From Circular Migrants in the Mines to Transnational Polygynists in the Townships: A Century of Transformation in Central Mozambican Male Migration Regimes (1900‐1999)
| Date | 01 August 2009 |
| Author | Stephen C. Lubkemann |
| Published date | 01 August 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00524.x |
From Circular Migrants in the
Mines to Transnational Polygynists
in the Townships: A Century of
Transformation in Central
Mozambican Male Migration
Regimes (1900-1999)
Stephen C. Lubkemann*
ABSTRACT
This article tracks the most significant transformations in the interna-
tional migration regime between central Mozambique and South Africa
throughout the twentieth century as the product of complex and continu-
ous interactions between the broader political-economic environment and
local forms of gendered and inter-generational social struggle. A century
of perspective brings into resolution the complex linkages between
forms of migrancy such as labour migration and refugee displacement
that are usually treated as categorically distinct, but which are be
demonstrated here to significantly inform each other. As a result of its
deployment as a strategy for coping with various forms of political
duress, seizing new economic opportunity, and negotiating local social
relations, the meaning and practice of migration has been transformed
throughout the twentieth century from a strategy for ensuring social
reproduction back in Mozambique into the indispensable mechanism for
enacting transnational lives that presume and pursue simultaneous social
and economic investment and involvement in both South Africa and
in Mozambique.
* Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, The George Washington
University.
2009 The Author
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Journal Compilation 2009 IOM
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 47 (3) 2009
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00524.x
INTRODUCTION
This article tracks the most significant transformations in the interna-
tional migration regime between central Mozambique and South Africa
throughout the twentieth century as the product of complex and contin-
uous interactions between the broader political-economic environment
and local forms of gendered and inter-generational social struggle. The
focus of this study is on migrant men from the current day district of
Machaze, located in central Mozambique immediately north of the Save
river. Throughout the twentieth century the people of Machaze experi-
enced two periods of intensification in colonial forced-labour recruit-
ment (1907–1926 and 1942–1962), the abrupt end of Portuguese colonial
rule in 1975, and the beginning of a devastating post-colonial civil war
(1977–1992) that ultimately displaced over half of its population. This
study demonstrates how migration was continuously re-deployed and
adapted throughout the twentieth century as a strategy for navigating
these successive political and economic dispensations and shocks – even
as it became simultaneously implicated in and affected by – strategies of
local socio-economic differentiation and struggles over inter-generational
and gendered power within extended households. This ethno-historical
case-study examination thus provides a detailed example of how
Mozambican – and other migration regimes in sub-Saharan Africa –
have been continuously re-constituted at the point where broader
macro-economic trends intersect with micro-political struggles that are
played out in culturally specific terms.
1
A century of perspective also allows this study to bring into resolution
the complex linkages and mutually informing relationships between
forms of migrancy that are often analytically approached as categori-
cally distinct and yet which can be demonstrated to significantly inform
each other. In the southern African region a great deal of historical
research on labour migration has privileged migrants working (legally)
in the mining industry (Rita-Ferreira, 1963; Wople, 1972; First, 1983;
Murray, 1981; Jeeves, 1985; Covane, 2001; Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman,
1991; Moodie, 1994; Crush and James, 1995; DeVletter, 2000; but see
Chilundo, 2001; Neves, 1998), while a more recent body of scholarship
has focused more closely on those ‘‘invisible’’ migrants to peri-urban
areas now estimated to constitute the overwhelming majority of foreign
nationals in South Africa (Minaar and Hough, 1996; McDonald, 2000;
Crush and McDonald, 2002, Landau 2006). Meanwhile, the study of
forced migration in southern Africa has also thrived (e.g. Mazur, 1989;
52 Lubkemann
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Journal Compilation 2009 IOM
Wilson, 1992, 1994; Wilson and Nunes, 1994; Ranger, 1994; Dolan,
1999; Lubkemann, 2000b, 2002b, 2008; Sommers, 2001; Englund, 2002),
yet largely in isolation from the study of labour migration, and the rela-
tionships between refugee and labour migration have been left largely
unscrutinized (but, see Hughes, 1999; Polzer, 2004, 2005). This study
documents the connections among all three of these forms of migration
(refugee, legal⁄formal labour migration, and informal labour migration)
and how these flows have mutually informed each other.
By taking a broad historical perspective that spans nearly a century, this
article first explores the confluence of political, economic, and social
forces that led migrants from Machaze to eschew formal employment in
the mines and seek informal and technically illegal alternatives in the
manufacturing sector of the peri-urban Vaal region (in South Africa)
during the three decades following World War II. It then documents
how social transformations introduced by this shift influenced the socio-
demographic organization and profile of refugee migration during the
Mozambican civil war (1978–1992). Finally this article documents how
the new social possibilities that resulted from engendered patterns of
wartime displacement profoundly transformed the meaning and patterns
of labour migrancy during the first post-war decade (1992–2002). By
tracing the historical interconnections between formal and informal, and
labour and refugee migration flows, and situating migration in relation
to both local social struggles and broader political and economic
change, this article explains how the meaning and practice of migration
has been transformed throughout the twentieth century: from a strategy
for ensuring social reproduction back in Mozambique into the indis-
pensable mechanism for enacting transnational life strategies that pre-
sume simultaneous social and economic investment and involvement in
both South Africa and in Mozambique.
LABOUR MIGRATION IN CENTRAL MOZAMBIQUE UNDER
THE COMPANHIA DE MOCAMBIQUE 1893–1942
The lived horizons of Machazian ‘‘social worlds’’ (Marx, 1990) have
long transcended territorial and political boundaries in ways that cen-
tered and depended upon various forms of migrancy. Throughout the
twentieth century Machazian subsistence strategies revolved around a
social division of labour between female subsistence agriculture largely
confined to Machaze and male migration to South Africa in pursuit of
wage-labour. The earliest accounts from the colonial administrators who
Central Mozambican Male Migration Regimes 53
2009 The Author
Journal Compilation 2009 IOM
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