Few issues have occupied the attention of academics, analysts and activists more closely than those on the role of South Africa's labor movement in the transition to democracy. Most commentators place the beginning of this transition to former President F. W. De Klerk's February 1990 decision to repeal the ban on liberation movements and release Nelson Mandela and other prisoners from incarceration. However, it would be more accurate to think of the transition as beginning in 1973 in the industrial and port city of Durban, where thousands of workers shook the quiet confidence of South Africa's racial capitalist regime through a series of spontaneous and prolonged strikes that changed the context of South African labor and politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century.