Trade Union Studies in UK and Kenya, Nigel Flanagan and Shiraz Durrani. Vita Books, Nairobi 2024.
History is a story of class struggles with the working classes fighting for their humanity against suppression and exploitation. The toilers of the world living a meagre existence either as landowners of small plots or as low wage workers, have always been confronted by the challenge: If we organize and stand together, we might better feed our families and build a more secure life. If we are passive the ruling classes will continue stealing the fruits of our work.
Breaking the chains of feudalism and colonialism brought better conditions for organizing and stand together, a change that was a fruit of organized struggle. But this was not a time for relaxing, but for reorientation of the class struggle. A new ruling class demanded an end to the class war to their benefit and many followed this call. But to the dismay of many, the exploitation just took another form.
Shiraz Durrani has written extensively on the class struggle in Kenya and Nigel Flanagan on organizing workers in trade unions. Durrani is Kenyan and Flanagan British and bring together perspectives and analyses on barriers to trade union organising. This book is worth reading as it brings forward exemplary lessons from the global south and global north.
Nigel Flanagan:
Nigel Flanagan writes about lessons from UK, but also about cases from Kenya and Morocco. He takes an activist perspective and makes a crass critique of the failures of traditional methods used by union officials. Using models followed over decades with weak results. Flanagan`s message is that workers don’t need missionaries and gurus using top-down management style leadership, with officer controlled projects and low level of membership engagement.
“The ideas of solidarity, unity and collective action are more easily understood than the gurus and the bureaucrats believe”(p.122). The key is to see members as resources and not as passive actors and blaming them for apathy. Here it is vital also to mobilize for political demands like universal healthcare and retirement age. Demands that are meaningful in workers daily life. Unions must not abandon politics to others. Flanagan stress class politics and cites the British socialist Tony Benn: “There are too many socialist parties and not enough socialists”(p.107). There is no “social democratic heaven” and the “myth of partnership” is not “rocking the boat”(p.121). Organising is a strategy, but mostly it is politics, says Flanagan. The unions have lots of money, but they must be redeployed.
This is rarely discussed says Flanagan in unions relying on “expertise” and lead activists and blaming members for apathy. “No sustained trade union growth has been led by officers”(p.120). Instead existing members have to be the recruiters and he takes examples from Kenya where a campaign building on every 1 in 10 members as recruiters resulted in ½ million new members(p.115). The method is called SPIDER WEBBING, where volunteer “spiders” get a weblist of 10 names to contact. This is a bottom-up strategy instead of a push-down strategy where the old activists are overburdened. In Kenya they could use an old SMS network, so it does not need to be a fancy digital campaign. The key is communication and “any action that does not enhance the members is anti-organizing”(p.106). Activists have to be the heartblood of a living movement. Union organizing in UK is as low as 22 %, and unions must stop looking to US and Western Europe for solutions. The US movement is a failing movement while many European unions are trapped in the EU circus. We must decolonize and drop the narrow thinking: The future lies in Asia, Latin America and Africa! Referring to the Indian million strong union strikes, Flanagan says: “Don’t applaud Indian trade union workers for organizing their resistance and then shy away from a UK revival! Follow their example.”(p.106).
Shiraz Durrani:
Kenya was a British colony and is today ruled by a capitalist class closely connected to US imperialism. But there was a liberation struggle against the British where the trade unions movement played an important role influencing the Mau Mau liberation movement. The colonialists jailed and persecuted the movement and Shiraz Durrani has been very active in preserving the lessons and history of this struggle through many books and articles. And this collaboration with Nigel Flanagan is really a scoop, and it shows utterly clear that trade union struggle is political
Shiraz has been vocal in pointing out, we must Look Back to Fight Forward. “ People need to know their history….. but in a class divided society where people do not have the power to keep their history alive, those who do have power manipulate, distort and hide historical facts and interpret history from their class perspective. They thus satisfy their class interests against the interest of working people”(Shiraz, 2018).
“Kenya won independence after a bloody confrontation with Britain after the sacrifices of lives, limbs, land and property of hundreds of thousands – not to mention collective punishments, unpaid, slave labour and concentration camps for millions. The sacrifices affected not only the generation involved in the war, but future generations as well. Those who fought in various ways for independence saw a minority elite, groomed under the watchful eye of imperialism, take all the power and benefits of independence.
Among the losses that working people suffered was the control over their history. Their oral histories were allowed to die with the death of those involved – directly or indirectly – in the War of Independence. Imperialism took charge of interpreting the anti colonial, anti imperialist war from their perspective, turning our heroes into villains and our enemies into heroes. Their version of history hid the achievements of people who refused to live on their knees and heaped praise on the Homeguards, the protectors of imperialist interest”(op.cit.).
Trade unions became a target of colonialist violence along with the Mau Mau movement and the nationalities. Trade unions were especially dangerous as they sought alliances and organized on a class basis across ethnic lines, and therefore more immune to the British strategy of divide and rule. The colonial government suppressed prominent trade unionists like Makhan Singh, Fred Kubai, Pio Gama Pinto and Bildad Kaggia. It also passed on colonial laws that the independent Kenya government continued as there was fear of socialist independent unions. As Shiraz has pointed out: “They thus created imperialist-oriented trade unions that bedevil working class politics to this day. There are valuable lessons to be learnt from the history of the militant trade unions in Kenya and also from understanding how colonialism and imperialism enforced changes that made the trade unions ineffective after independence”(op.cit.).
Trade Unions were in the beginning organised on racial lines, but the solution lay in becoming a non-racial trade union to unite the energies and fighting spirits of the African, Indian and other workers in Kenya. In 1935 the Labour Trade Union of Kenya was created and open to all workers “irrespective of race, religion, caste. Creed, colour and tribe”(p. 194). A central figure that Shiraz mentions and have written books about, is Makhan Singh. He was class conscious, socialist and anti colonialist, anti imperialist and the trade union struggle was connected to liberation of Kenya. Makhan Singh was singled out as one of the gravest threats and was heavily punished by the British colonialists with prison for 11 years from 1950 to 1961. Reactionary leaders took over the leadership of the labour movement with the support of the British. They don’t raise the key issues of the capitalist system in Kenya like rising economic inequality and the land question.
The debate about organising must not be reduced to one of tactics and training. To meet the economic demands of the working class, it is essential to win political power. And here Nigel Flanagan and Shiraz Durrani are walking in the footsteps of Makhan Singh.
John Graversgaard is a Political commentator from Aarhus, Denmark
Notes:
Vita Books: www.vitabooks.co.ke
Shiraz Durrani: Kenya’s War of Independence, Mau Mau and its Legacy of Resistance to Colonialism and Imperialism, 1948-1990, Nairobi: Vita Books, 2018.
Shiraz Durrani(Ed.): Makhan Singh: A Revolutionary Kenyan Trade Unionist. Nairobi: Vita Books, 2016.
