Anarchism in South Africa

Anarchism in South Africa dates to the 1880s, and played a major role in the labour and socialist movements from the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1920s. The early South African anarchist movement was strongly syndicalist. The ascendance of Marxism–Leninism following the Russian Revolution, along with state repression, resulted in most of the movement going over to the Comintern line, with the remainder consigned to irrelevance. There were slight traces of anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist influence in some of the independent left-wing groups which resisted the apartheid government from the 1970s onward, but anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism as a distinct movement only began re-emerging in South Africa in the early 1990s. It remains a minority current in South African politics.

The first notable anarchist in South Africa was Henry Glasse, an English immigrant who settled in Port Elizabeth in the 1880s. Glasse maintained contact with London-based anarchist circles linked to Pyotr Kropotkin's newspaper Freedom. Based on a lecture he gave at the Port Elizabeth Mechanic's Institute, Glasse published Socialism the Remedy with Freedom Press in 1901. He also authored The Superstition of Government which was co-published with a Kropotkin tract in 1902.

The Social Democratic Federation (SDF), founded in Cape Town in 1904 and open to socialists of all persuasions, had an active anarchist wing. A notable revolutionary syndicalist formation was the International Socialist League (ISL). Founded in Johannesburg in September 1915, the ISL established branches across much of South Africa (excluding the western Cape) and organised the first black African trade union in the country, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) – influenced by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – in September 1917. In 1918, the anarchists and syndicalists in Cape Town left the SDF to form the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Socialist League, which supported the IWA in the western Cape and also formed its own syndicalist union in food processing factories. The ISL and Industrial Socialist League, which developed an alliance, also formed a number of other unions among people of colour. While their founders were mainly drawn from the radical wing of the white working class, the movement would develop a substantial black African, Coloured and Indian membership.

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