Silkscreen poster shows two women holding large signs with SACTU demands listed on them. One woman has her fist raised. Title of poster is in white with background in blue. Women and signs in blue and black ink.
The Medu Arts Ensemble was an Anti-Apartheid resistance art movement that operated in Gaborone, Botswana. (Medu is the Pedi word for "roots.") Membership consisted of South African exiles and western sympathizers, and included five artistic units: photography, film and theatre, music, graphic art, and publications and research. The visual arts unit membership consisted of: Thami Mnyele, Miles Pelo, Heinz, Judy Seidman, Gordon Metz, Albio, Theresa Gonzales, Philip Segola, and Lentswe Mokgatle. From 1979-1985, the Medu graphic arts unit produced over fifty anti-Apartheid posters. These posters were smuggled into South African and posted throughout the black townships. "The South African Congress of Trade Unions was established in 1955 after the right wing unions walked out of the South African Trades and Labour Council in 1954 to form the exclusive White, Coloured, and Indian workers' Trade Union Council of South Africa...It was explicitly political and was one of the founders of the Congress Alliance in 1955. Its first conference in 1956 proclaimed that the fights for economic and political rights were one and the same. It explicitly campaigned against the Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act, 1953 and urged members to have nothing to do with the Native Labour Officials established by it. SACTU organised factory "cells" which studied Marxist ideology as well as organising techniques."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Congress_of_Trade_Unions
