Table Of ContentAFRICAN SOCIETY TODA Y
Migrant Laborers
Migrant Laborers surveys the large Iiterature on Iabor migration in east,
west and southern Africa and interprets it from a political economy
perspective. lt addresses the controversies as to the origins of migrancy
and its effects on the rural economy, emphasizing the differences in the
response of various African pre-capitalist societies to wage Iabor, and the
regional variations in the effects on the rural economy and on the division
of Iabor wirhin the rural household. Male migrants' experiences with
forced Iabor, recruitment systems, advance payments and compound
controls are described, and the rather different character of women's
migratio:-~ is examined.
A centrat concern is the development of migrant workers' conscious
ness and forms of resistance. Under what conditions are the Iabor-marker
divisions between migrant and non-migram workers overcome? When
do migrants move beyond strategies of desertion and Iabor mobiliry to
collective on-site work actions such as strikes and unionism? Labor
protest among dockers, miners and domestic workers is examined with
respect to these questions. Finally, the persistence of migrancy in South
Africa today is contrasred to the decline of Iabor migrancy in other parts
of the continent.
AFRICAN SOCIETY TODA Y
Genera/editor: ROBIN COHEN
Advisory editors:
0. Aribiah, Jean Copans, Paul Lubeck, Philip M. Mbithi,
M. S. Muntemba, 0. Nnoli, Richard Sandbrook
The series has been designed to provide scholarly, but lively and up-to
date, books, likely to appeal to a wide readership. The authors will be
drawn from the field of development studies and all the social sciences,
and will also have had experience of teaching and research in a nurober of
African countries.
The books will deal with the various social groups and classes that
comprise contemporary African society and successive volumes willlink
with previous volumes to create an int(grated and comprehensive picture
of the African social structure.
Also in the series
Farm labour. KEN SWINDELL
The politics of Africa's economic Stagnation. RICHARD SANDBROOK
MI GRANT
LABORERS
SHARON STICHTER
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge
London New York New Rochelle
Melbourne Sydney
Published by rhe Press Syndicate of rhe University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpingron Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
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10 Stamförd Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1985
First published 1985
Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 85-4098
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Stichter, Sharon
Migrant laborers. - (African society
today)
r. Migrant Iabor - Africa
I. Tide li. Series
331·5'44'096 HDs8s6.A/
ISBN o 521 25II8 4 hard covers
ISBN o 521 27213 opaperback
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CONTENTS
I Migration and development page I
2 Migrants and the rural economy 29
3 Migration and the African hausehold 58
4 Entering and leaving the work force 88
5 Migrants at the work place I20
6 Warnen as migrants and workers I44
7 Migrants, protest and the future I79
Notes I96
Index 22I
V
MIGRATION AND
DEVELOPMENT
Circular Iabor migration is not unique to Africa, yet it has
been one of the most distinctive featuresofthat continent's
development. To understand it, we must grasp not only its
general function in early capitalist development, but also
those characteristics of Africa which have made it so com
mon a pattern there. Temporary Iabor migrants shuttle
between two different modes of production, capitalist wage
employment on the one hand, and some form of pre- or
partially capitalist subsistence or peasant production on the
other. Returnmigration is a phenomenon of the incomplete
separation of the worker from his or her means of
production.
Temporary participation in the Iabor market involving
spatial movement has been common in all parts of the world
during early industrial development. Russian Iords pro
vided serfs for the textile factories in Moscow in the eight
eenth century, allowing them to migrate on a temporary
basis.1 Chinese Iabor contractors brought hundreds of vil
lagers to the coal- and salt-mines for specified periods of
time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Return
migration has been important in other parts of Asia andin
Latin America.3 But, as development, whether capitalist or
socialist, proceeds, circulatory Iabor migration tends to
decline. From a comparative perspective, the reason that
return migration remains so prevalent in Africa has to do
Migrant laborers in Africa
2
with the Iack of industrial development. Only one coumry,
South Africa, has successfully industrialized on the basis of
enforced migrancy.
In other areas of Africa the low Ievel of industrial devel
opment still makes it possible for ~any enterprises to rely
on cheap, less skilled and less stabthzed Iabor. At the same
time, the Iack of penetration of capital into agriculture has
left small-scale peasant and subsistence farming and
herding as attainable, although materially not very satisfac
tory, options for the majority of the population. But when
explaining the origins of the migrancy system, as distinct
from its continuance, there is reason to argue that condi
tions specific to African pre-colonial social formations
themselves, in addition to external forces, contributed to
determining that migrancy would be the predominant form
of wage Iabor for the first half-century of capitalist
development.
APPROACHES TOMIGRANTS
The term 'migrant laborer' encompasses a range of patterns
of participation in the Iabor force, but at the same time
specifically excludes several other types of migration. More
or less permanent migration of whole kin groups has been
common in Africa for centuries; movements were often
undertaken out of economic necessity, for example to con
trol trade routes or to get access to fertile land for
cultivation or grazing. In fact, it was the colonial authorities
who by and !arge attempted to curb these movements, the
official view being that Africans ought to have a permanent
rural home, to which the male could be returned after
temporary migration for wage Iabor, and which could
support his family. Forthis reason forms of migrationsuch
as the seasonal movement of pastoralists were discouraged
under colonial rule.
Migration and development
A modern version of pre-colonial migration has been
brought about by the successful development of African
grown cash crops in some areas, resulting in in-migration.
Immigrantsoften come first as laborers in a typical migrant
pattern, but then establish themselves as independent pro
ducers and bring in their families. The cotton- and coffee
growing areas of Buganda, the cocoa-producing areas of
Ghana, and the palm-oil producing areas of Nigeria are, or
have been, areas of extensive in-migration. In 1948, for
example, one-third of the population of Buganda consisted
of migrants from other parts of Uganda, or from T anzania,
Sudan or Rwanda.4
This volume does not deal with these kinds of migration,
but focusses exclusively on the temporary migration of
individuals into and out of wage employment. We use the
term 'Iabor migrant' to refer specifically to a person who
moves between wage work and some other mode of produc
tion, over some spatial distance. We do not include those
who migrate in order to engage in trade, farming or other
self-employment, nor do we include an individual who,
upon leaving wage employment, is completely without an
income; he or she must have some alternative way of getting
an income, usually in the peasant or subsistence economy.
In theory, one might include those who, as is so typical in
many Third World cities, move periodically between em
ployment and urban self-employment, but this pattern
usually does not involve much migration.5
Within these parameters, patterns of Iabor participation
can vary widely, from the long-service clerk or miner who
brings his family with him to town but still returns to the
rural area without pension upon retirement, to the unskilled
laborer who works only a few days or weeks before return
ing home. Between these extremes are many variations,
depending in the first instance on length of stay in the Iabor
force. This is not equivalent to length of stay in a particular
Migrant laborers in Africa
4
job; migrants such as thos~ to the central and . southern
African copper- and gold-mmes often move from JOb to job
or have periods of unemployment between jobs. For our
purposes it is not job turnover but turnover between wage
and non-wage work that is the key factor. Other important
variations among workers stem from the distance traveled,
whether long or short (each representing a different invest
ment of time and resources), and the degree of dependence
on wage work as opposed to other sources of income.
Another crucial factor consists in the political-legal terms
of the migrant's incorporation into the labor force: whether
participation is in one way or another forced (as was
common in the early colonial era) or is in some sense
voluntary, and also the duration and terms of the contract.
We return to the description of the various patterns of
participation in Chapter 4· A final differentiating factor
among workers is the kinds of familial and pre-capitalist
social obligations the migrant is enmeshed in in his or her
home area; these too have an impact on the pattern of work
and the disposition of wages. They are more fully described
in Cha pters 2 and 3.
These considerations point to the need for understanding
both the political-economic situation from which migrants
come, which determines their decision to migrate, or forces
them to do so, as weil as the situation which they enter as
workers, which influences their actions as workers and
determines, or in some cases forces, their decision to return
home. In Chapters and 3 we look at the experiences of
2
migrants in the rural areas, and in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 we
examine the migrant as worker. Throughout, we want to
consider not only the question of out-migration, but also
that of return migration, that is, the failure of the wage
system to absorb workers on a permanent basis. And, most
important, we want to examine what actions and reactions
have been provoked by Africans' experiences as workers,
other than simply their comings and goings. Too often the
