Bennie Bunsee

Cape Town, South Africa

1964–94

Bennie Bunsee, a Pan-Africanist and anti-racist activist, arrived in Britain during the mid-1960s as an anti-apartheid exile. Bunsee was born to an Indian family in Durban, South Africa. As a teenager, he moved to Johannesburg where he became involved with radical anti-apartheid organizations including the Pan Africanist Congress. During his exile in Britain, he studied at the University of Hull and University of Nottingham and was involved in anti-apartheid activism in Britain.

Bunsee became involved with the labour movement and notably supported striking South Asian workers who led the Mansfield Hosiery strike in Loughborough in 1972 and Imperial Typewriters strike in Leicester in 1974. In an interview with ATV Today on the picket line of the Imperial Typewriters strike, Bunsee stated that his involvement in the strikes was motivated by the lack of support for Black and South Asian workers within a largely white trade union movement. Whilst he himself was not a factory worker, he regarded himself as an advisor by necessity, given the failures of trade union officials to adequately support the strikers. His involvement in the Mansfield Hosiery and Imperial Typewriters strikes included supporting community mobilization, advising the strike committees on negotiating with their employers and being a spokesperson for the campaigns. In various newspaper articles related to the strikes, Bunsee often spoke to journalists on behalf of the strikers, and a Mansfield striker told the Leicester Mercury that Bunsee was persuaded to take on this role because he had a good command of English. His socialist politics, and in particular his praise for Communist China which he visited in the early 1960s, became a point of interest for journalists, with an article in the Sunday Times referring to Bunsee as a ‘Maoist’. Moreover, during the Mansfield Hosiery strike, Bunsee and other allies were depicted as ‘industrial troublemakers’ by local newspapers, who were taking control of the strike as part of a broader left-wing and Black Power conspiracy.

During the strikes, Bunsee lived with activist Amrit Wilson. Whilst in exile, he wrote for several South African newspapers and journals. He returned to South Africa in 1994 after thirty years in Britain, when the country’s first democratic elections took place. Subsequently, Bunsee became a member of the new African National Congress (ANC) government.

Bennie Bunsee died on 10 October 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa.