Africa: He Who Controls Labor

Since the brightest, most aggressive young men of Africa are generally the labor leaders, he who controls Africa’s trade unions today may well control the continent tomorrow. No one is more aware of this than Ghana’s ambitious Kwame Nkrumah, who for months has been striving to export his own authoritarian Marxist-style unionism to all of Africa. But everywhere Nkrumah turns, he finds the same stubborn opponent, the West’s International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which has won affiliates in 22 African nations with the argument that the worker fares best under demo cratic unionism in a free society. Last week the two systems clashed head-on at a 38-nation conference in Casablanca to launch the All-African Trade Union Federation, pet project of Nkrumah and such pals as Guinea’s Sekou Toure.

Marx & Meany. Since the agenda skirted such practical labor matters as collective bargaining, the closed shop or overtime, the rafters rang for five days with inflamed speeches denouncing aggression in Cuba, the French in Algeria, French atomic tests in the Sahara—and, of course, colonialism, a subject that set the Ghana-Guinea radicals off in full cry against I.C.F.T.U. and its Western ties. Charging that I.C.F.T.U. was out to sabotage Africa’s labor movement, not encourage it, they argued that any African union that joins the A.A.T.U.F. must cut all its ties with foreign labor groups.

Fact is, from the time it began operations in 1949, I.C.F.T.U. has probably been the biggest single source of help to the weak, scattered trade unions of Africa. Financed by such big Western union organizations as the U.S.’s A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Britain’s Trades Union Congress (who recognize that if the free world’s unions do not show African unionists how to organize, the Communists will), the Brussels-based I.C.F.T.U. maintains six fulltime roving representatives in Africa, pumped in $432.000 in hard cash last year. The money goes for union buildings, instruction in collective bargaining, and education of union officials in lands where labor organizers ride bicycles and preach worker solidarity to illiterates who have never heard of Marx, much less George Meany. I.C.F.T.U. makes a point that colonial officials cannot: that the time and money of union leaders in African lands are far better spent in free bargaining with employers to raise wages than in bitter anticapitalist, antiwhite efforts to wipe the employers out. The very presence in Africa of I.C.F.T.U.’s men as advocates of the employee underdog often strengthens the point that not all Westerners are ”colonialist imperialists.”

Help to Rebels. A.F.L.-C.I.O. pours considerable sums of its own into Africa, last year put up $54,000 toward a new Nairobi headquarters building (Solidarity House) for Mboya’s Kenya Federation of Labor, subsidized Harvard scholarships for several African students, recently allocated another $330,000 to help African labor unions. Sparking this African program is the controversial Irving Brown, 49, bustling, bespectacled A.F.L.-C.I.O. international representative, who is based in Paris but spends most of his time dashing between such places as Tunis, Lagos. Salisbury, and Dakar. It was Brown, and other trade unionists like him, who offered many an African leader comfort and advice when they were considered dangerous subversives by their colonial mentors. For his efforts. French colonial officials once barred Brown from Algeria. A Tunisian rebel, released after arrest by the French in 1955, telephoned Brown the moment he was free: “I will be over to see you in a few minutes. I am free, thanks to you.” His name: Habib Bourguiba, today President of Tunisia.

By rigging the voting at Casablanca, Nkrumah’s allies won their way last week, ramming through a resolution requiring all members of the new A.A.T.U.F. to drop their foreign affiliations within ten months. But Kenya’s Tom Mboya, as well as other loyal I.C.F.T.U.-affiliated union leaders from Tunisia, Nigeria. Liberia and other countries, felt certain they could get the rules changed before the ten-month deadline was up. “We have lost the battle, but not the war,” said Mboya grimly as he departed for home.