AFRICAN CONTINENTAL MIGRANTS IN THE CITY
3.4. MESO-LEVEL PERSPECTIVES: BEYOND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
successful outcome. In particular the focus has been on the micro-networks of migrants, that is, on the internal dynamics that give rise to successful entrepreneurs and incorporation into the main stream of host society. This may be contrasted with internal social relationships that limit integration into the mainstream of formal economic life. The implication here is that some social capital is positive, whereas in other cases it is negative. For Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzman (1999: 355) this assumes an unproblematic wider environment without legal or discriminatory impediments to full participation in the economic life of a society. The problem with this kind of research focus is that it assumes that micro-networks are divorced from broader social structures that constrain or enable access to capital, information and resources by a community's micro-networks. In other words 'discrimination', 'marginalisation' and exclusion are not related to broader social, economic and political forces that shape and structure the micro-networks. Part of this thesis is to specify those broader social-economic and political forces in which diverse ranges of migrants have set up their social capital networks. The success or failure of these networks does not depend only on their internal mobilisation of resources, but also the external environment in which they operate.
3.4.2 Migration in Africa: Colonial Contexts
While Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993) and Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzman (1998) appear to point to new approaches within the context of America, elements of such approaches have been attempted within the Southern African context. Social anthropologists working in Zambia and in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s were among the flIst social scientists to investigate the question of labour migration and social and cultural relations. The theoretical paradigm of structural functionalism and the disciplinary perspectives and methods of social anthropology tended to see them grouped into studies of rural decline, rather than as complex set of intersection and exchanges. This anthropological work gave the impression that the research focussed on a rural perspective, on the necessity of migration to urban centres, or to studies of the consequence of migration for rural areas. There is also the oft mentioned colonial imperative of such research that colonial governments not only sponsored such research but were concerned to understand the migration process in order to keep it going (Moore, 1994: 20-21). However, from the 1950s onwards questions about 'urbanism' in Africa, and in partiCUlar in Southern Africa began to make an appearance within the anthropological literature. An important problem that these
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anthropologists raised was concerned with how migrants' consciousness of tribal origins affected their new lives in the urban area (Moore, 1994: 51; 55). This was originally posed as a question of'detribalisation' or how much of the tribal culture was imported into the urban setting? Or put another way, how much of the new ideas learnt and encountered in the colonial situation replaced tribal customs, and ideas3•
The approaches to the question of 'detribalisation' is of some importance as it links to the question of embeddedness and social capital raised by Portes and Sensenbrenner in the sense of carrying and unpacking cultural baggage into a new setting, and reliance on one's own ethnic group and networks to cope, survive and, if possible, prosper. There is also an implicit question about the differentiated way in which migrants fmd their way into a host society. Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzman have pointed out that a shortcoming of emphasizing the cultural logic of migrants' behaviour, without linking it to wider political and economic issues, does not fully explain migrant behaviour. With this in mind it will be useful to examine, briefly, the debate on 'detribalisation'.
Monica and Geoffrey Wilson made an early approach to this problem in their book The Analysis of Social Change (1945). They argue that there were two kinds of societies, the tribal or primitive society, and the industrial or civilised society, each being internally coherent under ideal circumstances. Once tribal societies came into contact with industrial societies destabilisation ensues, where the old was not yet fully given up, while new becomes adopted. This process was referred to a detribalisation.
The Wilson's were careful to point out the these uneven changes were as a result of systematic connections between circulatory movements of labour, impoverishment of rural areas, the demographic shifts between rural and urban areas and industrial (capitalist) developments in urban areas. However, inherent in their work is the idea of two societies in tension with one another and that these tensions are most evident in the urban centres where the pressures of colonial domination and resistance to it,
3 This issue addressed by social anthropologists - what happens to the 'culture' of people, once it becomes disconnected from its original rural environment, and how is it re-constructed to accommodate itself in a new urban environment - can be placed in a wider theoretical debate about the adequacy of Durkheimian structural- functional models. As the anthropologists posed it, this question was a continuation of both the field research bias (rural areas), as it was of the Durkheimian structural-functional model of cohesion in tribal and industrial societies. Social anthropologists were able to demonstrate, contra to Durkheim's postulation of simple cultural h?mogeneity, that the cohesion of rural societies depended on an articulation of a number of kinship groups,
~ll~~es and networks ~f individuals engaged in ~tricate system of exchange (and by implication a complex dIVISIon oflabour). This approach was the theoretical parallel to Durkheim's occupational division oflabour in industrial society. The assumptions underlying this approach were carried over into the early studies of migrants in urban areas. (See Moore, 1994: 51-55)
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particularly by African labour, was most keenly felt. This often exploded into riots, marches and strikes. The link between the explosive anger and detribalisation was felt, but not systematically explored or explained.
The Mayer's in their study of Xhosa of East London, accept the dual model of the Wilson's, but continue to pursue the issue of 'tribal survivals' in an urban setting.
They draw the distinction between 'school' and 'red' Xhosa people. According to the Mayer's 'school' people are quite happy to engage with new or 'European' institutions and ideas, e.g. educational and religious institutions of modem civilised society. The 'red' people on the other hand are reticent to get 'mixed-up' in things that obscure the distinction between real Xhosa and foreigners (primitive, tribal society). 'School' people on the other hand don't make the distinction. 'Red' people, in an urban setting try to retain as much of their rural traditions as possible. In other words they unpacked their urban behaviour in accordance with a reconstructed version of the rural setting of cultural patterns of behaviour. What is revealing about the ethnographic work is not so much the fact that these two ideological positions exist among the Xhosa of East London, but the model that the Mayer's are working with.
'School' people make choices from an array of offerings in a modem society, whereas 'red' people work within a system of ascribed statuses and given modes of behaviour of a tribal society. There is no doubt that in fact both 'school' and 'red' people are making choices, but the Mayer's work reflects as if these choices are made freely. In fact, much of their ethnographic data can be read in opposition to this perspective. It can be argued that the choices made by either 'red' or 'school' people was within a highly controlled migrant labour system within a larger system of economic, political and legal determinants. These determinants are constraints, which allow 'school' people certain limited choices, and made the red people, i.e. the migrants, all the more dependent on their rural ties and hence the reason for maintaining strong cultural traditions in the urban areas. Thus the social relationships such as homeboys, networks, ties of kinship and village in East London strongly reflect their rural origins and dependency.
There was an entirely different way of looking at the issue. Rather than focussing on survivals among migrants, Gluckman, and his colleagues Watson, Mitchell and others at the Institute for Social and Economic Research in Lusaka, Zambia, eschewed the idea of culture loss and conflicting cultural systems approach. Rather they saw rural
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and urban settings as part of one system, in which Africans, including migrants, are learning, experiencing and discovering new knowledge and new skills, in addition to those they already have. Watson argued that the notion of detribalisation implied Africans must choose between two systems. In fact his work among the Mambwe showed that people participate in both the modem and the traditional 'conjointly'.
Young Mambwe men when in need of cash would migrate to urban centres to earn such an income, and return once the task was accomplished. Mitchell in an important monograph The Kalela Dance made the point that urban centres are not necessarily ethnically homogenous, because of the multiplicity of people migrating to the copper belt. Mitchell argued that while African people did interact on the basis of ethnicity, the ethnic reference categories were of broad politically dominant areas or spaces, rather than fme distinctions or specific places that different ethnic groups or tribes occupy. In fact ethnic identity became exaggerated in a heterogeneous urban setting, rather than as a taken for granted quality of social relationships in rural areas.
However, he pointed out that in Black-White relations ethnicity seemed to be less important than the industrial system. It was the industrial system that formed the basis of trade union activity in the copper belt mines, and targeted for abolition the ethnically based employees' representative system set up by the mine management.
Mitchell pointed to the very different uses of tribalism in urban and rural settings. In an urban area, belonging to a tribe, however defmed, depended on various situations.
This situational logic of tribalism revealed only one aspect of a very complex urban identity. Moore (1994: 65) comments "Mitchell did not treat tribal connections and categories as a form of conservatism, a traditionalism in which fragments of the past were retained in a rapidly changing milieu". Rather migrants were part of a wider social system, in which he, and others, began to highlight different and new forms of social relationships. This gave rise to a whole new research agenda on migrants, workers and social order (see for example, Eades, 1987)4 An important aspect that was inspired by the work of Mitchell was the study of networks, social situations and transactions (Kapferer, 1972). Networks focussed on the chain of friends and friends of friends, and the content of each social situation and the specific transactions that
4 Some other specific areas of research were: migrant identity (Hart, 1971); on fonnal voluntary associations, like tr~e unions, were studied as to how they were fonned, and how they operated, (peace, 1979); specific categones of workers, such as railway men (Grillo, 1973) domestic workers (Hansen, 1989), or miners and compounds (Gordon, 1977). For reviews of urban anthropology and developments in the field oflabour see Freund, B The African Worker (1988) Sanjeck, (1990) 'Urban Anthropology in the 1980s: a World View' Annual Review of Anthropology; Coquery-Vidrovitch, (1991)' The Process of Urbanization in Africa' African Studies Review, vol 34 and Moore, AnthrOPOlogy and Africa (994).
individuals engaged in for economic or non-economic ends. Portes (1978) has also called for closer attention to networks in migrant research. In Portes' and Sensenbrenner's (1993) work, networks within ethnic groups became part of the social capital that either assists or constrains endeavours of individuals and groups.
It is possible to re-read the early anthropological work on migrants and networks through the lens of the social capital approach. While Mayer's work took norms, values and customs as the primary driving force informing migrants' 'conservative' behaviour in the town, Mitchell and his colleagues' work began to focus on agency, on individuals, on the way in which cultural ideas and urban exigencies were in a constant process of negotiations, where people's lives were constantly constructed and re-structured within a broader complex of social, political and economic circumstances. Crucially from a migrant labourer's perspective, making decisions based on a network of people supplying information on where they could fmd the best areas to work in for the cash they needed, not just as remittances, but for possible entrepreneurial activities funded in part by cash wages (Kapferer, 1972: Peace, 1979).
In those circumstances where coercion and control was a necessary corollary to migration, research on the place of work, such as on the mining compounds, was a logical progression (Gordon, 1977; Moodie, 1983). Here the activities of migrants had to be understood in terms of the formal and informal organisation of work and leisure activities which allowed migrants the space to be involved in a network of various intense money making and other activities (Gordon, 1977). Moodie analysed other aspects such as sexual activities among men in the compounds as subversive of the official authority structures of the mine (1983, 1988). Retention of links to the rural areas could be interpreted as a defence (or resistance) against full proletarianisation, or maintaining a link to rural livelihood strategies, the politics of rural elites and their entrepreneurial activities (Sharp, 1986). However, these works tended to locate migration both within territorial colonial and post-colonial state boundaries, and as a function of those states' economies. It has not considered these migration patterns as part of broader pattern of international migration.
Given these insights into the multiple cultural dimensions of migrancy, it is possible for this earlier work to be reinterpreted, or new insights and hypotheses to be developed. The thick descriptive quality of their ethnographic work makes it possible to reinterpret the issue of migrants within a broader political economy with all the
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constraints and possibilities inherent in state control of urbanisation, but also the embeddedness of migrant labour in the social relationships that stretches from rural to urban areas. 'Tribal survivals' become a resource (rather than an aspect of ascribed behaviour), the social capital (cf Portes and Sensenbrenner) that sustains a social field of relationships across the divide between rural and urban areas. On the other hand too close a focus on the micro-networks approach that Mitchell and his colleagues developed, with its close attention to individual choice might equally undermine the crucial insight that the Wilson's drew attention to: that migrant labour is embedded in a wider, uneven and ever changing capitalist system, from which capitalists benefited immensely having to pay only the immediate subsistence costs of an individual worker (Murray, quoted in Wright, 1995).
In more recent times rural-urban migration, and inter-regional, cross-border migration in Southern Africa as a consequence of, for example structural adjustment programmes, or political instability, have began to be examined. The wider impact of, for example, compulsory deferred payments as part of the system of remittances of foreign based migrants to neighbouring countries have been examined (Crush, J.
Contract Migration to South Africa: Past, Present and Future: 5). The impact of foreign migrants being retrenched from the mining industry and seeking alternative means of employment have been analysed by Chirwa (1997: 628-654). He analysed the survival strategies that emerged in Malawi after miners were retrenched in South Africa. Potts (2000) has raised the issue of urban links to the rural areas as providing the means of survival from the impact of structural adjustment programmes, directly as a consequence of declining urban-based employment possibilities. But these studies looked at the result of the decline or ending of highly structured and institutionalised systems of migration instituted by employers and recognised by the state, or as a result of the implementation of state driven economic policies. The 'voluntary' immigrant or refugee migration of African continental people to South Africa, and their survival strategies in South Africa, and the continuing links to places of orgin has had a less systematic focus in empirical and theoretical terms. This cross-border, or transnational migration, is the subject of much of the rest of the thesis. In the next chapter some of the literature on this topic is reviewed. Below I review some central concepts that have been used to describe and analyse the new forms of international migration.
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One such theory that offers a new explanation has been labelled transnational migration. It is defmed principally by the fact that people cross two or more boundaries, and who do not necessarily lose touch with their countries of origin. In many cases migrants make frequent return trips. The principal work upon which this is based is that of Basch, Schiller and Szanton-Blanc (1994). They defme transnationalism in the following terms:
We defme "transnationalism" as the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders. Immigrants who develop and maintain multiple relationships - familial, economic, social, organisational, religious and political - that span borders we call transmigrants. An essential element of transnationalism is the multiplicity of involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host societies... . . . Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states.
1994:7)
There are several implications of the defmition that I shall list below. Only some of these are important for this work, and will be analysed.
Firstly, the focus and analysis is on the lived experience of individuals, especially the fluidity of their 'travelling' experiences. These experiences reflect transnational processes, although individuals and communities may not speak of transnationalism.
Secondly, their identities are not tied solely to the location they come from or fmd themselves in. Although identity is often tied up to place or geographical setting, as home (family), homeland, or home community, migrants are 'travelling', in terms of the defmition above, identity becomes relational and dislodged from a distinct position (Appadurai, 2000: 231). Thus while identities are defmed in relation to borders and boundaries, the identities cannot be taken for granted as fixed. Where, who and what you are is not only defmed by the others such as a state or in relation to the formal criteria of national citizenship or in relation to social interaction with local citizens, but is also made explicitly conscious by oneself. Identities can become markers for inclusion or exclusion, not just for belonging to particular groups and places, but also for access (or denial) to resources. Thirdly, national identities, or the nation state identity still functions. The nation state still functions to represent identity, even though the idea of nationality is being undermined by the emergence of
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