This broad description should not gloss over the many deep differences of practices and aspiration that existed among migrant groupings. Perhaps the most vividly described of these is the divide between Red (Traditionalist) and School (Christian) identities in the former Transkei and Eastern Cape.13 But this dichotomy also fails to capture the diverse forms of identity and the organisations crafted by migrants to sustain themselves in a maelstrom of change. The chapters by William Beinart, Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi and Deborah James and Dinah Rajak deal with some of these manifestations and how they, in turn, shaped the migrant labour system. Beinart highlights the range of groups, often glued together by a common ethnically defined masculinity on the mines, involved in gangs, such as the Mpondo-based Isitshozi and the AmaRussians from Lesotho. These provided security for men against other often quite violent organisations, but also created networks of socialisation far from home.
In Chapter 11, Lekgoathi speaks about similar ethnic groupings of migrant labourers, but specifically tracks their changing political nature from the 1930s to the 1970s. Focusing on Ndebele migrants from Zebediela, he shows that networks of kinship were initially the most powerful forms of mobilising resistance to betterment policies amongst migrants concerned about their rural homes. But as ethnicity became an increasingly exploitable currency, new concerns emerged and many migrants from Zebediela became bound together by an Ndebele identity, a more expedient way of accessing resources and safeguarding their livelihood.
In Chapter 17, James and Rajak’s analysis of credit and the relationship between lending money and migrant labour in historical perspective also brings to the fore the groupings created around financial resources. Burial groups and savings societies were very important and we can begin to see how one of the hidden drivers of migrant labour – low wages and exploitative practices – produced groups of solidarity that shifted people’s ability to cope in important ways.
David Coplan offers us valuable and textured insights into the communal experiences of migrant labourers, both men and women, this time from Lesotho. In Chapter 12, he tracks the use of song in migrants’ lives to explain and make meaning of their experiences, analysing how song and its performance not only reflected migrants’ movements and travels, but also shaped how they thought about their experiences as labourers.
But organisations and public activities were not the only ways that migrants made sense of their experiences. Intimate worlds of family and sexuality were as much a part of migrants’ daily experiences as political or ethnic organisations. In Chapter 13, Julia Charlton provides a more private angle on this issue, by exploring the letters of Tito Zungu. Charlton reveals a poignant example of the difficulties of conducting family life as a migrant labourer. Using his letters and their designs to drive her argument, she examines some of the strategies employed by migrants and their families to overcome spatial distance.
The migrant workers of Laura Phillips’s Chapter 14 often struggled to organise as a group or form associations of support. Isolated and atomised, live-in domestic workers sought alternative ways to manage the difficulties of their migrant labour experience. Phillips suggests that for many domestic workers, working in white homes was the only way for them to be mothers to their children. Similarly, Jonny Steinberg’s moving essay (Chapter 15), reflects on the life of an elderly mineworker, illuminating the interplay of masculinity, sexuality and migrancy and the role of marriages between male migrants on the mines.
As the decades passed, migrants’ means of organising within the system altered. One of the most significant shifts was ushered in by the 1973 worker strikes in Durban, led by the emerging black trade union movement and strongly shaped by militant migrant labourers.14 In Chapter 16, Noor Nieftagodien introduces the long history of black workers’ organising in the twentieth century and accounts for the increased momentum after 1973. He shows that the specificities of migrant worker life made migrants particularly active in union organising. Living in compounds and in close quarters, at times workers were able to use home, residence- and work-based networks to organise resistance. Furthermore, as residual rural economies atrophied from the 1960s onwards, migrant workers faced the possibility of being forced to return to their rural ‘homes’ without sufficient earnings to support their families. This threat also propelled their involvement in trade unions. In addition, grass-roots rural networks and forms of migrant organisations (such as burial societies) both informed and were compatible with the bottom-up and democratic practices of many of the independent unions. These unions helped to win important economic advances and organisational spaces in the 1980s. Reforms of the post-apartheid era were heavily dependent on what was won – and lost – in the late-apartheid period. Changes in the economy over the second half of the twentieth century were highly significant in shaping what came post-1994.
From 1970 onwards, the economic parameters of migrant labour underwent profound changes. The rapid increases in the population of the reserves in the 1950s and 1960s, resulting from tightened influx control, forced removals and permanent migration from white farms, further enfeebled already faltering rural economies. Many households had neither land nor livestock and even those that did battled to secure meaningful returns. But jobs – badly paid and hazardous as many were – remained relatively freely available. Imperfect estimates put the national unemployment rate in 1970 at 6.7 per cent.15
In the early 1970s, a combination of labour shortages and the emergence of black trade unions led to significant increases in wages, which boosted remittances to many rural households. This decade also saw a substantial increase in the level of pensions. However, tragically, from the end of the decade, unemployment levels soared. By Charles Feinstein’s calculation, in the period 1980–1996, the potential labour force increased by 4 500 000, of whom 4 170 000 became unemployed. If the 1 400 000 individuals who had abandoned the search for employment is added into the equation, the total unemployment level rises to a staggering 5 570 000 by 1996. In percentage terms, the unemployment rate increased from 7 per cent to 33 per cent in these years. While these percentages are probably not entirely reliable – especially for the earlier period – they point to a massive and rapid transformation in the political economy of rural areas, which has yet to be fully appreciated and analysed.16 Job losses were particularly severe in mining, industry and agriculture and unskilled migrant workers were at grave risk. A storekeeper in Limpopo recalled:
In the late 70s and early 80s business was good. People were working and sending money home until [after] 1983 when I realised that most of my customers were blue card people waiting for unemployment insurance claims … they had been laid off … it was all-over, people working in the firms, factory workers were retrenched.17
These developments had a particularly severe impact in the many parts of South Africa that had long depended on migrant remittances for their economic survival and to underwrite key social processes, such as marriage. Many older individuals who lost their jobs would never find another and their hopes of a dignified retirement were dashed. The prospects for the youth were as dismal. Unable to find work or accumulate resources to pay bride-wealth and so to marry and establish their own households, many young people in rural areas were trapped in social limbo. They were no longer children and some had passed through a daunting process of initiation, but they could not make the transition to full adult status.18
The tragic irony of modern South African history is that the advent of democracy, with all the hope it brought for a better future for all, came when the economy was losing its capacity to provide jobs for a third or more of those aspiring to employment. The failure of successive African National Congress (ANC) governments to reverse