Conclusion
Despite the many hardships and dangers involved in the long journeys they undertook, these groups of men drew on forms of organisation rooted in their own societies. They could make their own decisions about when to stay and when to go. Their freedom from control by government officials, mine-owners and recruiting agencies gave them considerable bargaining power and helped to keep their wages relatively high. But, as the other chapters in this volume show, by the end of the century, their room for manoeuvre was being steadily whittled away and the camaraderie and autonomy that characterised their ‘wandering’ was supplanted, at least in part, by systems of recruitment designed to break their spirits and prepare them to accept industrial discipline.
Notes
1.P Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), Chapter 3. A rich literature dealing with the origins and development of the migrant labour system was published from the 1980s onwards. See, for example, W Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982) and P Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994).
2.Harries, Work, 13–16, Delius, Land, 69–71.
3.Delius, Land, 62.
4.Wandernde Bassuto: Ein Lebensbild van C Richter, Berliner Missions-berichte (Berlin: Des Berliner Missionshauses, 1882).
5.L Zollner and J Heese, The Berlin Missionaries in South Africa (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1984), 378–385.
6.Richter, Wandernde Bassuto, 46.
7.Ibid., 46–59. I am grateful to Professor IM Kosch for her help with the translation.
8.The term ‘Bassuto’ as used here is the equivalent of North Sotho in contemporary usage. ‘Mossutho’ is the singular form.
9.See Delius, Land, Chapter 6 for a fuller description of this system and, more broadly, labour relations in South Africa. See also H Giliomee, The Afrikaners (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003), Chapter 6.
10.Sekhukhune ruled the Pedi kingdom from 1861 until its conquest by an Imperial Army in 1879, shortly after the defeat of the Zulu kingdom.
CHAPTER 4
A Century of Migrancy from Mpondoland
William Beinart
Migrant workers from Mpondoland have been characterised as traditionalist and fiercely attached to their rural homes. Yet mineworkers from this area came into the national news in August 2012 as both strikers and victims of the shootings at Marikana Platinum Mine. Of the 45 people killed at Marikana, 30 came from Mpondoland and nearby districts of the Eastern Cape/former Transkei. Their deaths raise questions about their history and their politics. While it is important not to ethnicise a diverse segment of the South African workforce, or the strikes themselves, I suggest that a sense of collective identity has, in part, shaped their experiences of migration over the long term.
Labour migrancy and the rural economy
Historians have analysed different patterns of migrant labour in southern Africa, but it is still difficult to distinguish the forms of consciousness and organisation that arose amongst specific groups and networks of migrants. Migrants from Mpondoland were, in part, distinctive because the Mpondo chiefdom was, in 1894, amongst the last to be annexed in South Africa as a whole. They were not conquered by force, lost little of their land to settlers and were pushed into wage labour at a later stage than other African societies. Most families maintained access to arable plots, as well as grazing for their livestock, until far into the twentieth century. Since the region is blessed with high rainfall, smallholder agriculture was relatively effective, at least until the 1960s. Mpondoland comprised only 7 of the 26 old Transkeian districts (the number rose to 28 in the 1970s when the homeland was consolidated). Yet although they were sometimes categorised as Xhosa in the homeland era, Mpondo people retained their identity, as well as separate paramount chiefs and regional political authorities.
Until the 1960s, Mpondo migrants characteristically worked underground on the gold mines and as cane-cutters in the Natal sugar fields.1 In general terms, their experience differed from rural isiZulu-speakers to the north, who tended to avoid long phases of underground work and cane-cutting; they worked in mills or migrated to Durban or Johannesburg. Those to the south, in the western Transkeian and Ciskeian districts, gravitated more to the Cape ports, working on the docks and in a wide range of urban employment. Bhaca workers from Mount Frere, neighbouring Mpondoland, specialised for some decades in night-soil removal and municipal employment in Durban and on the Witwatersrand.
Numbers of workers migrating annually from the seven (old) districts increased from about 2 000 in 1896 to 10 000 in 1910, to 20 000 in 1921 and 30 000 in the 1936 census. By then, roughly two-thirds worked on the mines and most of the rest – especially younger men – in the sugar fields. By the 1930s, more than 40 per cent of men between the ages of 15 and 45 were absent from their homes for work annually. As workers tended not to migrate every year, long-distance migrancy had become an experience general to most men in Mpondoland. Initially, many mine migrants accepted prepayment from labour agents in livestock, thus ensuring that the bulk of their earnings never left home (and could potentially reproduce while they were away). Although this was abolished on the mines in 1910 because it was linked with desertion, advance payments remained available from some sugar recruiters. Mgeyana Ngumlaba told me in 1977:
I never put my foot in school. I never saw a school here in Msikaba in those days. The church was not here … It was joyin’inkomo [recruiting with cattle] at that time. You used to get a beast from Mr Strachan … and then go forward. This was done after East Coast fever and these are the cattle we got after East Coast fever. I went to the sugar fields … before getting married in 1920. I preferred to go to the sugar rather than the mines [as] … I could join and get a beast … I worked six months for a young heifer [itoli] … I went to the sugar fields because I wanted a beast … There was an Indian foreman who was in charge of us and he beat us. That is how it was in those days. My intention was to get that beast. I was not interested in what was happening to me.2
Figure 4.1
Monica Hunter Xhosa miners back from the mines playing cards 1932
Wits Museum of Ethnology Photography Collection, Wits Art Museum
The advance system and testimonies such as the one above led me to argue that many men from the region initially saw the migrant labour system as a means of accumulating livestock, paying part of their bride-wealth and building their rural homesteads. In fact, Mgeyana later returned to the sugar fields, taking cash contracts that provided a better deal. He avoided the mines because he felt the contracts were too long: I only went away five times. I bought cattle with the money from the sugar fields. The cattle were cheap in those days … I bought nine and also got other cattle that were paid … as bride-wealth for my sisters. I bought clothes for my sisters and bought blankets for my father. I bought saddles and bridles. I was wearing blankets myself. I bought a plough from the money from the sugar fields. I came back here and got married and got fields but I was working first on my father’s fields … I am the man who buried my father. I have always got enough mealies [maize] to keep my family ... My father did not drink tea; those things have just come now.
Migrancy became embedded in the expectations of young men. I once asked an old headman, Meje Ngalonkulu, who was more than 90 years old when I interviewed him in 1982, ‘Could you not loan cattle?’3 ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I did not want to.’ Loaning cattle also carried risks and responsibilities because a portion of the increase had to be paid back. ‘However rich the father was, the son must go out to work,’ he said. ‘Even