Another symptom of this intellectual and political malaise has been the extraordinary absence of migrant labour from the debates about and representations of heritage since 1994. If one looks at the priorities expressed in thought and action by the new heritage agencies, it would be reasonable to assume that democratic South Africa was built on slavery, urban struggles, trade unions, educated intellectuals and nationalist organisations, all bound seamlessly together in the forward march of ‘The Struggle’. We have lost sight of the lives, struggles and ideas of the millions of migrant workers from within and far beyond South Africa’s borders. Their efforts, in often deeply dangerous and dehumanising conditions, provided the foundations of an industrial economy that may, if properly managed, be able to improve the lot of the majority of South Africans. Their attempts to comprehend, explain, represent and simply to endure the maelstrom of change that swept through their lives and communities have also bequeathed to contemporary society a living, dynamic cultural and artistic heritage. This legacy could provide rich resources for further innovation and adaption. However, instead of drawing on these artistic wellsprings, all too often our society is offered a static, ossified and reactionary version of ‘tribal’ culture – a legacy initially elaborated by apartheid’s intellectual fellow travellers, but now endorsed by the new cultural commissars as our authentic repository of heritage. This book (and the art exhibition ‘Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys’) present glimpses of alternative possibilities, which we hope will fuel debate about the ways in which migrant workers’ searches for meaning, self-expression and solace can inform the ways we remember the past and imagine the future.
Notes
1.J Crush, A Jeeves and D Yudelman, South Africa’s Labour Empire (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 2–3.
2.F Wilson, Migrant Labour in South Africa (Johannesburg: South African Council of Churches, 1972), 120–165.
3.Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman, Labour Empire.
4.P Delius, A Lion Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Portsmouth: Heinemann; Oxford: James Currey, 1996), 88.
5.D Gaitskell, ‘Christian Compounds for Girls: Church Hostels for African Women in Johannesburg, 1907–1979’, Journal of Southern African Studies 6.1 (1979), 44–69.
6.Wilson, Migrant Labour.
7.P Delius and C Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective’, African Studies 61.1 (2002).
8.P Delius, ‘Family, Young People and the Social Fabric’, in The Next Decade: Perspectives on South Africa’s Growth and Development, ed. A Bernstein and S Johnston (Johannesburg: CDE, 2005), 49–68.
9.J Illiffe, The African AIDS Epidemic: A History (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 33–65.
10.P Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994), 13–16; P Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), 69–71.
11.Wilson, Migrant Labour, 46.
12.P Delius, Lion, 23.
13.P Mayer, Black Villagers in an Industrial Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
14.Though, significantly, not much changed for domestic workers, whose conditions of employment were not changed by the Wiehahn Commission.
15.CH Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 274.
16.Ibid., 239, 274.
17.Delius, Lion, 147.
18.Ibid., 160.
19.A Delius, The Day Natal Took Off: A Satire (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), 3.
20.K Forrest, ‘Migrant Labour: Discarded but Not Discontinued (A Rustenburg Recruitment Case)’, Ruth First Memorial Lecture, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 29 August 2013.
CHAPTER 1
Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys
Fiona Rankin-Smith
In 2004, I participated as one of the curators in an important exhibition entitled ‘Democracy X: Marking the Present – Re-Presenting the Past’, held in the Castle galleries of Iziko Museums in Cape Town.
The flagship exhibition formed part of the celebrations to mark a decade of democracy in South Africa. The exhibition covered the long sweep of South African history – from the first traces of human past, in ochre fragments with engraved lines, found at the Blombos caves in the Eastern Cape and dating back 70 000 years to the present. The exhibition used significant objects pertaining to migrancy, documents and other forms of archive that explored the history, politics and culture of South Africa from past to present. Curator Sandra Klopper and I were assigned to source objects and items that best exemplified migrancy and migrant culture. Although it was only a small part of the ‘Democracy X’ exhibition, I discussed with Peter Delius, a historian on the curatorial team, the desirability of staging a comprehensive exhibition about migrant labour. Responsible for multiple transformations wrought in our society over 200 years and across southern and central Africa, the richness of this subject seemed worthy of much more serious interrogation for a future exhibition.
‘Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys’ takes that seed of an idea and extends across disciplines to include film, photography, artworks, artefacts from ethnographic collections, archival documents, interviews and other forms, such as performance, music and dance, in ways that explore the rich and diverse ramifications of the migrant labour system that has built South Africa’s economy. The exhibition takes place in three levels of the Wits Art Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: in the Street and Core Galleries on the ground level, the Strip space, which is half way to the basement space, and the Mezzanine, which is the upper level of the Wits Art Museum display areas.
Journey/transformation
The theme of journeying is threaded metaphorically throughout the exhibition, constantly referring to travelling between spaces, on foot originally. The journeys made by men from rural to urban spaces in search of labour were often very long and full of danger and hardships. The roots of the migrant labour system stretch back to ancient trading networks and forms of mobility within African societies. By the 1860s, thousands of young men from Lesotho, the Transvaal and Mozambique tramped to the Cape and Natal in search of work and the prized commodities – especially firearms – that wages enabled them to secure. The experience of travelling between the rural homestead and the mines and urban centres in search of work was a defining experience for migrant workers, separating and connecting various emotional universes.
This exhibition is centred on the concept of journeys across and between different worlds, journeys that both unite and overlap the differences, creating linkages between objects. The objects’ significance resonates within multiple categories of the exhibition, symbolic of the journeys travelled between the rural and the urban, from home to places of work that were often dehumanising and foreign. Thus the placement of the objects and images in the exhibition are not organised according to a specific historical timeline. Instead, the exhibition progresses along the routes of