Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union
The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) was founded in Cape Town in 1919 with the aim of 'creating one great union' (on the model of the Industrial Workers' of the World which dockworkers in Cape Town has learned about from visiting black American sailors) and its membership grew throughout South Africa until by 1927 it could boast a membership of one hundred thousand - the largest trade union ever to have taken root in the continent of Africa.[1]. No movement before or since has succeeded in mobilizing the rural poor on that scale and the movement also succeeded in mobilizing shack dwellers in Durban on a large scale. Helen Bradford's detailed study[2] describes it as "one of the most radical movements even seen in Southern Africa."
In the 1920s the movement took on a millenarian aspect in the rural Eastern Cape where predictions of airborne liberation by black Americans captured the imagination of thousands of Transkeians. At the same time an outbreak of militant strikes spread through the big cities reeacing their climax in 1920 when forty-thousand African mine-workers downed tools inJohannesburg in demand for higher pay. Farm workers also engaged in militant action across the country. The ICU also made extensive, and often successful, use of the court.
By the late 1920s the ICU faced severe repression, especially the eviction of activists from white farms. However in 1928 the union was still able to play a major role in the famous Women's beer hall boycott in the shack settlements of Durban. During the 1930s the union had its own hall, in Prince Edward street in Durban, and undertook mass marches through the suburb of Sydenham. However by the end of the 1930s the Union's twenty years of militant activism was over. Some blame the leadership from drifting into professionalized self-interest, others blame increasing state repression.
The ICU generally mobilized the underclass (peasants, farm workers and shack dwellers) and faced constant condescension from the elite nationalism of the African National Congress and the elite dominated European orientated Communist Party of South Africa. Orthodox Marxist analysis, which often retains a suspicion of the underclass, today largely contains to see the ICU as not particularly significant despite is unparalleled size and ability to organize across the rural/urban divide. However analysis more sympathetic to an autonomous and self directed politics of the poor is increasingly revisiting the history of the ICU. Anarchist scholarsCite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).