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1
LICHTENSTEIN, ALEX. "MAKING APARTHEID WORK: AFRICAN TRADE UNIONS AND THE 1953 NATIVE LABOUR (SETTLEMENT OF DISPUTES) ACT IN SOUTH AFRICA." Journal of African History 46, no. 2 (July 2005): 293–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853704000441.
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Most analyses of apartheid labor policy focus on the regulation of the labor market rather than the industrial workplace. Instead, this article investigates the administration of South Africa's 1953 Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act to examine shop-floor control rather than influx control. The article argues that in response to the threat of African trade unionism, apartheid policymakers in the Department of Labour addressed the problem of low African wages and expanded the use of ‘works committees’. By shifting the debate about capitalism and apartheid away from influx control and migrant labor, and towards industrial legislation and shop-floor conflict, the article places working-class struggle at the center of an analysis of apartheid.
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Huang, Mingwei. "The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism." Public Culture 33, no. 2 (May 1, 2021): 193–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917178.
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Abstract This article tells a story about the unfolding “Chinese Century” in South Africa centered on China Malls, wholesale shopping centers for Chinese goods that have cropped up along Johannesburg's old mining belt since the early 2000s. Based in ethnographic and historical analysis, the essay takes a palimpsestic approach to imagine how Chinese capital enters into a terrain profoundly shaped by race, labor, and migration and is entangled with the afterlives of gold. Chinese migrant traders in South Africa draw on legacies of migrant mine labor and refashion processes that devalue Black labor. Whereas these histories are lost upon Chinese newcomers, African workers experience working for “the Chinese” through the memory of the mines. With the aim of theorizing emergent formations of race and capital in the Chinese Century, the essay threads this new epoch through the history of colonial and racial capitalism of the City of Gold.
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Musoni, Francis. "The Ban on “Tropical Natives” and the Promotion of Illegal Migration in Pre-Apartheid South Africa." African Studies Review 61, no. 3 (July 10, 2018): 156–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.73.
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Abstract:This article examines the historical as well as contemporary significance of South Africa’s 1913 ban on the recruitment of migrant workers from areas north of latitude 22 degrees south. This ill-conceived policy not only criminalized the employment of so-called “tropical natives” in South Africa but also triggered contestations, fueling illegal migration from the restricted areas. By 1933, when the ban was lifted, illegal migration from Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) had become a major site of contestations among policymakers, labor agents, business owners, and migrant workers in South Africa. While the dominant narrative in Southern Africa holds that illegal migration only became an issue of concern after the end of apartheid rule, this phenomenon has a much longer history in the subregion. Identifying factors that push people to move from one country to another and those that force or encourage travelers to cross international boundaries without following official channels facilitates the understanding of the complexities involved in cases of illegal migration wherever this practice exists. While low wages and other sources of insecurity in colonial Zimbabwe may indeed have compelled many people to consider moving to South Africa, such factors did not cause migrants to use unofficial channels in crossing the border. Rather, South Africa’s ban imposed numerous barriers, rendering it difficult for those seeking work to cross between the two countries through legal and/or formal channels.
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Breckenridge, Keith. "‘Money with Dignity’: Migrants, Minelords and the Cultural Politics of the South African Gold Standard Crisis, 1920–33." Journal of African History 36, no. 2 (July 1995): 271–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700034149.
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This paper takes as its point of departure a simple fact that has gone largely unnoticed in the historical and ethnographic literature of migrant mine labour: prior to 1933 mineworkers were paid in gold. It is argued that the ideas and practices associated with the control and transmission of metallic money were at the heart of the experience of migrant labour before the crisis and formed a major part of the self-definition of migrant gold miners during the 1920s. Moreover, both the practices and ideas of African mineworkers were reciprocally linked to the global political struggles taking place over the gold standard. From the First World War to the Christmas of 1932, the South African and Imperial states and mining capital were involved in a controversy over the form of the South African and international money supplies. Whilst in appearance an abstract and mysterious debate, the contest over the form of the money supply laid the foundations for a system of value that penetrated into the daily lives and politics of many southern Africans. Chief amongst these were hundreds of thousands of migrant mine-workers. Following from this, the paper posits a re-interpretation of the gold standard crisis. The turning point that coincided with the new year of 1933 was not merely an economic change; it constituted a major transformation of the form, value, velocity and politics of money throughout Southern Africa. Coincidently, the crisis was an economic and cultural transition for the mining industry itself and marked a dramatic re-definition of the terms of economic conflict between workers and managers. Finally, this paper calls for a new periodization of capitalist development in Southern Africa that meshes together the cultural and economic dimensions of historical processes in a manner that foregrounds the experience of the African working class.
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Breckenridge, Keith. "Promiscuous Method: The Historiographical Effects of the Search for the Rural Origins of the Urban Working Class in South Africa." International Labor and Working-Class History 65 (April 2004): 26–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547904000043.
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Class in contemporary South Africa is undergoing an identity crisis. The demographic decline of the industrial working class, and the terrible predicament of the unemployed, especially in the countryside, lends support to the argument that we should, as Geoff Eley and Keith Neald have recently suggested in the pages of this journal, reconsider the class-centered theory that has dominated social history since the early 1970s. This paper examines the recent labor history of the coastal center of Durban, the urban epicenter of the contemporary disease and subsistence crisis in South Africa. Three distinct, ethnically defined, working-class groups have made the journey to this city from Zululand, Mozambique and India. And the histories of each of these groups suggest that class-centered histories in South Africa have been methodologically promiscuous, considering themes, problems and narratives that have no obvious connection to the industrial lives of the working class. The wide-ranging scope of South African labor history and its tremendous explanatory power in fields far from the industrial workplace follow directly from the effort to explore the rural roots of the working class. In following the paths that migrant workers have used to come to the city, historians have strayed into fields of social life—sex, marriage, identity, desire, witchcraft, nationalism—that have much greater significance today than the old working-class politics. Yet these studies never lose sight of the real powers of local, regional and imperial states and the capitalist institutions that harnessed them. The study of class has been recast in South Africa by the search for rural culture. Class may not be the most useful tool for understanding South Africa today, but it has proved extremely powerful as a means of understanding how we got here.
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GEWALD, JAN-BART. "NEAR DEATH IN THE STREETS OF KARIBIB: FAMINE, MIGRANT LABOUR AND THE COMING OF OVAMBO TO CENTRAL NAMIBIA." Journal of African History 44, no. 2 (July 2003): 211–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853702008381.
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Namibian politics and society are today dominated by people who trace their descent from the settlements and homesteads of Ovamboland in southern Angola and northern Namibia. Yet, prior to 1915, and the defeat by South Africa of the German colonial army in German South-West Africa, very few Ovambo had settled in areas to the south of the Etosha Pan. In 1915, a Portuguese expeditionary army defeated Kwanyama forces in southern Angola, and unleashed a flood of refugees into northern Namibia. These refugees entered an area that was already overstretched. Since 1912 the rains had failed and, on account of the First World War, trade and migration had come to a standstill. As a result the area was experiencing its most devastating famine ever. Unable to find sanctuary in Ovamboland, thousands of people trekked southwards into central Namibia, an area which had only just come under the control of South Africa. The famine allowed for the easy entrance of South African military administrators and labour recruiters into Ovamboland and heralded the demise of Ovambo independence. By focusing on developments in the central Namibian town of Karibib between 1915 to 1916, the article explores the move of the Ovambo into central and southern Namibia. It traces the impact of war and drought on Ovambo societies, and follows Ovambo famine migrants on their route south into areas administered by the South African military administration. Discussion also concentrates on the reception and treatment of Ovambo famine migrants in the Karibib settlement, and argues that the refugee crisis heralded the establishment of Ovambo in modern central and southern Namibia.
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Lalthapersad, Pinky. "Historical analysis of African women workers in South Africa during the period 1900 to 2000." South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences 6, no. 2 (June 30, 2003): 262–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajems.v6i2.3313.
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The article is a detailed exposition of the history of the incorporation of African women into paid work in the South African labour market. The interlocking effects of racism, classism and sexism exposed African women to income and job insecurity. Historically, access of African women to the labour market was shaped by the gendered nature of the migrant labour system and by legal measures that restricted women’s entry into urban areas and waged work. When African women were allowed into the formal labour market, they were only allowed to undertake the low-skilled, low-paying, menial jobs, were excluded from union benefits and forced to work under exploitative conditions.
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Heinicke, Craig, and Wayne A. Grove. "Labor Markets, Regional Diversity, and Cotton Harvest Mechanization in the Post-World War II United States." Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 269–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200012955.
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As hand-harvest labor disappeared from the American cotton fields after World War II, labor market dynamics differed between two key production regions, the South and the West. In the South, predominantly resident African Americans and whites harvested cotton, whereas in the West the labor market was composed of white residents, domestic Latino migrant workers, and Mexican nationals temporarily immigrating under the sponsorship of the U.S. government (braceros). We use newly reconstructed data for the two regions and estimate for the first time the regional causes of the demise of the hand-harvest labor force from 1949 to 1964. Whereas cheaper harvest mechanization substantially affected both regions, the downward trend in cotton prices and government programs to control cotton acreage played important roles in the disappearance of hand–harvested cotton in the South, but not in the West.
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White, Hylton. "Tempora Et Mores: Family Values and the Possessions of a Post-Apartheid Countryside." Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no. 4 (2001): 457–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006601x00275.
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AbstractThis paper examines a set of ritual responses to the challenges that post-apartheid South Africa's political economy poses to projects of domestic reproduction in the former Bantustan countryside of Zululand, where unemployment has limited the capacities of young men to create marital households. In the case study on which the paper is based, one such man's misfortunes are connected by divination to the spirit of an older kinsman who disappeared while working as a labor migrant. I argue that this connection and the rituals meant to confront it turn on fraught symbolic relations between the present and two pasts: the past of apartheid migrancy and a projected past of custom. Like the ghosts by which they are manifest, these times trouble domestic life in the present because of contradictory developments forcing unemployed migrants back on the values of private spheres while they undermine the bases of rural households.
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Yoon, Soo Ryon. "Artists or Slave Laborers? Performing Uncapturability in Burkinabe Performers’ Labor Rights Struggle in South Korea." positions: asia critique 28, no. 2 (May 1, 2020): 311–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8112468.
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This article traces eight performers from Burkina Faso, who in 2014 protested unfair labor practices at the Africa Museum of Original Art in South Korea, where they had been hired to perform. In the process, they demonstrated political and artistic endeavors in live concerts and dance workshops to reclaim both their monetary compensation and their artists’ status. Nevertheless, public and media discourse that followed this nationwide news—no matter how sympathetic—tended to treat the artists’ experiences as merely a failed Korean dream. Using performance studies methodologies and ethnographic methods, this article uses the terms performance and performativity more capaciously to include a range of embodied acts. With this, the article argues that framing the artists’ experiences within the narrative confines of struggling migrant workers fails to capture the complex, often contradictory relationship that they have with acts of performing beyond the existing categories of migrant labor. Furthermore, the sympathetic discourse capitalizes on hypervisibility of blackness, through which the artists’ suffering becomes a spectacle. This article suggests consideration of the concept of uncapturability—the embodiment of which exposes failures of a nationalist and racialized language—as well as existing theoretical frameworks mobilized to understand the interiority of performance and the artists’ work.
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Cox, Kevin R., and David Hemson. "Mamdani and the politics of migrant labor in South Africa: Durban dockworkers and the difference that geography makes." Political Geography 27, no. 2 (February 2008): 194–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.08.002.
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Austin, Gareth. "The Emergence of Capitalist Relations in South Asante Cocoa-Farming, C. 1916–33." Journal of African History 28, no. 2 (July 1987): 259–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700029777.
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The notion of capitalist relations in Ghanaian cocoa-farming is familiar, yet their development has been relatively little studied. In Amansie district, Asante, capitalist relations of production developed as a result rather than as a cause of the cocoa ‘take-off’, c. 1900–16. This paper examines their emergence, which occurred largely during the subsequent period of much slower growth and generally lower prices. The introduction and spread of regular wage-labour, the widening and deepening burden of rent on ‘stranger’ cocoa farms, the proliferation of ‘advances’, and the introduction of farm mortgaging are described, together with the accompanying decline of slavery, pawning, and other non-wage forms of labour. Colonial officials ineffectually deplored the growth of money-lending and, to a lesser extent, that of wage-labour. From the mid-1930s, however, the tendency towards greater separation of labour from control of the farm was partly reversed by a new insistence by northern labourers on the replacement of annual wage contracts by a managerial form of share-cropping. This demand was sustained against the opposition of farmowners and despite persistent unemployment, an achievement made possible by the migrants continued foothold in subsistence agriculture in their home areas. This case of migrant labourers successfully challenging the extension of wage relations raises questions concerning the relationships between commercial agriculture and ‘precapitalist’ social relations of production in Africa generally.
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Ngwane, Zolani. "'Real Men Reawaken Their Fathers' Homesteads, the Educated Leave Them in Ruins': the Politics of Domestic Reproduction in Post-Apartheid Rural South Africa1." Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no. 4 (2001): 402–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006601x00257.
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AbstractAn historical ethnography of generational conflicts in a rural community in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, this paper engages debates on the consequences of global neo-liberalism in local contexts. Through cash from migrant labor, rural household heads exercised power over domestic economics. Ideologically this power translated into the symbolic articulation of two institutions of social reproduction-the school and initiation rite such that the educated and potentially alienated subjects yielded by the former were resocialized through the latter into local subjects of the chief and sons of their fathers. With rising unemployment rates since the 1980s, however, the older men lost the material base for their monopoly over this symbolic structure. The generational conflicts that ensued reflected at once the attendant contradictions in social consciousness and consequent struggles to renegotiate the symbolic purchase of the relations between schooling and initiation.
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Atkins, Keletso E. "‘Kafir Time’: Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labour Discipline in Nineteenth Century Colonial Natal." Journal of African History 29, no. 2 (July 1988): 229–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700023653.
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This article attempts to understand in substantive terms the nature of black proletarianization in Natal, South Africa. This is undertaken by moving beyond arid explanations of outside agencies to focus on some of the underlying cultural premises that ordered the day-to-day activities of northern Nguni communities. This article examines their temporal perceptions, exploring within the colonial context the shift from peasant to industrial time, and showing the central role mission churches played in the transition process.Two important disclosures emerge as a result of this study. First, it conclusively demonstrates the existence of a rich history of nineteenth century African labour action (where until now the overwhelming assumption among historians has been that no such activity existed), much of which was related to the struggle over the definition of time. Secondly, it presents a more balanced picture of the migrant worker. One finds groups of labourers who continued to adhere to old attachments, while others adapted in a rather remarkable fashion to the conditions of the industrial workplace. Most striking of all, is that both were capable of dictating the terms of labour, whether they involved demands for the lunar month or the halfholiday and Sabbath rest day.
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Masuku, Sikanyiso, and Sharmla Rama. "Challenges to Refugees’ Socioeconomic Inclusion: A Lens Through the Experiences of Congolese Refugees in South Africa." Oriental Anthropologist: A Bi-annual International Journal of the Science of Man 20, no. 1 (June 2020): 82–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0972558x20913713.
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In antithesis to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development (socioeconomic inclusion for all) and a relatively progressive refugee policy framework (Refugee Act 130 of 1998), refugees in South Africa continue to face targeted exclusion and reduced living potentials. Impediments to refugee groups ability to ‘thrive and not just survive’ (as called for in the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees), are examined in this paper through a synopsis of the conditions surrounding their access to legal documents (a conduit to socioeconomic rights), their equitable participation/inclusion within the formal labour markets, financial sectors etc. In examining these issues, a case-study-based interpretive research design technique with eight FGD participants and two life history participants (drawn from Congolese refugees’ residing in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) was done. Several conceptual frameworks as well as a single principal theory (Murphy’s theory of monopolization) were utilized so as to fully examine forced migrant groups socioeconomic participation/inclusion in South Africa. This articles findings revealed that primary cultural, as well as structural agentive processes of obstruction significantly inhibit refugee groups full socioeconomic participating in the life of their host communities. The said obstructions included but were not confined to: adverse forms of incorporation, opportunity hoarding, as well as the normative unobtainability of social, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital.
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Nduna, Mzikazi, and Grace Khunou. "Editorial: Father Connections." Open Family Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (December 31, 2014): 17. http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1874922401406010017.
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South Africa celebrated twenty years of democracy in 2014 following more than 100 years of colonization and institutionalized discrimination through Apartheid. A ‘broken’ family structure is one of the pathetic legacies left by political instability in post-colonial and post war countries globally. This phenomenon of broken families is evident in South Africa following the period of discrimination against Black people and the systematic migrant labor system that was sponsored by and for the Apartheid government. The migrant labor system separated fathers from their families and men left their families in the rural communities to work in the burgeoning mines and factories in urban areas. The current democratic State has a responsibility to strengthen broken families through policies and intervention informed by research evidence. There is an emerging body of research on Father Connections in post-war and post-colonial settings. This special issue brings together eight articles on Father Connections in South Africa. The articles present data from diverse but interesting research; for example the piece by Nduna M and Taulela M focuses on the experiences of ‘discovering’ biological fathers for youth who grew up with absent and unknown fathers. The participants that the article draws from are young women from a small town, in Mpumalanga. Through narrative analysis, the article explores how young people deal with finding out who their biological fathers are. In the article by Selebano N and Khunou G, the experiences of young fathers from Soweto are explored. It is illustrated in this article that, there are strong ties between young men’s experiences and the community values, history and culture where they experience fatherhood. The article by Langa M interestingly looks at narratives and meaning makings of young boys who grew up without fathers. Langa looks at how young boys can adopt alternative ideas of what it means to be a man in contexts that would otherwise be assumed to automatically lead to an embrace of hegemonic notions of masculinities. On a similar note the article by Nduna M focuses on experiences of young people who grow up without a father entering into endeavours to find and use their father’s surname. The article looks at how the signifying paternal ancestry is developed and maintained in contexts of father absence, through pursuing an absent father’s surname as the ‘right surname’. The article by Lesch E and Ismail A focuses on the significant question of the father daughter relationship and examines constraining constructions of fatherhood for daughters with a specific focus on the Cape Winelands community in South Africa. In Chauke P and Khunou G‘s contribution on the media’s influence on societal notions of fatherhood in relation to the maintenance system is examined. The article looks at how cases of maintenance are dealt with in print media. Franklin A & Makiwane M’s article provides a significant examination of male attitudes of family and children. This article begins to speak to the transformations of expectations of men in families. This transformation is addressed through a look at racially disaggregated quantitative data. Mthombeni A reviews a book, Good Morning Mr. Mandela by Zelda Le Grange where she examines some of the challenges of fatherhood in South Africa’s past and present.
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McInnis, Jarvis C. "A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South." American Literature 91, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 523–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7722116.
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Abstract This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi delta. The Cotton Farmer ran from 1919 to circa 1927 and was mainly confined to the company’s properties. However, in 1926, three copies of the paper circulated to Bocas del Toro, Panama, to a Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborer employed on the infamous United Fruit Company’s vast banana and fruit plantations. Tracing the Cotton Farmer’s hemispheric circulation from the Mississippi delta to Panama, this essay explores the intersections of labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black south. What do we make of a reading public among black tenant farmers on a corporate cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta at the height of Jim Crow? How did the entanglements of labor and literacy at once challenge and correspond with conventional accounts of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South? Further, in light of the Cotton Farmer’s circulation from Mississippi’s cotton fields to Panama’s banana fields, this essay establishes the corporate plantation as a heuristic for exploring the imperial logics and practices tying the US South to the larger project of colonial domination in the Caribbean and Latin America, and ultimately reexamines black transnationalism and diaspora from the position of corporate plantation laborers as they negotiated ever-evolving modes of domination and social control on corporate plantations in the global black south. In so doing, it establishes black agricultural and corporate plantation laborers as architects of black geographic thought and diasporic practice alongside their urban, cosmopolitan contemporaries.
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JEEVES, ALAN. "Migrant Labour and South African Expansion, 1920–1950." South African Historical Journal 18, no. 1 (November 1986): 73–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582478608671606.
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Kenefick, William. "Confronting White Labourism: Socialism, Syndicalism, and the Role of the Scottish Radical Left in South Africa before 1914." International Review of Social History 55, no. 1 (April 2010): 29–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020859009990617.
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SummaryDominated by the ideas of the “communist school”, the early history of the socialist and revolutionary syndicalist movement in South Africa has (until relatively recently) been largely overlooked by labour historians. From this approach emerged the view that the dominant voice of white workers in South Africa was British, and to a lesser extent Australian, and that their blend of class and racial consciousness resulted in the widespread support for the common ideology of white labourism. Indeed, support for this system of industrial and racial segregation was prevalent across the British Empire, was widely supported by the imperial working class, and in South Africa was never seriously challenged or confronted before 1914. Over recent years, however, South African labour historians have made efforts to rethink their national labour history by examining the early labour movement and the ideology of white labourism in a global context. This article adopts a similar approach and argues that the politics of white labourism was not uniformly embraced by the imperial working class, and that in South Africa there was a vocal and active non-racialist movement which sought to confront racism and segregation, dispute the operation of the “colour bar”, and challenge the white protectionist policies of the labour and trade-union movement. In conclusion, it will be argued that the campaign to confront white labourism was disproportionately influenced by radical left Scottish migrants who adhered firmly to the colour-blind principles of international socialism and revolutionary syndicalism.
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BARNES, TERESA A. "FOLLOWING THE MIGRANT MINEWORKERS HOME Basotho and the Mines: A Social History of Labour Migrancy in Lesotho and South Africa, c. 1890–1940. By EDDY TSHIDISO MALOKA. Dakar: Codesria, 2004. Pp. xi+257. £28.95/$47.95, paperback (ISBN 2-85978-128-8)." Journal of African History 46, no. 3 (November 2005): 527–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853705341338.
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Jochelson, Karen, Monyaola Mothibeli, and Jean-Patrick Leger. "Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Migrant Labor in South Africa." International Journal of Health Services 21, no. 1 (January 1991): 157–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/11ue-l88j-46hn-hr0k.
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Hogendorn, Jan S. "Africa - West African Diamonds, 1919–1983: An Economic History. By Peter Greenhalgh. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Pp. xiii, 306. $32.50. - Migrant Labour in South Africa's Mining Economy: The Struggle for the Gold Mines' Labour Supply, 1890–1920. By Alan H. Jeeves. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv, 323. $30.00. - Industrialization and Trade Union Organisation in South Africa, 1924–55: The Rise and Fall of the South African Trades and Labour Council. By Jon Lewis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. x, 246. £25.00." Journal of Economic History 47, no. 3 (September 1987): 817–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700049391.
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Clark, Samuel J., Mark A. Collinson, Kathleen Kahn, Kyle Drullinger, and Stephen M. Tollman. "Returning home to die: Circular labour migration and mortality in South Africa 1." Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 35, no. 69_suppl (August 2007): 35–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14034950701355619.
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Aim: To examine the hypothesis that circular labour migrants who become seriously ill while living away from home return to their rural homes to convalesce and possibly to die. Methods: Drawing on longitudinal data collected by the Agincourt health and demographic surveillance system in rural northeastern South Africa between 1995 and 2004, discrete time event history analysis is used to estimate the likelihood of dying for residents, short-term returning migrants, and long-term returning migrants controlling for sex, age, and historical period. Results: The annual odds of dying for short-term returning migrants are generally 1.1 to 1.9 times (depending on period, sex, and age) higher than those of residents and long-term returning migrants, and these differences are generally highly statistically significant. Further supporting the hypothesis is the fact that the proportion of HIV/TB deaths among short-term returning migrants increases dramatically as time progresses, and short-term returning migrants account for an increasing proportion of all HIV/TB deaths. Conclusions: This evidence strongly suggests that increasing numbers of circular labour migrants of prime working age are becoming ill in the urban areas where they work and coming home to be cared for and eventually to die in the rural areas where their families live. This shifts the burden of caring for them in their terminal illness to their families and the rural healthcare system with significant consequences for the distribution and allocation of health care resources.
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Crush, Jonathan, and Wilmot James. "Depopulating the compounds: Migrant labor and mine housing in South Africa." World Development 19, no. 4 (April 1991): 301–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0305-750x(91)90178-k.
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Thomas, William G., Richard G. Healey, and Ian Cottingham. "Reconstructing African American Mobility after Emancipation, 1865–67." Social Science History 41, no. 4 (2017): 673–704. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2017.23.
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Historians and social scientists have relied on contemporaneous textual accounts to document African American mobility in the immediate aftermath of emancipation after the Civil War, but they have interpreted them in widely varying ways. Some emphasize large-scale migration across the South, while others suggest that most movements were local and limited. This research tracks the early or “first wave” of African American migrants between 1865 and 1867 within and out of the South in an attempt to map the motion taking place after the war and to document the scale, direction, and intensity of African American mobility in the period between 1865 and 1867. The Freedmen's Bureau records indicate certain kinds of movements within the South, while our census methodology shows that there was more movement out of the South than accounted for in the Freedmen's Bureau labor records or previously accounted for in the historiography. Further, we observe two types of movement: short-term migration based on one-year contracts, perhaps returning to the point of origin, and another movement not always mediated through the Freedmen's Bureau that was more long term, but also subject to the freedperson's return to the point of origin. We seek to chart the process of emancipation over time and across space, detecting spatial patterns on an otherwise highly variable individual experience. No study has used the Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts to trace African American labor movements, and no study has deployed the 1880 individual census data to examine African American migration based on birthplace cohorts.
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Rockel, Stephen J. "New Labor History in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Enslavement and Forced Labor." International Labor and Working-Class History 86 (2014): 159–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547914000155.
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African labor history is undergoing a resurgence judging by the appearance of these three important books. During the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, historians working in East, West, and southern Africa published a remarkable number of first-rate histories of migrant laborers, rural workers, and the emerging urban working class, notably in the innovative Heinemann Social History of Africa series founded by Allen Isaacman and Jean Hay. Other historians published fine works elsewhere. Labor history of all kinds flourished. However, with new academic trends and the demise of the Social History series in the mid-2000s, African labor history seems to have entered a decline, although studies of precolonial slavery have continued to appear regularly. It is therefore gratifying to see a number of new labor histories published in the last two or three years.
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McCracken, John. "Fishing and the Colonial Economy: the Case of Malawi." Journal of African History 28, no. 3 (November 1987): 413–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700030115.
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Despite the evident importance of fishing in Malawi, its role in the territorial colonial economy has been largely ignored. This paper focuses on the evolution of fishing and fish-trading at the south end of Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi), emphasising the interaction between ecological change and changes in market opportunity. During the late nineteenth century, fishing played an important role in the economy of the Mang'anja people alongside agricultural production. Communual tasks such as the setting of nets or building of canoes were conducted by male members of an mbumba or matrilineage group who traded fish with the agriculturally productive highland regions nearby in exchange for maize and beans. Little changed initially with the estalishment of colonial rule, though some labour previously employed in fishing may have been diverted into cotton-growing which the Government encouraged in the Upper Shire Valley. The establishment of military camps during the First World War, combined with the sudden drying up of Lake Chilwa, the major source of fish in the Shire Highlands, created the opportunity for enterprising fishermen to start a regular trade in dried fish to Blantyre and Zomba from about 1917. This was stimulated in the 1920s by the steady rise of water levels on the Shire River which brought cotton production virtually to a halt making fishing an attractive alternative.The advent in the 1930s of non-African commercial fishermen who used lorries to transport fresh fish to Blantyre and dried fish to Salisbury did not prevent a further expansion of African fishing and fish-trading, many of the traders using bicycles to extend their sales into the southern Malawian hinterland. Officials tended to side with African fishermen when their interests clashed with those of incomers, notably the Greek Yiannakis brothers. But they had little success in introducing new techniques to improve productivity and fell back in the 1950s On the prohibition of exports to the Rhodesias, a policy aimed at ensuring a regular supply of fish to workers on European estates within Malawi.By the 1950s, European companies were recorded as being responsible for over half the fish caught in Malawi. African fishing had been affected by the emergence of a small group of capitalist entrepreneurs, most of them former labour migrants, who had invested their savings in imported nets and boats and employed labour on a regular basis. Mang'anja fishermen now faced competition from Tonga migrants using new technical and organisational methods. In contrast to under-development sterotypes, the indigenous industry continued to expand, with migrant workers playing an important role in the development of fishing.
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Zhan, Shaohua, and Ben Scully. "From South Africa to China: land, migrant labor and the semi-proletarian thesis revisited." Journal of Peasant Studies 45, no. 5-6 (September 19, 2018): 1018–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1474458.
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Chirwa, Wiseman Chijere. "“No TEBA …Forget TEBA”: The Plight of Malawian Ex-migrant Workers to South Africa, 1988–1994." International Migration Review 31, no. 3 (September 1997): 628–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/019791839703100305.
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This article is about the process of socioeconomic transformation in rural Malawi. It examines the survival strategies and enterprising spirit of Malawian migrant workers and their households. It argues that the strategies of these people often went beyond survival in the provision of basic necessities. Those who had the economic drive and entrepreneurial skills were able to use the proceeds of labor migration to improve their own and their households’ socioeconomic life. In March 1988, the South African Chamber of Mines stopped a century-old tradition of recruiting migrant workers from Malawi. This has arrested and put to a halt a process of accumulation taking place in the households of the returned migrant workers in the rural economy. Thus, the effects of the retrenchment of the workers will spread from the migrant and his family through the economic and social wellspring of all sectors of rural communities and their commercial lives.
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Redhead, Grace. "‘A British Problem Affecting British People’: Sickle Cell Anaemia, Medical Activism and Race in the National Health Service, 1975–1993." Twentieth Century British History 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 189–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwab007.
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Abstract Recent historiography has explored a contradiction at the heart of the British welfare state—it was founded on and supported by migrant and non-white labour, whose own healthcare and broader welfare state entitlements were neglected. This article explores how this contradiction was exposed and challenged by some of the health service’s own workforce, who witnessed and contested racism in the National Health Service (NHS). This is discussed through the lens of the treatment of sickle cell anaemia (SCA), a genetic trait and disease more common in people of African, South Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean descent, which has been highly racialized as affecting black people in particular. By pushing for improved responses to pain in sickle cell disease, and demonstrating the need for SCA screening in urban areas, healthcare professionals within the NHS—many of whom were black or migrant nurses, health visitors or doctors—articulated the status and entitlements of Black British citizenship.
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Choi), Manie (Jong-Man, Joyce C. H. Liu, and Brett Neilson. "Migrant Struggles in South Korea and Elsewhere." South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 3 (July 1, 2021): 655–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9155351.
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Bidduth, Syed, and Samar were dishonorably deported from South Korea about fifteen years ago while they were protesting for the rights of undocumented migrant workers. Since returning to their home countries, Bangladesh and Nepal, they have been practicing modes of solidarity that they learned during the years of struggle. Still, We Are Migrant Workers is a documentary film made to record their personal history, will, and current political projects. This is an interview about the historical background of labor migration in Korea, the struggles of the characters in the film, and the alternatives they have been pursuing in the wake of their deportations.
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Singh, Gayatri. "Paradoxical Payoffs: Migrant Women, Informal Sector Work, and Hiv/Aids in South Africa." NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 17, no. 2 (August 2007): 71–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/104829110701700208.
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In post-apartheid South Africa, there has been a significant rise in women's out-migration from rural areas and across its territorial borders for economic purposes resulting in gender reconfiguration of migration streams. Alongside, there has been a simultaneous increase in the participation of women in the labor force. However, this has mostly grown in the informal sector,1 which is often associated with low earnings and insecure working conditions. One consequence has been the increasing reliance of migrant women on survivalist activities such as informal sexual exchanges that increase their risk of contracting HIV infection. Insecure working environments also expose migrant women to sexual abuses. This article is based on the author's work in South Africa's major urban centers and examines the nature of the relationship between the increased migration of black African women in South Africa, the nature of their work, and their resultant vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.
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Fay, Derick. "Migrants, Forests and Houses: The Political Ecology of Architectural Change in Hobeni and Cwebe, South Africa." Human Organization 70, no. 3 (August 18, 2011): 310–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.17730/humo.70.3.f346361227x06866.
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Examining architectural continuity and change over a century in two communities in South Africa's Eastern Cape, this paper reassesses the assertion that migration, wage labor, and capitalism lead to major architectural changes and the adoption of extra-local purchased building materials. Labor migration was widespread here by the early 20th century, but houses were built from local materials until the 21st century. The pace and trajectories of architectural change in Hobeni and Cwebe have been contingently related to the stability or dynamism of labor migration, migrant cultures of consumption, access to building materials from local forests and distant markets, and intra-household control of resources. Illustrating interconnections between processes across household, local, regional, and national scales, the paper highlights the value of a political ecology approach to architectural change.
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Rohde, R. F., and M. T. Hoffman. "One Hundred Years of Separation: The Historical Ecology of a South African ‘Coloured Reserve’." Africa 78, no. 2 (May 2008): 189–222. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/e0001972008000132.
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During the twentieth century, the 20,000 hectares commons surrounding the village of Paulshoek as well as the neighbouring privately-owned farms have been significantly influenced by evolving land-use practices driven largely by socio-economic and political change in the broader Namaqualand and South African region. Land-use practices in the communal lands of Namaqualand were based initially on transhumant pastoralism, then on extensive dryland cropping associated with livestock production under restricted mobility, and more recently on a sedentarized labour reserve where agricultural production now forms a minor part of the local economy. For the first half of the twentieth century, farmers on communal and privately-owned farms shared similar transhumant pastoral practices and both moved across unfenced farm boundaries. By the middle of the century, however, fence-lines were established and commercial farming on privately-owned farms was increasingly managed according to rangeland science principles. As the population grew in the communal areas, families gravitated to new ‘service’ villages such as Paulshoek and became increasingly dependent on migrant labour and state welfare. While the majority of former croplands are now fallow, many of them for decades or more, communal livestock populations have remained relatively high, fluctuating with rainfall. The impact of this history of land use can be compared with that of neighbouring privately-owned farms where low stocking rates, coupled with a variety of state subsidies, have had a very different environmental outcome. This article charts the environmental transformations that have occurred in the area of Paulshoek as a direct result of the region's political history and the evolution of the regional economy. We present a variety of evidence drawn from archival sources, oral history, repeat aerial and ground photography, and detailed climate, cropping and livestock records to show that events far beyond the borders of Namaqualand's communal areas have had a profound influence on their environments.
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Thebe, Vusilizwe, and Pamela Maombera. "“Negotiating the Border”: Zimbabwean Migrant Mothers and Shifting Immigration Policy and Law in South Africa." African Studies Review 62, no. 4 (March 26, 2019): 134–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.120.
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Abstract:Based on an extended study of Zimbabwean women migrants in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, this article focuses on these women both as mothers and as labor migrants, seeking to understand their migration intentions in relation to changing policy and law in South Africa. It also focuses on their responses to the changes in policy as they seek to renegotiate the border. The strategies adopted by the women in negotiating the border not only demonstrate their agency, but are also intricately linked to their migration intentions. Their responses are critical to our understanding of contemporary migration in the region.
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Parpart, Jane L., and Fred Cooper. "Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital and the State in Urban Africa." International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (1986): 578. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/219018.
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Kenny, Bridget. "Walmart in South Africa: Precarious Labor and Retail Expansion." International Labor and Working-Class History 86 (2014): 173–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547914000167.
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In 2011 Walmart's bid to buy a controlling stake in South Africa's Massmart Holdings, Inc. went before the country's Competition Commission and Competition Tribunal, both of which would determine whether to grant the merger outright or to place conditions on it. Massmart Holdings comprises a number of branded subsidiaries in the South African market, including Walmart-style general merchandise dealers, electronics retailers, do-it-yourself building suppliers, and food wholesalers—Game, Dion, Builder's Warehouse, and Makro, respectively—as well as the more recently acquired food retailer, Cambridge Food. South African unions, most prominently the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (Saccawu), with support from the Global Union Federation UNI Global and, in the United States, the United Food and Commercial Workers, fought the merger.
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Watson, R. L., Elizabeth A. Eldredge, Fred Morton, and Carolyn Hamilton. "Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier." African Economic History, no. 24 (1996): 165. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3601854.
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Cleveland, David A. "Migration in West Africa: a savanna village prespective." Africa 61, no. 2 (April 1991): 222–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1160616.
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AbstractLocal migration in response to population pressure is part of the history of northeast Ghana. First by physical coercion, then by economic coercion, colonialism drastically changed the pattern of migration to one of long-distance movement from north-east Ghana and the northern savannas in general to southern Ghana. Migration in turn affected social organisation, agriculture and population dynamics n i savanna communities. While colonial policy was not always consistent, one dominant and ultimately effective strategy seems evident: to break up locally self-sufficient economies and societies in order to stimulate the temporary migration of labour from largely subsistence agriculture to work in commercial agriculture, mining and public works in the south. These sectors were directly tied to the European economy for the benefit of Britain. Low wages and poor working conditions encouraged most migrants to return to their savanna villages when they were sick, injured or too old to work.When Ghana gained its political independence from Britain this new pattern of migration had become firmly established and was maintained by changes in the social, economic and transport systems. Data from Zorse and the Upper Region show that migration at any one time takes about 50 per cent of working-age males and 15 per cent of working-age females to southern Ghana for periods of a year or more. Significantly increased dependency ratios mean that as a result of this migration each four remaining working-age adults must support themselves plus four dependants, instead of supporting only three dependants, as would be the case without migration. Since remittances by Zorse migrants are equal to only a small fraction of the value of their lost productive labour, the net effect of migration on the food consumption level of those remaining in the village will be determined by the balance between the increased output required of each remaining working-age adult and the decreased yield required of the total area of arable land. While I do not have all the quantitative data needed to resolve this question, statements by Zorse residents, evidence of chronic undernutrition, a long-term decrease in land productivity due to erosion and lack of organic matter, and serious labour shortages during periods of critical farm activity, suggest that the net effect of migration on Zorse is negative. That is, neither labour productivity nor land productivity is likely to compensate for the higher dependency ratio.While it may be true that migrants vote with their feet, the choice of paths is often determined by forces in the larger system beyond their control. The good news is that indigenous agricultural and demographic knowledge and practices in Africa may provide the starting point for a sustainable future if the patterns established by colonialism and reinforced by ‘modern’ economic development can be changed.
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Parthasarathi, Prasannan, and Donald Quataert. "Migrant Workers in the Middle East: Introduction." International Labor and Working-Class History 79, no. 1 (2011): 4–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547910000268.
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Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.
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Scully, Pamela, Elizabeth A. Eldredge, and Fred Morton. "Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier." International Journal of African Historical Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 607. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/221375.
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Worger, William H., and Patrick Harries. "Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910." American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (December 1995): 1641. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2170035.
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Dube, Gugulethu, and Brian Chanda Chiluba. "Burden of Silicosis in the South African Mining Sector and its Effects on Migrant Labor from Neighboring Countries." Journal of Preventive and Rehabilitative Medicine 3, no. 1 (January 10, 2021): 20–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.21617/jprm2021.316.
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Background: Among other minerals, South Africa has an abundance of asbestos and crystalline silica. Due to dust particles from these minerals, exposure causes respiratory diseases in particular silicosis. Most researches on silicosis have largely been of a cross sectional nature with no or limited long-term patterns reported.Objective:This review aims to analyse silicosis patterns in the gold, diamond and platinum workers over a period of 30 years, and to investigate possible causative factors for mining sector employees leading to them developing respiratory diseases associated with silica.Methods:This review article is a product of analysis of published reports and studies from South Africa published in the last decades. The EliScholar digital platform and Google scholar were used, and the focus publications were those that related to “silicosis”, “migrant workers”, silica dust” and autopsy. The review also allowed articles that were generalized, not merely focusing on one mineral. Autopsy reports obtained from the National Institute for Occupational Health database on miners were used for three sub-studies that are the subject of this review.Conclusion:The silicosis trends in miners at autopsy show a clear system failure by the mining sector in controlling and managing occupational respiratory diseases
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Pitcher, M. Anne. "What Has Happened to Organized Labor in Southern Africa?" International Labor and Working-Class History 72, no. 1 (2007): 134–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547907000579.
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AbstractWhy have labor movements in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa increasingly been marginalized from the economic debates that are taking place in their countries, even though they have supported ruling parties? Policy reforms such as trade liberalization, privatization, and revisions to labor legislation in all three countries partially account for the loss of power by organized labor as many scholars have claimed. Yet, these policy “adjustments” have also interacted with long-run, structural changes in production, distribution, and trade of goods as well as with processes of democratization to undermine the position of trade unions across much of southern Africa. The article explores this puzzle by first examining the different historical trajectories of organized labor in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa. It then analyzes how policy reforms, global restructuring, and democracy had similar consequences across all three cases; collectively, they produced declines in trade-union membership and weakened the influence of organized labor. Although trade unions face a number of daunting challenges, the conclusion traces emerging opportunities for labor to recover from its current malaise.
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DE LUNA, KATHRYN M. "HUNTING REPUTATIONS: TALENT, INDIVIDUALS, AND COMMUNITY IN PRECOLONIAL SOUTH CENTRAL AFRICA." Journal of African History 53, no. 3 (November 2012): 279–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002185371200045x.
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ABSTRACTThe familiar mystique of African hunters was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners, dependents, and leaders who created it. Late in the first millennium, Botatwe farmers’ successful adoption of cereals and limited cattle sustained the transformation of hunting from a generalist's labor into a path to distinction. Throughout the second millennium, the basis of hunters’ renown diversified as trade intensified, new political traditions emerged, and, eventually, the caravan trade andmfecaneravaged established communities. The story of Botatwe hunters reveals alongue duréehistory of local notables and the durability of affective, social dimensions of recognition in the face of changes in the material, political, and technological basis sustaining such status.
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Cobley, Alan. "“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”: “Tropical Africans” on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1903–1904." International Labor and Working-Class History 86 (2014): 36–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014754791400009x.
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AbstractIn May 1903, 380 Africans were recruited from British Central Africa (modern Malawi) by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association on one-year contracts to work in the gold mines. It was an experiment designed to test the potential for recruiting cheap black labor for the mines from the region north of the Zambesi. By the end of the contract period, more than a quarter of the men were either dead or permanently disabled. Their struggles to adapt to the harsh working conditions in the mines fueled a racist discourse among white South Africans about “Tropical Africans,” which focused on their supposed susceptibility to disease on the one hand, and their supposed “natural indolence” on the other. Notwithstanding these issues, the mine owners considered the experiment a success and moved rapidly to expand recruitment from the region in the years that followed. This article tells the story of this pioneering group of migrant workers, detailing their grim encounter with modernity and the power of capital in South Africa. It also suggests ways in which their experiences helped to determine the conditions of employment for the generations of migrant mineworkers that followed them.
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Gentili, Anna Maria, and Patrick Harries. "Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910." International Journal of African Historical Studies 29, no. 2 (1996): 405. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/220548.
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Mosoetsa, Sarah, Joel Stillerman, and Chris Tilly. "Precarious Labor, South and North: An Introduction." International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (2016): 5–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547916000028.
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AbstractThis special issue on precarious labor in global perspective includes analyses of precarious work in South Africa, Mexico, the United States, China and India. The key strengths of the contributions to this issue are that they demonstrate precarious workers’ capacity for collective action, the hidden forms of work that are not tracked by states, long-term historical continuities of precarious work, and differences between precarious work in the Global North and South. This introduction explores the challenges of conceptualizing precarious work; the history of precarious labor; its variations in the Global North and South; possible differences across sectors of precarious work; and the intersections between precarious work and categories of gender, race, and citizenship status. We conclude with a summary of the articles included in the issue.
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Rogozen-Soltar, Mikaela. "“We suffered in our bones just like them”: Comparing Migrations at the Margins of Europe." Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 4 (September 27, 2016): 880–907. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417516000463.
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AbstractIn this article, I trace how return migrants (former labor emigrants) from Andalusia, Spain draw on their regional history of emigration as a resource for claiming the moral authority to assess immigrants from the global south. By comparing their own migratory experiences and those of new migrants, Andalusians renegotiate competing ideas about their region's membership in Europe, a question with renewed political saliency during the ongoing economic crisis. Specifically, they use comparisons to claim a more central place in Europe for Andalusia, while at the same time eschewing moral culpability for Europe's mistreatment of labor emigration. To do so, Andalusian return migrants mobilize discourses of migrant suffering at various geopolitical scales of belonging, often mapping Andalusians’ experiences of emigration and return onto the region's historical trajectory of Europeanization. The scaling up and down of discourses of migrant suffering in the context of historical narratives of migration enables Andalusians to claim moral superiority based on their non-European, migrant past while also claiming European belonging in the present. Memorializing and assessing migrant suffering thus become forms of discursive work that help construct the political and moral limits of Europeanness. Through analysis of this process, I call for a more central focus on return migration and the intersection of multiple kinds of population mobility in migration research and in the study of European unification.
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Smart, Devin. "Provisioning the Posho: Labor Migration and Working-Class Food Systems on the Early-Colonial Kenyan Coast." International Labor and Working-Class History 98 (2020): 173–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014754791900019x.
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AbstractEngaging questions about social reproduction, migrant labor, and food provisioning, this article examines the emergence of a working-class food system on the coast of Kenya during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in Africa, labor migrants in Kenya's port city of Mombasa and on nearby plantations were provisioned with food rations, which were part of what Patrick Harries calls a “racial paternalism” that structured many labor relations during the colonial period. The article starts in rural Kenya, but then follows labor migrants to their places of employment to examine the formation of this new food system. In upcountry rural societies, women had primarily produced and then exclusively prepared their communities’ food. However, as migrants, men received a ration (posho) of maize meal or rice as part of their pay, used their cash wages to purchase foodstuffs from nearby markets, and some plantation workers were also able to grow their own vegetables on plots allocated by their employers. After acquiring their food through these wage-labor relations, men then had to cook their meals themselves. In addition the cuisine created by labor migration was one of extreme monotony compared to what these migrants ate in their rural communities, but I also show how food became a point of conflict between management and labor. The article demonstrates how workers successfully pressured their employers to improve the quantity and quality of their rations from the 1910s to the 1920s, while also raising their wages that allowed them to purchase better food. I additionally argue that during this period an “urban” or “rural” context did not fundamentally define how migrant workers acquired their food, as those laboring in both city and countryside received these rations. However, the article concludes by examining how after 1930, economic transformations changed Mombasa's food system so that workers became almost entirely reliant on cash and credit as the way they acquired their daily meals, while paternalism continued to infuse the food systems of rural migrant laborers. In sum, this article is a local study of coastal Kenya that is also concerned with global questions about how food provisioning fits into the social reproduction of working classes in industrial and colonial capitalism.