In the 1920s, ANC provincial structures continued to be loosely based and poorly financed and to suffer splits. This situation limited their potential appeal to workers as an effective organisation able to represent their rights. However, these branches were able to continue to attract some black workers to their ranks, and in general to stand up for their rights. Direct connections with labour unions and workers were often easier at the grassroots level, away from the high politics of national ANC deliberations. In the 1920s, this trend was most noticeable in Natal, which also saw the dramatic rise of worker organisation and militancy in the ICU. This chapter therefore focuses on ANC and labour history in Natal, with the following chapter picking up the same thread in the other provinces.

The 1925 Report of Native Churches Commission seems almost to have discovered a sort of law of African politics: “the activities of Congress vary inversely with the prosperity” of Africans; it contrasted ANC strength in the Northern provinces with its weakness in the Transkei and Natal. There was good reason for this prognostication: Congress in Natal had fractured and, if black people were hardly “prosperous” under escalating white economic diktat, other movements influenced many rural Africans.

The 1920s saw substantial industrial take-off in South Africa. Although this was based largely on the Rand, Durban also witnessed considerable economic growth. Natal's growing, but largely migrant, African labour force tended to push ANC labour policy into contradictory positions, such as towards acknowledgement of the need for relief from their harsh exploitation, but away from pursuing industrial unionism to a more syncretic form of representation of workers who still had close ties to the land. The greater concentration of workers in Durban offered opportunities to political and union leaders to organise on a more industrial basis, but even here the high levels of casualisation militated against the sort of ANC-labour intimacy present on the Rand.

There was nothing moderate, however, about resolutions of a Congress meeting held in the Salvation Army Hall, Pietermaritzburg in March 1921 and chaired by Mark Radebe.