JOHNNY
CLEGG on MIGRANT LABOUR
WHAT
IS MIGRANT LABOUR?
"The
migrant labour system has always existed, not only in South Africa,
but also around the world. The experience is similar across cultures.
It comprises of members of a peasant rural community or traditional
society, which due to various pressures be they ecological, social,
political or cultural, who are forced off the land to go and obtain
cash and sell their labour on the market in an urban environment. When
they do this, all sorts of new dynamics are set up in their own culture.
They’re exposed top new systems of thinking, new value systems, new
cultures and new World views. The traditional culture does not prepare
them for this so it’s a very rude birth. In South Africa the first real
waves of migration onto the labour market occurred with the discovery
of gold and diamonds. People from all over South Africa and beyond travelled
to Johannesburg to sell their labour on the labour market. Originally
the labour pool was male gender based, and only later women joined the
labour pool in order to work in the domestic arena. Although enforced
by government the need to procure a job became part of the male rite
of passage and rural tradition. You were considered a successful peasant
farmer to the extent that you went off when you were a young man, found
a job, came back when you had enough cash, started to have your own
children, set up a family and ran the farm plot at home. Then in a cyclical
fashion, your sons went off and sent you cash, and in this way you had
a sustainable way of life. You produced a little bit of surplus."
MIGRANT
LABOUR IN SOUTH AFRICA:
- ‘You
had 72 hours to get a job offer, which had to originate from the city.
Thereafter you had to leave the city.’
- ‘Once
you had the job offer you had to return to the labour office in your
area.’
- ‘Your
prospective employer had to have accommodation for you or you had
to get a hostel bed number.’
- ‘Your
pass would then be stamped to say that you had received a job offer
from the city.’
- ‘Once
your pass was stamped, you could return to the city and apply for
a work permit.’
"The
government’s plan was to allow rural workers to seek work in a town
for 72 hours maximum. After that the rural ‘worker’ had to go back home.
The idea was that you had to have a job offer and if you had that you
could come to the city and apply for a work permit – which would only
be for 11 months. You had to go back to the rural areas for one month
every year – which was considered leave. Then your employer had to re-employ
you, which would be marked in your passbook for the following year.
And that was the whole concept of the pass system. It was based on a
cynical and thoroughly worked out system whereby people in the rural
areas where made to be third class citizens in their own country, in
that they were prevented from moving around the country freely. In order
to move you had to have permission, which goes against the right to
freedom of movement. The government’s biggest fear was a mass movement
of black people into the city causing what they considered a political
problem, and this was how they regulated it. They enforced it ruthlessly.
A black person could be stopped on the street at any time of day and
night and asked for his or her pass. In the 60’s, in all the urban areas
there was siren that went off at exactly 9pm every night. Thereafter
no black person was allowed on the street. I remember the siren; it
was like a World War II air raid siren. The concept was ‘white by night’.
All of these policies were implemented in order to limit the growth
of a black urban population. They did not want an urban society, which
would be hard to control or would have residence rights in the city.
Freedom
of movement is a critical right for a citizen to have. It enables you
to look for work, find opportunities where you can, without harassment.
In this situation you had to leave the rural areas and go off on an
illegal sortie into a town that you targeted through a network of your
kinship, relatives, friends or homeboys from the district. You had to
sneak into the city, look for a job, get a job offer and then you had
to go back to the rural areas to the labour bureau in your area. For
e.g.: If you came from Nkandla (a rural village in KwaZulu Natal)
you had to go to the Nkandla labour office and say, "I
have a job." This had to be ratified and once you had your piece
of paper from there, you could go and get your job. The other key element
was that the government realised it wasn’t as much as securing a job,
as it was a place to stay that was the key to this issue. So you had
to get a letter from your employer stating they would supply accommodation
or at least put job applicant up in a hostel, and they would have to
give you a bed number for a specific hostel."
THE
HOSTELS:
"The
hostel was a very dark dingy affair. It was a Spartan military barracks.
You have about 20 or 30 hostels serving each area, including the industrial
areas. They would be away from the shopping or white areas, on the outskirts
of the urban area. The entire structure and architecture was open planning.
Huge open plan kitchens and showers, toilet facilities - all were shared
so there wasn’t sense of ownership or permanence. The only thing you
owned was the receipt for the bed number. Every bed was registered in
the administration office on the ground floor. Some were two to three
stories tall. Denver or Jeppe Hostel can house 3-5000 people. You can
triple that because of all the illegals in there at night. Your bed
number was imperative. You had to get a bed number in order to get accommodation.
But you couldn’t get accommodation unless you had a job offer. But you
couldn’t come to the city unless you had a bed number. So you couldn’t
be in the city longer than 72 hrs. If you were caught you’d be arrested
and basically ‘sold’ off to a farmer for cheap labour for 3 months.
That’s how the government kept the number of rural workers in the cities
down, because people would be caught in the conundrum. You’d move into
a room that your district or tribal region had taken over. So your tribal
background was critical. You needed the tribal contacts to alleviate
the fierce competition for beds, for rooms. People fought wars. In order
to control beds and access to bed numbers, entire brokerage systems
were created. For example, in the old days Baxa - a tribe from Natal,
controlled all the jobs involving municipal rubbish collection. Unless
you belonged to that clan you couldn’t work there – you would be killed.
So economic niches were carved out for different groups. If you were
a senior flatcleaner in Hillbrow you would make sure that new guys that
were employed came from your area. In so doing you became a labour broker.
You would say "I’m getting you a job but for the first year you
must give me R5, 00 a month." If you could be inventive you could
stay in the city."
THE
HOSTEL BED NUMBER:
"A
bed number was worth the gold the city was built on. If you had a bed
number in a hostel you were a broker because you could sell the number,
or utilise the number and the bed to hide people under it. The hostel
rooms would take 16 - 30 people, but there were always double the amount
staying in the room. Your kids and your nephews would sneak into the
city to find a job, but they would have no place to sleep and would
end up under your bed. So securing a bed number was a critical aspect
of the hostel life. In this way the government not only monitored
the labour pool but they limited its access to the economy, thus limiting
the urbanisation process."
THE
UNIQUENESS OF MIGRANT LABOUR IN SOUTH AFRICA:
"1.This
system is unique in the world, because the migrant labourers were constantly
on a treadmill enforcing them to return to the rural areas because their
contracts only lasted 11 months. They had to be re-employed every year.
This meant that they couldn’t start a workers union because a workers
who is technically fired and then re-employed is happy just to get his
job back on a yearly basis. So the migrant workers unions were the last
unions to get off the ground in the sense that the migrant workers,
especially in the domestic arena, were extremely conservative. Migrant
workers often undercut the salaries of urban workers because they were
prepared to work for less. This elicited a huge urban / rural tension
which exists to this day. Causing further friction is the fact that
foreign African workers will work for less than the rural workers, who
in turn will work for less than urban workers.
2.
The migrant worker never gets a sense of permanence. He never gets a
sense of being part of a particular economic situation. He’s constantly
being recycled.
3.
The migrant worker has absolutely no rights and no real freedom. At
least if you were born in the urban area, you had more rights than a
rural worker because you had the right to residence. The urban worker
had freedom of movement.
4.
Most societies were taxed. However conservative, however hard they are
in economic policy, they provided some form of pension or social security
or benefit. In South Africa this was not the case. The government piggybacked
on the rural traditional kinship system, which provided a form of social
security to the peasant farmers. The government believed that rural
workers could provide for their own from the land they farmed. So the
migrant workers were forced to go back to the land to work out their
twilight years. The tribal kinship system became critical because you
saw that your father came back AND lived with his extended family on
the farm and that’s how he lived out his days. It meant that you had
to subscribe to tribal values and maintain the system. Which was exactly
what the government wanted the people to do. They wanted to freeze these
societies so that they didn’t change, so that the labour could be used,
the best got out of them and the ‘husk’ sent back into the rural area.
Through this the systematic culture of povertisation developed in these
areas. It’s a unique system of internal colonisation that happened in
one country as late as 1970. This gave rise to unique responses and
cultural inflections."
CULTURAL
RESPONSES:
"Migrant
workers had to find a way to deal with Western notions of culture and
economic value. There was a kind of a cultural schizophrenia. They would
take things from the west, neutralise them and incorporate them into
their own culture. On a cultural level it changed everything, from the
most basic things like clothing styles, food styles, music to the concept
of ‘interest’. They worked out that they put the money into the bank
and the bank made the money grow. How did the bank do this? Through
something called ‘interest’. So rural notions of urban interest were
incorporated into traditional life. There used to be a system called
ukusisa impahla, which means ‘to loan out livestock to poor clans’.
How did this play out? "I have a hundred head of cattle spare,
and I have a problem looking after them. So I’m going to sisa
(to loan) these out to you. You will look after these cattle for 1 year
and I will give you 20 of the young that are born, and I will take back
the rest. But you must look after them for that year." Suddenly
things changed and you had local moneylenders - the amashonisa.
To ‘shonisa’ means to cause someone to become destitute. What
these people would do is charge an unbelievable 100-200% interest on
loans in the informal sector. These are perverted notions of interest.
The levels are so high and the enforcement can be so violent. So what’s
happened is that the Western notion of interest is utilised in a very
raw way."
THE
INFLUENCE OF URBAN CULTURE ON THE TRADITIONAL:
CLOTHING
AND DESIGN
"This
was my entry point into Zulu culture."
"Hostels
were a breeding ground for cultural innovation. They were the engine
room of cultural transformation. Every weekend a new thing would happen.
Someone would be pushing the boundary on footwear, or creating a flywhisk
handle. It was an avalanche of ideas. The city gave them cheap throwaway
materials
Plastic
was an incredible revelation to the tribesmen. It was an incredible
moment of discovery. It was used for so many things - the adornment
of fighting sticks, plastic checkers bags could be woven into hats.
If you look at the way a migrant worker dressed you would see the integration
in all his apparel of his urban experience – bicycle reflectors, little
chains, leather and plastic cut together to make different shapes. Layered
plastic and leather was used to create incredible colourful clothing
items.
These
plastic things would be woven into the clothing and it was an incredible
cultural moment. To the extent that the practice of opening up the earlobes
to put the big round earpieces in became decorative with large pieces
of plastic and wood. Even these became objects of display. Plastic would
be cut out into little squares, triangles, oblong shapes and knocked
into little round pieces of wood to go into the ears.
The
traditional war magical band umam’langeni, worn around the arm
just under the shoulder on the top of the biceps, was normally hidden.
The little band would have a magical clan medicine which would be to
do with getting a job or getting ancestral protection for a pending
fight or feud. Now it became something you showed off, a colourful ring
full of reflectors or stitching, full of little plastic pieces. It often
had the colours black or red.
And
then there was the car tyre. It was incorporated into about three different
types of sandals. You had 2 kinds of mbadada – the sandals with
cross bars. Some had car tyre cross bars, some had car tyre soles and
leather cross bars. Then you had odabuluzwane, which was the
dancing sandal based on the traditional sandal – with a thong through
the toe – similar to typical Asian footwear.
If
someone couldn’t afford a real genet tail for their wedding, they simply
made them up, because there were materials in the city, which were useful.
The momentous discovery when migrant workers discovered all these materials
- plastic, car tyre, fabric, meant that they could develop a process
of neutralising them. There was a mental and physical process that occurred,
where their original function was no longer important to these people.
They also did this with musical instruments. They took a guitar and
they re-tuned it to a key and a format, which enabled them to play traditional
music. They had no notion of chords, which were foreign to traditional
music. It was more a case of picking at the notes. It was the same thing
with the concertina. They retuned and reconceptualised the concertina.
They made demands on the instrument, which wasn’t considered technically
possible. They did the same to the violin; they re-tuned it, played
it like the fiddle and played it down on their hip. The easiest way
an instrument could be played, whilst the musician was walking, was
chosen.
A
world of meaning was constructed out of abandoned industrial materials.
You would see a guy on a bike that looked like a kaleidoscope. He had
aerials and plastic bottles attached to both the bicycle and him. His
bicycle gave meaning to his life. It was his concept. He exposed it
to the world around him. That is extremely powerful and a good energy.
The time that it takes to construct the bicycle, the meaning that the
person has given the bicycle. Why put a little coloured plastic token
on each spoke of the wheel? Because when it turns a kaleidoscope of
shimmering colours is exposed to him and us. What he’s saying is that
he enforces his meaning on the world around him. This is evidence that
he is so powerful he can construct a world around him. The essence of
culture is systems of meaning. Meaning is what nourishes us. He’s coded
his life into his bicycle. He’s chosen colours and objects and the bicycle
is his most prided thing he owns. That is the power of the traditional
meaning systems."
MASKANDE
AND OTHER MUSIC:
"When
I was a youngster in 1965 the streets of Johannesburg were full of street
musicians, walking, playing violins, guitars, concertinas. Once I taped,
in the street, a Shangaan playing a shipendane mouth bow. I still
have the tape. Migrant workers were bringing their traditional music
into the cities. It was very different to the urban black music we were
hearing at the time. That was influenced by jazz, by the popular music
we were hearing. At that time, the development of umbaqanga hadn’t
even really started. Umbaqanga music was named after thick, doughy bread,
which was the staple diet of the working urban class. The bread was
used to describe the textural sound of the bass guitar. It was considered
‘thick and chewy’.
Maskande
came out of the street music tradition that developed in Durban. Maskande
is a word coming from the Afrikaans ‘musikant’. It’s adoptive from Afrikaans
and it signals that this kind of music is not really our music. It’s
something new; it’s a mixture, a cultural exploration. It’s a linguistic
separation from the tribal lexicon of musical performance. It’s saying,
‘this is new and foreign.’ We’re taking these western instruments and
making them play what we think is our traditional music. It’s music
that’s been influenced by the church, Christianity and what we’ve heard
on the radio. So a whole new area of music was carved out. New and experimental
styles of playing developed. In the 60’s I remember listening to the
radio to stuff they’d been recording in the streets. I was amazed at
the different picking styles. When I met Sipho he had developed a picking
style in the D and C chord shape – he was playing on a part of the guitar
that nobody had tried before. Normally the first shapes were technically
in an A and G chord shape. It was fascinating. It was about being exposed
to something that was new and developing. Even the dances were changing.
The moves that I had in dancing then have changed now and been forgotten.
They’re being re-generated; every generation brings their own perceptions.
I recently saw some guys who were doing breakdancing. Some people laughed,
others thought it great."
‘THE
ASPECT OF ‘IMMEDIATE PRESENCE’ IN AFRICAN:
"When
I was at school we were so conformist, we wore uniforms, there were
systems, and suddenly I was seeing real individuality. The African culture
has the ability to be inserted into the moment – ‘I am right here now,
I’m alive, I have enough money to buy food and I’m with my people.’
That’s the most important thing. ‘Here I am. I’m young and I’m alive.’
To
take the smallest positive moment and live in it is a very powerful
device.
The
ability to exaggerate is prized in the Zulu tradition. Even in America
you have to strut your stuff and say ‘I’m bigger than life’. It’s a
very powerful cultural survival mechanism. It’s also a send up and it’s
ironic. It’s socially constructed meaning. ‘We are in this moment and
we are alive.’
An
important moment in my life was when Sipho said to me "It is so
nice to know that you are alive" "You can go through the day
working for your umlungu and the umlungu doesn’t even
acknowledge that you’re alive. It is so foreign to us. We have to teach
white people to say sawubona - we see you. You are in
our vision. We acknowledge."
In
the old system you couldn’t say hello, sawubona, without stopping.
It was not considered correct. It is important to acknowledge the other
person is alive. The guy will then respond and say, "siyaphila
- we are alive" or "sivukile - we
woke up this morning". Or if it were not going so well the response
would be, "cha siyancenga", which means ‘we’re
still pleading with life to give us a break’. It’s all centred on the
notion of being alive. African culture puts you in the here and now,
on the spot. All the cultural emanations are to do with creating a constant
now and to live it through. (As well has having a deep sense of irony.)
It is real when you transcend it. It’s real when you repeat and
repeat and it becomes a pattern of behaviour. So it becomes objectively
true.
RELATED
SONGS:
Universal
Men – the first album Juluka did was influenced by these events
in South African history. I wrote that song after reading a book called
‘A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe’ (Viking Press) by John Berger.
The book tried to show that migrant labour was a universal experience.
Here you have these people who have to straddle two worlds, travel between
two worlds, construct a cognitive map of meaning between these two worlds
and still make sense of it. You had to make sense of things, which were
so far apart from each other. You would have to go home and insert yourself
into a tribal problem and then at the same time be able to deal with
an administrator or superintendent in a flat, who has a complex system
of rules and values, which you don’t subscribe to. What lies between?
The
Ladysmith Black Mambazo song Stimela influenced my work. It was
a song about ‘the train’. The train is the vehicle; it is the umbilical
chord that links these two people. It is the metaphysical as well as
physical journey. What are you leaving and what are you going to? The
train and the bus are important in the life of the migrant worker. They
represent saying "bye bye darling". The problems of having
to rekindle the relationship you leave behind every 11 months are enormous.
Letters are also important in the mythology of the migrant worker. The
first famous migrant workers’ song says "I’ve received a letter
/ It’s a little letter from my lover / And in the letter she speaks
only to me". Letter writing was an important part of the community
process. The letters were never sent by post but always hand delivered
by friends or family. Ladysmith Black Mambazo also sang "I leave
them with tears in their eyes once again, and I’m going to the city"
All the traditional problems and how people dealt with them were addressed
in these songs. "They straddle universes." They were giants.
They were survivors.
The
other song I wrote recently was Circle of Light. It’s about saying
goodbye. I need to say goodbye to the traditional world. It’s a personal
reference but it uses the metaphor of the migrant worker. If I have
the courage to walk across the bridge to the New World, what am I giving
up and what can I take with me? That’s the question of the New World.
I don’t dream in the house of my father anymore..."
THE
KEY COLOURS OF ZULU DANCE:
"Black
red and white were the primary colours of the Zulu nation.
Black
symbolised depth, darkness, evil but also strength, character, political
power, dark force, death but also gravitas, heaviness, weight and deep
meaning.
Red
is blood, life, war, it’s hot, passion, the driving force of life energy,
speed, agility.
White
is coolness, peace, auspiciousness, fortune, life.
These
3 colours are important."
THE
MIGRANT LABOURERS