The Rise of an African Middle Class by West Michael O.;

Author:West, Michael O.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

The African petty bourgeoisie, it seems, set strict social limits on whatever political alliance it may have developed with the working class. A political alliance was one thing, but it did not follow that elite Africans necessarily wanted to live with the working class.

The Urban Areas Act was first implemented in July 1947 in Salisbury, where the RICU had an organizational advantage over the rival National Congress and the Voters League.57 Within days, the RICU called a meeting that drew a crowd of more than six hundred Africans, as the elite and the masses came together to protest, for both similar and different reasons.58 A second gathering weeks later attracted an even larger audience, filling the Harari Recreation Hall to capacity and forcing hundreds to remain outside.59 Mzingeli and his supporters were unable, however, to translate their success in mobilizing the populace against the Urban Areas Act into actual support for the RICU. In 1947, the year of its most spectacular achievements, the RICU had only 150 paid-up members, with the number dropping to 125 the following year, as the government continued to implement the law over strong African objection.60

The RICU’s modest membership, as well as the existence of two other groups, the National Congress and the Voters League, did not prevent the emergence of yet another political organization. The African Workers Voice Association, founded in early 1947, presented itself as the most energetic defender of the emerging all-African coalition. Led by Benjamin Burombo, a businessman who held the post of organizing secretary, the Workers Voice resulted from a split in the Federation of Bulawayo African Trade Unions, the new name for the African Workers Trade Unions of Bulawayo, which had been created at the time of the railway strike. The Bulawayo-based Workers Voice claimed to be a more radical advocate of the working class than was the African Trade Unions, which the larger-than-life Burombo and his associates accused of being concerned “only with rich men and big business propositions. It is not interested in the common working class.” The Workers Voice, by contrast, billed itself as the champion of “the Native in the street—the house-boy, the farm boy, etc.”61

To prove its proletarian bona fides and outflank the rival African Trade Unions, the Workers Voice took its case directly to the streets of Bulawayo, organizing a series of well-attended meetings. The predominantly working-class audiences at these forums had become increasingly restive since 1945. Heartened by the success of the railway strike and buffeted by stagnant wages and rising inflation, workers in other economic sectors redoubled their efforts to stanch their declining living standards. The Workers Voice gave popular expression to their grievances. Burombo, like Savanhu and the other New Africans, attributed the plight of African workers to racialized economic inequality. “While there was colour-bar in fixing rates of pay and cost of living allowances,” Burombo averred, “traders did not make any distinction between an under-paid African and a well paid European[;] hence both Europeans and Africans paid the same prices for the various commodities, [and] the Africans felt the weight of this economic burden more.

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