Thirty Years Since the Durban Strikes: Black Working-Class Leadership and the South African Transition

The article explores core themes arising from a sustained ethnography spanning South Africa’s transition to democracy. Focusing on emerging tensions in what used to be a strong horizontal solidarity of ‘comradeship’ since the 1980s, it explores why the ‘elastic band’ that held the movement together still holds despite class mobility, divergent socioeconomic needs and mounting challenges to its ‘elasticity’. In this longitudinal study of 400 people the author traces the shifts in consciousness and notions of solidarity and analyses how livelihood strategies, notions of race and ethnicity and most importantly notions of class had been redefined by the year 2000. This article is for a generation of black worker leaders who, since the 1973 Durban strikes that ushered the new trade unions onto the historical stage, were a core component of the resistance against racial domination and economic inequality in the country.