Anxious communities: the decline of mine migration in the Eastern Cape

Abstract

This article addresses the neglected question of what happens to development when migration goes into decline. It examines two villages in the Eastern Cape, South Africa's poorest province and long dependent on mine migration, which is now burdened with returning ex-miners because of retrenchments in the mining industry. It describes the negative effect on ex-migrants' psychological wellbeing and standing in the community, and other effects such as the emergence of women as the new migrants as ex-miners fail to cope in other sectors or to apply mine skills at home; an increase in poverty through loss of wages; lack of money for education; a decline in investment in agriculture; the conversion of farmland to grazing; lack of business development; and dependence on pensions and child welfare grants. The article concludes that although migration did not provide a route out of poverty, its absence is making the poor a lot worse off.

1. INTRODUCTION

One of the major unaddressed questions in the migration and development literature is what happens to development when migration goes into decline. The South African mining industry provides an excellent test case, as it has shed over 200 000 jobs in the last decade. Many rural sending areas have had to contend with the impact of returning ex-miners. This paper examines the case of the Eastern Cape, long dependent on mine migration yet also one of the poorest regions of the country.

In the past three decades, numerous studies have been undertaken on the role migrants play in the economy of the sending areas, as well as the effects of migrancy on the family and household (Beinart, 1979; Bundy, 1979; Murray, 1981; May, 1984; Muller, 1984; Spiegel, 1987). More recently, scholars have examined the impact of restructuring in the mining industry on the mining environs and to some extent in Lesotho and other southern African countries (Crush & Yudelman, 1991; Steinberg & Siedman, 1995; Chirwa, 1997; Crush et al., 1999, 2000). However, none of this recent literature examines the effects of mining restructuring in the former Transkei – the most underserviced and impoverished of the Bantustans and one of the key sources of migrant labour for the mining industry (Steinberg & Seidman, 1995). In this article, the author seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature by presenting data on the effects of restructuring from the former Transkei.

2. METHODOLOGY

Ex-migrant workers look to the future with fear and hopelessness, shrouded by uncertainty, but marked by a nostalgic reverie of what could have been a route to ‘modernity’. Against this background, the links between the ex-migrants and their communities and the mining industry were examined. To understand the impact of retrenchments required immersion in the realities of anxious communities caught in the throes of restructuring industries. The author thus spent time with the ex-migrants and their families gaining insights and trying to understand the situation they were in. The study had a three-pronged approach of unstructured interviews, participant observation and social biography of migrant workers.

The unstructured interviews were conducted with ex-migrants to gather their individual perceptions of and reflections on the turn their life had taken as a result of retrenchment. However, in rural areas, unlike urban ones, employment is also a socially observed function, open to the whole community. The author therefore also interviewed ex-migrants' dependents, and community members who knew them and had observed what kind of work they had done while employed, to see how retrenchments had affected the ex-migrants' social lives. The aim was to reveal the sufferings and felt needs of the actors in a social group by seeing them as the result of structural conflicts in the social order.

The villages studied, Nyanisweni and Dutyini, are in the southeast of the Pondoland region in the former Transkei, on the Indian Ocean. Nyanisweni is ten km and Dutyini about 40 km from the town of Mbizana. Both fall under the Mbizana Municipality which is under the OR Tambo District Council – a compendium of various municipalities, such as Ntabankulu, Ingquza, Mhlontlo, King Sabata Dalindyebo, Nyandeni and Port St Johns – with an 80 per cent unemployment rate. According to StatsSA (2005), Mbizana has a population of 1 604 411 and covers an area of 2411 km².

The Eastern Cape is the poorest province in South Africa. It includes the former homelands of Transkei and Ciskei and has a population of 6.2 million people. Its poverty levels are the highest in the country, with an estimated 80 per cent of the population living in poverty, and it has an unemployment rate of 80 per cent. The former Transkei is the poorer of the two former homelands. Nearly 80 per cent of the homesteads have no running water; more than 50 per cent have no electricity, and 58 per cent are further than five km from a health clinic. Poverty is deeply rooted in this province, with 27 per cent of households earning less than R400 per month and only 11 per cent earning more than R1500 per month (PSLSD, 1993; CSS, 1995; May et al., 1998). The majority of the people have no schooling, and 60 per cent of the children who are at school have to walk a long distance to get there (StatsSA, 2005). The economic growth of the new era has increased the demand for skilled workers and conversely made the older, unskilled migrant labourers redundant.

According to Malherbe (2000), 53 districts in this province rely heavily on mining as a source of jobs, income and financial security. In 15 of these districts, one in every three African males with a job works in the mining industry; in another 38 districts, at least one in six men works on the mines (Malherbe, 2000). Thus, the report concludes, ‘virtually the whole of Transkei falls in these two groups’ (Malherbe, 2000). James (1992) states that in the 1970s and 1980s about 500 000 migrants were recruited from the Transkei region. As Figure 1 shows, in the 1970s the number of new recruits increased. All 28 magisterial districts of the former homeland were traditional suppliers of labour, each district supplying about 5000 workers (Crush & James, 1995:136). However, the graph also shows the decline in recruitment from this region as a result of retrenchments in the industry.

Figure 1: Recruitment patterns from the Eastern Cape. Source: Malherbe, 2000.

3. SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN NYANISWENI AND DUTYINI

Dutyini has a population of 9085 and Nyanisweni 10 285 (StatsSA, 2005). Although these two villages are in the same district, their social, economic and political structures are vastly different. Nyanisweni is a site of political activism and has the potential to stake a claim on resources from the municipality, while Dutyini has none. Such differences have a bearing on the type of livelihoods it is possible to pursue. Dutyini village is further away from the town of Mbizana and is thus not accessing the fruits of democracy – piped water, electricity, library, tarred road, clinic and so on. Those who have access to electricity are based in the town of Mbizana and surrounding villages such as Nyanisweni. Figure 2 shows the disparities in access to resources in Mbizana. It shows that here the majority still use candles for lighting, a few use gas and very few use electricity. Most of the people in Dutyini are still using candles for lighting and wood for heating and natural water for drinking. Mbizana has two hospitals (Greenville and St Patrick's) and 18 clinics. The main hospital (St Patrick's) is within walking distance of Nyanisweni, but for residents of Dutyini it is 40 km away. Thus Nyanisweni has easy access to hospital services, for example the ambulance, because there are telephones and the road is tarred. In Dutyini, by contrast, there are no telephones.

Figure 2: Power resources available to households in Mbizana. Source: Data World, 2000.

While Nyanisweni could be described as a poor rural area, Dutyini falls into the category of the ultra poor as defined in the Project for statistics on living standards and development (PSLSD). According to the PSLSD findings, the poor have an income of less than R300 per month and the ultra-poor less than R178. Dutyini residents' livelihoods have been largely from migrant wages, whereas Nyanisweni residents have various sources of livelihood ranging from part-time jobs in towns to work on the mines. People who live in Nyanisweni speak of deriving income from collecting scrap material and working for the municipality and the government. Some of them work in retail shops as cleaners, as security guards and, if they are lucky, as cashiers. However, they also complain that the wages are too low to meet their needs.

There is no municipal transport system servicing the villages, neither the ones close to Mbizana nor the remote ones. Since the closure of the Transkei Road Transport Corporation (TRTC), the former homeland bus service, no alternative transport system has been made available. Needless to say, with the closure of the TRTC hundreds of families were left destitute. Dutyini is serviced by old trucks purchased from the proceeds of migrant labour. Apart from this, some people use horses for transport.

4. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

The migratory tradition was that the homestead head took an ijoyini (mine work contract) to either initiate or consolidate the homestead. After ten to 20 years on the mines, the first-born followed in his footsteps. In the past, older miners used to negotiate for their sons. It became the norm that if a father worked on the mines, the sons would definitely go there as well. Now the system has changed, as one ex-Elysburg mine worker explained:

When I started working on the mines, I was not asked if I had a certificate or not. They only checked my weight and height. And if you had strong muscles you were more likely to be taken without questions. But now, when we apply they tell us about some certificates we need to produce, and also to demonstrate that we can read and write. These things were not asked for before.

When these men were on the job, their families were proud of them. The common parlance of the time was, ‘My son and I are industrial workers or mine workers’ (Ngonini, 2001). One Lesotho migrant, cited in Moodie (1994:18), declared ‘We are the bulls of the mines’. During this time of ijoyini, skills were not important – they would be acquired on the job. All that was crucial was the weight and height of the migrant worker. So, desperate for cash, migrants who were not strong and heavy would wrap chains around their waists to increase their body weight.

Underground workers were respected and feared because of the physique they developed and the ‘mystique’ they acquired through drilling, loading the underground train and so forth. Most of the disabled ex-migrants the author interviewed said they had worked underground, and most of the widows said that their husbands were mshini boys (drillers). Because of hard work on the mines, leave periods were normally taken during the rainy season. Migrants who worked underground were the lowest paid and most vulnerable of the mineworkers. Socially, in their villages they commanded high cultural capital – they were respected for what they knew and could do.

The migrant labour system appears to have had a Janus-faced impact. On one hand, it permitted the homestead and its people to survive, which is different from having a decent livelihood. On the other hand, it gradually erased the idea of working the land and thus living independently. It also inundated rural areas with manufactured goods, thus diminishing rural people's need to farm.

Mhle (not his real name) took ijoyini in the 1970s, and from that date never considered himself a farmer. He saw himself rather as an industrial worker who digs for gold underground. Migrants of the 1970s were more cosmopolitan than their predecessors and this cosmopolitanism has been transmitted to youngsters. One older ex-miner mourned the fact that today's children do not know how to farm and see no future in it, perceiving it as a waste of time:

When the kids return from schools, they do not want to work in the gardens. They say we should buy food from the shops, they do not understand the extent of poverty here because they are just from high school – where they were eating meat and vegetables, rice, all that fancy stuff.

Migrants bought aprons and blankets for their in-laws to strengthen homestead relations. However, behind the jubilation of this kind of work were the debilitating accidents – which migrants did not foresee. In the minds of the ex-migrants, lost limbs were a glaring reminder of the dangers involved in mine work. Koki, who worked for Leudoran Mines, showed me his experience that he carries around every day; it is the only thing other than documents that he still has as evidence of his stint on the mines:

Look here [showing me his right hand from which two fingers are missing], I never got money for this injury, now I cannot lift heavy material. I have no pension. I am forced to rely on my wife and after every time I lift something heavy this thing bleeds.

Migrants who have lost limbs now depend on family members for help in carrying out their daily duties such as eating, washing and moving around. One woman commented on the difficulty she faces in her homestead – caring for the husband who is virtually immobilised by injuries from the mines:

We, females, suffer a lot. When our husbands were on the mines we struggled to make the ends meet. For they sometimes took time to send money and you could not sit on your laurels waiting for that manna – you needed to improvise. Now they are back, some with fractured legs, cut hands, in fact some are crippled. We have to nurse them. My husband lost the left leg as well as the left arm. He cannot do a damn thing. He has no money, no job. The mines just dumped him here at home.

Migrant labour was necessary not only for survival but also to secure respect in the community. Those who bought blankets, aprons and horses were highly esteemed. Hence, working on the mines became an entrenched way of life, and a prized possession. In particular, building and maintaining umzi (the homestead) depended on perpetual migrancy. Men initially migrated to make money to build and maintain it, and once they had built it they assumed that migrancy would support them forever. And every young man who got married paid lobola (bride price) with remittances from the mines rather than with cattle. When cattle were used, they were purchased with the same remittances. Migrant wages in Mbizana made a number of traditional functions possible, such as circumcision ceremonies and weddings. The monetary contribution made it possible for migrants' homesteads to buy oxen, goats and sheep to provide meat for the feast.

5. EX-MINERS' ECONOMIC PRACTICES AND INCOME-GENERATING OPPORTUNITIES

A strong relationship exists between local economic practice and income. Thus the more diversified the economic practices, the better the income. In Mbizana there are no industries; the only job opportunities are the retail shops. The majority of people survive because of the informal sector. Several of the ex-migrants the author interviewed have ‘gone green’ – they now cultivate potatoes, cabbages and spinach. The leader of the ‘green’ ex-migrants is a man who was retrenched in 1995 and has been unemployed since then. Frustrated by waiting and hoping for the next employment opportunity, Nqoyi stated:

I have given up on looking for a job. My wife left me in 1990 and I have been living alone ever since. Because of the difficult experience of not having a source of income, I decided to start farming, just to provide supper for us.

Three other ex-migrants were lured by his success. However, he has a problem of theft, since his garden is not fenced and he does not have money to buy fencing material to keep out the people who help themselves in his garden at night. For men like him, ready to do anything yet aware of being skilled at nothing, always available to do anything and totally subject to everything, there is nothing solid, nothing certain and nothing permanent (Bourdieu, 1990:66).

There is a perception that Pondoland produces one of world's best varieties of marijuana (locally ‘weed’ or dagga). In oral discussions, the elders always speak about dagga being sold to tourists who visit the area, some of them from overseas. Most of the homesteads the author visited in Dutyini used it as their source of income. It is the cheapest of all crops to grow. Grown mainly around shrubs and in forests, it does not need fertilisers and hoeing, so it leaves the farmer with more time to devote to other crops. The main farmers and best entrepreneurs of the crop are women, but they are also victims of police arrests. They showed me dagga farms in the forests. Nomzamo, a mother of eight children, commented:

I have been arrested five times in the past two years. First I was arrested at night on my way to Durban and then Gauteng. I get more money in Durban and Gauteng than when I sell it locally. Here a box of matches would cost R2 but in Durban and Gauteng I can charge R15 or more. [The villagers use a matchbox to measure the quantity of marijuana.]

Another source of livelihood diversification is commercial sexual relationships. These take place between better-off men and poor or ultra-poor females, in most cases at midday and after hours when men are on drinking sprees, oscillating between drinking spots. The men who engage in this form of exploitation or sexual predation know very well that these women care about their children and thus are forced into this business to support them. As Mandlovu says:

Poverty can cause you to do all sorts of bad things, from witchcraft, pilfering and sleeping with other women's husbands. Most of us have secret boyfriends [amaqabane] who give us money to buy food for iintsapho [family]. If there is no work, no food in the house – what would you do?

The risk of disease is high, as many of these ‘secret boyfriends’ are migrants, mostly to KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, two provinces with a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. In Dutyini there is neither a clinic nor provision of condoms. Consequently, in the past three years St Patrick's Hospital has recorded the highest incidence of HIV infection of any hospital in Pondoland. HIV, according to St Patrick's staff, is concentrated in the most inaccessible places. Where it hits, people deny that it is HIV; rather they decry it as witchcraft and embark on killing neighbours and relatives. Large numbers of migrants have perished. Mbizana and other traditional sources of migrant labour in the former homelands have the highest levels of migrancy related HIV/AIDS. Kati, an elderly former migrant, remarked:

In our times, only the old were prone to death, but now we are burying young people every weekend. What moves me is that they leave children behind and we are old and going to die soon. What is happening is shame?

This respondent started counting the number of people who have succumbed to the deadly disease in a short period of time. In some cases, entire families have been wiped out by it. These families are haunted by not only the reality of retrenchment and unemployment, but also by the risk of dying from HIV-related illnesses for which there is no remedy. Kuckertz (1990) argues that remittances made a number of socio-cultural functions possible, such as weddings, circumcision ceremonies, and so forth. However, in the wake of massive retrenchments, elders lament that now they only talk about death and there are hardly any jubilant social events such as ukthombisa or ukwaluka (female and male initiation). The family structured around a permanently employed male breadwinner is now under severe assault. The traditional family was the basic unit of production, and agriculture involved all members of the family. In these villages many homesteads are now split over numerous sites and have to diversify survival strategies and work in a number of places. Mandlovu said:

I wake up very early in the morning, around 4 a.m., to work in the garden in summer, and thereafter without even taking a break, I go to ask nurses or teachers if they have a laundry that needs to be done. I do this so as to pay fees for my children because since their father was retrenched they are routinely sent home.

Women are becoming the major social actors, and the burden of family responsibility has been shifted to them. Over the past few years the cost of living has increased dramatically, school fees have risen and school uniforms have become expensive. As another respondent remarked, ‘If your kids don't have the uniform, then they can't be in the classroom.’ Sadly, this happens at a time when these parents have realised the importance of getting an education. Lack of income has destabilised many families.

With the loss of jobs, many homesteads complained about poor diet and shortage of food. Migrant families say they used to eat meat almost every day when the heads of the homesteads were still employed. Food is one of the things that keep the family intact in the rural areas. Now, however, for most families, as the old Xhosa adage goes, the cat sleeps on the hearth, meaning cooking does not take place because there is nothing to cook. As a consequence, relatively young women have decided to leave their husbands and either go back to their original homesteads or migrate to KwaZulu-Natal. Nolizwe, aged 28, said:

If he can't provide food and money for us I don't know why I have to stay with him because he is never going to get a job here. The only thing I see is yindlala [hunger, poverty].

Most women stated that what they hear from their husbands is Ayikho (meaning ‘There is nothing’). These women then decide to migrate to Durban to work as street fruit vendors if they fail to secure a factory or domestic job. Their husbands complain that they do not come back with money; rather, some come back pregnant and do not want to stay with their husbands any more. Rhadebe, who worked at East Driefontein, said:

My wife left for Durban in 1997; she told me that her friend had found her a job. She only came back in 1999 pregnant and to fetch the kids from me. This devastated me very much, such that I cannot sleep properly since they left because I do not know what is happening to my children.

Elderly women seek employment in Mbizana from nurses and teachers who pay them pitiful wages. One said that she works as a maidservant and she is paid R20 a day.

Two ex-migrants suffered strokes while they were still employed and were compelled by their health conditions to stop working and come back to live with their families. Upon ‘retiring’ they were given severance packages, which they used to purchase tractors. These tractors earned them some money initially, but since they lacked business acumen they did not make much profit. Chagi, who worked at Zulwini mine, stated:

When I came back I bought a red tractor from Kokstad, and initially I made money, but as time went by I did not see where it was going, people started not paying on time or not paying at all. They told me that their husbands or sons have not sent money. What you would see next is the disappearance of the wife to look for her husband, but never to come back.

In many homesteads family heads have disappeared, for fear of being embarrassed and losing their dignity in the family and their society in general. They choose to stay on the mines in the hope of getting another job; but even in those places, they do not find sustainable employment. This has affected the migrants' dependants. A large number of children have been withdrawn from school because the parents are unable to pay fees. Some students have completed grade 12 but cannot further their studies because there is no one to fund them. One frustrated pupil said:

If these unsympathetic mine owners had not retrenched my father I would be doing mechanical engineering at a university now. When we go to the bank, they ask for a pay slip yet my father does not work and thus I do not qualify for a loan.

Food associations (imihlanganiso) have mushroomed over the last few years as buffers against poverty and to establish social networks. These organisations are based on contributions of R30–50 per month. However, the ultra-poor complain that it is very difficult for them to participate in such schemes. One migrant stated that it took his homestead almost six months to save R30 for the association and by then they had to pay R100 because of interest. As a result they were expelled. These associations need to be nurtured and supported financially by the state. It is also important to note that imihlanganiso are very functional during the festive season. Women collect money throughout the year and then in December they buy food in bulk and congregate to divide it among the members.

During the heyday of migrancy, migrant workers were treated with high esteem. The impression created in the rural areas was that they were scooping gold with their helmets and were thus rich. In Bourdieu's terms, they commanded both cultural and economic capital in the minds of the people of the villages. With retrenchments, all that dignity (cultural capital) has been dissipated. Loss of employment has serious implications for status and dignity within the family and the community at large. Ex-migrants have become the most unimportant people in the countryside. Ngutyana, who was employed by the Kloof Mine, said:

Since I lost my job, I do not have the respect I use to command when I was working. Then, when I came back I use to buy people beers, drinks, blankets for old people, sweets for children, but now I cannot afford to buy myself even a loose cigarette.

These were traditional patriarchal villages, where men had the last word. However, the crisis in the migrant labour system has shaken the edifice upon which patriarchy was based – men as the sole breadwinners and wives staying at home. Many migrants have decided to live in ‘hiding’ because they cannot accept the situation they find themselves in; consequently they are always stressed, depressed because they are in a state of denial. The retrenched have limited options and were not given counselling. They keep repeating ‘What am I going to do?’; ‘How am I going to make a living?’; ‘I do not know how to do anything else!’.

Some ex-migrants are presumed mad because of depression. Most migrants have difficulty in dealing with the situation and have been living in denial. Many families have broken down as a result of retrenchments, as some people decided to migrate to better places like Natal. These migrants say that their wives complain that they cannot stay because ‘I have no money [andinamali]’.

There are at least two things which frustrate the retrenched migrants – first, loss of jobs and regular income with the concomitant loss of dignity and status in the homestead, and secondly, confusion emanating from worries about their dependants, not being counselled and not knowing what to do next. Kehla, an ex-Dolfontein worker, said that he received certified training for which he cannot get a job in the village:

I have the drilling and blasting certificate, but I cannot use these things here. I can only be a security at the gate with my knobkerrie.

Peku, who worked at Western Deep Levels Mine, now works as a security guard at a local shop. He earns R200 per month, with which he has to feed nine people. Those who bought goats, sheep and cattle have had to sell their livestock to educate their children, and state that they are no longer important people in society since their herds have decreased. Men feel abandoned by the mine labour system; their prospects have shrunk and they have become superfluous and burdensome. Nkosi, an ex-mineworker from Lebanon mine, sums up their sentiments:

My wife once told me that things were easier for her while I was away and now things have become more complex since I am here at home doing nothing [umahlalela – the unemployed]. I am only a burden, and in fact I am just like one of the children she has to feed. I felt so terrible, because what she was telling was true.

His wife does laundry in town for nurses and sometimes works in other people's gardens just to ensure that the children have something in their stomachs when they go to sleep. One migrant said that his wife told him that she was going to leave if he did not do something about their poverty. Reflecting on the effects of being unemployed, Candlovu stated emphatically:

You know indlala inamanyala [hunger breeds evil]. I never thought to myself that I could steal anything. But now I am forced by the circumstances. I cannot find a job. Children need to eat, and I decided to steal. I have stolen three goats and a pig. I slaughtered them and sold them in town, to make money for food and school fees.

This former migrant's three daughters have been sent away from school and are saving money to go to Durban to look for employment. Currently, women mainly take care of the farming and cultivation, while the men tend to run away to drink, as they say, ‘to drown their sorrows’.

Entrepreneurial strategies have been used quite extensively by some ex-migrants, to the point that one can say that there are at least two types – consumer migrants and entrepreneurial migrants. The latter tend to open general dealer shops and cafes and buy tractors to rent out to the local people, while consumer migrants just consume their money. However, many of those who opened shops have since failed and gone into debt with the local wholesaler. Studies in Lesotho reveal that ex-migrants fail to diversify their business undertakings (Philip, 1995; Crush et al., 2000). They have a copycat approach to business, which renders them victims of small Shylocks. When Shylock comes to cut his pound of flesh for their failure to honour the agreement, the ex-migrants do not have an adjudicator to instruct Shylock not to spill blood. For this Shylock is different – instead of a pound of flesh, he takes the valuables inside the homestead; thus ex-migrants resolve to abandon their homesteads.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, pensions and remittances became the main sources of income for the majority of homesteads (Wilson & Ramphele, 1989; May et al., 1998); but in the 1990s pensions came to replace the remittances. A homestead with pensioners is better off than a family that relies on social and kin networks based on ukunkinkqa – begging with a basin for mealie meal, samp (crushed maize), sugar and tea. Homesteads which embark on ukunkinkqa have fewer assets, such as livestock, education and skills; absolutely no one is earning an income and alternative sources are thus not available. In most of these homesteads, wives use multiple relationships as a way to siphon money from those who are working. As Makhumala stated:

Since he does not work, and I cannot find a job in town, besides it's too far, I have decided to date a joyini [a miner] because he is still working and does give me money, which I use to buy basic things for the homestead.

One ex-migrant told me that he lives on his mother's pension. Ndende, who worked at Carletonville, said:

There is nothing I do here; I depend on my mother's pension. So every time I make sure that I know the pay date so that I don't miss out. Because this is the only way I can share and be able to buy drink for my friends.

The increased reliance on pensions has had a negative effect. Because of the severity of poverty in these homesteads, pensioners are forever indebted to the shops, so that by the time they receive their grant they have already lost 90 per cent of it. Rather than improving the purchasing power of rural areas, pensions compound the problem through heavy dependency on pensioners and putting off finding a solution to problems.

It is not only pensions that have become a means of achieving a livelihood; most participants said they use the child maintenance grant to support their families. This grant is earmarked for children under seven years, but now it serves a bigger role of maintaining not only the child but the entire homestead. Pension grants and child grants enable poverty-stricken homesteads to farm the gardens. However, they do not provide a sustainable livelihood but rather defer the crisis. When a child turns eight they are no longer entitled to the grant and the family must find a way around that. Similarly, when a pensioner passes away the family must devise another means of getting an income. But most families do not report to the magistrate that the pensioner has died; rather they will report that he or she is unable to walk and thus one of the family members is collecting the grant for him or her. As a result there are ‘ghost’ pensioners.

The rural economy of Mbizana since the late 1980s has been shifting from migrant remittances towards a greater dependence on welfare grants. With this shift, the amount of land and the capacity to farm have diminished and cultivation has shifted to gardens (Bank, 1999). Early studies in Pondoland report that the region was conducive to agriculture because of wet weather (Beinart & Bundy, 1980; Kuckertz, 1990). Some even went so far as to argue that it was the richest region in the former Transkei homeland (Beinart, 1994). Now the majority of farm fields have reverted to grazing lands – a result of financial deficiency rather than a move towards modernity.

Vimbela is a typical example of someone who has gone from being a productive farmer to living from hand to mouth. He had four farm fields about ten and 15 km from his house. In the village, he was rated as the best farmer. When he became retrenched things changed for the worse. He could no longer afford to farm all his fields, so he lent some to his relatives who soon abandoned them because they were short of money. As he said:

I used to reap about five to eight tonnes of mealies in good season from all my farm fields [amasimi]. Children would not sleep on an empty stomach. We would drink traditional sorghum beer and be merry. That is not the case anymore.

Normally families who reap excellent harvests have strong cattle for ploughing and hoeing. Vimbela told me that he only farms certain contours in the field below his homestead. Since he sold and slaughtered most of his livestock, he cannot obtain kraal manure to supplement fertilisers, which he says have become very expensive.

Thus grazing lands have expanded at the expense of croplands, and the expansion of grazing lands has coincided with the shrinking of the livestock. There is now more grazing land than livestock to graze the land, with the result that more areas are now overgrown with bush, providing hiding-places for thieves. This situation is partly the result of forced resettlement and destruction of the rural subsistence economy, but the mine retrenchments and their effect on former migrants and their families have also been a major cause.

6. CONCLUSION

For centuries, the South African economy has relied on the mining industry, and the mining industry has depended on unskilled labour from impoverished rural areas. This article has shown the ways in which the social economy of the villages of Dutyini and Nyanisweni have been reconfigured by the permanent return of the migrants, thus exploring the rural impact of large scale retrenchments and the decline of migration.

The article has illustrated the negative impact of retrenchments on the migrants' wellbeing and their loss of standing in the community. Men who used to function as breadwinners have difficulty adapting to the new conditions in the villages: they feel sidelined and emotionally and psychologically alienated from their rural communities. These ex-migrant workers have lost not only income; the emasculating experience of losing a job denies them any possible claims on the future.

While they have become sedentary, women have emerged as the new migrants, as the ex-miners are ill-equipped to work in other sectors or to apply mine skills at home. Without the earnings from the mines, poverty has increased and funds for educating children are unavailable. Money for investment in agriculture has declined and cropland is rapidly being converted to under-utilised grazing lands. Entrepreneurial skills are lacking, so attempts to use severance packages in business development usually fail. Many households formerly dependent on remittances are now dependent on pensions and child welfare grants. The intended beneficiaries of both forms of grant no longer benefit in the same way. The conclusion is thus that although migration did not provide a route out of poverty its absence is making the poor a lot worse off.

Notes

¹Independent researcher. Funding for the research for data collection were provided by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung through The Sociology of Work Unit, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand.