Early African political leaders could build bridges to black workers in a variety of ways: shared ideologies such as nascent nationalism or religion; shared history and culture; common oppression; policies that supported labour interests; and direct support for worker struggles. This chapter outlines the tentative and ambiguous, yet multifaceted and concerned policies towards black labour by incipient African political protest movements in the decades prior to the formation of the ANC in 1912. These antecedents are important because not only did many of these organisations become ANC branches, with their leading figures prominent in Congress, but also because traditions of concern for and interaction with labour laid down in this period are likely to have influenced ANC policies.

The emergence of early African (proto)-nationalism has been ascribed various origins, such as struggles over land, the influence of Christianity, and involvement of subaltern classes. Christian educated social strata (kholwa, or believers) such as Tiyo Soga first began to mention the idea of a wider African nation in the emergent black press of the later nineteenth century. These educated leaders began to present petitions of black grievances, for instance in Natal in 1863 and 1875, and in the Cape in 1869.

Whilst radical historians from the 1970s sneered at this ultra-moderate petitionbased politics, recent revisionist historians have begun to unpack the way in which petitions for black rights reflected the birth of a political culture of “evening meetings and social gatherings where people who wanted to discuss grievances turned their ideas into intelligible petitions”. Seen in this context, early Congress politics would be as much the reflection of an emergent black political agenda as any mimicry of white bourgeois politics. Moreover, as I noted in Chapter 1, petitions were also a weapon of black workers.

Traditions of resistance grew which, as Clifton Crais argues for the Eastern Cape, ranged from “meetings of the African elite to the daily struggles of farm labourers”. Many political leaders, whom we shall meet below, raised labour issues. As early as 1888, Elijah Makiwane criticised low wages of black workers in Port Elizabeth.