The Death of Neil Aggett: Unions and Politics, Then and Now

On the morning of 27th November 1981 Neil Aggett was arrested in Johannesburg and taken to John Vorster Square. Seventy days later, 5th February 1982, he was dead. He was 28 years old.

In the wake of the 1973 strikes in Durban a non-racial trade union movement re-emerged after some decades of repression by the apartheid state. These unions presented a challenge not only to the state and employers but also to the dominant national democratic tradition in South Africa. These embryonic unions placed strong emphasis on building a cadre of shop stewards with deep roots in their workplaces and industry-wide organisation and bargaining. They were labelled by their critics in the SACP and the national democratic tradition as syndicalist in orientation or, later in the 1980s, as “workerist”.