Timing as Tactic: The Wildcat Strikes during the Transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, March 1980

Abstract

During the interregnum between the announcement of the election results in March 1980 and the independence ceremony in April, approximately 16,000 workers staged wildcat strikes across Zimbabwe. While previous scholarly analyses have focused on the failure of these strikes to catalyse a sustained movement, this article reads them as timely enactments of the workers’ vision of decolonisation during a fragile moment of transition. First, rather than reacting to state policy making, the strikes seized the brief opening to make demands to which the incoming government was forced to respond. Second, the strikes intervened in a broader debate about the speed at which political change ought to unfold in the new state. This debate was reflected through the terms ‘reconciliation’ and ‘transformation’, which circulated in public discourse and framed ZANU(PF)’s approach to governance. These terms captured two different approaches to the predicament that the party found itself in once it acquired power. Reconciliation centred on gradualism and moderation, while transformation emphasised the rapid change of extant colonial institutions. Caught in this bind, through the mechanism of the wildcat strike, workers refused the injunction to wait for the formal transfer of power to access the freedoms promised to them, enacting a sense of anticipation that made distinct claims on the future government.