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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL 379

Table 25.1 Culture activists in Natal’s trade unions: Index of hardships, 1986–92 (N = 120)
Type of hardship % experiencing it
1. Deaths 6.6
2. Homelessness due to persecution/incl. burning down of home 18.3
3. Assaults, skirmishes and violent combat/incl. hospitalization (but not death) 50.0
4. Unable to practice, rehearse or organize events in their community due to victimization or violence 39.2
5. Still active in cultural work 38.7
6. Job loss/retrenchment 23.5
7. Able to improve life-chances and jobs because of creative involvement 17.5
8. Still in their old jobs 40.8
9. Participation in strikes and stayaways 80.0

This crude index compiled from bio-data reveries, and sleeplessness and anxiety –
is useful for some sociological observations: phenomena which may be termed ‘anomie’.
there is no doubt that the majority were part Fourth, a small number experienced job
and parcel of a militant labour and political mobility through their prominence in cre-
challenge in the region. Eighty percent of ative and educational work. They emerged as
them participated fully in at least one strike leaders and were employed in NGOs and
and one stayaway in the period from provided some of the leadership of mass
1986–92. Those who did not were mostly democratic movement organizations.
Inkatha Freedom Party members who Nowhere in this group’s experience was
rejected the calls for stayaways and partici- there any sense of promotion within manage-
pated rather in what I have termed a move- rial structures. Rather the distances between
ment for revaluation, a counter-mobilization their orientations and managements were
against COSATU. enormous.
Second, most lost their jobs. Although in The group nurtured a shop floor culture
some cases victimization was alleged, the based on low trust of any employer initiative,
majority were victims of the recessionary and a sense of distance that buttressed the
conditions, of the famous ‘downsizing’ of resistance to management ideas. They saw
lean production and its retrenchment poli- the factory as a necessary evil. For most, it
cies. In approximately half of the cases of job was imposed by their migrant contract and
loss, protest by co-workers turned into a influx controls; for many of the younger gen-
strike, but the effort at reinstatement was eration it was a degrading place, a place to
unsuccessful. run away from.
Third, violence seriously affected the In short, black workers were caught in
lives, the homesteads and the activities of work routines that were simple and repetitive
these people. Between 1986 and 1988 vio- in a world that cared little about them; within
lence involved assassinations and raids on relationships that lacked a moral foundation,
homesteads, with people fleeing after such within languages they did not speak and
attacks and not returning. From 1990 on, it which excluded them, within roles that were
seems there was community self-defense, foreign to them. Out of these elements, they
fewer people fleeing and an increase of created a culture of solidarity.
people being hospitalized after ‘battles’. Since the 1990s, there has been a trans-
However one examines this, it will remain a formation of the institutional matrix that gov-
shocking testament of the ruthlessness of the erned black lives in South Africa. Not only
Apartheid period and the ‘violence’ in Natal. have managerial practices changed, affirma-
About 15% of the workers in this study tive action policies proliferated, new oppor-
reported serious psychological paroxysms, tunities for black people to accumulate by
an incapacity to cope, depression, pessimistic monopolizing resources and finally the