Organize... or Starve! - The history of the SACTU
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Organize... or Starve! - The history of the SACTU
by Luckhardt & Wall (1980)
Preface
Book Cover: Organize... or Starve! - The history of the SACTU. Source: anc.org.za
Twenty-five years ago, on 5 March 1955, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was founded at a Conference in Johannesburg. For a quarter of a century, SACTU has distinguished itself as the first non-racial trade union coordinating body, promoting the common class interests of all workers, regardless of race or colour. SACTU has also been in the forefront of the political struggle against the national oppression of all Black people in South Africa - Africans, Indians and Coloureds. The purpose of this book is to commemorate SACTU's twenty-fifth anniversary and in so doing call upon all progressive forces, in South Africa and throughout the world, to redouble their efforts to bring an end to the Apartheid system.
The history presented in these pages is necessarily incomplete. Hundreds of SACTU documents have through the years been confiscated in raids carried out by the South African state; they are stored in government buildings, unavailable to the millions of Black South Africans who are deprived of the opportunity to study and learn from the struggles of the recent past. Far more important than the loss of recorded history are the many comrades, veteran trade union leaders, who are forced to waste their lives rotting in the prisons of Apartheid. Their crime? That of struggling for a free and democratic South Africa, devoid of all forms of racial oppression and class exploitation.
For these reasons, the complete history of the workers' struggle against Apartheid, led by SACTU, can only be told after liberation. The prison gates will be flung open wide and the state archives will become a people's library accessible to all friends of the Revolution. Only under those conditions will all aspects of this long struggle - the gains, the setbacks and the sacrifices - be available for critical analysis and investigation.
These realities should not cause despair, but instead should inspire everyone to work that much harder for the day of liberation when not only the rich history of the South African struggle can be fully recorded but the new society of the future created. This book, based on all existing SACTU documents and materials available outside South Africa, is meant to be another step forward in this process. The primary purpose is to pay tribute to the dedication of SACTU workers through a documentation of the role that SACTU has played in the liberation struggle for the past twenty-five years.
Source From www.anc.org.za
