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Title: Revolutionary Joburg
Author: Zabalaza
Date: August 2002
Language: en
Topics: South Africa, Zabalaza
Source: Retrieved on 11th August 2021 from https://zabalaza.net/2002/08/03/zabalaza-3-august-2002/
Notes: Published in Zabalaza #3.

Zabalaza

Revolutionary Joburg

Welcome to Joburg, the heartland of the revolutionary industrialised

working class in South Africa! Following the discovery of gold here more

than 110 years ago, Joburg has developed as the lynchpin of SA’s

smokestack economy – and as one of the most unsustainable cities in

Africa, with water for industry and the rich having to be piped in from

Lesotho, hundreds of kilometres away, while the poor are simply cut off

from this basic resource.

But Joburg has a long radical fighting tradition: it was here that

“Pickhandle” Mary Fitzgerald lead militant strikers in street-fighting

against the police who were defending the bosses’ interests during the

1913 strikes; it was here that aircraft were used for the first time in

“peace-time” to bomb civilians, during the 1922 Rand Revolt; it was here

that in 1946, thousands of black miners downed tools and rose up against

their oppressors; it was here that in 1976, school-children risked death

and started an uprising against apartheid capital that echoed around the

world; and it was here in 1985, that the final, successful struggle

against the racist regime was begun by unions, civics, community militia

and popular committees.

Importantly, it was here in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution,

that the racially-divided workforces of the then-British dominion were

united by anarchists like Thomas “TW” Thibedi and Reuben Kaplan of the

International Socialist League (ISL) founded the Industrial Workers of

Africa (IWA). Based on the anarchist-influenced revolutionary

syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the IWA was

probably the first trade union for black workers in British colonial

Africa and it established branches in Joburg and Cape Town. Other IWA

anarchists like RK Moodley and Bernard Sigamoney founded the Indian

Workers’ Industrial Union (IWIU) in Durban along similar lines in the

same year, while two years later, “coloured” IWA militants set up two

unions in the diamond-mining centre of Kimberley.

Today, the anarchist direct-action tradition of poor communities,

exploited workers and the dispossessed peasantry united against the

murderous plans of the ANC mandarins is continuing the fight. Job losses

since racist capital transformed itself into bourgeois capital have

reached 1-million (with some 40% unemployed), 3,5-million have been cut

off from water and electricity and 1,5-million evicted from their homes.

Almost 57% of all South Africans are living in poverty, 75% have

inadequate food security, and 21,6% of all young children are stunted by

malnutrition. Those responsible, our enemies, include Trevor Manuel, the

smug Minister of Finance, who also happens to be chairman of the World

Bank – and so-called “communist” Ministers Jeff Radebe (state

businesses), Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi (civil service) and Charles

Nqakula (police), who all act as key Trojan horses in the ANC’s war on

the poor. Then there’s fat-cat Joburg Metro Mayor Amos Masondo whose

house we fucked up after his hired goon fired shots at our desperate,

hungry and broke demonstrators – while he was schmoozing in Hawaii,

planning the W$D talk shop on how to sugar-coat global misery.

The message is simple:

WE WILL MAKE THIS COUNTRY UNGOVERNABLE BY THE PARASITES!

WE KICKED OUT THE RACISTS – AND WE’LL KICK YOU OUT TOO!