With the World Cup upon us, our performance as a soccer nation has come under scrutiny and South Africa has been found sadly lacking. But what are we lacking? Tony Fluxman marvels that despite soccer being a dominant global sport, and hugely popular in South Africa, we tend to view it as a second cousin to cricket and rugby. One of the major problems he believes is the lack of support for soccer within our school education system which urgently needs addressing if we are to become world contenders.
Crispen Chinguno looks at the more short-term benefits of South Africa hosting the World Cup. He notes that trade unions in sectors such as construction and security seized the opportunity to expand their base and made important gains. He also believes, however, that we lost many opportunities to engage with global capital in order to address ‘apartheid legacies of poverty, extreme inequality and worker exploitation.’
Indeed as Katherine Joynt records South Africa is a place of severe poverty. She examined the alarming impact of rising food prices on poor households in Soweto in 2008 and how they coped. One of the strategies used was to simply eat less and Joynt witnessed the conflict within a family over the division of food portions.
Such poverty also hammered Zimbabweans in the same period caused by a combination of political bankruptcy and severe drought. Tatenda Mukwedeya explores how households developed a variety of survival strategies (much wider than Joynt’s Soweto households). An important element was remittances from South Africa and other countries. Remittances first took the form of cash, but as there was little to buy in Zimbabwe, they evolved into large-scale tradable goods and food. Such trading networks, Mukwedeya believes, could continue to be of value to Zimbabwe on its road to economic recovery.
Tradable remittances from South Africa are clearly an important way that foreign nationals enable their families
to survive elsewhere in Africa. In a moving interview, Jean Pierre Lukamba describes his extraordinary journey since
leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo as a refugee in 2006. Indeed one of his survival strategies is to remit South African goods to people back home who sell them for three times the price.
Lukamba has mixed responses to his treatment by South Africans, sadly mostly negative. But in a heartening article Bones Skulu and Keith Jacobs tell of an initiative by the South African catering union Saccawu to ensure that the
South African company Shoprite Checkers, which has extensive operations in Africa, is forced to respect labour standards.
This takes the form of a global agreement which guarantees important worker rights. The agreement carefully lays down how it will be monitored to ensure that Shoprite does not neglect its responsibilities. Unfortunately, as Kholofelo Ngoepe tells after shadowing a group of inspectors, this is not the case with the Department of Labour inspectorate. It appears to be a large sieve through which many employers escape whilst the implementation of our laws on decent wages and conditions simply drains away.
Frequently the Left in South Africa forget the power of unions to enforce basic rights. This is a weakness in an interesting initiative, Conference of the Democratic Left (CDL), which seeks to create a broadbased, working class,
anti-capitalist and participatory dialogue on the way forward for the Left. Vishwas Satgar explains CDL’s aims and outlines the involvement of various left-wing, unemployed and grassroots groups. But sadly the participation of left membership from Cosatu unions was absent at its Gauteng consultative conference in April.
It is not only the CDL that has forgotten the power of labour. Michelle Friedman tells of a disturbing development in the history curriculum in schools. Since Thabo Mbeki’s presidency an unstated agenda in history text books has emerged which promotes a neo-liberal capitalist order. Post 1994 the curriculum had encouraged debates around the role of trade unions and critical engagement with South Africa’s racist past, in the light of class and economic exploitation. This has now disappeared.
The clothing and textile union Sactwu’s recently published Weaving our stories, together stands in contrast to such history as it records through workers’ stories a powerful movement from below. Labour Bulletin carries a review of this book as well as a way to win a copy by recounting your life and work history. Dave Dargie’s wonderful tale of tracking down Zulu bow players also gives a fascinating glimpse into ordinary South African’s colonial past where protest and resistance songs still ring down the ages.
Kally Forrest
Editor