ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Farewell to pioneering trade unionist Leon Levy

Leon Levy, who died in Cape Town recently aged 96, was the last living signatory of the 1955 Freedom Charter, the principles of which formed the bedrock of SA’s 1996 constitution.

Levy was accused number four at the Treason Trial (1956 to 1961), along with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph and 25 others. He was the first South African to be detained under apartheid’s notorious 90-day law, before Winnie Mandela and Ruth First.

Levy was born in Johannesburg in August 1929 to Jewish parents, Mark and Mary Levy, who had left Lithuania as children. After losing his father (who ran a fish and groceries business) aged six years, Leon described in his rich 2023 memoir, Back to the Front, a nomadic Johannesburg childhood with his intrepid mother, widowed at 39, moving her family frequently between guesthouses she ran.

He and his twin brother, Norman, were the youngest of four children (with Goldie and David). Leon imbibed socialist ideas early, joining the National Union of Laundering, Cleaning & Dyeing Workers aged 16, before becoming a member of the South African Communist Party and the ANC.

At 26 he was the moving force behind SA’s first non-racial trade union federation — the 53,000-member, 51-union South African Congress of Trade Unions, forerunner of the Congress of South African Trade Unions — which he headed for nine years.

He established the Workers Unity newspaper and was an indefatigable pamphleteer and organiser of strikes and boycotts, along with comrades such as Ray Alexander, Moses Kotane, JB Marks, Govan Mbeki and Ben Turok, facing frequent bannings and detentions. Levy coordinated the organising of dockworkers in Durban, steelworkers in Cape Town, auto industry workers in Port Elizabeth and metal workers in Johannesburg.

He affiliated with the All-African Trade Union Federation, and drew lessons for mobilising unskilled workers from the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations. Completely colour-blind, he once recounted to me how he resisted the urging of his black comrades to enter a liquor store, before suddenly remembering his white skin entitled him to buy alcohol.

Levy served time in solitary confinement before going into exile in England in 1963. He studied politics, economics and industrial relations on a scholarship at Ruskin College in Oxford, shuttling as a student to London, where he applied his theoretical skills for three decades as a trade unionist at Mobil Oil and Chrysler Motor Company, settling strikes from Coventry to Glasgow while crafting innovative solutions to disputes that empowered workers.

That he returned to post-apartheid SA in 1997 aged 68 after 34 years in exile, to live out “the language and meaning of my core beliefs”, demonstrated a total commitment to his country. After contributing to publications encoding the new SA’s labour laws he served, from the age of 70, for two decades at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation & Arbitration in Cape Town, helping to entrench new methods of dispute resolution.

Wisdom, humility and calmness

From 2004, Levy chaired the board of the Cape Town-based Centre for Conflict Resolution — which I directed — for a decade. His wisdom, humility, calmness and experience were indispensable to the centre’s transformation from a Southern African-focused mediation and training outfit into a leading Pan-African think tank and peacebuilding capacity-building institute, working as far afield as South Sudan, the Great Lakes and West Africa.

During this period of unparalleled success the centre produced 21 books and 34 policy briefs, strengthened African regional bodies and contributed tremendously to Cape Town’s intellectual life through more than 200 public dialogues.

Levy was predeceased by his wife, Lorna, by two months, and is survived by his daughter Emma.

• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.