Labour Struggles in Southern Africa, 1919-1949

New Perspectives on the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU)
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-7969-2641-8
Verlag: HSRC Press

Buch, Englisch, 390 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Thirteen original chapters by major scholars examine different aspects of the ICU's record in the 1920s and 1930s, assessing its achievements and its failures in relation to the post-apartheid present. In its syndicalist One Big Union approach to protecting workers' rights; its emphasis on economic freedoms; its internationalism; and its robust protection of women and migrant workers, the ICU challenged fundamentally the axioms, tactics, and programmes of rival organisations like the African National Congress. More than simply an exercise in excavating a crucial chapter in struggle history, this volume demonstrates that the traditions and legacies of the ICU are of great relevance to contemporary Southern Africa.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Industrialisierung
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Afrikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Gewerkschaften, Industrielle Beziehungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- ICU Map
- Introduction
- Section A The ICU in Southern Africa
- Chapter 1: The ICU, the Mines and the State in South West Africa, 1920-1926: Garveyism, Syndicalism and Global Labour History, Lucien van der Walt.
- Chapter 2: The Rabble-rouser: Robert Sambo's ICU Stint in Rhodesia, Anusa Daimon.
- Chapter 3: Organising the Unorganised: ICU Internationalism and the Transnational Unionisation of Migrant Workers, Henry Dee.
- Section B Local and Regional Histories of the ICU
- Chapter 4: The ICU in Free State Dorps and Dorpies, Peter Limb and Chitja Twala
- Chapter 5: The ICU and Local Politics: Kroonstad, from the Late 1920s to the 1930s, Tshepo Moloi.
- Chapter 6: Trouble Brewing: The ICU, the 1925 Bloemfontein Riots and the Women Question, Nicole Ulrich.
- Chapter 7: The ICU in the Western Transvaal, 1926-1934: Re-imagining Ideological, Spatial and Political Realities, Laurence Stewart.
- Chapter 8: The ICU in Port-Elizabeth: The Making of a Union-cum-Protest Movement, 1920-1931, Noor Nieftagodien.
- Chapter 9: 'Home Truths' and the Political Discourse of the ICU, Phil Bonner.
- Section C Factions and Legacies of the ICU
- Chapter 10: Leadership Contestations and Worker Mobilisation in the Early Years of the Twentieth Century: Selby Msimang and the ICU, 1919-1921, Sibongiseni Mkhize.
- Chapter 11: The Communist Party of South Africa and the ICU, 1923 – 1931, Tom Lodge.
- Chapter 12: Elizabeth van Heyningen, Illusion and Disillusion: White Women and the ICU
- Chapter 13: The Romance and the Tragedy of the ICU, David Johnson.
- About the Editors
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index

Über Autor(innen)

David Johnson is Professor of Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (Clarendon Press, 1996), Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation (Edinburgh University/ UCT Press, 2012) and Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia (Edinburgh University/ UCT Press, 2019); the principal author of Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (Butterworths, 2001); the co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Edinburgh UP, 2008), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Palgrave, 2015). Stuart Hood: Twentieth-Century Partisan (Cambridge Scholars, 2021), and 'I See You!' The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa, 1919-1930 (HiPSA, 2022). He is the General Editor of the Edinburgh UP series Key Texts in Anti-Colonial Thought.