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CHAPTER 4

A Century of Migrancy from Mpondoland

William Beinart

Migrant workers from Mpondoland have been characterised as traditionalist and fiercely attached to their rural homes. Yet mineworkers from this area came into the national news in August 2012 as both strikers and victims of the shootings at Marikana Platinum Mine. Of the 45 people killed at Marikana, 30 came from Mpondoland and nearby districts of the Eastern Cape/former Transkei. Their deaths raise questions about their history and their politics. While it is important not to ethnicise a diverse segment of the South African workforce, or the strikes themselves, I suggest that a sense of collective identity has, in part, shaped their experiences of migration over the long term.

Labour migrancy and the rural economy

Historians have analysed different patterns of migrant labour in southern Africa, but it is still difficult to distinguish the forms of consciousness and organisation that arose amongst specific groups and networks of migrants. Migrants from Mpondoland were, in part, distinctive because the Mpondo chiefdom was, in 1894, amongst the last to be annexed in South Africa as a whole. They were not conquered by force, lost little of their land to settlers and were pushed into wage labour at a later stage than other African societies. Most families maintained access to arable plots, as well as grazing for their livestock, until far into the twentieth century. Since the region is blessed with high rainfall, smallholder agriculture was relatively effective, at least until the 1960s. Mpondoland comprised only 7 of the 26 old Transkeian districts (the number rose to 28 in the 1970s when the homeland was consolidated). Yet although they were sometimes categorised as Xhosa in the homeland era, Mpondo people retained their identity, as well as separate paramount chiefs and regional political authorities.

Until the 1960s, Mpondo migrants characteristically worked underground on the gold mines and as cane-cutters in the Natal sugar fields.¹ In general terms, their experience differed from rural isiZulu-speakers to the north, who tended to avoid long phases of underground work and cane-cutting; they worked in mills or migrated to Durban or Johannesburg. Those to the south, in the western Transkeian and Ciskeian districts, gravitated more to the Cape ports, working on the docks and in a wide range of urban employment. Bhaca workers from Mount Frere, neighbouring Mpondoland, specialised for some decades in night-soil removal and municipal employment in Durban and on the Witwatersrand.

Numbers of workers migrating annually from the seven (old) districts increased from about 2 000 in 1896 to 10 000 in 1910, to 20 000 in 1921 and 30 000 in the 1936 census. By then, roughly two-thirds worked on the mines and most of the rest – especially younger men – in the sugar fields. By the 1930s, more than 40 per cent of men between the ages of 15 and 45 were absent from their homes for work annually. As workers tended not to migrate every year, long-distance migrancy had become an experience general to most men in Mpondoland. Initially, many mine migrants accepted prepayment from labour agents in livestock, thus ensuring that the bulk of their earnings never left home (and could potentially reproduce while they were away). Although this was abolished on the mines in 1910 because it was linked with desertion, advance payments remained available from some sugar recruiters. Mgeyana Ngumlaba told me in 1977:

I never put my foot in school. I never saw a school here in Msikaba in those days. The church was not here … It was joyin’inkomo [recruiting with cattle] at that time. You used to get a beast from Mr Strachan … and then go forward. This was done after East Coast fever and these are the cattle we got after East Coast fever. I went to the sugar fields … before getting married in 1920. I preferred to go to the sugar rather than the mines [as] … I could join and get a beast … I worked six months for a young heifer [itoli] … I went to the sugar fields because I wanted a beast … There was an Indian foreman who was in charge of us and he beat us. That is how it was in those days. My intention was to get that beast. I was not interested in what was happening to me.²

Figure 4.1

Monica Hunter Xhosa miners back from the mines playing cards 1932

Wits Museum of Ethnology Photography Collection, Wits Art Museum

The advance system and testimonies such as the one above led me to argue that many men from the region initially saw the migrant labour system as a means of accumulating livestock, paying part of their bride-wealth and building their rural homesteads. In fact, Mgeyana later returned to the sugar fields, taking cash contracts that provided a better deal. He avoided the mines because he felt the contracts were too long: I only went away five times. I bought cattle with the money from the sugar fields. The cattle were cheap in those days … I bought nine and also got other cattle that were paid … as bride-wealth for my sisters. I bought clothes for my sisters and bought blankets for my father. I bought saddles and bridles. I was wearing blankets myself. I bought a plough from the money from the sugar fields. I came back here and got married and got fields but I was working first on my father’s fields … I am the man who buried my father. I have always got enough mealies [maize] to keep my family ... My father did not drink tea; those things have just come now.

Migrancy became embedded in the expectations of young men. I once asked an old headman, Meje Ngalonkulu, who was more than 90 years old when I interviewed him in 1982, ‘Could you not loan cattle?’³ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I did not want to.’ Loaning cattle also carried risks and responsibilities because a portion of the increase had to be paid back. ‘However rich the father was, the son must go out to work,’ he said. ‘Even if the father could pay the bride-wealth in full?’ I asked. ‘Well that was not the practice when the sons started to work,’ he responded. ‘The father must help, but the sons must pay some.’ He had bought cattle from other people and paid seven for his bride-wealth, to which his father added four. Thus earnings from migrant labour were gradually incorporated into the very reproduction of the homesteads. The amount paid in bride-wealth also increased: ‘Before it was two or three, but when people started going to work, it was 10 or 12 – and this was for ordinary people.’⁴

Even by the 1940s, when men were taking more regular contracts on the mines, Native Recruiting Corporation records show that 45 per cent of recruits from Mpondoland deferred their pay in full and 60–70 per cent of the total earned by recruits from these districts was repatriated. Earnings from migrant labour were important for family subsistence, but also helped to sustain the rural economy through investment in livestock and arable production. Migrancy became necessary for most families, in order to pay taxes and purchase what became seen as necessities. However, contrary to some early analyses that saw migrancy as symptomatic of the collapse of rural production, evidence suggests that there was initially a positive, rather than inverse relationship between wage income and smallholder output.

We can explore this in two ways – as an aggregate and with respect to individual homesteads.

In Table 4.1, the 1914 figure shows cattle herds devastated by East Coast fever, but by 1932, numbers had reached 521 000 – almost certainly at an all-time high. Booming livestock numbers, facilitated by dipping against tick-borne diseases, coincided closely with the rise in migration. Cattle prices were low at this time, so wages went further if invested in livestock. Production of maize (Table 4.2) also doubled in the early decades of the twentieth century, so that 1939 (at 810 000 bags) was probably the all-time peak year.

In the aggregate, the standard of living for Transkeian families, especially in the Mpondoland districts, probably improved until the 1930s. The positive relationship between migrant earnings and agricultural production continued until the 1960s – and possibly longer. Although aggregate production probably then declined, surveys emphasise the continuing link between wage income and investment in agriculture for individual homesteads. In Tsolo in 1976, families earning above R40 per month cultivated three times more land than those earning R10–20 and they also got slightly higher yields; similar correlations were found in Matatiele and in Libode in the 1980s.⁵ Since the 1990s, however, this relationship seems to have broken down for arable production, even in wealthier homesteads.

Migrant identities, rural families and associational life

In Going for Gold, Dunbar Moodie attempted to identify different ‘migrant cultures’ on the mines, based on interviews conducted in the 1970s. He records that ‘miners from other groups talk of the proverbial stinginess of the Mpondo’, who were there ‘on business’.⁶ Following the analysis of Philip and Iona Mayer of the relative ‘encapsulation’ of traditionalist migrant workers in East London, Moodie argued that his Mpondo interviewees shared a ‘commitment to the independence and satisfactions of patriarchal proprietorship over a rural homestead’ and that this ‘implied resistance to proletarianisation’. Their social and economic base in the rural areas remained a priority and manhood ‘was achieved essentially in presiding justly, wisely, and generously over an umzi, or rural homestead’.⁷

Table 4.1 Average cattle holdings in seven Mpondoland districts

Year	Number of cattle
1904 census	135 000 (still recovering from Rinderpest)
1911 census	280 000
1914	76 000 (after East Coast fever)
1910s	127 000 (number of figures =5)
1920s	312 000 (n=10)
1930s	500 000 (n=10)
1940s	453 000 (n=10)
1950s	401 000 (n=10)
1960s	400 000 (n=3 – published series ceases after 1963)

Table 4.2 Average maize production in seven Mpondoland districts

Year	Number of bags of maize
1920s	545 000 bags (n=7)
1930s	544 000 bags (n=7)
1940s	542 000 bags (n=4)
1950s	499 000 bags (n=10)
1960s	627 000 bags (n=5)

Source: Figures taken from the Census, Agricultural Census and Transkeian Territories General Council reports

Migrants from Mpondoland, however, also absorbed cultural practices and patterns of masculinity forged in underground work and the compounds that, in some respects, mitigated the harshness of conditions on the mines. They were known for their clannish behaviour and assertiveness. When I conducted interviews in the 1970s, I was not especially looking for such material, but it was sometimes forthcoming. Xatsha Cingo remembered: ‘The Mpondo were in their own rooms; the Xhosa lived separately. It was all right as long as a man was Mpondo, it did not matter if he was from Nyandeni [Western Mpondoland] but no Xhosa were allowed. We were not on good terms.’⁸ The language of difference between Mpondo and Xhosa on the mines was often remembered as focusing on circumcision. In the nineteenth century, the Mpondo, as in the case of the Zulu kings, abolished male circumcision, which remained central to most African societies in the region. Lionel Mathandabuzo from Lusikisiki recollected that ‘when they go to the mines, they meet with the Xhosas and they are insulted as boys.’⁹ Leonard Mdingi, from Bizana, worked for four contracts on the mines in the 1940s and blamed employers for the strength of ethnic identity. But he recognised the sense of difference: ‘When the Xhosas speak of Pondos as boys, the Pondos don’t take it seriously. Because the Xhosas want the Pondos to adopt their customs and the Pondos don’t want that.’¹⁰

Moodie analysed the way that collective action by miners in the compounds enabled them to forge some space and influence over their lives. These solidarities could also result in conflict and Mpondo workers were perceived to have a predisposition to violence. Mdingi recalled: