A Long Way Home. Deborah James
acquiring iron hoes – which were then the principal component of bride-wealth payments – was a key goal. But new goods came to play an increasingly important role. Most in demand from the 1840s to the 1880s were firearms, which played a key part in the hunting economy and in the power struggles between voortrekkers (white settlers) and indigenous people and in conflicts between black states. The South African Republic tried to ban the arms trade with black people, which was far from effective, but it did help to make guns very expensive in the interior. They were much easier and cheaper to buy in the Cape and hence presented a strong incentive for young men to seek work there.
A considerable literature has accumulated in recent decades on this early system of migrant labour, but our understanding of many elements remains sketchy. A great deal of historical writing portrays epic journeys, whether by voortrekkers, explorers, hunters, missionaries or shipwreck survivors. But the extraordinary journeys routinely undertaken by migrant workers, crossing more than a thousand kilometres of often hostile terrain, remain largely uncelebrated. While the evidence to correct this omission is sadly sparse, there are some documents that provide revealing glimpses into their travels.
Peter Delius provides one example of this. Berlin missionary Carl Richter was stationed in the Transvaal in the late nineteenth century and closely observed the migrant labourers who travelled long distances to work in the mines. In Chapter 3, Delius records Richter’s account of migrant journeys, giving a textured sense of the nature of the early system of migrant labour and labour relations between Afrikaans farmers and neighbouring chiefdoms. From Richter’s record, we are able to gain significant insights into the extraordinary journeys that migrants made in the 1860s and 1870s.
Figure 0.3
Anne Fischer
Xhosa migrant worker returning to the Transkei c.1950s
University of Cape Town Libraries, Iziko Museums of South Africa, Social History Collections
While early migrant communities were to some degree able to dictate the terms of their engagement with the system, societies were never a seamless whole. Who migrated, the effects of this migration and who benefited from the migration were seriously contested. Benedict Carton’s chapter reveals a dramatic example of this, showing how quickly migrant labour disrupted homestead hierarchies, particularly along the already fraught lines of generation and gender. In Chapter 5, we are introduced to the family of Zululand chief Matshana and his young son Ugudhla, who, after working in the mines and earning a waged income that he used to pay his mother’s hut tax, challenged his father’s authority and the ‘traditional’ paths towards patriarchal control. Played out before the Native High Court in Eshowe, the bitter rifts in this family reveal some of the corrosive consequences of migrancy for both patriarchal and generational authority.
But these processes had more subtle effects on social roles and identities. In Chapter 6, Anitra Nettleton explores one of the ‘hidden’ effects of migrant labour, focusing on the introduction of seemingly unremarkable glass beads into migrant communities from the late eighteenth century onwards. That the transformation of these beads into ornate symbols of ‘traditional identity’ became ‘women’s work’ is no coincidence. Rather it is one of many examples of the social processes in which women have become bearers of ‘custom’, particularly for a society in flux. Given the dynamism of culture, it comes as no surprise that these beads were not, in reality, part of a romanticised past, but were introduced into the society only through engagement with Western traders. These ambivalent beads were part of complex forms of self-representation among migrant-exporting societies, which merged and refashioned old and new practices and expressions of identity.
With the rapid increase of mining activities, the system of migrant labour became increasingly embedded in the functioning of southern African states and economies. In Chapter 8, we offer a ‘picture essay’ on Chinese labour in South Africa, a series of images and documents displaying the lives of foreign workers brought in to prop up a system already so fundamental to the South African economy. Following on from this, Jacob Dlamini’s Chapter 9 tells a story about a different set of foreign workers and their experiences as migrant labourers. Having engaged with the tentacles of the system for several decades now, many Mozambican societies have relied on – or came to anticipate – its institutions. Dlamini narrates one of the tragic outcomes of the dependence on labour recruitment agencies, whose racism and single-minded pursuit of profit blunted even the most rudimentary form of humanity. The weak and the old were literally left to die by the wayside. This callousness contrasts sharply with the concern for their fellow workers shown among Pedi and other groups of migrants organised from within African societies. First named the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wenela) and later known as The Employment Bureau of Africa (Teba), these agencies were the pillars of the mining industry, fundamentally shaping its expansion and power for much of the twentieth century.
The genesis of long-distance migrancy lay in the interaction between the dynamics of African societies and the demands of an economy based on colonial farming and, increasingly, mining. It was not determined by employer demand for cheap labour and, indeed, initially wages were relatively high. But over time, with considerable assistance from the processes of conquest and colonisation and with government support, it was transformed into a cheap labour system, in which much of the initial room for manoeuvre for migrants had been removed. One key indicator of this change in the balance of power was that real wage levels for black labourers on the mines remained more or less constant from 1911 to 1969, whereas white miners earned 11 times more in 1911 and 20 times more by 1969.11 Workers who secured employment in secondary industries and in the service sectors could earn considerably more, but mine wages remained a key underlying benchmark for the wage structure as a whole. But the fact that migrant workers lost a good deal of their economic bargaining power does not mean that the values, economic resources and forms of social organisation that existed within migrant and rural societies lost significance in shaping their world.
Land and livestock still played some part in sustaining households. In Chapter 4, William Beinart shows that until the 1940s the majority of Mpondo migrant labourers primarily saw their work as a means to sustain a rural economy, not least of all, through accumulating cattle. In fact, in their arable and fertile homes, for a period of time, there was a positive relationship between migrant incomes and smallholder output. While this was certainly not the case across the whole country, it was significant enough to conclude that rural livelihoods were not uniformly and simultaneously decimated. The fact that rural communities survived grinding droughts without the catastrophic loss of life that took place elsewhere in the region can also be partly explained by the interplay between migrants and rural economies. In Chapter 10, Michelle Hay examines how women in the 1940s and 1950s in the rural Letaba district came to rely on remittances from their partners, brothers and uncles in difficult times, ensuring that the effects of drought, though not overcome, were mitigated to some degree. Migrant labour had become integrated into people’s strategies of livelihood. Again, these remittances were linked to existing social forms: that a woman’s husband could save her from the worst effects of drought became an important marker of successful womanhood.
A description of the world view of Pedi workers has resonances across many of the migrant-sending societies in southern Africa during the early part of the twentieth century:
The first Pedi workers had seen migrancy as a way of protecting the independence of the kingdom. In the 1930s most men still regarded working in the city primarily as a means of maintaining a rural way of life. Migrancy was seen as a necessary evil which had to be undertaken not only in order to pay taxes but also to secure the resources to marry, to build a homestead and accumulate cattle and ultimately to allow for