This article is drawn from Chapters 5 and 6 of my doctoral dissertation, “The Factory Belongs to All Who Work In It: Race, Class, and Collective Action in the South African Motor Industry, 1967–1986” (Columbia University, 1994). The findings reported here are based on more than sixty interviews with workers, union officials, and managers, as well as observation and documentary research conducted between 1986 and 1991. Refer to this work for detailed documentation. The thesis focuses on social science debates on social movements and collective action, and though theoretical matters are not the explicit focus of the present article, an intellectual debt is owed to the following works: Katznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York, 1981);Google ScholarKatznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986);Google Scholar Sidney Tarrow, “Struggle, Politics, and Reform: Collective Action, Social Movements, and Cycles of Protest,” Western Societies Program Occasional Paper No. 21(2nd Edition), Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1991; McAdam, Doug, “Micromobilization Contexts and Recruitment to Activism,” in From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures, ed. Klandermans, Bert, Kriesi, Hanspeter, and Tarrow, Sidney (Greenwich, CT, 1988);Google Scholar and Berlanstein, Lenard R., ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana and Chicago, 1993).Google Scholar I wish to thank Gay Seidman for her valuable and extensive comments on a previous draft of this article, and the participants in the seminar of the Institute for Advanced Social Research, and my colleagues in the Sociology of Work Unit, both at the University of the Witwatersrand. I also wish to thank Cohn Urquhart for permission to reproduce photographs of the 1980 strikes.

1. Throughout this article the term black refers to all people of color, who generally, as a result of their skin color, share broadly similar conditions of exclusion and dispossession under apartheid. The term colored refers to people of mixed-race origins. Indian refers to descendants of persons from the subcontinent who either emigrated to South Africa or came as indentured labor. White refers to the descendants of European colonists and immigrants. Where necessary, the term African is used to distinguish descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of the land from coloreds and Indians. These terms are admittedly imprecise and contested, and the reality to which they refer is itself indeterminate. Yet to write about relations between colored and African workers assumes that the differences between them are experientially real, not just a product of a researcher's conceptual categories.

2. See Carrim, Yunus, “Trade Unionism in Natal: Shopfloor Relations between Indian and African Workers,” South African Labour Bulletin 11 (1986):44–64.Google Scholar For a discussion of the problems encountered organizing colored workers see Hilary, Joffe. “Stayaways in Cape Town, 1986.” paper presented at the Association for Sociology in Southern Africa conference, University of Natal, Durban. 07 1986.Google Scholar Many of the problems associated with organizing across racial lines have been overcome through national-level mergers. such as between two large unions of African and colored clothing and textile workers, and through the development of new organizing strategies.

3. For a discussion of racial despotism, see Webster, Eddie, “A New Frontier of Control? Case Studies in the Changing Form of Job Control in South African Industrial Relations,” in South African Industrial Relations of the 80s, ed. Bendix, Willie (Cape Town, 1988), 72–82;Google Scholar and Webster, Eddie, Cast in A Racial Mould: Labour Process and Trade Unionism in the Foundries (Johannesburg, 1985).Google Scholar

4. Interview with Antonie, Elijah, Kwanobuhle Township. Uitenhage, 09 20. 1990.Google Scholar

5. Interview with Kwinana, Vuyo, Kwanobuhle Township, Uitenhage, 09 20, 1990.Google Scholar

6. Ibid.

7. TUCSA was founded in 1954 as a federation of unions that supported neither the governing National party nor the African nationalist opposition. Its affiliates were composed mostly of white workers and its leadership was almost exclusively composed of white trade unionists.

8. Liaison Committees were a common form of union avoidance in South Africa in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s once unionization picked up. They were composed of equal numbers of workers and managers, though management appointed worker “representatives” and held the casting vote.

9. Lodge, Tom, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg, 1983), 57.Google Scholar

10. In December 1955, 131 TWIU members at Fine Wool Products struck work in protest of forced overtime after the company refused their demand for an overtime rate of two shillings per hour. The workers were found guilty of conducting an illegal strike, but the union won a reversal on appeal. The workers won a wage increase but also established through their legal action an important precedent—that employees could not be compelled to work overtime unless their contract specified such an obligation. See Luckhardt, Ken and Wall, Brenda, Organize … or Starve! The History of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (New York, 1980), 230;Google Scholar “Judges Uphold Appeal by Native Strikers,” Eastern Province Herald, 23 May 1956.

11. In 1963 Mhlaba, a member of MK's high command, was arrested with other senior ANC and MK leaders in the famous Rivonia Raid and was later sentenced, along with Nelson Mandela, to a life sentence for sabotage. Between 1994 and 1997 he was the premier of the Eastern Cape Province.

12. The Pan Africanist Congress had broken away from the ANC in 1959 over disputes related to the ANC's policy of nonracialism.

13. Interview with Antonie, Elijah, Kwanobuhle Township, Uitenhage, 09 20, 1990.Google Scholar

14. Indeed, John Gomomo went on to become Uitenhage organizer for the Ciskei National Independence party. a party contesting for power in the Ciskei homeland, a fictitious “state” created by the apartheid government to give the appearance of granting political rights to Africans. Participants in homeland politics were often branded as sellouts. Gomomo's involvement in the union would thus not provoke either management or the state. His political Orientations soon changed as a result of his union work: He went on to become a full-time shop steward at Volkswagen, vice president and then president of the autoworkers' union, and is today president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the key peak union organization in South Africa. In 1990 he, along with other prominent African unionists, publicly announced their apparently longstanding membership in the South African Communist party, on whose Central Committee he now sits. See the interview with Gomomo, , “Union Organisation in Volkswagen,” South African Labour Bulletin 11 (1985):71–76:Google Scholar and “Profile: John Gomomo,” South African Labour Bulletin 15 (1990):108–9.Google Scholar

15. Interview with Kwinana, Vuyo, Kwanobuhle Township, Uitenhage, 09 20, 1990.Google Scholar

16. Ibid.

17. Interview with Dyasi, Themba, Body Shop, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, 05 28, 1986.Google Scholar

18. Interview with Kwinana, Vuyo, Kwanobuhle Township. Uitenhage, 09 20, 1990.Google Scholar

19. Where previous governments attempted to separate Africans from the rest of the population, the National party's apartheid policy entailed a more thoroughgoing residential and social separation of a number of statutorily defined “racial” groups. The Population Registration Act classified every person into a specific racial category.

20. Before 1952 implementation of these laws was voluntary, and some larger municipalities, such as Port Elizabeth, did not apply them. Furthermore, even after 1952 towns with small African populations were not obliged to enforce the laws, and the Uitenhage Town Council chose not to do so.

21. For a discussion of the Group Areas Act, see Mabin, Alan, “Comprehensive Segregation: the Origins of the Group Areas Act and its Planning Apparatuses,” Journal of Southern African Studies 18 (06 1992):405–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. For further discussion of racial segregation in Port Elizabeth, see Christopher, A.J., “Formal segregation and population distribution in Port Elizabeth,” Contree 24 (1988):5–12;Google ScholarChristopher, , “Apartheid Planning in South Africa: The Case of Port Elizabeth” Geographical Journal 153 (1987):195–204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee also Robinson, Jennifer, “The Power of Apartheid: Territoriality and State Power in South African Cities—Port Elizabeth, 1923–1972” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1990).Google Scholar

23. Anonymous interview, Assembly Hall, Volkswagen South Africa. Uitenhage, June 26, 1986.

24. Anonymous interview, Assembly Hall, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, June 25, 1986.

25. Anonymous interview, Body Shop, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, August 14, 1986.

26. Anonymous interview, Assembly Hall, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, August 6–7, 1986.

27. Anonymous interview, Assembly Hall, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, June 26, 1986.

28. Ibid.

29. See Chapter 6 of my doctoral dissertation.

30. Ibid.

31. Roux, Marianne, “Perspectives and Values of Industrial Workers: The Emergence of Socio-Economic Consciousness Amongst Colored Workers in the Motor Manufacturing Industry in the Eastern Cape” (Ph.D. diss., Stellenbosch University, 1977, 159, 163).Google Scholar

32. See Marqusee, Mike, Anyone But England: Cricket and the National Game (London, 1994)Google Scholar and Mangan, J.A., The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth, 1986).Google Scholar

33. James, C.L.R., Beyond a Boundary (London, 1963).Google Scholar

34. Grundlingh, Albert, “Playing for Power: Rugby, Afrikaner Nationalism and Masculinity in South Africa,” in Beyond the Tryline: Rugby and South African Society, ed. Grundlingh, Albert, Odendaal, André, and Spies, Burridge (Johannesburg, 1995), 113.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., 114.

36. Ibid., 127, 131.

37. Odendaal, André, “South Africa's Black Victorians: Sport and Society in South Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in Pleasure, Profit and Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad, 1700–1914, ed. Mangan, J.A. (London, 1988), 195.Google Scholar

38. Neither rugby nor cricket caught on with Africans in Natal, the Orange Free State. or the Transvaal. Odendaal accounts for the lack of interest in Natal by pointing to the very prominent role of American rather than British missionaries in African education in the province, while the lack of interest in the Afrikaner republics to the north may stem from a similar lack of penetration by English missionaries and the far stronger restrictions on African education and an African middle class there. See Peires, Jeff, “Rugby in the Eastern Cape: A History,” Work in Progress 17 (1981):1–5.Google Scholar

39. Peires, “Rugby in the Eastern Cape,” 3, 5.

40. Indeed, this demonstration effect may have motivated the Town Council in the Eastern Cape city of Grahamstown when it passed a bylaw in the 1960s banning blacks from watching matches between white rugby teams. The action sparked a rare protest, led by rugbyplaying students from the local Rhodes University, who sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and demanded “open admission” to rugby grounds. One of the leaders of the protest, Eddie Webster, now a left-wing professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, remarked on the limits of their protest and white student politics in general at the time: According to Webster, the students had so little contact with black South Africans that “we didn't know blacks played rugby, and never considered protesting for the right to play with blacks!” Interview, Eddie Webster, Johannesburg. September 1994.

41. Blacks here followed the pattern of left-of-center British sports enthusiasts. Marqusee's book takes its title from a comment by the radical Labour Member of Parliament Dennis Skinner, who, when asked what side he supported in test cricket, replied “Anyone but England.” Marqusee, Anyone But England, 250. Black South Africans have long supported the Springbok's opponents, especially in rugby. The attitude has not disappeared, despite the broad political changes in the country as a result of the ANC's 1994 electoral win. In August 1996 a row erupted following a Springbok test match against New Zealand, when the minister of finance, a colored ex-rugby player from the Western Cape, was seen on television enthusiastically cheering for the All Blacks. Notwithstanding the ANC's efforts to promote reconciliation, old enmities die hard, and rugby remains a largely unreconstructed citadel of white power. The minister was not disciplined, and letters and comments in the media suggested that he enjoyed widespread support among blacks.

42. Anonymous interview, Body Shop, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, August 14, 1986.

43. Anonymous interview, Body Shop, Volkswagen South Africa, Uitenhage, June 6, 1986.

44. The University of Fort Hare, located in the town of Alice, 180 kilometers east of Uitenhage, has been called the black Oxford of southern Africa. Rhoxa's path from university graduate to factory worker was an unusual one; Fort Hare alumni routinely took up positions in the few occupations open to a black educated elite. It numbers among its former students some of the leading political figures of African independence movements, including Nelson Mandela; former ANC president Oliver Tambo; Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe; the first leader of the PAC, Robert Sobukwe; and Charles Njonjo, the first attorney general of independent Kenya.

45. Interview with Rhoxa, Elcott, Uitenhage Local Office. National Automobile and Allied Workers' Union, 10 4 and 11 26, 1986.Google Scholar

46. Ibid.

47. 0Interview with Rhoxa, Elcott, Uitenhage Local Office, National Automobile and Allied Workers' Union, 10 4 and 11 26, 1986.Google Scholar

48. Ibid.

49. Tshaka played a surprisingly similar role in the factory. He never stood for election as a shop steward but was extremely important behind the scenes as an activist and “conscientizer” among the rank and file.