Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
2.2 State, Borders, Displacement and South Africa’s Evolving Regimes of Migration Governance: From Colonial Conquest to the
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formal (i.e. the legal status of membership) and substantive (i.e. the ability to enjoy those rights and duties that accompany this membership), citizenship draws two sets of boundaries around the nation state: one regarding admission to its territory and another pertaining to the depth and degree of people’s membership. Accordingly, ‘refugees, asylum seekers, would-be immigrants and migrant workers face a common set of ‘gates’, albeit differently constructed’ (Lister 1997:46). South Africa, too, has developed differential mechanisms that provide for layered levels of inclusion and exclusion of non-citizens. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 explore the dynamic relationships between global economic and political processes, changing forms of migratory movements and evolving systems of migration governance in relation to sub-Saharan migratory systems and in relation to South Africa as a traditional destination point for the region’s migrants.
2.2 State, Borders, Displacement and South Africa’s Evolving
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Lakes region – commonly referred to as Mfecane, ‘the Scattering’ (Reader 1998; Terreblanche 2002; Crampton 2006).
In 1814, following alternating periods of British and Dutch colonial rule, the region was entered formally into the British Empire as the Cape Colony. When in 1834, Britain abolished slavery, several thousand farmers and slave owners of predominantly Dutch origin (known as Boers and later, as Afrikaners) left the Cape Colony for Southern Africa’s interior and eastern regions where they fought several wars with the resident population and displaced entire peoples in the process. Between 1839 and 1854, the Boers founded three independent republics, which, between 1843 and 1903, were all annexed by Britain (Reader 1998; Giliomee 2003). In 1910, what were by then known as the Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were formally united into the Union of South Africa and integrated into the British Commonwealth as a nominally independent territory. The Union was granted full sovereignty in 1931 (Meredith 2011). Following the 1948 election victory of the National Party, South Africa began to institutionalise the doctrine of apartheid, an increasingly expansive and elaborate system of race-based discrimination, exclusion and exploitation, as well as working towards gaining complete political independence from Britain. In 1961, a referendum held among South Africa’s white citizens led to the country becoming an independent republic. In 1986, after years of political resistance internally and increasing pressure from abroad, negotiations began in earnest about how to end apartheid. These negotiations, initially between South African business leaders and the African National Congress (ANC), later also included American and British pressure groups and the South African state (Terreblanche 2012). The adoption of an interim constitution in 1993 (Republic of South Africa 1993) cleared the way for the country’s first general elections in 1994. Finally, with the promulgation of its current constitution in 1996, the Republic of South Africa became a constitutional democracy (Republic of South Africa 1996b).
Even though slaves were formally emancipated in 1834, race-based discrimination and segregation remained common practice under British colonial rule, and the displacement and deportation of black Africans into designated ‘locations’ or ‘reserves’ became firmly established practices from about 1876. These practices continued, were further refined and entrenched by the Union of South Africa, and later by the apartheid state (Reader 1998;
Terreblanche 2002). From 1951 until 1970, South Africa created ten nominally independent
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homelands, Bantustans, into which it deported some 3.5 million black South Africans who, in the process, lost their South African citizenship. The latter were allowed to re-enter South Africa only as cross-border migrants and to remain only if in possession of a valid work permit, a condition which greatly served, and was taken advantage of by, South Africa’s mining industry. However, with the end of apartheid, the Bantustans and their citizens were reintegrated into South Africa (Egerö 1991; Republic of South Africa 1993).
Britain’s annexation of the Boer republics in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal was motivated by the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1885. In its wake, South Africa’s economy became dominated by the extraction of its mineral resources (Reader 1998). What began in the late 1860s as a spontaneous and somewhat egalitarian effort of many to extract South Africa’s mineral wealth, became over period of less than 40 years a well-coordinated extractive economy that was concentrated in the hands of a small, politically powerful elite, funded by foreign capital. This created a huge demand for labour and was one of the key drivers of the successive expansion of colonial boundaries in the 19th century, including the dispossession of Southern Africa’s indigenous people and their forceful relocation to small, often unproductive ‘locations’: if indigenous people could be rendered indigent, they would need to sell their labour to survive (Reader 1998; Terreblanche 2002, 2012; Mbeki 2009). This move enabled the colonial government and mining companies to better control the movements of the colonised without having to attend much to their human needs.
In spite of these and a myriad of other coercive measures, the recruitment and retention of cheap and compliant labour remained a key challenge for South Africa’s mining industry. In this context, Reader (1998:500) makes the startling observation that the largest number of mine workers were those who had travelled the furthest, noting ‘a direct correlation between the distance travelled to the mine and length of stay: only those who had travelled from afar would tolerate the unrelenting demands of mine labour for any length of time’. Desiring therefore a centralised and co-ordinated approach to the problem, South Africa’s Chamber of Mines formed in 1896 what became later known as ‘the Employment Bureau of Africa’
(TEBA). TEBA set up recruitment stations across Southern Africa(Latsky 2008). By 1936, just under 400 000 men between the ages of 15 and 50 (the majority of whom were migrants) were working in the country’s mines. The number of jobs in the mining industry peaked around 1948, but in 1986, South Africa’s gold mines still employed more than 477 000
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workers. Of these, almost 45% were cross-border migrants (Crush and James 1995:22), mainly from Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi and Swaziland but also including workers from Angola, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe (Crush, Peberdy and Williams 2006:4).
Following on from the location system, both the Bantustans and the co-ordinated recruitment of foreign labour can be regarded as a continuation of the colonial regime’s attempts to keep a workforce outside their sphere of responsibility while continuing to be able to exploit their labour. John Reader (1998:512-513) concludes:
The influence of the mines’ employment regime on African society in Southern Africa has been pernicious – and profound ... It was never employment in the sense of a [mutually beneficial]
relationship … but always the exploitation of an indispensable resource ... Farms, factories, government agencies and even employers of domestic labour perpetuated the system, in South Africa and throughout the continent (highlights in original).
Yet by 1992, the number of people selling labour to South Africa’s gold mines had dropped by over 32% (Crush and James 1995:22), and in 2006, the total number of employees in South Africa’s mining industry fell below 268 000, while the percentage of foreign workers had been reduced to 38% (Crush and Williams 2010:11). The background to this contraction was a severe accumulation crisis that has beset South Africa’s mining and energy sector since 1970s.
Some of the contributing factors to this crisis were directly linked to the economic globalisation processes discussed above. Jonathan Crush and Vincent Williams (2010:9) describe the contraction as the cumulative result of ‘declining ore reserves, rising cost and a stagnant gold price’, which caused the South African mining industry to enter ‘a long period of restructuring and downsizing’. From the 1970s onwards, the tendency therefore has been towards mine closures, capital rather than labour intensive investment, outsourcing, and a growing automation of mining processes (Crush and Williams 2010). The result has been ‘a dramatic decline in employment opportunities … in the mining industry’ (Crush 2011:3), severely affecting both South African and cross-border migrants. These structural changes are a major contributor to the overall rise in South Africa’s unemployment rate from 20% in 1970 to 36% in 1995 (Terrblanche 2012:56), a level at which it remains2 (Statistics South Africa 2014:xii). Over a period of a hundred years, border crossers who were accustomed to South
2 In this thesis, I use the so-called expanded definition of unemployment. This figure includes both active, registered job seekers, those who no longer look and those who never have looked for paid employment in South Africa’s formal economy.
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Africa’s ongoing need for foreign labour, found increasingly that they were, in fact, surplus to South Africa’s economic needs.
There were also political reasons for the accumulation crisis of the mining sector in that by 1986, global mobilisation against apartheid had led to a sharp increase in net capital flight, triggering ‘a dramatic decline in the international exchange of the South African currency’ and convincing ‘the corporate sector … that the apartheid regime could not survive and ought to be abolished’ (Terreblanche 2012:12; cf. Mbeki 2009). As noted above, negotiations with the ANC around political change began in earnest in 1986 and were central in determining the future of South Africa’s economic developments. Citing Sam Ashman, Ben Fine and Susan Newman, Terreblanche (2012:64-65) writes:
The strongest foreign pressure on the ANC, in all probability, came from American pressure groups … The attitude was overwhelmingly that … every country in the world … [should adapt]
as quickly as possible and as completely as possible to the American model of anti-statism, deregulation, privatisation, fiscal austerity, market fundamentalism and free trade … The role of [these] pressure groups … included … [making] exaggerated promises … [and exerting]
subtle threats that the US had the ability (and the inclination) to disrupt the South African economy if the ANC should be recalcitrant ... The ANC’s acceptance of the … neoliberal model reached a zenith when GEAR [Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy] was adopted in June 1996 … ‘The irony is that while the rationale for these policies was to attract direct foreign investment, their actual effect was to increase the outflow of domestic capital’ (cf.
Perkins 2004).
In the wake of South Africa’s embrace of this neoliberal policy set, Terreblanche (2012:73) concludes that, ‘the African poor and the unemployed [were] seemingly permanently and systematically excluded from participation in the global economy’. Importantly, South Africa entered this period of transition with an economic history that over 350 years, had been founded upon unfree black labour – generated through conquest, capture, displacement and coercion of local people, the importation of slaves and later, of indentured labourers. During this long period, migratory patterns in Southern Africa became firmly entrenched, prefiguring contemporary migratory movements and South Africa’s efforts to govern cross-border migration in the post-1994 period – the mining industry’s changing needs and drastically transformed contextual conditions notwithstanding. This is the subject of the following section.
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