A Long Way Home

Migrant Worker Worlds 1800-2014

William Beinart, Julia Charlton, David Coplan, Peter Delius, Jacob Dlamini, Patrick Harries, Michelle Hay, Deborah James, Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Jock McCulloch, Anitra Nettleton, Noor Nieftagodien, Laura Phillips, Dinah Rajak, Fiona Rankin-Smith, Micah Reddy, Jonny Steinberg, Peter Delius, Laura Phillips, Fiona Rankin-Smith, William Beinart, Laura Phillips, Fiona Rankin-Smith

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781868149940
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations de travail et relations industrielles

In no other society in the world have urbanisation and industrialization been as comprehensively based on migrant labour as in South Africa. Rather than focusing on the well-documented narrative of displacement and oppression, A Long Way Home captures the humanity, agency and creative modes of self-expression of the millions of workers who helped to build and shape modern South Africa. The book spans a three-hundred-year history beginning with the exportation of slave labour from Mozambique in the eighteenth century and ending with the strikes and tensions on the platinum belt in recent years. It shows not only the age-old mobility of African migrants across the continent but also, with the growing demand for labour in the mining industry, the importation of Chinese indentured migrant workers. Contributions include 18 essays and over 90 artworks and photographs that traverse homesteads, chiefdoms and mining hostels, taking readers into the materiality of migrant life and its customs and traditions, including the rituals practiced by migrants in an effort to preserve connections to "home" and create a sense of "belonging". The essays and visual materials provide multiple perspectives on the lived experience of migrant labourers and celebrate their extraordinary journeys. A Long Way Home was conceived during the planning of an art exhibition entitled 'Ngezinyawo: Migrant Journeys' at Wits Art Museum. The interdisciplinary nature of the contributions and the extraordinary collection of images selected to complement and expand on the text make this a unique collection.

CHAPTER 1

Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys

Fiona Rankin-Smith

In 2004, I participated as one of the curators in an important exhibition entitled ‘Democracy X: Marking the Present – Re-Presenting the Past’, held in the Castle galleries of Iziko Museums in Cape Town.

The flagship exhibition formed part of the celebrations to mark a decade of democracy in South Africa. The exhibition covered the long sweep of South African history – from the first traces of human past, in ochre fragments with engraved lines, found at the Blombos caves in the Eastern Cape and dating back 70 000 years to the present. The exhibition used significant objects pertaining to migrancy, documents and other forms of archive that explored the history, politics and culture of South Africa from past to present. Curator Sandra Klopper and I were assigned to source objects and items that best exemplified migrancy and migrant culture. Although it was only a small part of the ‘Democracy X’ exhibition, I discussed with Peter Delius, a historian on the curatorial team, the desirability of staging a comprehensive exhibition about migrant labour. Responsible for multiple transformations wrought in our society over 200 years and across southern and central Africa, the richness of this subject seemed worthy of much more serious interrogation for a future exhibition.

‘Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys’ takes that seed of an idea and extends across disciplines to include film, photography, artworks, artefacts from ethnographic collections, archival documents, interviews and other forms, such as performance, music and dance, in ways that explore the rich and diverse ramifications of the migrant labour system that has built South Africa’s economy. The exhibition takes place in three levels of the Wits Art Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: in the Street and Core Galleries on the ground level, the Strip space, which is half way to the basement space, and the Mezzanine, which is the upper level of the Wits Art Museum display areas.

Journey/transformation

The theme of journeying is threaded metaphorically throughout the exhibition, constantly referring to travelling between spaces, on foot originally. The journeys made by men from rural to urban spaces in search of labour were often very long and full of danger and hardships. The roots of the migrant labour system stretch back to ancient trading networks and forms of mobility within African societies. By the 1860s, thousands of young men from Lesotho, the Transvaal and Mozambique tramped to the Cape and Natal in search of work and the prized commodities – especially firearms – that wages enabled them to secure. The experience of travelling between the rural homestead and the mines and urban centres in search of work was a defining experience for migrant workers, separating and connecting various emotional universes.

This exhibition is centred on the concept of journeys across and between different worlds, journeys that both unite and overlap the differences, creating linkages between objects. The objects’ significance resonates within multiple categories of the exhibition, symbolic of the journeys travelled between the rural and the urban, from home to places of work that were often dehumanising and foreign. Thus the placement of the objects and images in the exhibition are not organised according to a specific historical timeline. Instead, the exhibition progresses along the routes of a migrant journey, where fine art objects are sometimes juxtaposed with other objects, the original intent of which would not have been as works of art. The curatorial intention here is to include the kinds of linkages mentioned above, as well as archival documents, to expand their meanings and bring a multiperspectival aspect to understanding the complexities of migrancy.

Figure 1.1

Photographer unrecorded

Migrant workers bound for the gold fields Date unrecorded

Courtesy of Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Rural/urban

The exhibition begins at the entrance to the museum in the Street space and looks at the divide between the rural spaces that early migrants would have left in order to find work and the cities and towns they arrived in. A life-size black and white photograph from the nineteenth century of two male migrants, beckons the viewer into the exhibition. Both men, dressed in long coats and hats, are barefoot, carrying their belongings on their backs, each clutching a tin and a handful of carved wooden sticks and a knotted cloth bag filled with meagre belongings. They look directly towards the camera. Standing on a dusty road in a rural landscape, devoid of any other human life or dwelling, they appear to have been on a long trek on foot. They introduce a leitmotif of the exhibition: the long journeys travelled and the daily hardships faced by migrants. Close to the photograph of the walking miners, in glass cabinets, are a range of carved walking sticks and a number of nineteenth-century headrests, all from southern Africa. The juxtaposition of ethnographic items and the photograph indicate a curatorial device repeated throughout the exhibition, which is a means of providing a context to assist the viewer in understanding the links between art and ethnography.

In the 1860s in Natal and later in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, the British South African Company agents of the colonial government imposed taxes on black Africans on a per-hut basis. Colonial administrators, aiming to generate revenue, forced people off their land in search of jobs, in order to pay their taxes. A collection of 12 Rhodesian hut tax tokens, from the beginning of the twentieth century, are placed near the beginning of the exhibition and exemplify a key element of what necessitated the early part of the migrant journey.

Meeting of Two Cultures, a linocut by the Eastern Cape artist Sandile Goje, exemplifies the significance of walking across diverse landscapes. The work is based on the subject of reconciliation a year before South Africa’s first democratic election, in which Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress candidate, was elected president. The title and imagery reflect the artist’s optimism about reconciliation between black and white South Africans, as well as the comparison of rural versus urban existence.¹ This is represented by a handshake between a circular thatched Xhosa rural dwelling and a Western-style suburban brick house. The symbolism of these anthropomorphised buildings, placed in an inhospitable and uninhabited landscape, represents the coming together of two separate worlds and the journeys of men and women who vacate rural homesteads to find work in the cities. They also represent the differences in lifestyles between black and white, the rectangular ‘modern’ house is dressed in smart pants and has good shoes, while the rural house’s legs are thin and its feet bare.

Being away from home also meant a lack of communication with the homestead and letter writing formed an important link between the two worlds. Wits Art Museum has a collection of 46 illustrated envelopes containing letters written to and from the Zulu artist Tito Zungu. The contents of the letters refer to domestic matters, such as financial requests and information about loved ones. Examples of his imaginative aspirational images of aeroplanes and of transistor radios drawn on the envelopes, embellished in coloured ballpoint pens, can be seen in display cases in the Street Gallery.²

Simon Stone’s Figure in a Landscape is an image of a migrant worker straddling a series of railway lines in a cityscape. What seems a naturalistic of portrayal of the cityscape south of the Johannesburg Art Gallery is unnerved by the intrusion of a large zombie-like figure,...