What this open forum will also show is that the Pan-Africanism and collective ideas of freedom, struggle and resistance or ‘bonds of solidarity’ among migrant labourers, both from other countries as well as the former Bantustans during the struggles against apartheid, should not be confined to a nostalgic past, but seen as very much present in South Africa today. It suggests that use of xenophobic discourse and language, the precarious nature of living conditions, labour conditions and restricted access to citizenship rights from the State, are experienced by all people who are categorised as ‘migrants’ internally, and those described as ‘foreigners’ or ‘refugees’ by Government officials. This open forum argues that the language and discourse of xenophobia is a shared experience among people who are seen and constructed as being from ‘elsewhere’ in four different provinces in South Africa. It is also clear the in these times of hardship the remittances of migrant labourers offered some reprieve to those at home in the rural areas. One is forced to reckon with the agency, imagination and thriftiness of young and old Southern Africans during a time of new kinds of accumulation and changing economic paradigms, without risking the romanticisation of what was also, as we see in chapters seven and eleven, a period of hunger, famine and disease as a result not only of drought but also directed and deliberate colonial action and legislation. Like youthful and ambitious people everywhere, the young men and women who left home for personal gain and individual growth knew, also, its potentiality not only to influence their own future, but also change collective paths. It is these new economic, spatial and power configurations that offer the opportunity, in the case of Ugudhla, son of Chief Matshana kaMondisa and 22-year-old composer/performer Nthabiseng Nthako, to flout tradition and rebel against social norms. The Basotho, Zulu and Mpondo, men and women of Southern Africa, are all shaped in some way by migrant work for the white man who has come to offer money, slavery and difference. As Carl Richter's account in chapter three shows, the making of the modern-tradition has at its root the entry into migrant labour. Seeking work at the mines blends with " traditional " ideas about becoming a man by " going wandering ". We are offered remade time, remade traditions and remade cultures. Migrancy, it seems, bends time and space and reconfigures them again and again. The thoughtful cataloguing of poetry, song and visual art that often do not have dates, about people such as Tito Zungu who sometimes do not remember the year in which they were born, reminds and reinforces the brilliance of the art that both defies and seeks to redefine the linear trajectory of western histories. The National Parks Board relationship of mutualism with the Chamber of Mines and Wenela (the labour recruiting company) is explored in chapter nine and is a brilliant example of the collusion of several different kinds of actors in the building of a white capitalist state, and the enclosure of the commons, in a time when the park was a space of fluidity and migration for many. In chapter two, Harries relates the history of immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, the long-standing and persisting exploitation by colonialists extracting work from Africans who often trekked through the Kruger National Park to the mines. The book presents parallel histories of slavery, domination and exploitation not only in the form of colonial legislation and capitalist-directed entrapment but also agency, art and invention as migrants negotiated their new social experiences. Although the period 1800–2014 spans more than 200 years, this edited collection strikingly captures the commonalities and universalities of the way in which Southern Africans have interacted with migrant labour systems, settler colonialism and changing economic and political landscapes in Southern Africa. If that was the intention, then the book, which can be read alone since there are more than enough graphic images and literary artefacts included, definitely manages to achieve this. As Delius and Phillips describe in chapter one, its aim is to " portray migrant experience, agency and humanity in thought, action and expression – dimensions that are often neglected in overviews of the migrant labour system ". A long way home was conceived during an art exhibition entitled " Ngezinyawo – Migrant Journeys " that opened at Wits University in Johannesburg in April 2014.
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