Henry Dee’s biography of Clements Kadalie is a remarkable achievement. Kadalie himself is well known to historians of Southern Africa as the larger-than-life character who founded the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), and whose erudite and biting commentaries make for a rich source of quotes. The ICU is well known, too, as the first mass organization of African workers in the region, briefly reaching as many as 250,000 members before shattering into mutually hostile factions.
Over the last two decades, historians have reassessed the significance of the ICU by emphasizing its status as a transnational organization rather than an unsuccessful precursor to national liberation movements or a cautionary tale on how not to organize a union. Militant Migrants is part of this reassessment but goes further to investigate why the ICU tried to organize workers in a transnational way and why it failed. Dee persuasively situates this transnational orientation in a particular and brief historical moment of greater regional integration in Southern Africa in the 1920s.
Economic integration in the form of the wide acceptance of new colonial currencies and customs along with the rapid expansion of the road network and rising vehicle ownership spurred greater migration. The people who formed the ICU were immersed in this, and part of the reason why the ICU sought to organize migrant workers is because almost all leading ICU members were themselves migrant workers. Many were drawn from the large diaspora of Malawians in South Africa, but others came from further afield, including West Africa, Zanzibar, and the Caribbean. Sometimes, the origins of workers were not clear as identities were malleable. Malawians in Johannesburg often registered as Mozambicans and there is a fantastic section about how the same people in Cape Town could present themselves as Malawian, Mozambican, Zanzibari, or Coloured, as circumstances warranted.
One of these “Zanzibaris” in Cape Town was Kadalie, who was himself a serial migrant. Born in Malawi (then Nyasaland), he subsequently lived in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and East London and undertook a lengthy tour of Europe. These kinds of mobile lives usually require a wide-ranging search for scattered archival material, and here Dee has set a new standard. The breadth of research underpinning this book is extraordinary and a testament to several years of tenacious research. Material from Malawi, Britain, and South Africa, including a thorough search of provincial archives in the latter, can be expected, but there are also sources from New Delhi, Montreal, and six private collections from families whose lives became entangled with Kadalie’s. The other benefit of this thorough archival trawl is the rich series of illustrations accompanying the book, including pictures of leading ICU members, meetings, and publications.
The book is organized chronologically around Kadalie’s life and the broader milieu of political activists and Malawian migrants. Militant Migrants mostly follows Kadalie, but when Kadalie first moves to Cape Town in 1918 the narrative switches to Johannesburg, the destination of most Malawians. This approach makes the book something of a group biography of the people swept up around Kadalie and the ICU. Albert Batty, for instance, is first spotted in Cape Town in 1919 advising Kadalie to form a union; he then reappears eight years and 120 pages later in Durban leading the ICU’s educational efforts and as Kadalie’s antagonist.
This emphasis on the wider milieu successfully captures the broader influences around the ICU – like the millenarian Christian movements in Malawi – as well as the tumultuous political and personal lives of leading ICU members and the raucous culture around the organization. The union had dance halls, organized May Day marches headed by a jazz band complete with a piano, squandered membership fees on alcohol and travel, held mass meetings enlivened by drunken speakers, maintained relaxed attitudes to extramarital affairs, and was wracked by interminable violent feuds. Kadalie once accidentally dropped his briefcase and women’s underwear spilled out. When times were good, the union’s leaders seemed to live in a whirlwind of alcohol, new cars, and sex.
Something of the person of Kadalie is lost in this emphasis on the wider milieu, though. Kadalie was like many of his contemporaries, but he was also unlike them in important ways. One was his enormous capacity for self-education, and the range of topics he referred to in his speeches and writings – quoting Walter Scott’s poetry from a century previously or Marcus Garvey as the mood took him – was astounding. Dee treats his “becoming something of an intellectual magpie” (p. 93) a little briefly, though few, if any, of his contemporaries were better read. I had hoped for more on this.
Dee emphasizes the ICU’s transnational aspirations and the importance of migrant workers in the union and in unionization more broadly. These aspirations were defeated by the growing ability of states to make newly established borders a reality through deportations and passports. Kadalie tried to strengthen the connections made with African-American trade unions through exchanging publications and correspondence with a personal visit to the United States but was blocked from travelling. Plans to unionize migrant miners were blocked by the deportation of ICU organizers from Malawi, where many of the miners came from, and South Africa. Kadalie himself was banned from entering Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and his travel even within South Africa was frequently restricted.
Yet the ICU’s transnational aspirations were also limited by popular xenophobic attitudes even among the ICU’s own ranks. The union’s politics were more ambiguous and contradictory than previously understood, as Dee explains. The ICU sought to organize migrant workers and, at other times, encouraged the South African government to expel them. ICU publications attacked Mozambican miners for “their stupidity” (p. 141), but the union also organized wildcat strikes when Mozambican women were threatened with deportation. Some irate ICU members even demanded Kadalie himself be deported as the union disintegrated.
While stressing the importance of Kadalie and his ideas, Dee does not whitewash him. He shows that Kadalie endorsed segregation at times and forged strikingly unlikely alliances. One of the more astonishing of these was with the National Party, the Afrikaner nationalist party that subsequently implemented apartheid. Incredibly, the National Party donated to the union’s funds and covered the expenses for publishing the ICU’s Workers’ Herald in 1924. In return, Kadalie publicly backed the party at the 1924 election. The previous year, the ICU’s annual conference had been addressed by a prominent member of the newly founded Communist Party of Great Britain, Tom Mann. The hard lines of opposition drawn during the apartheid period were still blurry in these years.
These years did see the clearer emergence of national borders, national identities, and a consequent closing down of transnational possibilities. It is this that led to the ICU’s failure, rather than the continual inability of the union’s leadership to handle personal animosities or Kadalie’s personal failings, notably his persistent financial impropriety and addiction to alcohol. “State-centred solidarities” (p. 289) became the norm. Antagonism towards migrant workers also became commonplace. Malawians in particular were depicted as parasitic gangsters who pioneered new forms of violent crime, lured women away from their families, and occupied jobs that rightly belonged to South Africans, or “Union natives” in contemporary parlance.
Xenophobia in Southern Africa is often understood as a recent phenomenon, and what is astonishing to me is how the xenophobia of the 1920s was almost identical to present-day xenophobia. Both the problems attributed to migrants (stealing goods, jobs, and women) and the purported solutions to these problems (primarily deporting migrants) were the same then as they are today. The historical roots of xenophobia are crying out for investigation.
A short concluding chapter looks at the legacies of the ICU. Many ICU members went on to become leading figures in new trade unions while others became active in nationalist politics across the region, but the way the ICU failed meant its approach became a cautionary tale for trade unionists even a century later. It is remarkable that, even in the 2000s, prominent South African trade unionists were warning workers about the dangers of “Kadalism” (p. 288). Dee argues this is unfair. Before the ICU, people argued about whether African workers could be organized; afterwards, about how. Moreover, the ICU’s willingness to organize migrant workers and informal workers seems ever more relevant today.
