With shouts of Afrika!’: The 1952 textile strike at good hope textiles, King William's town

Abstract

This paper, through a detailed examination of one of the biggest and most significant strikes in the East London region, suggests its importance lies both in the events and processes of the strike itself, and in its longer term impact on political traditions of union and popular struggle. It argues that a dynamic relationship developed between a newly emergent industrial working class in the textile industry, and an equally rapidly established local ATWIU, and local ANC branch. This resulted in the merging of a pattern of worker discontent and strike action with the ANCs Defiance Campaign in particular, and in so doing, the nature and direction of the strike was transformed. Finally it is argued that the defeat of this ‘mass’ strike of defiance by the textile workers, laid the patterns and built the disillusions of future labour struggles in the region. © 1990 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.