AFRICAN CONTINENTAL MIGRANTS IN THE CITY
3.3 MACRO LEVEL APPROACHES: STRUCTURAL APPROACHES
addition to such explanations, the implications of the experiences of migration and practices in the specific context and for larger societal issues such as citizenship and identity need to be explored.
principle pull factor or inducement to migrate. This in turn allows capitalists to generate high profits leading to further capitalist investment and accumulation, thus drawing in more workers until the surplus rural labour is absorbed, and industrial production is entrenched. Although the Lewis model implicitly recognised an impoverished exploited rural economy, the theory still posits a principle that suggests smoothing out of the relationship between wages and labour supply (Gelderblom, 2000: 12). However, Todaro (1969, 1976) applied neo-classical theory to developing economies, based on his work in East Africa where he extended the idea of wage differentials to include the possibility or probability of fmding work. This was recognition that the market in developing countries was not perfect between wages and labour supply as the original theory implied. This invoked the idea that wages are a poor determinant or indicator of migration, and that in fact the effect of migration is to increase the level of urban unemployment, because of the persistence of wage differentials between urban and rural areas (Gelderblom, 2000: 12-14).
Within sociology the theory of migration has been explained in terms of modernisation. Western values and forms of consumption lead to new aspirations. In rural areas the realisation of these aspirations means that people have to move to the city. The city is the place where the prospect of modem lifestyles can be most concretely and consistently enjoyed. Modernisation, in its application to migration, thus accepts the split between a modernised urban city and the backward or traditional rural area. Migration settles the balance between those who want to be part of and accept the values of the advanced modem world, and those who stay behind in the tradition dominated rural areas.
Within the context of South Africa, Houghton's work is an example of a neo-classical migration theory. As Wright summarises the argument: 'population movement migration is understood as a rational and individual response to the disparities in labour productivity and labour returns, between the subsistence economy of tribal areas which have failed to adapt and the mines and industries which form the core of the modem exchange economy of the nation' (1995: 773). Wright comments that Houghton acknowledges that there is no tendency towards labour productivity equilibrium because African urbanisation is not permanent, in that the migrant regularly returns to the rural areas. However, Houghton fails to mention the structural factors and legislative constraints that enforce oscillating migration patterns. He
simply accepts as given the dual economy because of the distribution of existing resources, skills and attitudes, but does not examine its basis. Other factors such as expected and real incomes earned, expected benefits of moving to a city/town and remaining in a rural area, and the often differential treatment of migrants along national, ethnic and race lines through the implementation of migration policies by governments were not given consideration, all of which affected the process of incorporation and ability to make a living. Theorists of underdevelopment and world systems approaches take up the issues arising out of structural constraints.
3.3.2 Marxist and World Systems Approaches
The equilibrium theory of classical orthodox liberal economics has been subject to severe criticism. Magubane (1971) has, for instance, critiqued lifestyles as indices of modernisation and for failing to analyse social change as occurring in both urban and rural areas as part of a larger political economy. A large part of the criticism has focused not just on the destination, the urban metropole, but also on the origin of migratory populations, the periphery and its function in the service of capitalism.
Rather than see the rural area as a backward zone of tradition and unchanging values, it was conceived as an area from which resources, both human and other physical, were siphoned off. The rural periphery, as it became characterised, is not a static entity but in fact is subject to a process of underdevelopment as surplus is drained off in a series of exploitative satellite-metropolis relationships (Frank 1969). Other writers such as Baran (1957), Furtado (1971), Amin (1976) argued that economic relationships between advanced and peripheral areas and countries did not inevitably lead to equilibrium between them, but rather to unequal exchange and subordination.
While the surplus of the peripheral areas was constantly drained off to the advanced urban or metropolitan zones, the peripheral zones (including smaller towns and cities) stagnated (Frank, 1969), or grew at very marginal rates (Amin, 1976, 1977; Cardoso, 1979).
The insights developed by the dependency/underdevelopment school had its own counterpart in Southern Africa. Early revisionist writers such as Wolpe (1972), Legassick (1974) and Johnstone (1976) prob lematised the relationship between the capitalist sector and the so-called non-capitalist or rural and traditional sector, and shifted the analysis from race and nation to one based on the primacy of class. Labour migration is a consequence of the development of capitalism in South Africa,
following the discovery of gold and diamonds and the need for cheap labour to ensure its extraction. In broad terms the argument put forward was that the migrant labour system developed as a result of state sponsored coercion, a direct system of forced labour, and indirectly induced though the constraints imposed by capitalism. Unlike Houghton's image of rational individuals exercising their free choice to migrate to the urban centres, these early revisionist studies explained migrant labour as a structural phenomenon, where migrant black labour functioned to serve the mainly white capitalist class in the urban centres. Rather what is offered is the 'cheap labour thesis'.
Drawing on the work of the French anthropologist, Meillassoux (1972), it was further argued that the full reproductive costs of labour were not directly borne by the state or the employers, but by the subsistence economy of rural migrants. In other words, wages were calculated on the costs of maintaining a single worker in an urban area, rather than a family. It was in the interests of the state to maintain the agricultural base of migrants through the reserve and 'homelands' systems. To this end the continuation of elements of the pre-capitalist system, and a legislative framework that prevented permanent urbanisation, underscored the argument of the cheap labour contributing to the spectacular development of capitalism in South Africa. However, the end of apartheid did not see the end of the migrancy, although as a system enforced by the state it was officially abolished in 1986. Nor was this outcome unique to South Africa. Zegeye and Ishemo (1989) attest to the continuation of migration well after colonial rule and independence in other African states. They further suggest, notwithstanding the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, that in fact 'migrant labour and certain forms of unfree labour are in the process of being reproduced' in contemporary times despite decades of independence and attempts by independent African states to 'autocentric' [indigenise] their economies (1989: 26-27).
Potts also points to the continued existence, or rather resurgence of migrant labour in Zimbabwe (2000), and recent work in South Africa by Murray (1999) and Cross (1998) also report the continued existence of migrant labour, albeit in new and differentiated forms.
While the underdevelopment/unequal exchange thesis did present a coherent argument which incorporated the rural and urban areas as a single whole in an exploitative system, it was still premised on the notion that migration occurs between two distinct and spatially separate areas: one which is underdeveloped, exploited and exports labour, and the other which receives and exploits labour. This conception is
still static: the primary flow of capital and labour is in one direction, although the periphery is included as part of the system. The theory indicates only the dependent and stagnant nature of the periphery, and therein lay the origins of migration. The problem, as O'Brien (1975: 24) has identified, is to overcome the circular argument that dependent countries lack autonomous development, which they lack because they are dependent. Migration merely perpetuates dependenci.
Analysts such as Amin (1977), among others, have acknowledged the changed rural structure with new ruling elites emerging, albeit under certain conditions peculiar to their peripheral status in a world economy. Under such changed conditions in rural areas, migration to urban areas is not just about being locked into a stagnant dependency relationship. Portes (1978, 8-9) has argued that once capitalist techniques of production have penetrated into agricultural production, the point when migration begins is when population exceeds the productive carrying capacity of the land forcing surplus population to move or face pecuniary constraints. Similarly Amin (1977) points to rural capitalism changing relationships based on patronage, paternalism and labour tenancy to those of employer-employee relations. The change in social relationships, combined with mechanisation had the effect of displacing agricultural labour, who were then forced to leave the land and move to regional or national centres, and sometimes to emigrate to foreign countries. Thus, while capitalist agricultural production increased to supply the necessary food for the urban market, the increasing displaced population of rural areas was forced to move either to some other areas within the rural economy or move to the urban centres. In the case of South Africa under apartheid forced removal was to so-called homelands. For others in the developing world the move was to the shantytowns, bidonvilles and Javellas of the urban centres.
Underdevelopment and dependency theory does not adequately grasp the implications of changed migratory practices, including continued links between urban and rural areas, return or circulatory migration, physically split families and changed gender
2 There are other more general criticisms of underdevelopment theory, such as Laclau (1977) who has pointed out that dependency theory does not specify how surplus is produced and how the transfer takes place to the metropolis. He suggests that capitalism has developed in third world countries albeit in a uneven manner and often in an unfinished manner wherein elements of non-capitalist forms of production, such as communal land tenure persist, providing part of the livelihood for workers and other groups of people. Warren (1980) has suggested that rather than see the whole process as under or unequal development, it is merely a stage in the
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relations. Furthermore it plays down the creation of new forms of stratification in rural areas, and hence multi-layered migrant populations with changing identities in urban centres. A focus on the comprador bourgeoisie dependent on international corporations and the state to the exclusion of what migrants actually do in urban settings fails to recognise that individuals and groups make, create and forge new ties in very different social fields across expanses of space and time.
Thus within nation states rural-urban migration followed the flow of economic goods and resources to urban centres, reflecting the exploitation and decline of rural areas.
In South Africa this migration was not free flowing and the pass system and migrant labour system ensured a controlled migratory process (as far as it could be controlled until the mid-1980s when it was abolished). For international migration the process was similar, except that migrants had greater difficulty in gaining access to, and being incorporated into the advanced industrialised countries, unless the policy of individual countries permitted relatively unrestricted entry as illegal and undocumented immigrants. For South Africans the experience of international migration is only beginning to be felt with the presence of migrants from Africa and other parts of the world.
3.3.3 World Systems Theory and Migration
As a general body of scientific literature and theoretical understanding of the world in the post-colonial period, world systems theory provides the broad generalised theoretical understanding of current debates on globalisation. It also provides, within its general perspective, a way of viewing the multiple sites and reasons for migration from peripheral areas to core areas. While Wallerstein (1974; 1979) emphasises unequal exchange between different units of the world capitalist system, the idea of a global world integrated by a single dominant mode of production might be more useful perspective in explaining both and the current division oflabour (Cohen, 1987;
Portes, 1978) (rather than underdevelopment or dependency theories). Wallerstein's central expression of the division of the world is that of core - areas that dominate and profit from international divisions of labour, and periphery - areas of the world that are subordinated within the world system. Such a global level of analysis seems very similar to Frank's metaphorical sense of a single connected strand of exploitation
development of capitalism, not dissimilar from that of comparable periods in Europe's own economic and social development.
stretching from isolated rural hamlets to international centres of capital. However, it is possible to conceive of a core area as not just a European or American industrial area, city or state, but any area or site such as a rural village or town that has resources or factories which becomes in relation to its 'natural' rural constituency a core area (Wolf, 1992: 99-104). Although the relationship between core and periphery can be structured and graded in a variety of ways world systems theory tends to reduce migration to labour migration and immigrants to workers. It is this reduction of migrant mobility to labour units that needs to be challenged.
The challenge is to build on the perspectives of world systems theory, as well as the subsequent critiques and clarifications of underdevelopment and dependency theories (Wallerstein, 1974; Laclau 1977; Warren, 1980). At first glance world systems theory does not appear to allow for the scrutiny of the particular impact such forces have on regions, colonies, countries/states on the periphery, cities, towns, villages, homesteads and households. Clarifications by Comaroff (1982), Worsley (1984) and Sharp (1985), among others, clearly demonstrated that world systems theory would be inadequate if not contextualised with reference to more particularistic impacts, interactions, outcomes, and influences at the local level. Thus, for example, Sharp (1987) has shown how the changing nature of the transport beginning in the early 1980s, in particular the taxi industry, as well as the differentiated levels of investment by migrants in rural places of origin, have changed the reasons for migration and intensified stratification between places such as Qwa Qwa, a former homeland area, and the places of work in the industrial and mining heartland of the Witwatersrand.
Gelderblom has shown how migration reinforces inequality, rather than reduces such disparities in rural areas (2000: 199-206). One may even add the spatial patterns of unequal but inextricably linked parts of the world system are equally important to take into account (Smith, 2000). Further afield, Wolf (1992) shows how rural industrialization in Java attracts female migrant workers from other areas. She then demonstrates the impact of such migrant workers in terms of gender and household dynamics. Wolfs work demonstrates that it is the subordinated areas, and rural areas in particular, that experience new kinds of capital penetration, particularly for the extraction of raw materials and manufacture of products for export in a new international division of labour and manufacturing. In contextualising the global level of analysis with partiCUlar histories, the movements of people in a specific period of time may be understood. Basch et al (1995: 11) argue that by adopting a new nuanced
perspective, it is possible to link waves of migration to new forms of capital concentration and penetration, and to the particular actions of migrants.
There are a number of implications that flow from this capitalist penetration of rural areas from a world systems perspective for studies on migration. Firstly the goods embodying the core-periphery relationship circulate around the world. Thus in peripheral areas of the world economy where the manufacture of commodities such sportswear (Nike, Reebok etc) or jewellery, watches and clothes take place, they become core areas to their hinterlands. Secondly, such sites of manufacture become simultaneously core and periphery, providing the attraction for possible employment from outside the local village. Thirdly, in making the forward linkages, the manufactured commodities from these peripheral areas of the developing world are appropriated by a variety of traders on a worldwide scale. Some of these traders at the end of the forward linked chain may well be itinerant migrants and immigrants peddling such commodities on streets and informal markets in the core areas of the world system, whether this is in Durban, Marseille, New York or Abidjan. Fourthly, the impact of such industrialisation and migration changes the social relationships at a variety of levels from personal to household, both in place of origin and the place of destination. It is the third and fourth points here that will be of some consideration when analysing the experiences and survival strategies of recently arrived migrants in the city of Durban.
I do not want to suggest that this literature privileges rural societies. It is not an in- depth analysis of capitalist penetration of rural economies, or the collapse of rural and/or agricultural sectors, and hence the migration of surplus labour. However, pointing to capitalist penetration of rural areas is not just to underscore insights that Laclau, Amin or Warren have offered, but to note that changes in the rural society and resultant migration of people are not the result of a single factor of either a 'push' or 'pull'. At this point it is important to highlight commodity exchange as the central mechanism embedded in push-pull factors, but not to derive from this structural feature a model that homogenises migrant experiences into a single structural pattern, into which reality must be forced. It suggests a level of analysis below that of the macro perspectives of some underdevelopment, dependency or world systems theorists.
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