Organising for control: the Garment Workers' Union, The Indian Tailoring Section and the South African Clothing Workers' Union, 1928-1936

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The Making of Class, 9-14 February, 198

Posing biographical questions to deep pasts

No abstract

Commemorations and conflicts in the production of South African national pasts : the 1952 Jan van Riebeeck tercentenary festival

Bibliography: pages 356-385.This thesis investigates how the icon of Jan van Riebeeck acquired a position of prominence in South African public pasts through the government sponsored festival organised in 1952 to commemorate his landing three hundred years previously. From the seventeenth to the midtwentieth centuries van Riebeeck and the landing in 1652 had, through commemorative events, school text books and the publication of the Dutch East India Company journal for the period when he was commander at the Cape of Good Hope, acquired different meanings. These ranged from conveying Christianity to southern Africa, to initiating British colonial rule and providing the ancestry for an Afrikaner volk. tVsing material from the various planning committees for the tercentenary celebrations, newspaper reports, pamphlets, high school year books, interviews with organisers and participants, radio broadcasts and documentary film footage, this thesis argues that the festival in 1952 selected elements from these various pasts to construct a Van Riebeeck as the founder figure of a racially exclusive settler nation in South Africa. The pasts that were produced for this festival of European settler founding often resulted from negotiations between opposing groups over its constituent elements, what events and personalities should be included and excluded and how they should be represented. It was immensely difficult to produce this consensual past, particularly as local identities often clashed with the national pasts the festival was attempting to construct and the audiences viewed the exhibitions and performances in a variety of different ways. There was also a massive boycott of the proceedings by those whom the festival organisers attempted to incorporate into its displays and audiences as, separate, developing 'non-European' ethnic entities. One of the most notable aspects of the boycott campaigns against the festival was that they largely mirrored and inverted its symbols. Instead of subverting the images of the festival, they therefore unintentionally bolstered and sustained their significance in South African public pasts

Support or control: The children of the Garment Workers' Union, 1939-1948

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented March 1985Various historians have pointed out that during the first three decades of the twentieth century both capital and the state incorporated white wage earners in South Africa into institutionalised structures (1). The white workers lost all their militancy, developed a racist hierarchical division of labour, became entrapped in the hegemony of bourgeois politics and their trade unions slipped into the morass of bureaucracy. White workers, however, were not simply trapped by the state and capital. Incorporation was a process which took over twenty years or more to accomplish and was determined by specific conditions facing white workers and trade unions, in particular on the Witwatersrand, during this period. White workers rather eased themselves into a trap, lowered the gate, bolted it and threw away the key (2). There is one group of white workers which, it is maintained, managed to resist this incorporation: the clothing workers on the Witwatersrand in the 1930s and 40s. These workers were Afrikaner women who were active members of the Garment Workers' Union (GWU), a trade union which, it is claimed, under the leadership of Solly Sachs (its general secretary from 1928 to 1952), displayed a high degree of militancy, established internal democratic structures, assumed an independent political role and firmly committed itself to non-racialism (3). Perhaps the most important claim made on behalf of the union is the last for it has been used to justify many a theoretical position in the South African political arena. Solly Sachs himself used it to criticise the Communist Party's almost exclusive concern with black workers (4). Basil Davidson, writing in the New Statesman in 1950, wrote that the nonracialism in the Garment Workers' Union represented the hope that Afrikaners would forego their racialism and that black and white could co-operate in a future free South Africa (5). More recently Fine, de Clercq and Innes used the GWU's commitment to non-racialism as an example of how workers need not simply become incorporated into racial structures if trade unions registered under government sponsored legislation (6). All these assertions are based on an unquestioning acceptance of the Garment Workers' Union's official version of its stance towards black workers in the industry. The GWU always maintained that it welcomed blacks into its organisation, supported their struggles and through this assistance black workers acquired substantial benefits such as higher wages and shorter working hours (7). This paper will attempt to examine this rendition critically, looking particularly at the period 1939 to 1948, a time when black workers started entering the clothing industry on the Witwatersrand in significant numbers. However, we must first briefly survey the period 1929 to 1938 for in those years the roots of the GWU's policies towards black workers in the clothing industry were implanted (8)

Archives, museums and autobiography: reflections on write your own history (with a small detour to the University of Bophuthatswana)

This article is the beginning of a series of critical reflections on three projects that employed different technologies to produce histories that were signalled as interior to collectivities of community and assertions of personhood: The Write Your Own History project and book, which was published in the 1980s, which I co-ordinated and wrote, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 40 kilometres outside central Cape Town, which opened in 2000 and where I have served on the museum board since its inception, and the University of the Western Cape-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive. The three projects of writing history, museum making and archive assemblage I want to suggest can be connected. Not only are they points in what might be seen as a biographic positioning, of thinking about my own involvement as a writing project coordinator, engaged museum board member and a collector of documents, but they also are about history in the public domain and about what is constituted as the category of history. There is a concern in recovering and representing “words” of pasts and turning them into history. So what I do is run these three together; write your own history, make your own museum, assemble your own collection as a way to think about how words are made into history. Yet even in writing this I want to hesitate. How does one attach value to the personal “I” and “our”, and how does that translate into “your own”? And part of that autobiographical hesitation takes us on a diversion to a university in a town then named Mmabatho in apartheid’s bantustan of Bophuthatswana, some twenty odd kilometres from the Ramatlabama border post with Botswana

"The Horse that made it all the way: towards a political biography of Issie Heymann"

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 1990

The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck tercentenary festival: constructing and contesting public national history

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Myths, Monuments, Museums; New Premises? 16-18 July, 199

Sir Harry Smith and his imbongi: local and national identities in the Eastern Cape, 1952

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Museums, Histories and the Dilemmas of Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s series of “Working Papers in Museum Studies” presents emerging research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, all focused on the multiple concerns of the modern museum and heritage studies field. Contributions from scholars, members of the museum profession and graduate students are represented. Many of these papers have their origins in public presentations made under the auspices of the Museum Studies Program. We gratefully thank the authors published herein for their participation.This paper was first presented as part of the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s “Issues in Museum Studies” lecture series on March 11, 2009. Leslie Witz is Professor of History at University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77459/1/3_witz_2010.pd

‘The voices of the people involved’: Red, representation and histories of labour

The installation artwork Red by Simon Gush (with his collaborators James Cairns and Mokotjo Mohulo) evokes two senses of representation. One is of symbolism, meaning, visual strategies, juxtapositions, silences and so on. The other appears as the authority to speak on behalf of the views of an individual or an assemblage such as ‘the workers’, ‘the community’ or ‘the people’. In this article I employ this double sense of the term to consider how the voice of the worker has been deployed in the production of South African labour histories. I do this through examining what was arguably the major labour history publication in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, the South African Labour Bulletin. It devoted a large part of its November 1990 issue to the strike and sleep-in at the Mercedes-Benz plant in East London in that year, the same set of events that Gush drew upon over twenty years later. I then turn to the installation Red itself, originally exhibited in 2014 at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg and the following year at the Ann Bryant Gallery in East London. In Red, events were made into history through voices and images on film and the fabrication of artefacts for display: ‘strike uniforms’, a ‘Mandela car’ and ‘sleep-in strike beds’. The latter were presented in the installation’s publicity as speculative reconstructions and counterposed with interviews in the film component that were depicted as ‘the voices of the people involved’ from management and labour. Instead I argue for seeing these both a speculative reconstructions. Linking this to the spatialising technologies of museums I examine how the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum in Cape Town and the Workers Museum in Johannesburg, evoke voice and words in their depictions of migrant labour. Locating the Labour Bulletin and these museums alongside Red provides an opportunity to think of alternative ways that labour histories may be produced in both the academy and the public domain.DHE