Growing up in abject poverty has never left general secretary of Cosatu Zwelinzima Vavi; it has informed who he is
Glenda Daniels
When Zwelinzima Vavi pours me tea from a hot enamel teapot, he uses his tie to protect his fingers from getting burnt. Standing, he looks down from an impressive 6 foot 4 and, grinning mischievously, asserts: “You’ll never take the peasant out of me.”
But for a “peasant” he is slick and articulate. He also gets very intense when he talks about his childhood in Hanover, Northern Cape, and his family. Growing up as one of 12 children to farm workers in the Northern Cape in abject poverty has never left him; it has completely informed who he is.
“My father said to me when I became a young Cosas [Congress of South African Students’] activist, ‘Why you? Leave it to the others – don’t be a voorbok [leading goat]’ – but that’s not who I am. I couldn’t bear injustice, which I saw happening from a young age.
“If there’s one thing that you can charge Cosatu [the Congress of South African Trade Unions] with today, it’s that we have not organised farm workers properly. The beatings, dismissals and poverty continue the same way they did when my parents were farm workers.”
Neither Vavi nor most of his 11 siblings know when they were born, but he clearly remembers the harsh treatment his parents and elderly farm workers suffered at the hands of farmers in the Northern Cape.
“I remember vividly the many trips we would take when they left one farm for another, walking in a file behind my parents. At night our beds were roads. We slept under a donkey cart. In the horrible, cold winter my parents would shake the frost from our blanket in the mornings and then we would be off to another farm looking for work, often without having eaten breakfast.”
Vavi witnessed beatings of farm workers and the humiliation of his parents. “My political awareness stemmed from seeing this cruelty.”
After the family moved from the farms to Sada, a township in the Eastern Cape, the teenaged Vavi set up a Cosas branch in the township and was detained many times.
“We would have meetings late into a Friday and Saturday night analysing banned literature; and often we were teased by other youths who went to discos that we were reading because we could not get girlfriends.”
Today Vavi, a married man with three children, lives in suburban Kempton Park. He worries about youth living in a society full of “materialism and careerism”.
“There isn’t the moral conviction and idealism that we had in our youth. Youth seem to be interested in cellphones, designer clothes, discos. The future generation worries me a great deal.” He believes young people should become involved in youth groups and discuss community issues such as HIV/Aids.
But Vavi does lighten up when he talks about his own three children. He likes nothing better than to relax and dance with them to local music when he gets home early. “And I love my music, but for me it’s only local. I’m a great ‘buy local’ fan.” Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa, African Jazz Pioneers, Hugh Masekela and Mbongeni Khumalo are his favourites.
What he looks forward to even more than this, he confides, are Christmas family reunions where, with his other siblings, he slaughters a sheep on a farm in the Eastern Cape and then they exchange stories about old times. “The eating and talking goes on all day and these are the best times in my life.”
Vavi doesn’t get drunk during these reunions, and only drinks about twice a month when a nice long whiskey goes down well. However, the hardest thing he’s ever had to do was give up smoking, which he did on the eve of the millennium. “This September, when the Cosatu congress takes place, I’m going to be stressed. Keeping to my resolution then is going to be my greatest challenge.”
Vavi describes himself as a man with two sides. “I’m tense and impatient, and then there’s the compassionate side, where I often offer my shoulder for the odd tear,” he says from his Johannesburg office, which is adorned with pot plants, fashionably checked blue-and-burgundy Wetherlys furniture, a Che Guevara poster on one wall and a long wooden bookshelf lined with Marx and Engels collections.
But his closest friend, Enoch Godongwana, Eastern Cape MEC for Finance, Economic and Environment Affairs, perceives Vavi’s strengths as his “honesty, frankness, commitment to workers” and not being an ideologue, but his weakness as his overly meticulous following of the demo-cratic process. “Sometimes you have to give the other side in negotiations some signal, but Vavi is very democratic and always wants to consult. This taken to extremes becomes a weakness.”
But his wife of 16 years, Nikiwe, can think of nothing that she would change about him. “He is passionate about life, he is loving, especially to his children, his dogs, his work.”
Vavi loves animals – he says had it not been for the struggle against apartheid, he might have become a farmer, but then again he might have become a boxer, too.
There is also a serious jolling side to Vavi. His colleague Ravi Naidoo, head of Naledi, recalls him getting up on stage and singing and dancing at a club in Sao Paulo, Brazil, recently.
“He was jovial, he sang some international songs and he enjoyed himself. He has a tough side, but he is popular because he is sincere. He is also very attached to his family. I heard that during the famous mining strike in the Eighties when hundreds were retrenched, including Vavi, his mother was so distraught she died.”
After matric Vavi was detained many times and then fled to Durban, where he participated in the United Democratic Front’s Million Signature Campaign for the release of Nelson Mandela.
In 1984 he became a clerk at Vaal Reef’s no 8 mine but did not join the union federation, Cusa, because it felt “too black, there was too much Azapo [Azanian People’s Organisation] in it”.
He joined the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), was elected shop steward, and went on to become Cosatu’s local chair. He was dismissed together with hundreds of others in 1987 after a 21-day strike and became an organiser at NUM.
“The morale was low after the dismissals and reviving the spirit was one of the brightest marks in my life,” he says. October will mark his 12th year as a full- time Cosatu official.
Is he tired of it, and does he have plans to leave for greener pastures, such as the government, the route taken by many trade unionists?
Vavi laughs, saying he hears those rumours all the time. “Besides the fact that I’m committed to the workers’ movement, I also feel I am far too young to go to government. And, in fact, no one has tried to deploy me, so the rumour that I’m being lured is all untrue.”
One of the burning political issues in the labour movement today is the question of the alliance. Are the days for the tripartite alliance numbered?
Vavi concedes that there is an ongoing debate, which will be fully aired at the Cosatu congress. However, he feels the need for the alliance to continue. “Of course there are problems and contradictions within the alliance, if you’re looking at the African National Congress’s macroeconomic policies – but that’s one issue. Cosatu is not a homogeneous body. There will always be workers who will say the alliance does not suit the workers, that Cosatu is in danger of becoming a sweetheart. But for me it’s like a conditional marriage. The alliance has to deliver to the working class.”
In light of Cosatu often lambasting the government’s macroeconomic policies as being conservative, how does that affect a relationship he might have with President Thabo Mbeki, for instance?
Vavi says the relationship is “fairly good”. They can sit down and have a drink together and “chat comfortably with no animosity”.
Vavi is in for a stressful few weeks. Cosatu has given business and the government eight weeks to implement job-creating strategies before it might embark on yet another national strike.
If the amiable Vavi does indeed remain Cosatu’s general secretary for the next few years, he is in for a tough time. A showdown between the government and public service unions looms – as the public service administration is adopting a tough stance on job cuts, retrenchments and pay rises, as enshrined in the growth, employment and redistribution macroeconomic policy.
While Vavi currently rules out any chance of the split within the alliance, he might be forced to think again if, in a few years time, his supporters are sufficiently dissatisfied with the performance of the ANC government.
All the stresses might mean that he would either have to take up smoking again or head off for the farms to slaughter another sheep.