Sunset of migrant labour lights both sides of the coin of SA history

He didn’t coin the phrase, but historian Arnold J Toynbee is often associated with the saying, “History is just one damned thing after another.” Actually, Toynbee only quoted the phrase to criticise it. Toynbee’s alternative was a kind of rising-and-declining-nations thesis, driven by spiritual thirst — an idea that led him into some thick undergrowth.

So although Toynbee, at one point influential, has not endured, the rather amusing put-down of history and historians has.

Like all history of conflicts, South Africa’s history is heavily contested. And yet it is also made up of facts. And like all histories, perceptions of that history change too.

I consider labour migrancy to have been a curse on SA and a historical period to be reviled. Migration split up families, reduced once-functional cultures to gradual impoverishment, distorted national and regional politics, served only elites, and reduced its participants to something akin to slavery.

Yet there are also facts to consider. Without mining, SA’s development might well have been stunted. And because mines are inconveniently located where the ore happens to be, migrancy is often a necessity.

Sending men from rural areas to the mines was initially resisted. But gradually it was embraced, not only in SA but all over the continent, and the money sent home became a crucial component of rural economies.

Historians say migrancy in SA was politically manipulated by confining black South Africans to sub-economic land areas and I have no doubt this is true. But migrants arrived from countries all over the subcontinent. Those damn facts do get in the way.

The reason I’m raising this thorny issue is that my colleagues Ed Stoddard and Felix Dlangamandla have returned from a trip to places where the proportion of migrant labourers was high. They filed reports published in last week.

They make for riveting reading and leave you with an odd ambivalence about the institution of migrant labour. It’s that odd situation where you regret anyone had to go through this, but you have to wonder whether the alternative is that much better.

And there are those pesky facts. The most dramatic is the huge drop in foreign migrants working in SA’s mines, from 500,000 to 35,000, matching the decline of SA’s gold mines. And yet about half a million people still work in mining in SA, and many are still migrants. The Minerals Council SA estimates that the sector’s 460,000 direct jobs support about 4.5 million dependants.

So where are we now? Do we celebrate the sunset of the migrant labour system?

One negative consequence is visible in the rise of zama zama mining. Other forms of criminality are also evident, like rhino poaching. But on the positive side, the decline of migrancy means many miners are no longer supporting dual households, and that has possibly played a role in reducing labour militancy.

One of the irritating aspects of history is that it’s tricky to change — well, most of it, anyway. Migrant labour happened in SA, and it is now declining. Those are facts. And I for one celebrate the latter.