The Labour Movement in the Sudan, 1946–1955, by Saad ed din Fawzi

[p034] Labour on the Nile— The Labour Movement in the Sudan, 1946-1955, by Saad ed din Fawzi, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Oxford University Press, 25s.) IT is a commonplace that Africa is undergoing an industrial revolution. This revolution, however, is sadly one-sided and localized: it has special features which are part of the general colonial legacy. By this I do not merely mean that industry in colonial Africa has largely developed in directions deter- mined by the needs of the imperialist countries for raw materials and for markets for their goods etc. This has obviously been the force which has led to the development of extractive industries (mining etc.) food processing, trans- port and service industries, to the virtual exclusion of all other industrial development. I refer to ‘imperialist’ countries, because it is fashionable to say that the social tensions generated in Africa (and the USSR, too) are merely the product of industrialization, and are problems which will necessarily occur whenever industrial- ization takes place, whether the political superstructure be capitalist democracy, Soviet ‘communism’, or a_ colonial régime. That there are general problems of industrialization is obvious enough; how they are solved, however, and the specific forms they take largely depend upon the historically- given circumstances of each country. For Africa, the colonial legacy has had very special effects on the process of indus- trialization, particularly of course in holding it back greatly, or even in wiping out flourishing indigenous industries and breeding a ‘secondary primitivism’. The whole system of migrant labour, for example, has in many areas deliberately been built up in an effort to prevent the emergence of a stable, conscious and organized urban proletariat; and political power has been used to implement this policy. But, contra- dictorily, a lop-sided and delayed industrialization, combined with a degenerating situation in the rural areas caused by the penetration of capitalism into the countryside, constantly pushes to the towns more Africans than industry, commerce and Government can absorb. The amount of concealed as well as open unemployment is tremendous, the waste of labour prodigious (in the Sudan, as elsewhere, one-tenth of railway workers are unskilled domestic servants), and the wretched- ness of urban living recalls the Industrial Revolution of our own country. In spite of attempts to halt this process, the towns are rapidly expanding into enormous, sprawling ‘urban agglomerations’. But, despite the squalor, these towns are bursting with new life, with a vitality only captured by a few writers, notably by Anthony Sampson in his book ‘Drum’. Vv Furthermore, each territory has its special history, though these histories are at present inadequately studied, and hidden behind wide generalizations about ‘the colonies’ or ‘Africa’. Yet the differences are at least as great as those between, say, French, American and British capitalism. In independent South Africa, for example, the growth of secondary industry, the organized, deliberate penetration of Afrikaner capital into industry during this present period of expansion, and the de- velopment of a large urban African proletariat, are all striking 95

[p035] LABOUR REVIEW post-second world war features. In Kenya, again, the wiping- out of African political organizations during the Mau Mau ‘Emergency’ has thrust leadership, perhaps temporarily, into the hands of the Labour movement. : The Sudanese social structure, analysed very efficiently by Professor Fawzi in this book, has its own perculiar features. Considerations of imperial strategy, rather than the direct search for profit, led the British there, determined the con- struction of a large railway network, and held back industrial development. Half the population are subsistence farmers; the rest of the rural population are mainly sharecroppers (e.g., the 28,000 peasants on the famous Gezira scheme), but sharecroppers who are often Government tenants and who employ tens of thousands of seasonal workers, mostly from abroad. The latter are naturally difficult to organize. Only 2 per cent. of the total population are wage-earners: this is backward even for colonial Africa. Of the wage-earners, the bulk are Government employees, more than half of them on the railways. And 80 per cent. are unskilled or semi-skilled first generation workers, many of © them still moving in and out of agriculture. But the trend is clear: even when unemployed, 65 per cent. now stay in the towns. This mere 2 per cent. of the population is the key force. Fawzi’s absorbing account shows that from the formation of the first trade union in 1946 to the achievement of political independence—in which the trade union movement played a major role—took a mere nine years. Vv Fawzi shows well how the growth of the Sudanese Labour movement can be understood only when it is viewed in its context of the economic, political and other forces causing its emergence. At the end of the second world war the con- Stitutional position was being revised; there was a large suc- cessful strike on the Gezira scheme; enormous price-rises, accentuated by derationing, with wages still at 1935 levels, produced widespread distress. And the war propaganda of the Government about democratic aims had borne fruit. The Government planned to introduce works committees, purely advisory bodies with no rights to discuss pay or con- ditions of employment. The railway workers thought otherwise, They were faced, as Hodgkin’s ‘Nationalism in Colonial Africa’ so well shows, with the need to create an organization which could cope with the many-sided wants of workers who were faced, not merely with the problem of hopelessly inadequate wages, but with the problem of learning to live town lives, of becoming different men, and all the while under a foreign government. The programme the Workers’ Affairs Association worked out, therefore, was very wide, embracing trade union, mutual aid and cultural objectives—all in terms very much ahead of what the Government was prepared to allow. In this formulation of aims, skilled, technically-trained workers took the lead. It is also interesting to note that funda- mental work in drawing up aims and constitution, and in negotiating with Government, was done by journalists and politicians. So much for theories of the ‘spontaneous’ emer- gence of political consciousness from the lowest, materially and culturally most depressed strata! The aims were initially moderate and non-political. Govern- ment, as usual, changed this by its stupidly inflexible policies. First, it refused recognition. The union was ‘illegal’ since there were no trade union laws under which it could be granted legal recognition. A mass movement of protest at non-recogni- tion led to an appeal to the Governor-General by the union. The cold shoulder, the arrest and trial of the union secretary, an orderly and effective strike, the release of the secretary and the granting of recognition followed. The peculiar structure of the Sudanese economy now be- comes significant. Government (especially the State railways) was the major employer: trade union action against the Gov- ernment inevitably became centralized and large-scale, and the economic struggle stimulated nationalist feeling. 96 produced the Indian Communist Party. May-June-July 1958 A large strike campaign for higher wages in 1948 brought a tribunal award which was nearly what the union had asked for. In 1950 trade union legislation was passed and the WAA became the Sudan Railways Workers’ Union. One hundred and twenty-three other unions were formed in five years, though many were very small, weak, badly-organized and highly localized. In 1950, the Sudan Workers’ Trade Union Federation was formed. At each stage strikes, or the threat of strikes, were needed; the unions consequently developed a highly militant tradition. On political issues, however, they did not command such sup- port, and there were strike failures. Although it is far from clear in this book, it appears that this is because of the sub- mergence as ‘an integral part of the nationalist movement’ of the SWTUF in the ‘United Front’ which was born after December 1951, largely under the advice of the World Federa- tion of Trade Unions and Moscow. Now I am no Trotskyist (I gave up religion a long time ago) but I think there is much to be learnt from the works of Trotsky. One thing he stressed was the Soviet proclivity to vacillate between adventurist putschism (as in the Canton Commune, Telengana, Greece and Malaya at certain stages), and a liquidationist submerging of working-class organizations in broad ‘fronts’ (as in pre-1927 China). The latter process is visible in the Sudan during this period and has recently been carried to the farthest limits of perfidy and betrayal in Syria. The SWTUF regarded itself, clearly, as a labour pressure group on the existing bourgeois parties. They did not move to set up working-class parties. The British have been quite ready, under pressure, to hand over power here, in Ghana and else- where, to bourgeois parties, which offer no threat to their holdings (despite Nkrumah’s and Nehru’s lip-service to ‘socialism’). In India the working class has, God help it, In the newly- independent State of Ghana, as in the Sudan, the working class has no independent party to represent its interests—- and who is to say when the Sudanese bourgeoisie may emu- late Nasser and turn on the Sudanese Labour movement? Though it played a key role in the achievement of inde- pendence the Labour movement got nothing out of it in terms of political power, but put the bourgeoisie in. And without a party of labour the prospects of advancing to social- ism, and turning the present limited form of independence into something stronger, are remote. The issue of socialism, according to Fawzi, has not yet even been raised. ‘Peace’ and ‘independence’ have been the key planks. But only a powerful Labour movement with a socialist objective—in the long run, only socialism itselfi—can ensure the maintenance of ‘peace’. and ‘independence’. Vv The only major defect in the book is the failure to show clearly the relationship between the Labour movement and the bourgeois parties. We are not shown just how the trade union movement fitted into the general nationalist movement, nor can we estimate how important labour pressure was from this book. In wider view, we have no picture of the strength, composition etc. of the bourgeoisie in general, nor of its parties. This is partly due to a mechanical isolation of the ‘Labour movement’ as a subject of study, a fault which Fawzi dces not commit at other points. Prof. Fawzi is no revolutionary. He believes the SWIUF (the Sudanese equivalent of the Trades Union Congress) should not call strikes as this would be ‘blackmailing the State’ by merely ‘sectional interests’. But there are big lessons for colonial socialists in this book. It is the first good study of a Labour movement in colonial Africa. One can hardly carp if the style is a little Ph.D.-ish for such an exciting subject. In view of the poor literary sources, this is a fine achievement. The achievement is all the more welcome from a citizen of the Sudanese Republic. PETER WORSLEY Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (T.U.), r.o. 180 Clapham High St., London, and published by New Park Publications, Ltd., 266, Lavender Hill, London

[p036] LABOUR irc = The Manchester Guardian and the Suez Crisis (“Gracchus’); The Communist REVIEW Party and Democratic Centralism (John Daniels); Dudintsev’s ‘Not by Bread Alcne’ (Leonard Hussey). MAY-JUNE 1957 Problems and Prespects of British Capitalism, I (Tom) Kemp); The Engineers’ Strike and the Labour Movement (Robert Shaw). JULY-AUGUST 1957 The New Course of the Chinese Communist Party (Michael Banda); British Communist History (Joseph Redman); The Inadequacies of Russian Trotsky- ism (R. W. Davies, with a comment by Leonard Hussey); ‘Russian Poetry, 1917-1955,’ trans. Jack Lindsay, reviewed by Anna Bostock. SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1957 Socialism, the H-Bomb and War; Labour and Nationalization; Lenin as Philosopher (Peter Fryer); From ‘Sccial-Fascism’ to ‘People’s Front’ (Joseph Redman); Marxism, Stalinism and Political Economy (Tom Kemp). NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1957 Forty Years of Soviet Russia; Radio, Science, Technique and Society (Leon Trotsky); The Case of André Marty (Joseph Redman); A Marxist Critique of Freud (John McLeish). JANUARY- FEBRUARY 1958 Labour and Leadership; The Dockers and Trade Union Democracy (William Hunter); The Early Years of the CPGB (Joseph Redman); Empiricist Philo- sophy, I (John Marshall); Leonhard’s' ‘Child of the Revolution’, reviewed by ° ‘Gracchus’. MARCH-APRIL 1958 Wages and the Bomb: A Single Front; An Unreasonable Reasoner; Marxism and the Algerian Revolution (Michael Banda); The British Stalinists and the Moscow Trials (Joseph Redman); Pat Dooley’s Letters; ‘The Family Life of Old People’, reviewed by Cliff Slaughter.