After the mines: the changing social and economic landscape of Malawi–South Africa migration

ABSTRACT

By the early 1970s, Malawi was the most significant supplier of mine labour to South Africa. Since then, for a variety of reasons, mine migrancy has dwindled. Nevertheless, migration to South Africa today looms large in the popular imagination, and is pursued by substantial numbers of Malawians, particularly men. By comparison with earlier migrants, however, their trajectories are less certain, their strategies more piecemeal. This paper will focus on contemporary migration to South Africa by young men from a particular village in Chiradzulu District, southern Malawi. Emphasising perspectives from their home village, it will offer insight into the impact of their migration upon family and gender relations, the social and economic situations of the wives and matrilineal kin whom they leave behind, and the tangible and intangible impacts of aspirations to South African migration.

RÉSUMÉ

Au début des années 70, le Malawi était le fournisseur le plus important de main d’œuvre pour les mines sud-africaines. Depuis lors, pour différentes raisons, cette migration a baissé. Cependant, la migration vers l’Afrique du Sud plane aujourd’hui dans l’imagination populaire, et est la voie prise par un nombre substantiel de Malawiens, surtout les hommes. En comparaison avec les migrants d’avant, leur trajectoire est cependant moins certaine, leurs stratégies plus parcellaires. Cet article se concentre sur la migration contemporaine vers l’Afrique du Sud des jeunes hommes d’un village du District de Chiradzulu, au sud du Malawi. En faisant ressortir les perspectives de leur village d’origine, l’article révèle l’impact de leur migration sur les relations familiales et entre les genres, les situations sociales et économiques des femmes et du parent matrilinéaire qu’ils laissent derrière eux ainsi que les impacts tangibles et intangibles des attentes de la migration sud africaine.

KEYWORDS:

• Malawi
• South Africa
• migration
• aspiration
• livelihoods
• gender

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Malawi
• Afrique du Sud
• migration
• aspiration
• moyens de subsistance
• genre

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Vito Laterza and John Sharp for their invitation to participate in the Pretoria workshop for which I prepared the earliest version of this paper. Their comments on drafts along the way have been invaluable. I am also grateful to the other workshop participants and audience members, as well as four anonymous reviewers, for their generous and constructive feedback. Conversations with Zoë Groves also helped me to think through the material and navigate the vast literature on labour migration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Jessica Johnson is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her early research focused on gender and marital relations in rural southern Malawi, and her new project looks at ‘everyday justice’ in Malawi’s magistrates’ courts.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms. See Englund (2006) for a discussion of the use of the Chichewa word ufulu (freedom, plural maufulu) to translate the English ‘rights’.

2 I carried out fieldwork in rural southern Malawi from January 2009 to September 2010, and then returned for several weeks in September 2013 and for six months from April 2015.

3 As Caroline Archambault (2010) has pointed out, the phrase ‘left behind’ carries undesirable baggage. I do not mean to imply that migrants’ wives are not actively involved in migration decisions or that remaining in their rural homes is incompatible with ‘a larger strategy to live meaningful productive and domestic lives’ (939).

4 As was the case in Malawi, rural areas in other countries of southern Africa were also interdependent with the South African mines, see, e.g., First (1983) on Mozambique, and Murray (1981) for a view from Lesotho.

5 Rijk van Dijk (2014) encountered a similar myth in Botswana and shares Bennesch's historical interpretation.

6 UN statistics put this figure at 62% (United Nations Development Programme 2014).

7 On the purchase of bicycles by returned migrants, see McCracken (2012, 259).

8 As noted by Banda for men from Mzimba District (2008, 54), male migrants from Chiradzulu also tend to marry prior to their departure for South Africa, as opposed to migrating in order to accumulate the wealth or status necessary to attract a spouse. That bridewealth is not paid in this part of the country is no doubt a relevant factor here.

9 For more on the impact of mobile telephony on the African continent, see, e.g., Archambault (2012) and de Bruijn, Nyamnjoh, and Brinkman (2009).