HISTORY LAID DOWN WHAT MODERN SA WOULD BECOME AND ONLY THE MOST MONUMENTAL EFFORTS WILL SHIFT THOSE PATHWAYS

Migrant Labour documents the lasting effect the system has had on SA’s social structure. Policymakers in 1994 largely assumed migrant labour would decline as restrictions on urbanisation were removed and people inevitably moved to the towns and cities.

Though urbanisation did occur, migration continued and even grew, with more migration by women — mostly as domestic workers — after apartheid. The large informal settlements on the fringes of towns and cities are “staging posts” for both urbanisation and circular migrancy. The authors call this the phenomenon of “double-rootedness”.

Today’s informal settlements and the successive waves of land occupations, which result in intense conflict with the state, are really the other side of the coin of the migrant labour system.

To think about where we are now as a country, it is helpful to think about where we came from. As writer and academic Njabulo Ndebele says on the first page of The

Night Trains: In reading this book “you will know about colonial visions and the brutal mining origins of SA capitalism. It is an effect that will never let go of you. And then you will ask: where is SA and where is it going? And you will ponder for a long time.”