South African Police

The International Socialist League was founded in 1915, in opposition to World War One and the racist and conservative policies of the all-white South African Labour Party and the craft unions supporting it. It was initially rooted amongst white labour militants, but from the start it attracted black workers. The League argued in its weekly paper, the International, for a "new movement" to found One Big Union that would overcome the "bounds of Craft and race and sex," "recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour," and destroy capitalism through a "lockout of the capitalist class." From 1917 onwards, the International Socialist League began to organise amongst black and coloured workers. In March 1917, it founded an Indian Workers Industrial Union in Durban; in 1918, it founded a Clothing Workers Industrial Union (later spreading to Johannesburg) and horse drivers' union in the diamond mining town of Kimberly; in Cape Town, a sister organisation, the Industrial Socialist League, founded the Sweet and Jam Workers Industrial Union that same year. The International Workers of Africa was founded in 1917, the new general union's demands were simple, summed up in its slogan- "Sifuna Zonke!" ("We want everything!"). It was the first trade union for African workers ever formed in South Africa.