Maye! Maye!: The History And Heritage Of The Kwa Mai Mai Market by Sipho Sithole lets the reader into the world of migrant workers and how they have used their culture and heritage to reimagine and create a new socio-economic order through the production of cultural goods and services. This extract is published by permission.
Maye! Maye!
When traders at Kwa Mai Mai speak of their grandparents or parents who started their own businesses and later passed them down to the next generation, their eyes glisten and tears trickle down their cheeks. They are reminded of the days when their grandparents or parents plied their trade in a place that was run like a camp – under lock and key. They recall the security and compound police who enforced the law to the letter. Only permitted Africans or so-called ‘natives’ were allowed in the compound.
In their fight to survive, these migrant workers created ‘social spaces of distraction’ (Harvey 1989:234) by using culture as a day-today focal point and as a raft to keep them buoyant in a city that would have preferred them to remain anonymous. As they became aware of the constant struggle between capital and labour, a cultural community was created, with people forming bonds that transcended their individual differences. By burying their personal and ethnic differences, they forged a solidarity that allowed them to withstand the threat of social exclusion and anonymity in a city that was full of life.
To avoid being mocked as urban outcasts, these migrant workers had to develop a sense of transnationalism or a cosmopolitan disposition, which overrode their cultural origins and propelled them into a socioeconomic space to survive urban marginality. These ‘transnational villagers’ (Levitt 2001) redefined the concept of diaspora or crossborder migration as a form of ‘mobile sociology’ (Urry 2010) whereby they assumed a diasporic status within migrant communities, with ‘cultural, economic, political and social formations in process’ (Werbner 2004:896).
Culture and the memory of one’s antecedents can only thrive within the context of collective remembering, especially where identity formation is in conflict with that of other social groups. Moreover, collective remembering involves individual minds (Wertsch and Roediger III 2008) – out of a sense of joint marginality and alienation from other dominant groups – sharing a common set of cultural tools to register their presence and ‘privilege identity formation’ in a space that would otherwise render them invisible. Using cultural memory and collective remembering to respond to their new and unfamiliar socio-economic and political environments, these migrants have formed their own communities. By maintaining their social independence, and trading in their own cultural goods and services, they have displayed the ‘highest level of self-sufficiency relative to its environment’ (Parsons 1971:8), as dictated by the prevailing socioeconomic and political circumstances.
Those who reluctantly returned to the city came to refer to it as esilungwini (the place of the white man). Disassociating themselves from the city was a clear indication that they had no intention of bonding with it and its way of life, which they found foreign. By calling it a place of the white man, migrant workers disengaged from the city, creating psychological and social boundaries in their interpretation of and engagement with it.
To these migrant workers, the city became a necessary destination after a journey, but not a desirable place to settle. McClendon (2002:118) correctly captures this sentiment when he remarks, ‘By the late 1930s, the resurgence of urban economies … led increasing numbers of young men seeking new opportunities in urban areas.’ McClendon (2002:101) further observes that land dispossession resulted in Africans having fewer cattle than before, which prompted increased migration by young men, who needed to earn cash ‘if they were to accumulate cattle for lobola’.
However, the city was also known for converting village men of stature into amabhunguka (those who abandoned their homesteads, women, children and livestock and opted for city life, never to return home). To most reluctant migrants, however, who refused to be seduced by the wicked ways of metropolitan life, the city became just a place to earn enough money to enable them to pay the colonially imposed government taxes. The city was a place in which to accumulate the financial resources needed to enjoy the ultimate village life, both during and after their time spent in it. These migrant workers refused to abandon their sense of loyalty to their heritage and tradition back home in the villages. Yet they also felt a commitment to making things work in their new place of residence (the metropolis) without selling their soul.
By retaining their old identity, albeit in the new urban setting, they created what Cohen (2006:7) calls a ‘syncretic compromise between old and new’, that is, a blend of rural and urban, giving rise to a new ethno-urban man. Cognisant of their rural persona and sticking out like a sore thumb in their new urban setting, they refused to fit in. Their heritage and tradition helped them to develop survival strategies and tactics in a city that would gobble up any migrant worker who arrived in Johannesburg culturally and mentally ill-prepared – who displayed even the slightest signs of weakness.
The vantage point from which they viewed and imagined the city presupposed the existence of a multi-layered construction of hierarchical race and class structures, where the relationship between social structure and residence-based differentiation was clearly defined. Therefore, upon arriving in the city, they opted for a simple life, often preserving their meagre savings for a dignified life back home when they reached retirement – if they were lucky enough to keep their jobs until then.
These ‘birds of passage’, as Wacquant (2008:163) calls them, defied the temptation to settle in the city. They clearly showed no affinity with, or intention of settling permanently in, their host town, and would go home whenever an opportunity presented itself so that they could be reunited with their families, even if only for a short while. This is best captured by Callinicos (1994:95), who says, ‘Each time they went back to work, they would hope it was for the last time. They hoped that this time they would save enough money to support the family so that they could stay home and go back to farming. But most men remained migrants until they were too old to work for themselves again.’
References:
Callinicos, L. 1994. ‘The migrant labour system’. In Work and Industrialisation in South Africa: An Introductory Reader, edited by E. Webster, L. Alfred, L. Bethlehem, A. Joffe and T.-A. Selikow. Randburg: Ravan Press, pp. 94–100.
Cohen, R. 2006. Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the Nation-State. Hampshire, England: Ashgate.
Harvey, D. 1989. The Urban Experience. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Levitt, P. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
McClendon, T.V. 2002. Genders and Generations Apart: Labour Tenants and Customary Law in Segregation Era South Africa, 1920s to 1940s. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Parsons, T. 1971. The System of Modern Societies. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Urry, J. 2010. ‘Mobile sociology’. The British Journal of Sociology 61(1):347–66.
Wacquant, L. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advance Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Werbner, P. 2004. ‘Theorising complex diasporas: Purity and hybridity in the South Asian public sphere in Britain’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration **Studies 30(5):895–911. doi: 10.1080/1369183042000245606
Wertsch, J.V. and Roediger III, H.L. 2008. ‘Collective memory: Conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches’. Memory Journal 16(3):318–26.