Abstract
A long way home was conceived during an art exhibition entitled “Ngezinyawo – Migrant Journeys” that opened at Wits University in Johannesburg in April 2014. As Delius and Phillips describe in chapter one, its aim is to “portray migrant experience, agency and humanity in thought, action and expression – dimensions that are often neglected in overviews of the migrant labour system”. If that was the intention, then the book, which can be read alone since there are more than enough graphic images and literary artefacts included, definitely manages to achieve this.
Although the period 1800–2014 spans more than 200 years, this edited collection strikingly captures the commonalities and universalities of the way in which Southern Africans have interacted with migrant labour systems, settler colonialism and changing economic and political landscapes in Southern Africa.
The book presents parallel histories of slavery, domination and exploitation not only in the form of colonial legislation and capitalist-directed entrapment but also agency, art and invention as migrants negotiated their new social experiences.
In chapter two, Harries relates the history of immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, the long-standing and persisting exploitation by colonialists extracting work from Africans who often trekked through the Kruger National Park to the mines. The National Parks Board relationship of mutualism with the Chamber of Mines and Wenela (the labour recruiting company) is explored in chapter nine and is a brilliant example of the collusion of several different kinds of actors in the building of a white capitalist state, and the enclosure of the commons, in a time when the park was a space of fluidity and migration for many.
The thoughtful cataloguing of poetry, song and visual art that often do not have dates, about people such as Tito Zungu who sometimes do not remember the year in which they were born, reminds and reinforces the brilliance of the art that both defies and seeks to redefine the linear trajectory of western histories. Migrancy, it seems, bends time and space and reconfigures them again and again. We are offered remade time, remade traditions and remade cultures. This is history as memory, not time.
Seeking work at the mines blends with “traditional” ideas about becoming a man by “going wandering”. As Carl Richter’s account in chapter three shows, the making of the modern-tradition has at its root the entry into migrant labour. The Basotho, Zulu and Mpondo, men and women of Southern Africa, are all shaped in some way by migrant work for the white man who has come to offer money, slavery and difference. It is these new economic, spatial and power configurations that offer the opportunity, in the case of Ugudhla, son of Chief Matshana kaMondisa and 22-year-old composer/performer Nthabiseng Nthako, to flout tradition and rebel against social norms. Like youthful and ambitious people everywhere, the young men and women who left home for personal gain and individual growth knew, also, its potentiality not only to influence their own future, but also change collective paths.
One is forced to reckon with the agency, imagination and thriftiness of young and old Southern Africans during a time of new kinds of accumulation and changing economic paradigms, without risking the romanticisation of what was also, as we see in chapters seven and eleven, a period of hunger, famine and disease as a result not only of drought but also directed and deliberate colonial action and legislation. It is also clear the in these times of hardship the remittances of migrant labourers offered some reprieve to those at home in the rural areas. Chapter 10 highlights the various ways that the urban sustained the rural for many years, a practice that continues today as chapter 18 demonstrates, albeit in changing contexts.
The capacity of migrant labourers to influence the political and oppose corrupt authorities, whether white bosses or indunas on the mines (as chapter 17 shows) or Chiefs at home, must not be understated. As Hay discusses, the militancy of migrant labourers in Limpopo, who had much to lose with the introduction of betterment schemes and Bantu authorities, is not unlike their fellow mineworkers in Mpondoland during the same period. The Mpondo revolts, as well as the case of Limpopo in the 1950s, show how mineworkers organised politically and collectively both on and off the mines to secure their rural homes, which would be their final retirement place.
What is particularly striking about this volume is the attention given to the differing kinds of migrant labour in South Africa, and specifically the experience of women within this. In her chapter on Sophie, Laura Phillips describes the intersection of motherhood, Christianity and domestic labour in the lives of countless African women, many of whom were the first generations of women to migrate to the cities and take over domestic labour positions from men. The chapter reveals the obscene underside of the private/public divide not only within labour markets but also within African society itself, and what is often referred to as the settlement of patriarchs when it came to women’s movements and the making of “respectable womanhood”.
It stands in contrast to the many stories, such as Bungityala’s in Steinberg’s contribution to the volume, of men who work for years on the mines and are repeatedly cuckolded by their wives who remain in the rural homestead. The way in which migrant labour reconfigures familial relations in the case of both men and women migrant labourers is undeniable, but as Steinberg shows, the way different people deal with it differs. Bungityala’s attempt to escape his past and reality by riding his magnificent horse up and down the shoreline is possibly reminiscent of the reputation Mpondo men got on the mines for being both fearless and confrontational in their masculinity, also explored in chapter five.
Yet, for Tito Zungu, the escape came in the form of art. One can only imagine that receiving one of Zungu’s famous hand-decorated envelopes in the mail, so that friends or family could write back to him, may have, for a while, kept at bay the need to fill it with tidings that would bring him a heavy heart or more responsibility. Charlton shows the centrality of letter writing in the lives of migrants and their families and friends, in the years before cellphones, to express love, hunger, pain, joy and panic at having not heard from a loved one in a while.
These new forms of art, like the songs of the Basotho migrant men and the young beer-brewing independent women of the town, become part of a landscape in which some are initiated into the “new” whereas others, “left behind”, remake the old. Chapter six explores the history of beadwork in Southern Africa and its ambiguous relationship with tradition and modernity as well as the role of women in reproducing the beaded body as both “a body of resistance, proclaiming tradition and asserting modernity in the same breath (Nettleton, 2014: 101)”.
A long way home is a successful attempt to reinvigorate studies on Migrant labour, particularly in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre. The book offers a valuable contribution to creating a space in the academy to explore subaltern histories of experience in a thoughtful and nuanced way. What is left unexplored in this volume, something that Beinart gestures towards, and that Nieftagodien is perhaps mistakenly rooting in trade unionism alone, is the way in which migrant labourers organised themselves politically outside of both nationalist and trade unionist struggles. While Lekgoathi describes the rise of Ndebele Ethnicity in chapter 11, and the evolution of resistance to bantu authorities and betterment schemes, there remains a gap in the understanding of the kinds of organisation and resistance that were happening within certain groups of people in Southern Africa that form part of a subaltern sphere of politics that cannot be fully captured by using the narrow and, therefore, inadequate category of “worker struggles”. However, this book is perhaps the beginning of what could become a sustained attempt to write alternative accounts, not only of histories of resistance that privilege subaltern agency, but also the way in which the political is inscribed within these.