Workers strike to break the chains

At wark while the white foreman looks on. racialist and repressive government faces its biggest challenge for decades in the 9,000strong Ovambo strike in SW Africa. • For the first time since brutal police activity five years ago, African workers -driven to work for international companies virtually in chains - have defied the police state and struck in Windhoek and Walvis Bay.

The strikers, mainly from Ovamboland in the N. are demanding an end to the vicious contract-labour scheme operated by Africa, or a return to their homeland.

The strike could paralyse the country. It has far wider implications than the immediate complaint against working conditions.

For based on the labourcontract schemean open form of slavery-is the prosperity of large mining and industrial concerns in the country.

The scheme has been at the centre of many previous protests. This time however, a General Strike. illegal in terms of S African law, takes place in political climate of increasing reaction.

Without Cheap labour from Ovamboland, industrialists could do little with the enormously rich potential mining wealth SW África.

So far the apartheid regime has used the labour scheme a form of indirect rule in the bush.

Recruitment of labour from these areas is a national institution. Individual companies work through semi-government agency called the New SW African Labour Association.

The agency is paid by employers to into various tribal areas of Ovamboland and -with the help of tribal chiefs -pick out able-bodied men for work in the southern mines and factories.

Selection is left entirely at the discretion of the tribal Once selected the men. then graded into three categories: firstly, the physically fit ones to heavy industrial work; secondly, the light industry workers, and finally those capable of doing only domestic work.

Every worker recruited through the scheme has to carry an identification disc around the neck specifying the grade and Earlier this 'year the International Court of Justice, meeting in the Hague, declared S Africa's presence in the territory illegal.

But Balthazar Vorster's apartheid regime has too much at stake in SW Africa to be able to listen to humanitarian gestures from a bourgeois court.

In the current confrontation, his government could bring in troops to start work in industry and break the strike.

S Africa has already moved in outside labour, which many observers believe to be army men in civilian clothes.

The other alternative, of course, would be another SharpeVille and a massacre of Ovambo strikers. Vorster has hesitated far in displaying any: open military involvement.

He knows that for decades the Ovambos centre of underground guerrilla activity. Windhoek for many the stronghold of the SW African People's Organization. Many members the capital operating under great pressure placed by illegality and police terror.

government has already deported about 20 of the strike leaders, along with 1,000 others, back to their homeland. But this has only hardened the strike.

Katatura, the newly-built townships for African workers, the situation is tense.

The Ovambos living there are refuse to eat the food prepared municipal officials. Police armed pistols, truncheons and equipment rounded the area and sealed it off completely.

Katatura came into being when the authorities decided to demolish an older location near Windhoek which happened to be too near to the 'white area'.

The township is divided into sections, each inhabited, by one ethnic group, and includes the compound where the contract labourers from the N live.

Earlier this year the police organized SWOOD the 'Ovambo compound' arresting 800. Ninety-two of them were either detained or sent back to Ovamboland while the rest were forced to continue work.

A similar swoop at this stage would be nothing new to the Ovambos.

In the words of a SWAP publication, the system has produced many of the traits which were found among inhabitants of Hitler's concentration camps: violence, desperation and moral 'One of the basic facts is that people are treated as objects and not human beings. and this inhuman treatment leads to degeneration and suffering unheard of elsewhere.' Ull The struggle for power most obscene of places.

Importing FIDEL CASTRO'S conciliation remarks about the Catholic church during his Chilean tour were not made by chance. A general reconciliation is taking place between his Cuban regime and the church.

Priests are being ordained again for the first time since Castro took over. To remedy the shortage, another 150 foreign priests have been allowed into the country.

The church was closely linked to the wealthy Cuban ruling class and the Batista regime. Most priests fled or were expelled after the revolution.

The church itself paved the way for a reconciliation by giving the regime tacit support, accepting that it is likely to last for some time.

In other Latin American countries, where reactionary regimes are earning popular contempt, or are likely to be overturned, the church is adopting a more discreet attitude than it had in Batista's Cuba.

Earlier this year a number of priests caused something of an uproar in conservative circles by giving up a whole day to cutting sugar cane.

Practising Catholics are said to ›e a small part of the population, out they include a number of Castro's comrades-in-arms from the Sierra Maestra days.

However, Castro can do with the support of the church both in Cuba and in other Latin American countries.

The reconciliation helps to define the nature of the Cuban revolution and shows that it is not an export product.