The worlds of migrant women looked somewhat different. Women had largely been held back from urban South Africa by rural patriarchs, but during the first quarter of the twentieth century, rural society had changed so dramatically that women were increasingly able to break these restrictions and enter urban South Africa. Often their passages out of rural society were necessarily informal and required ducking under the state’s radar. If not incorporated into the few institutions of moral control that sanctioned women’s urban presence, women were assumed to be entering urban spaces as beer-brewers or prostitutes.5
By the 1940s, with women streaming into the cities en masse and increasingly seen as evidence of a growing, permanent, urban black population, the value of strict control over urbanisation came under question. But the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948 and the expansion of its apartheid policies, limiting (or even reversing) urbanisation and restricting black people to the reserve areas, saw the system maintained and extended. As Francis Wilson observed in his pioneering work of 1972:
Instead of the mining and industrial employers having become less dependent on migrant labour by building family houses for their workers in town, the manufacturing and service sectors of the economy have become more dependent on oscillating migrants who are being housed on a temporary basis in gold mine-type hostels and compounds which are mushrooming in the industrial centres of the country.6
Post-1948, in line with wider policies of enforced segregation, the new hostels were built away from urban and industrial centres and on the margins of newly established townships. Their separation from wider urban society and the enforced juxtaposition with the burgeoning world of matchbox housing ensured that the interaction between migrants and townspeople became even more, though not uniformly, corrosive.
Aside from its economic ramifications, the system had profound consequences for virtually every aspect of the lives of black South Africans. It has been long and widely recognised that it had deeply destructive consequences for family life, as well as for peer group forms of socialisation, such as initiation.7 To this day, this toxic and intractable legacy remains a major impediment to positive processes of social and economic change.8 The connections between migrancy and the incidence and spread of death and disease have been relatively well documented. In addition to the mortal dangers of rockfalls and underground accidents in the mines, venereal diseases, pneumonia and tuberculosis all flourished in the context of the system and the inadequate forms of screening, treatment and care within it. It is now widely acknowledged that migrant labour systems in and beyond southern Africa have played a critical role in the evolution and intensification of the HIV and AIDS pandemic.9 But one dimension of the health costs involved has started to become fully apparent only in recent decades. Despite the perception for much of the twentieth century that South African mining companies were role models of disease prevention and health care in relation to lung diseases, new evidence shows this to be myth rather than reality. In Chapter 7 Jock McCulloch shows that mining companies systematically underestimated the deeply damaging consequences of working in the mines for workers’ health. Deceptive data from the Medical Bureau papered over the failure and cursory nature of medical exams, as well as the routine decision to repatriate ill miners to avoid paying compensation.
Figure 0.1
Get-together in a compound room. The usual drink was Bantu Beer, a fermented millet, undistilled. Hard liquor was forbidden on the mines, but the local breweries made this beer. It was quite strong and people could get merry on it quite quickly (information supplied by Struan Robertson).
Ernest Cole
Date unrecorded
Ernest Cole Family Trust, courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation
Figure 0.2
Jenny Gordon
Zulu couple at Mai Mai Market, Johannesburg Date unrecorded Silver gelatin print
27.5 × 27.5 cm
Market Theatre Collection (Wits Art Museum)
The view from above provides important insights into the nature and impact of the system. But it tends to diminish the lives, experience and agency of the men and women at its the heart.
Highlighting (migrant) humanity
Our objective is to place migrant experience, expression and perception at the centre of the portrait we craft. We cannot, of course, do full justice to these dimensions. Instead, we present essays that highlight important elements and, we hope, enhance an overall understanding of what migrant labour has meant and continues to mean in southern Africa. In Chapter 1, Fiona Rankin-Smith sets out the thinking behind the exhibition ‘Ngezinyawo: Migrant Journeys’, which she curated. The artworks and objects here are key to illuminating various elements of the migrant labour system and capture the subtleties and nuances of migrant experience. Without a delicate understanding of what it might have felt like to be within this system, it is difficult to come to grips with how and why responses to migrant labour took the form they did. Not all the contributors to the exhibition were migrants themselves, but their works tell a powerful story about the context and reception of migrant labour in South Africa. Taken together, the artworks and the essays in this book provide multiple perspectives on the experiences of – and, particularly, the centrality of material culture and art to – the world of migrant workers.
Despite the widespread assumption that migrant labour was a coerced consequence of the mining revolution, some roots of the system stretch back to ancient trading networks and forms of mobility in African societies. In fact, for centuries, men from South Africa’s interior had sought out income and employment away from home, traversing long-distance trading routes across southern Africa. Locally manufactured iron and copper goods, salt, ochre, horns, skins, pots, grain and cattle were traded locally and regionally. Metal goods were carried from the Transvaal to Lesotho and beyond. These trade networks linked even further eastwards and northwards, including to the Mozambican coast, where southern African traders exchanged mainly ivory for imported beads, cloth, ceramics and metalware. These long-established trade routes were often the paths that migrant workers walked on their way to work.10
However, the journeys of migrant workers were not always voluntary. As Patrick Harries shows in Chapter 2, one particularly grim antecedent of migrancy was the slave trade in Mozambique. Despite the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 in the British-governed Cape, the number of slaves sold and passing through the colony did not diminish dramatically. Through abolitionists’ lobbying and slave resistance, the practice of ‘apprenticeship’ – effectively a reformed version of slavery – began to evolve, freeing the labour market to some degree. But the Cape government and employers continued to resort to dubious methods of obtaining cheap labour, particularly from Mozambique, where labour recruitment routes were well established and the economy was increasingly dependent on the export of labour. Despite the shrinking of the formal slave trade, the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of recruitment, compulsion and state intervention in securing labour had been set in stone and had tied the Mozambican economy into the Cape’s – and later South Africa’s – need for cheap migrant labour.
Some younger men had previously travelled to attach themselves to richer homesteads. Their labour was paid for with livestock and other goods, used by the young migrants to accumulate bride-wealth and thus to marry and achieve adulthood. The pursuit of bride-wealth goods continued to be a key element in the migrant labour system that evolved in the nineteenth