannesburg where I was also staying. Of her current circumstances, Kompe said, »I'm getting old now, and I don't even have a house, though I've been working all my life since I was nineteen years old«. Needless to say, Kompe's situation is a common one for Africans.
I interviewed Kompe in the frenetically busy DPSC offices in Khotso House in downtown Johannesburg. Khotso House is a large several-storied building housing the offices of an assortment of anti-apartheid groups. It was an extraordinary place to visit, vibrant and collegial, and distinctly multiracial. It was hardly peaceful, however, and interviews there had to be conducted with many interruptions and background noises. Since my interview with Kompe, this building was severely damaged in a bomb attack and condemned as unsafe for use
Growing Up African
I was one of seven children born in a village called Matlala in the northern Transvaal. My father was a peasant farmer. We coped quite well until 1949 when the government came to take away my parents' cattle and donkeys. I was fourteen years old at the time. This hit us very hard and forced my father off the land. Before this my father had enough livestock so he didn't have to work for the capitalist system. Because my parents were now very poor, I didn't manage to go further in school than standard eight. I was eighteen when I left school.
I started working as a nursing assistant in Potgietersrus Hospital in 1954 when I was nineteen years old. I wanted to go on to train as a registered nurse, but after one year my husband pulled me out of the hospital because he didn't want me to be a nurse. He blocked me from getting trained in my profession because he didn't finish his teacher's course, which I thought was very unfair. He also thought a nurse wouldn't have enough time for her family. I chose not to continue because I really loved him and wanted to marry him.
We came to Johannesburg in 1955, and in 1956,1 had my first baby. We married in 1958 after I had my second child. I was about twenty-three years old then. My husband was very cruel. He didn't want me to communicate with other women. He just wanted me to be a housewife sitting at my sewing machine. All he wanted was to work for his own personal gain. After we divorced in 1974,1 immediately got involved in the struggle. In 1975, I got married again to a man called Smile.
The Metal and Allied Workers' Union
I went to work in a factory after I split with my first husband and got involved with the Metal and Allied Workers' Union. We participated in a big strike in 1976 to try to get our union recognized. But the management still had all the power at that time, and we were all dismissed. But we won a civil case against the police because they had beaten us when we tried to disperse and their dogs had bitten us. I only got a bruise on my head, but other people were very badly injured. It took more than two years to win our case, but finally the government had to pay the court expenses and damages.
Because I was a shop steward and I was seen as one of the instigators of the strike, they wouldn't take me back. I was unemployed for about five months and really had to struggle to pay my children's boarding-school fees. But I didn't regret losing my job because I was very committed to the union. Eventually I found a job as a packer at a Checkers store where I worked for nine months.
In 1977, the Metal and Allied Workers' Union asked me to be an organizer for them because two of their organizers had been banned. I became the only female organizer amongst six men. At first this was really difficult because I felt quite intimidated. Because women are seen as inferior to men in African tradition, it took me a while to get over my inferiority complex. Every lunchtime we put money together to buy lunch to eat together. These men would collect their fifty cents and dump them on my desk saying, »You are the woman. You can choose better food at better value than we can«. So I would leave my job to buy the food, then put on a kettle, and prepare the lunch while they continued doing their jobs. I realized that I had to fight this because otherwise it meant that I was partly an organizer and partly their maid. So I said, »If you don't know how to buy food, I'll show you how to do it. We must have a roster of who will buy food and who will wash and clean up«. Their resistance to my suggestion was quite strong, but I refused to continue doing these jobs, and in the end we started to share them.
It was very difficult for a woman to organize men. At forty-two years old, I was a bit young, and men didn't respect my age as they do now. We went to talk to the workers at lunchtime because we weren't allowed to go into the factories. We had to organize very secretly because the management was very against the unions at that time. It is mainly men who work in the metal foundries, so I would be the only woman surrounded by men. Some of them would say, »If you don't make love with us, we're not going to join your union«. I couldn't tell them to go to hell because I wanted their membership, but I couldn't say yes, just because I wanted them to join my union. I told the other organizers about the problems I was having. Sometimes they went with me to tell the men that they had to respect me because I was also an organizer and had been a shop steward before. The men started to recognize that I had once been a worker like themselves. And when the shop stewards saw me negotiate with their bosses, they also started to respect me.
The Transport and General Workers' Union
After working for the Metal and Allied Workers' Union for about two years, I became an organizer for the Transport and General Workers' Union. I started the union from scratch in Johannesburg and became the head of the Transvaal region. By this time I was quite used to men's tricks and could overcome them easily. I wasn't even scared to go and organize them on my own, and I got a lot of memberships. We negotiated for higher wages, holiday allowances, and the right to participate in stayaways. We managed to break down a lot of concrete walls which the management had built around the workers, and we grew tremendously. When I left the Transport and General Workers' Union, there were about twenty-four thousand members and six organizers. It had become a national union with its headquarters in Durban.
Security guards approached us to join our union, so we started organizing them. Then the women cleaners wanted to know why we weren't including them, so I said to my executive committee, »We must extend the constitution to cover the cleaning sectors so we can include these women«. So in 1982,1 started organizing women cleaners, a very neglected group.
The management employed men as supervisors over the cleaning women who worked at night, and these men were sexually harassing the women. The men did whatever they wanted to because the women would lose their jobs if they resisted. The men would report that the women had refused to work if the women wouldn't sleep with them. Every day women would come to my office weeping about being threatened the previous night by this man or that one. I called meetings with the managers about this and woke up the foremen and confronted them. As a result, some of the supervisors were dismissed and the male foremen are being replaced by women in most cases.
We now have about three thousand cleaners involved in this union. When we first organized the night cleaners, these women didn't have any facilities whatsoever. They had to sleep on concrete; there was no carpet, no cooking facilities. They had to eat cold food at 2 a.m. that they had cooked at two in the afternoon before they left for work. They had no resting time. We got them tea and coffee to drink, a little stove to warm their food. They now have an hour or two to sleep and rest. They get two overalls and soap to wash them in. They now work for eight hours, and then they can sleep at their place of work until it is light. We won all these rights for them. The only thing we are still fighting to get is transport to take them home.
Lobola and Women in the Struggle
The men are starting to realize that they cannot win the struggle on their own. But when we return home, men still think we have to do all the shit work because they paid lobola for us. It is as if they have bought us to work for them and we have become their slaves. The men in South Africa are still very backward about this.
I went to a Federation of Transvaal Women workshop on lobola in 1984. It was a really big issue. Some women in FEDTRAW—particularly the older women—still believe that we shouldn't throw away our tradition. They think we must educate men not to misinterpret lobola. But given the way lobola is being interpreted, I think it should be stopped. I don't believe that the objective of lobola in the past was to exploit women. It used to bring two families together. For example, if your family is much better off than mine, that means you have more cattle. If I give you my daughter, you give me a share of your cattle so that I can improve my standard of living. So in the past lobola wasn't the same as buying a woman but an exchange of resources and trying to live more equally. But now the paying of lobola exploits a woman because once a man has paid it, he believes he has bought his wife. That's how my husband interpreted it. I had no voice because I was the woman he had paid for. I had to do everything for him and he could tell me what to do.
I wouldn't accept lobola for my children if it wasn't our African tradition, but I can't change this tradition on my own. I can't give away my children for free. I have one married daughter, and lobola was paid for her. It would have been seen as an insult for me to refuse it. People would say, »Ah, your mother gave you away for nothing. You're just a parcel. You've got no dignity. You've got no right to be here because nothing was contributed for you«.
Men have understood that to be sexist at work is to oppress themselves because management then replaces men with women for lower wages. The men are also fighting for maternity benefit agreements together with women against the management. But men need very strong education about being equal at home and sharing the caring of the children with women.
We women have been having workshops on women's double work load. Women are ready to sit down and discuss it, but we don't know which group to discuss it with. We don't have anywhere to negotiate and bargain and resolve these issues unless the political organizations come together to discuss and confront them.