South Africa Fighting On

The narrow streets of downtown Johannesburg were strangely silent last week. Black workers and shoppers who normally jam the district by day were nowhere to be seen. Stores did desultory business; restaurants closed their doors. In ( Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, residents remained inside their homes.

For three days, 2 million to 3 million black South Africans stayed away from their jobs and classrooms in what was perhaps the nation’s biggest and longest general strike. Organized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a 700,000-member black umbrella group, the walkout proved that Pretoria’s two- year-old state of emergency — renewed last week for another year — had failed to crush opponents of apartheid. The general strike, protesting proposed changes that would toughen South Africa’s already restrictive labor laws, defied a February order that banned COSATU and 17 other militant groups from all political action.

Labeled a “national peaceful protest” to skirt the February ban, the walkout paralyzed manufacturing and transportation throughout the country. Nearly 80% of black service and industrial employees stayed off the job in Johannesburg and other major cities. The Association of Chambers of Commerce estimated the cost of the protest at $250 million nationwide. The sector least affected by the action was South Africa’s important mining industry, where less than 10% of black workers put down their tools. Most miners, who live at the mines and are insulated from the political passions of the townships, simply walked to work.

Elsewhere, sporadic violence punctuated the event. Mobs attacked bus drivers and taxi owners who refused to stay off the road: dozens of buses were stoned and fire bombed. One fire-bomb victim died in Natal province, where police reported eleven deaths during the three days.

By and large, police and government officials avoided cracking down on the protest. In Cape Town, Minister of Manpower Pieter du Plessis offered to discuss the proposed labor-law amendments with COSATU. He declared that the controversial bill, which bans sympathy walkouts and, according to COSATU, encourages management to sue unions for losses incurred through unlawful strikes, was not in its final form. The conciliatory statement confirmed that despite two years of repression, black labor unions could still make their voices heard.