Recent Trends And Prospects Of Black Migration To South Africa

Building on global interest in migration development, the volume draws attention to one of the most important migration systems in sub-Saharan Africa. It reviews South Africa’s approach to international migration in the post-apartheid period from a regional development perspective, highlighting key policy issues, debates, and consequences. The authors find at least three areas where migration is resulting in important development impacts. First, by offering options to those affected by conflict and crises in a region that has limited formal disaster management and social protection systems. Second, by mitigating shortcomings and distortions in regional labour markets. Third, by providing support to struggling rural economies and ever expanding urban areas in terms of livelihoods and social capital transfers. Chapter One consists of a study of the country’s historical experience of migration and, in particular, analyses the changes in official attitudes throughout the twentieth century, indicating the roots of contemporary ideas and policy dilemmas. Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five complement this analysis of the South African State’s capacity to reform and manage the South African migration situation by looking at often neglected dimensions: the first explores the question of skilled labour, a crucial question given the unbalanced structure of the South African labour market; the second examines the impact of migration on local government in South African cities and specifically implications for urban planning, service delivery, health, security, and political accountability; the third analyses the nature of undocumented migration to South Africa and the challenges it raises to both State and non-State actors; The book concludes with an examination of health as a critical issue when examining the relationship between migration and development in South Africa, in light of recent empirical data.

In Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds', Laura Evans examines the multi-layered social history of apartheid-era relocation into South Africa's Ciskei bantustan.

The events of May 2008 in which 62 people were killed simply for being "foreign" and thousands were turned overnight into refugees shook the South African nation. This book is the first to attempt a comprehensive and rigorous explanation for those horrific events. It argues that xenophobia should be understood as a political discourse and practice. As such its historical development as well as the conditions of its existence must be elucidated in terms of the practices and prescriptions which structure the field of politics. In South Africa, the history of xenophobia is intimately connected to the manner in which citizenship has been conceived and fought over during the past fifty years at least. Migrant labour was de-nationalised by the apartheid state, while African nationalism saw the same migrant labour as the foundation of that oppressive system. Only those who could show a family connection with the colonial and apartheid formation of South Africa could claim citizenship at liberation. Others were excluded and seen as unjustified claimants to national resources. Xenophobiaís conditions of existence, the book argues, are to be found in the politics of post-apartheid nationalism where state prescriptions founded on indigeneity have been allowed to dominate uncontested in conditions of an overwhelmingly passive conception of citizenship. The de-politicisation of an urban population, which had been able to assert its agency during the 1980s through a discourse of human rights in particular, contributed to this passivity. Such state liberal politics have remained largely unchallenged. As in other cases of post-colonial transition in Africa, the hegemony of xenophobic discourse, the book contends, is to be sought in the specific character of the state consensus.

Since the early 1970s, the South African gold-mining industry, for decades dominated by a set of fixed and unchanging features, has undergone a transformation. Above all, it is in the area of labour relations that changes have been most rapid and profound. Faced with a crisis in traditional patterns of labour recruitment, the mines have been forced to revise their sourcing and recruiting strategies and in so doing have struck at the heart of the migrant labour system. At the same time, in an attempt to contain the crisis of control, the mines have, for the first time in a hundred years, permitted trade unions to organise among workers, and in consequence the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has emerged as a powerful force in the industry. These processes are the subject of Wilmot James's sociological and historical study of African mine workers, which provides the first major account in twenty years of labour in South Africa's gold industry. In his lucid and original analysis, based on material much of which was not previously available to researchers, Wilmot James traces the interlocking developments which have brought about a transformation in the gold industry, and relates these to wider processes of change in contemporary South African society.