Revisiting the Relationship between Labour and Nationalist Movements in Southern Africa

The important role played by African trade unions in struggles against neo-liberalism, autocracies, and apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s – and more recently, in the Arab Spring – renewed scholarly interest in union politics and history. This included numerous case studies and comparative-historical analyses, focussing on issues like the causes of union involvement in such struggles, the sources of union resilience in the face of difficult economic and political conditions, and the impact of unions on political reform, including on new governments; the new body of work also sought antecedents of current union activity in unionism under European colonialism. Focusing on Eswatini, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe from the 1930s, this paper revisits this literature, arguing that Southern Africa’s unions have a richer, and more complicated history and politics than often acknowledged. Structuralist explanations, reliance on general categories like democratisation, political alignment and protest, a naturalisation of nationalism,and a focus on dominant union federations and political parties, have tended to homogenise labour movements, elide the importance of union and workers’ politics, and underplay the different modalities of union-party relationships and of union engagement in larger struggles. The paper draws attention to the fraught relationship between unions and nationalist movements, dating back well into the colonial era, the role of moderate and right-wing unionism and of religious and leftist influences, the persistence of anti-party and anti-politics sentiments, the importance of looking at union-based co-operatives, production and services, and workers’ complicated relationship to neo-liberalism. In closing, the paper suggests some new directions in categorising types of trade unionism, and for southern African labour studies more generally.