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Uneven LabourMigration in SouthernAfricaJonathan Crush aa Queens University , Kingston ,Ontario , CanadaPublished online: 13 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Jonathan Crush (1984) Uneven Labour Migration inSouthern Africa, South African Geographical Journal, 66:2, 115-132, DOI:10.1080/03736245.1984.10559694

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UNEVEN LABOUR MIGRATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: CONCEPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS

JONA THAN CRUSH Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

(Manuscript received 12th June, 1984; in final form 21st June, 1984)

The literature on the historical roots of southern Africa's migrant labour system is growing rapidly. Works pitched at the level of the system as a whole have been most common to date. A number of general concepts have consequently emerged which attempt to give substance to the nature and role of early labour migration. It is increasingly apparent that many of these concepts, while not without value, may hinder rather than help further exploration of the making of migrant labour. They are serving both to obscure the complexity and struggles which beset migrant labour systems at their foundation and to divert attention away from a set of processes and relationships which must be included in any explanatory account of the history of labour migrancy. In order to understand the complex character and regional variability of early labour migration it is essential that the concepts be disaggregated. The present paper criticalIy reviews a number of concepts, and the theoretical and empirical charges levelled against them. This is seen as a prelude to the construction of a research prospectus which might inform future work by historians and historical geographers in this important area.

Introduction

115

Studies of labour migration in Africa evidence a "dazzling heterogeneity" (Gerold-Scheepers and van Binsbergen, 1978). This large and burgeoning literature has been exhaustively reviewed in several recent works (Adepoju, 1977; Prothero, 1982; Riddell, 1981; Swindell, 1979; van Binsbergen and Meilink, 1978; Wood, 1982). The consensus seems to be that understanding has been hampered by a profusion of inappropriate methodologies, unexamined theoretical presuppositions and, until recently, an unnecessary fixation on contemporary migration and migrant labour systems at the expense of a comprehensive historical analysis of the genesis of African labour migration. In southern African scholarship the study of contemporaneous labour migration reaches back to the structural­functionalist anthropological accounts of the 1930's and 1940's but with the exception of the classic early studies by de Kiewiet (1941) and van der Horst (1942), attempts to uncover the roots of pre-colonia~migrant labour movements are of more recent pedigree.

The towering feature of the period of frontier closure in late nineteenth and early twentieth century southern Africa was the erection of a migrant labour system centred on the core industrial areas of South Africa. The voracious appetite of the increasingly dominant gold mining industry during this era was for large quantities of cheap black labour. Unable, for a number of reasons, to satisfy its cravings, mining capital was forced into an assertive campaign of labour acquisition which drew large parts of the sub-continent into its orbit. The penetration of mining capital into the rural districts of the region produced a "profound ripple effect" (Moodie, 1981) as it increasingly over-rode local frontier struggles between white settlers and autochthonous peoples, and materially altered the setting within which such conflict took place.

South African Geographical Journal, Vot. 66 No. 2, 1984

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Recent research has moved away from conceptualizations of the migrant labour system as a well-oiled machine, towards empirical demonstration of the conflicts and contradictions which often threatened to tear the system apart, particularly in the formative years before 1920. Attention now focuses squarely on the conflicts within the mining industry, and between it and other capitalist employers, over black labour; the ambiguous character of state action and response; the forces within African society promoting participation in and resistance to wage labour; the assertion of their powers of agency by individual migrants and commoner households and the struggles of disaffected groups to enlarge their influence within the system (Beinart, 1982; Delius, 1983; Jeeves, forthcoming; Lacey, 1981; Levy, 1982).

The picture which is emerging reveals that the origins of labour migrancy were extremely complicated, varying markedly in both spatial and temporal dimensions throughout southern Africa (Crush and Rogerson, 1983). Explanation of the phenomenon of "uneven labour migration" must therefore rate as a major project of any historical­geographic reconstruction of the sub-continent between 1850 and 1920. A similar research prospectus has been identified elsewhere in Africa by Freund (1981, p.73) and Stichter (1982, p.59). The historical geographer's grasp should extend further than the simple recovery of spatial and temporal variation in labour migration, however, for such superficial indicators are only manifestations of more deep-rooted and pervasive processes. Thus it is also necessary to appreciate the patchwork quilt of pre-capitalist social relations in the region, the variant forms of capital penetration and African response, and the simultaneous and interlocking history of the frontier of "dispossession and extrusion" (de Kiewiet, 1941, p.74).

There is therefore a need to locate studies of particular facets of the migrant labour system in the broader context of capitalist and pre­capitalist social institutions and relations, and in their transformation. The methodological commitment is to derive explanations of causation (reflected in the spatial and temporal patterns of migration and production) by working both inwards and outwards: inwards, by penetrating to the most basic level of the organization of production and decision-making in the African household; outwards, to the "wider processes of class formation, capital accumulation and state strategy, which must impinge upon the smallest of communities in profound ways" (Bozzoli, 1983a, p.35). Hence, migration studies must be conceptualized as but one contribution to analysis of the formation of the regional capitalist economy. .

The quest for a broader perspective which also gives credence to the immensely complex regional processes and patterns at work continues (Marks and Rathbone, 1983, p.157). One legacy of Frankian­inspired studies of labour migration in southern Africa is a series of general theses about "Africa of the labour reserves", which fail to achieve this integration of the general and the particular (Amin, 1972). In this inheritance can be included studies of the destruction of the southern African peasantry, deemed a necessary stage in the transition from subsistence cultivator to migrant labourer; the notion of semi­proletarianization as a deliberately contrived exercise by mining capital

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to cheapen the costs of black labour; and an instrumentalist view of all­powerful colonial states acting purely at the behest of unified mining (and agrarian) capital to secure African land and labour for capitalist enterprise (Bundy, 1979; Burawoy, 1976; Palmer and Parsons, 1977; Wolpe, 1972).

Central to this literature are a number of general concepts which have rapidly achieved an almost hallowed status in the historiography of the region. As a result, attention has tended to be diverted away from the shifting and unpredictable struggles over African labour power and material resources which formed the fluid context within which migrants and migrant households took decisions about labour migration. There is thus a need for a critical re-examination of these general concepts in the light of various theoretical and empirical considerations, if they are to be of any value in exploring the historical incorporation of particular localities into the regional capitalist labour market. The present paper attempts to clear the undergrowth. It aims to bring together and critically review the debates around the general concepts of inter alia labour mobility and immobility; the labour reserve; recruiting monopsony and the rise and fall sequence of African peasant production. Attention is then directed towards a set of research priorities which could structure further investigation of the origins of patterns and processes of labour migration in southern Africa.

Labour Mobility and Immobility The early development of the mines' migrant labour system in

southern Africa was infused with complexity, contradiction and chaos. The coercive forces which bore down on African people with increasing ferocity after 1860 have been well-documented. However, a concentration on the external inducements for labour migration has tended to ignore the important fact that the character of pre-colonial and colonial migrant labour movements was determined at the point of intersection between exogenous forces and the internal and external relationships of the African household.

A number of writers have recently focused on the internal relations of pre-capitalist society which, in certain cases, predisposed a migrant labour movement'to evolving capitalist labour markets (Delius, 1980, 1983; Hl!.rries, 1982; Kimble, 1982a; Moorsom, 1981; Webster, 1977). However; the common experience of capitalist employers during these formative years was the difficulty of obtaining Africans for wage labour at all or, at best, only for short periods of time (Denoon, 1967). This "resistance" to wage labour calls for a conceptualization of the phenomenon of pre-capitalist labour immobility, something which is often assumed to be unproblematical. Immobility can be seen as a product of both material and relational factors, given that the power of pre-capitalist society lay in its "internal relationships, its capacities to resist proletarianization, to retain access to the land, and to continue to produce and reproduce" (BOZlOli, 1983b, p.146).

Th~ material dimension refers ostensibly to the productive and reproductive needs of the basic economic unit of African society, the household. As long as the household could secure its necessary material

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requirements independently of capitalist labour markets, labour migration by household members remained an essentially discretionary phenomenon which tended to encourage labour immobility (Arrighi, 1970). Such immobility could only be consistently overcome when migration for wage labour become necessary for the reproduction of the household. The processes which moved the household in this direction included: (a) new social definitions of necessary requirements, (b) temporary deprivation of necessary requirements through periodic drought or widespread ecological calamity and the failure of traditional coping mechanisms, (c) the introduction of compulsory payments such as colonial taxation which had to be met in cash, and (d) alienation in whole or part of the means of production such as land. When cash needs became necessary for household reproduction, labour mobility was by no means the inevitable result. New capitalist labour markets invariably meant new opportunities for agricultural commodity production. If the household was a regular producer of agricultural surpluses or could re­arrange its productive activities in order to generate such surpluses, participation in wage labour could be avoided. Overcoming African immobility in this context required, and in the southern African case elicited, a sustained economic and political assault on the commodity producer (Bundy, 1979).

An approach to immobility which focuses on the material needs of the household alone typifies analysis of the rise and fall of the southern African peasantry, and studies of societies with a high degree of household autonomy (Bundy, 1979; Beinart, 1982). The basic assumption of this approach is of atomistic, self-contained households interacting individually with the material world and commodity markets. Where this situation did not obtain, however, a material approach to immobility immediately becomes a partial one. There is thus a need to develop a complementary relational analysis which seeks the roots of immobility in the social relations within and outside the African household.

Here the theoretical analysis of Standing (1981) is particularly useful. He argues that immobility is a central feature of pre-capitalist social systems and traces the various relational forces inhibiting labour mobi~ity within feudal society. The same genre of anarysis has been used in India and could also be profitably applied to African society at a number of levels (Omvedt, 1980). Within the household, for example, the emergence of a particular sexual division of labour rendered certain household members intrinsically less mobile than others. Or again, in many instances sons were dependent on their fathers for bridewealth and while this relationship persisted, household heads could bind their sons more firmly to the household. The advent of capitalist labour markets provided an alternative source of bridewealth and a counter­force to immobility which was sometimes resisted by household heads.

The price of access to necessary material requirements was for many households to enter into unequal relations with local overlords, such as chiefs and ruling lineages. In many cases the reciprocal obligation for access to the means of production was the provision of tribute and tribute labour to the overlord. The degree of appropriation

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varied from society to society, and within one society, accordIng to a number of variables including internal struggles over labour power. In highly centralised societies, chief-commoner relations had the potential to immobilise a considerable proportion of the male labour resources of an area (Crush, 1983; Guy, 1982; Peires, 1981).

It is not without significance that throughout the sub-continent recruiters attempting to generate a labour supply often worked through the agency of these local overlords. Where they responded favourably, the type of mobility which resulted was invariably conditional, at least in the early stages, as chiefs sought to exercise some control over the terms on which labour was released. The variable strength of chief-commoner relations therefore had the potential to produce great variation in the patterns of mobility which emerged.

The _penetration of the frontier of "disposession and extrusion" was a major factor in the struggle for African labour, particularly where there was widespread land expropriation. In general terms, far from attempting to overcome African labour immobility, the whole project of agrarian capital was to immobilize labour in the white controlled parts of the countryside and to extend the spatial extent of such control (Lacey, 1981, p.120). This strategy of immobilization was necessary in order to retain labour in a situation where farming was undercapitalized and in a weak competitive position in relation to other economic sectors. Strategies of immobilization took two forms; first, agrarian capital was resolutely opposed to the retention or extension of existing reserves since they provided a refuge for labourers who deserted from farms and for potential workseekers who were resisting farmwork (Lacey, 1981, p.13). From the start this led to conflict over land and labour between white settlers and African chiefs. And second, farmers attempted to lock Africans resident on expropriated land into immobilizing tenancy relations which prevented household members from leaving local farms to work elsewhere or from moving to reserves.

Against the immobilizing forces of pre-capitalist relations and agrarian capital was the almost overwhelming drive of mining capital to mobilize black labour from the outskirts of an expanding catchment area and channel it to the core industrial areas of South Africa. The machinery of mobilization left no district untouched, and the emergence of the Rand as the major employer of black labour in the sub-continent is testimony to the eventual supremacy of the forces promoting controlled labour mobility. Nevertheless, explanati~.R for inter-regional variation in the character of the migration experience must be sought. not simply in the nature and effectiveness of the forces of labour mobilization, but in the counterbalancing material and relational forces of immobility in the country districts.

Recruiting Monopsony Central to the genesis and operation of the mines' migrant labour

system was the role of labour recruiters in forging links between the rural districts and particular labour markets. Research in this important area is surprisingly sparse, being limited, to date, to a study of the operation of the Rhodesian Native Labour Bureau (Van Onselen, (1976), a perfunctory analysis of WNLA in Mozambique

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(Katzenellenbogen, 1982) and detailed local level reconstructions of recruiting activity in the first two decades of this century in Pondoland (Beinart, 1979), Swaziland (Crush, 1983) and the northern Transvaal (Jeeves, 1983). As a result, the crucial role of the recruiter in the generation and direction of black labour to the mines has, until recently, been almost completely neglected, and the complexities and conflicts which characterised the formative years of the mines' recruiting system have been largely ignored, disguised by all-embracing concepts such as "monopsony" (Jeeves, 1975). As Jeeves (forthcoming) notes:

"(Most studies) have shared the view that cooperative recruiting was easily achieved in the industry and that it was somehow the natural result of a very few large mining groups. Monopoly capitalism held sway; the Chamber of Mines controlled everything; the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), established in 1900, and the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC) , in 1912, developed smoothly, almost inevitably as the big corporations moved to the full­scale exploitation of the huge deposits of low grade ore. Since the mines dominated the economy, they had little to fear from the rivalry of outside employers also".

Jeeves' important study lays much of this mythology to rest. He clearly demonstrates that the recruiting system which characterised the goldmining industry after 1920 only emerged as the hard-won product of over thirty years of competition and bitter struggle between contending interests inside and outside the industry. In so doing he shows the cut­throat competition and ruthless pursuit of self-interest which characterised the recruiting system prior to 1920; the repeated but unsuccessful attempts to secure a recruiting monopsony by mining capitalists bent on lowering the costs of black labour; the vital role of the independent labour contractor in thwarting the move towards monopsony and in perpetuating a competitive recruiting environment; the inventive, elaborate and often highly organised methods of recruiting adopted by swarms of contractors, trader-recruiters, labour touts and black runners in the countryside and on the Rand itself; and the response of African migrants to an intensely competitive recruiting environment.

The fuzzy concept of an easily established and maintained recruiting monopsony sits well with "capital logic" approaches to the history of the migrant labour system in southern Africa. Unfortunately, the historical record tells a rather different story. Kitching's (1983) recent comment on the Mozambican experience consequently has a much broader application. Criticising the view which sees Africans as hapless victims of a forced labour recruiting system, he argues that:

"Draconian legislation and brutal recruiting practices represented desperate and - overall - probably unsuccessful attempts by ... capital to suppress the room for manoeuvre given to worker/peasants by their continued access to their own means of subsistence. It is significant not only . . . that workers could and frequently did run away both before and after they were recruited, but that they had somewhere and something to run to" (Kitching, 1983, p.262).

The conflicts and complexities which surrounded recruiting history at the level of the system as a whole and within particular localities must thus be clearly recognised to avoid· passive models of African participation and to appreciate the emergence of uneven patterns of labour migration.

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The Labour Reserve One of the defining characteristics of the southern African migrant

labour system in the twentieth century has been a strictly controlled form of mobility, where migrants were surrounded by a battery of coercive legislation which ensured oscillation between the rural districts and employment centres. As a result, the relationship between African landholding in the rural areas and the phenomenon of labour migration, has commanded increasing attention through the concept of the labour reserve. This concept has proved to be one of the most persistent, yet questionable, entities bequeathed by marxian structuralism to southern African historiography. The structuralist influence is writ large in Wolpe (1972) and Legassick's (1974) original, and several subsequent, formulations in which abstract necessities have the habit of appearing in the historical record and subordinating all historical evidence to the inexorable logic of capital (Greenberg, 1980, p.164-6; Legassick, 1974; Levy 1982; Massey, 1983; Wolpe, 1972). Pared of its structuralist (but not functionalist) connotations, the concept has also found widespread acceptance outside southern Africa (Mellaisoux, 1980; Riddell, 1981).

A basic feature of colonial conquest in southern Africa was the expropriation of land from Africans. Expropriation was rarely total, however, and in some areas Africans were able to retain access to land. Viewing the origins of reserved land in narrow terms simply as the creation of "labour reserves" is a currently fashionable perspective which derives from the role which these areas are perceived to have played under the dominance of mining capital between the two Wars (Crush, 1982, p.206). These "labour reserves", in which atrophied African modes of production were conserved by capital at the point where the food they produced covered some but not all subsistence needs, are supposed to have performed a number of functions for mining capital and the state. In particular, the labour reserve provided a wage subsidy, paid the cost of labour reproduction and provided relief for employers from the social welfare costs associated with advanced capitalism (Burawoy, 1976; Clarke, 1977; Magubane, 1975). Capitalist production throughout southern Africa thus entered into a symbiotic nexus-- with· the. reproduction -of labour_in restructed- and -atrophied' reserve economies (Crush and Rogerson, 1983).

Without an analysis of the creation of labour reserves or of pre­capitalist society, however, this thesis loses explanatory power. In Wolpe's (1972) initial analysis, attention focused on the effects of the existence of labour reserves and not on how and why the migrant labour system actually came about. In the absence of a systematic historical causal analysis, Wolpe's (1972) effects have become causes (Kimble, 1982b). It requires only a small jump of logic to claim that mining capital set up the migratory labour system as a means of reducing the cost of labour power. This form of argument has recently been criticised on two levels; theoretical and historical.

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The theoretical weakness of the cheap labour thesis is pithily expressed by Mouzelis (1980, p.367):

"Turning reproductive requirements into causes producing specific effects naively transforms structures into mysterious entities whose "needs" regulate everything and everybody on the social scene. In fact .. the illegitimate jump from necessity to occurrence, via the system's reproductive requirements will simply not do. Any attempt to brush aside actors, or to present them as mere effects of systemic constraints, inevitably leads to teleological explanations".

Hence capital alone becomes the subject of history and, even then, little is told of how capital achieved its ends. If it is argued that it was through state policy, then an unacceptably instrumentalist view of the role of the state is implied. As Cooper (1981a) has noted, African societies are seen as mere effects of systemic needs in a way which defines away all sense of incomplete domination, of African resistance to the dictates of capital, of African societies being organized in any way except to maximize the advantage to capital. Thus, "function becomes cause, and we are ill-equipped to understand how migratory labour was obtained, the complexity of the relationship between spheres of production and reproduction, the problems of disciplining and socializing workers, or the instability and tension that beset migrant labour systems (Cooper, 1981a, p.1S).

If we turn to the making of the southern African "labour reserve" , it now seems clear that it was not an inevitable process dictated by the conscious (or even structural) whim of mining capital. For one thing, the circumstances surrounding the reservation of land for Africans owed much to the particular course of struggles between African chiefs and commoners, settlers, Boer pastoralists, and land companies within the various colonies and to the resolution of those struggles by colonial states. For another, many reserves were fashioned under a different set of social and economic conditions in the period prior to the domination of mining capital in the regional economy (Cell, 1983; Crush, 1982).

What is missing then is any appreciation of "how difficult it was to get Africans off the land, how hard Africans fought to maintain their agricultural cycle . . . and hence how little alternative capital had to some form of migratory labour" (Cooper, 1981a, p.40). While attributing to the capitalist an omniscience which he quite clearly did not possess and underestimating the "violent clashes of interest between the architects of capitalist society and the needs of capital" (Lonsdale, 1981, p.188), this thesis also downplays the high degree of fractiousness both within the mining industry and be~ween it and other branches of capitalist production.

Mafeje (1981) has posed the general question of whether the functional relationship between capital accumulation and the conserva­tion of non-capitalist relations was true for South African capitalism in general. Lacey (1981) answers this question in the negative. For her, a distinction must be made between the conflicting labour needs of mining capital and those of a nascent capitalist agricultural sector. She tends to accept the Wolpe (1972) argument that the creation and maintenance of a migrant labour force depended upon the continued existence and partial viability of labour reserves. But she disputes that the interests of

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farmers were congruent, arguing that they were always opposed to reserve policies and the extension of reserves to support more Africans, since the farm labour supply was thereby inhibited. Tracing the c,?nflicting interests of mining and agrarian capital over reserve policy after Union, she shows that the impasse created as primarily responsible for the failure of one government after another to extend the reserves at the behest of mining capital. Here is a further challenge to the functionalist logic of the labour reserve thesis. For if capital was able to institute a finely-tuned, super-exploitative system, it is never made clear why it allowed the system to get out of hand and send carefully preserved labour-reserves on a course of irreversible decline.

The missing dimension in Lacey's (1981) analysis is the reaction of African peoples themselves. The degree to which reserve policies were made by African struggles to "shape the timing and conditions of labour and rural production" cannot be underestimated (Cooper, 1981a). In addition, Lacey has in common with the labour reserve theorists a residual conception of the African social relationships which persisted in the reserves. Hence, there is no consideration of the ways in which these relationships may have facilitated or inhibited migrancy nor of how they were affected by migrancy in turn.

The Rise and Fall of the Peasantry The attack on the African commodity producer in the late

ninteenth and early twentieth centuries by capital and colonial state has been well-documented although it has recently been suggested that sharecropping at least was a "vital and integral stage in the capitalization of settler agriculture" (Keegan, 1983). This has led to the idea of a typical subsistence cultivator-to-peasant-to-proletarian sequence thought to apply to large areas of the sub-continent:

"It has become clear that African agriculturalists in the nineteenth century responded positively and successfully to the colonial economy. its pressures and its opportunities. by producing agricultural surpluses for sale on the markets of southern Africa. The chronology of response and decline was uneven in different areas. depending on the timing and intensity of colonial penetration but it was a ubiquitous phenomenon to be observed throughout the region (Keegan, 1983. p.201; Webster. 1979)".

Without delving into the general critique of the under-development theory framework which has informed this thesis, or the seemingly endless debate on the meaning of the designation "peasant", it is necessary to highlight the strengths (the research,questions posed) and the weaknesses (the research answers proposed) by "rise-and-fall" conceptualizations (Bernstein, 1979; Cooper, 1981b; Hopkins, 1980; Ranger, 1981).

The thesis did raise a number of important points. First, it demonstrated that the impoverishment of the reserve areas of southern Africa was not an original state, and suggested that the reasons for the decline of the rural periphery should be sought in a complex of forces emanating from capitalist development in the sub-continent (Kimble, 1982b). Second, attention was squarely focused on-the African response to new opportunities and a challenge issued to orthodox conceptions of the conservatism and backwardness of the rural dweller. Third, it highlighted the coercive forces at work which launched an attack on

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African participation in the capitalist economy as sellers of produce rather than labour. And finally, an important conceptual link was forged between labour migration, rural processes and the emergence of agricultural commodity production.

However, the over-simplified, unilineal schema which is supposed to have applied to all areas of the sub-continent does scant justice to what was obviously a complex and highly variable connection between production and migrancy. To penetrate to the heart of this relationship and to understand the dynamics and blockages to commodity production and labour migration demands an examination of the organization and relations of rural production themselves (Cooper, 1981b). Only then can the forces which facilitated (or prohibited) a rapid response to market demand be understood.

In turn, an analysis is needed of the ways in which participation in wage or produce markets impacted upon rural relations of production. If Bundy in particular barely discusses the peasant household - big or small - then he also exhibits a tendency to ignore its "lateral" or "vertical" relationships with other households and social classes (Bundy, 1979; Cooper, 1981b). This issue is particularly relevant for understanding the relationship between rural production and labour migration in areas where Africans managed to retain access to consolidated land surfaces and where pre-capitalist social relations were much more resilient. Bundy (1979) gestures in the direction of these "intact" areas but with a highly ideal-typical reconstruction of African society (a "general type of tribal economy" involving "egalitarian and non-stratified relationships"), he makes the unwarranted assumption that commodity producers within these areas can be treated in the same way as those on expropriated land.

A number of authors have recently begun to develop an alternative analysis of the relationships between production and migrancy. Of these, the works of Kimble (1978; 1982; 1982a) on Lesotho and Beinart (1982) on Pondoland are particularly important. Both were societies where, at different times, migrant labour and agricultural production expanded simultaneously. Their approach has not systematically been addressed to "intact" societies where widespread commodity production was not a feature. Beinart and Kimble begin their analyses by asking basic questions about the organization of production and the changing social relationships within and between different households. They then ask how these structures facilitated a response to produce and labour markets and how, in turn, these societies were modified by participation in commodity markets.

In the case of Pondoland, Beinart examines the basis of chiefly power before 1840 and its decline thereafter. A growing decentralization of chiefly influence was facilitated by the inroads of traders, the growing primacy of agricultural production in household reproduction and the immigration of other households into the area who did not give full allegiance to local chiefs. By the end of the century, each household had become more or less self-sufficient in relation to the chiefs, surplus production was geared to the traders and production had become atomised to the level of each household. This facilitated an

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almost universal response to commodity markets with little labour time being expended outside the household, a process which further loosened chief-commoner relations.

By contrast, in Lesotho, Kimble shows how a strong ruling lineage drew off labour time from commoner households at every stage of the agricultural cycle, and disposed of the surplus product internally in ways which strengthened its dominance. After 1850, in particular, the ruling lineage through its tight control over the labour time of commoners responded positively to new commodity markets. By intensifying the level of appropriation of surplus labour and redirecting the surplus product externally, the ruling lineage engaged in production for exchange and acquired the commodities necessary to defend their area against outside attack and entrench their internal position of dominance. Kimble also shows (as does Delius (1980) for the Pedi) , how strong chief-commoner relations enabled the chiefs to mobilize their followers for wage labour to acquire guns to defend themselves against colonial penetration from as early as the mid-nineteenth century. In Pondoland, on the other hand, significant labour migration was delayed until the first decade of the twentieth century and was related more to the needs of household reproduction than the character of chief­commoner relations in the society. Beinart (1982) uncovers the shifting relationship between internal and external forces in Pondoland, the latter now compounded by the advent of migrancy. He shows how migrancy and commodity production expanded simultaneously, and the impact of participation in wage labour on the rate of household formation, the domestic division of labour, changes in cropping pattern and technological input, and the seasonal pattern of labour migration.

The detailed and sensitive reconstructions of Beinart and Kimble show that without an analysis at the level of rural production the fundamental differences between these two societies as participators in commodity and labour markets could be totally obscured. Their analyses have considerable relevance to other cases, not because they duplicate the Basotho or Pondo experience but because it is indicative of the form of analysis which it is necessary to develop to make sense of the highly variable African experience of migration.

New Research Directions Research on the making of a regional capitalist economy and the

incorporation of African societies into new circuits of production and exchange proceeds in a number of complementary directions. In this context, and that of the theoretical concerns outlined above, the research questions and hypotheses which need to be put to the historical evidence for particular localities can be pinpointed. Five interlinked research areas can be identified.

The first of these concerns itself with general contextual questions about the "hitherto unchartered development of capitalism in the sub­continent" (Mark and Rathbone, 1982). Research questions currently of concern include the process of white settlement and the emergence of agrarian capitalism; the nature of South African linkages with the metropolitan economies of Europe and the character of late nineteenth

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century European imperialism; the production processes, organizational structure and cost imperatives of particular economic sectors, such as goldmining; and the complex and controversial question of the role of the state and state-capital linkages during this period (Kubicek, 1979; Marks and Trapido, 1979; Richardson and van Helten, 1980; Yudelman, 1984).

Of particular relevance is the fact that emphasis on the domination and hegemony of mining capital has tended to divert attention away from the cut-throat nature of the evolving capitalist labour market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, for example, Marion Lacey has unpicked the so-called alliance of gold and maize by demonstrating that "the mines and farms were at loggerheads over labour supplies" (Lacey, 1981, p.120). Van Onselen's (1982) recent study of the social history of the Witwatersrand has illustrated the host of alternative employment niches open to Africans on the Rand. And Jeeves (forthcoming) has issued a forthright challenge to the prevailing view that "the mining industry and its labour systems (were) largely undifferentiated and for the most part free of internal dissension".

The existence and determinants of this competitive labour market in South Africa require much further investigation. One dimension which needs elaboration in specific contexts is the struggle of local employers in the rural districts of the sub-continent to carve out a share of local and migrant labour forces. The difficulties and dilemmas of peripheral production in a weak competitive position, notwithstanding proximity to potential labour supplies, are striking (Van Onselen, 1976). Integral to the labour market facing many migrants were local employment opportunities on mines and farms. The nature of these labour markets and the African response to their solicitation must therefore be reconstructed. Work is needed on the establishment of settler-estate production and local mines; the labour processes and cost imperatives of these production activities and the problems of labour mobilization and stabilization facing local employers (Crush, 1985a; Rennie, 1978).

Conversely, the African response to such employment opportunities should be gauged. Most migrants were forced onto a labour market characterised by fierce competition for African labour. In anenvironment where "choice of employer was regularly a matter of life and death", the resulting patterns of labour migration become of intrinsic interest as expressions of the "playing" of the labour market by migrants and their sending agencies such as chiefs and household heads (Moorsom, 1981, p.29).

The second major research area concerns itself with the vexed question of labour mobilization and immobility. All capitalist employers had a common desire to break the forces of pre-capitalist labour immobility but there the resemblance largely ended. Within areas of white settlement, settlers were concerned about land expropriation and immobilizing labour on that land. Local mines wished to secure a limited form of local mobility and to stabilize. their labour force. And urban employers of va~ous sorts wanted to overcome the inhibitions to migration and generate a significant labour flow to their industries,

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although different employers obviously had differing ideas about where such labour should go. Hence fierce contests for labour developed on the ground. The dimensions and outcome of these struggles and the response of both the local state and African communities need to be explored.

The picture was further complicated by the continued vitality of pre-capitalist relations and forms of immobility in many areas, and the struggles of African ruling classes to resist colonial threats to their powers of land and labour control. In this context it will be necessary to ask whether African rulers connived at all in the emergence of a migrant force and if so, why, and on what conditions; and what steps the rulers took to control migration once it was rendered increasingly inevitable by incorporation into the regional economy.

The task of mobilizing labour for capitalist enterprise, and the attempted resolution of struggles over labour fell, as in all other areas of the continent, to local colonial states. In examining the colonial response to these demands, a number of issues are raised. These include the methods adopted by the colonial state to overcome African immobility vis-a-vis capitalist labour markets. It has recently been suggested, for example, that colonial taxation was a blunt instrument for mobilizing labour (Cooper, 1981b, p.33). This hypothesis has been tested in Swaziland and Botswana through an examination of the colonial taxation machinery and the response of Tswana (Massey, 1979) and Swazi (Crush, 1985b) chiefs and commoners to its coercive pressures. The latter context is particularly important given the virtual absence of agricultural commodity production and the opportunities it offered elsewhere in the region for avoiding 'wage-Iabour, but further exploration of the question in other areas is still necessary. Other issues include the character and rationale behind the state response to the competing demands of local and regional employers for African labour; the contradictory response of the state to attempts by African rulers to control labour migration in their own interest; and the nature of state management of highly competitive recruiting environments. In the context of these various questions about state labour policy, the utility of recent conceptual developments in understanding the nature and role of the colonial state in Africa can be assessed (Berman, 1984).

A third general set of research questions extends the analysis of labour mobilization to the question of channelling labour to points where demand was greatest. The "bluntness" of colonial state policy was also manifested in its limited ability to direct labour to certain markets. Hence the role of recruiters in providing a conduit for labour markets such as the Witwatersrand became crucial. Against the backdrop of Jeeves' (1983; forthcoming) analysis of the goldmines' recruiting system at work, detailed analyses of particular localities are now needed to show how recruiting methods and their effectiveness varied from area to area. Only then can one proceed to a deeper understanding of the relationship between recruiting and labour mobilization; and to an appreciation of how this aspect of the migrant labour system was moulded by local conditions in the country districts. Uncovering local histories of labour recruiting activity in the formative years of the migrant labour system is likely to emerge as an important project in the future.

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Enquiry will have to be made into how far the local situation impinged upon the methods adopted by, and the success of, labour recruiters; the nature of recruiting operations in the anarchical 1890's and the after-effects of these activities in the first two decades of the twentieth century; the relationship between the activities of recruiters and the massive shift in African migration patterns towards the Rand after 1906; the effects on recruitment patterns of the formation of the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC) in late 1912; the waxing and waning of the relative strength of the voluntary (non-recruited) component in the Rand-bound migrant force; and the reasons behind colonial state intervention in the local recruiting system in these years.

The fourth research topic of interest concerns the inter-relationship of land and labour in the region in general, and the issue of the creation of "labour reserves" in particular. The above discussion on this concept, and the significance of "labour reserves" in the operation of the migrant labour system have a direct bearing on this issue. The conclusion was drawn that to avoid the functionalist logic of the cheap labour thesis the mechanics of reserve creation and the struggle for scarce resources should be explored in particular historical instances.

The history of labour migration in southern Africa cannot be understood independently of a discussion of the struggle for land between indigenous and exogenous claimants. Hence a number of questions are raised including whether reserves should be interpreted as the fulfilment of a grand design by mining capital or primarily as the outcome of local struggles; the designs of agrarian capital on African labour and land, the methods proposed to achieve these ends, and the reasons for the particular responses of the colonial state to these pressures; and the character of African opposition to colonial land policy, the methods of protest adopted and the internal factors which influenced the effectiveness of the challenge. It is then necessary to assess to what extent colonial states were swayed by African struggles to retain land; and thereby to contest the view that land policy was an un problematical response to the demands of either mining or agrarian capital. And finally, since "when white farmers took land, they also gained control of the people on it", it is necessary to set the question of colonial land policy in the context of the quest of agrarian capital to limit the extent of labour migration (Rennie, 1978, p.83).

The final set of research questions which present themselves arises from the general discussion of the relationship between migrancy and rural production. It was suggested earlier that the nature of the production processes and social relations in the African countryside exercised a strong influence on the ways in which African labour and agricultural commodities were made available to the markets of the region. Now the reverse set of research questions need to be posed; that is, how participation in wider commodity markets reacted upon the rural setting.

Attention must consequently be directed to the uneven emergence of peasant commodity production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Marks and Rathbone (1983, p.1S7) suggest that the crucial dimension of labour migration was the provision of resources outside the control of elders, chiefs and household heads since this "inexorably

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altered the fundamental relationship in settlement groups, between father and son, uncle and nephew, brother and brother, man and woman". Assessments must therefore be made of the impact of labour migration on domestic relations, household size and the sexual division of labour, the rate of household formation and the nature of rural production activities. It is also necessary to enquire how the complex forces which accompanied the imposition of colonial rule, white settlement and capitalist penetration moulded the character of the relations of production between African chiefs and commoners.

Conclusion The social and economic history of many parts of southern Africa

remains opaque of best. Recovering the intricate and variable patterns of African resistance, collaboration and response during the early making of the regional migrant labour system is emerging as a major research undertaking for historians and historical geographers. That the African was not simply made by, but was maker of, the course of capitalist penetration and colonial domination had been increasingly recognised. Africans did make decisions about various aspects of labour migration and those decisions mattered. Nonetheless, the scholarly temptation for over-indulgence must be resisted. The contours of southern Africa's industrial revolution, and the patterns and processes of labour migration which accompanied it, were the product of struggles between and within dominating, and increasingly dominated, societies, classes and economic units. If the phenomenon of uneven labour migration is to be properly uncovered, attention must be temporarily diverted away from the pageant of African resistance, and focused on the complex web of intruding and indigenous forces constituted within particular areas of the sub-continent.

Acknowledgements This paper was written while the author held a Canadian SSHRC

Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship and with the aid of an SSHRC Research Grant. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Barry Ridslell and Alan Jeeves (Queen's University), Randall Packard (Tufts University), PaUl Maylam (University of Natal) and David Crush (African Development Bank). Or Jeeves generously consented to my request to quote from the manuscript of his forthcoming book. My thanks also to Paul Wellings and Jill Nattrass of DSU (University of Natal) for their help.

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