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Chapter 4 Swazi Women Workers in Cottage Industries and Factories Introduction Increasingly, African women in Swaziland arc at the same time mothers and women who work for wages in the industrial sector. The existence of a category of black female industrial workers in peripheral areas such as Swaziland sometimes surprises outsiders because until recently there was a paucity of research and literature on black women and work in southern Africa and considerable neglect of the family dimension. Until the 1970s, most information available to scholars and concerned readers concerned male labor migrancy to the South African gold mines. However, the 1970s witnessed a shift in focus, and social-science literature began to cover women in the family context in areas peripheral to South Africa—those local labor reserves within national labor reserves, as in Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, the BLS countries. The work of such anthropologists as Murray, Gordon, Prinz and Rosen-Prinz, and Ngubane has provided insights into family dynamics, and in the field of political science, Brown has written about Botswana family structure and labor migrancy.' Women textile and cottage-industry workers in Swaziland captured my attention in the late 1980s. In contrast to the stereotype of exclusive female domesticity, women had participated in semi-industrial employment in some areas of the southern African periphery since the 1960s, and even earlier in others. Cottage industries were the major semi-industrial employers for women in Botswana,Lesotho, and Swaziland as well as in the South African homelands and border areas until the 1980s, when South African textile industries began to tap women's labor. Because Swaziland and the other countries are in the periphery of South Africa, their industrialization has been mediated through that of the European core and the southern African semiperiphery. Thus peripheral countries have not experienced the full impact of industrialization and actively seek to attract more industry , often under terms unfavorable to the state and to labor. Betty J. Harris White South African women's participation in the industrialization process succeeds that of European women by two centuries and precedes that of Swazi women by about half a century. Basotho and Botswana women arrived on the Witwatersrand a couple of decades later but were relegated to the informal sector, where they were beer brewers and, sometimes, prostitutes (Bonner 1990:228; Miles n.d). Miles (n.d.) indicates that Swazi women did not begin to migrate to South Africa until the 1940s and 1950s. The period of their labor migrancy was shortlived because under the Aliens Control Act of 1963, women who could not prove South African citizenship were "endorsed out" to their territories of origin. Many of these women had migrated to South Africa because of failed marriages and widowhood (Miles n.d.). Their return to Swaziland coincided with increasing domestic industrialization, to which they remained peripheral. Berger (1986, 1992) examined the class consciousness of South African women workers and refuted the notion prevalent in some feminist literature that women are semiproletarians who, by being concerned both with work and family, cannot make a total commitment to work itself. She focused on the garment and textile industry in South Africa—the sector with the highest concentration of female workers. Her article assessed female involvement in a series of strikes in the industry in the period 1973-74 and 1980-81, and the role of the Wiehahn Report in recognizing and regulating black trade unions. Whereas clothing factories were dispersed in the Witwatersrand, the Cape, and the border areas in Natal, textile mills were concentrated in border and homeland areas in Natal. Black South African textile workers exhibit a number of characteristics that are similar to those of their Swazi counterparts. Berger (1986) notes that many female workers—single, married, divorced, or deserted—have financial responsibility for their children even if they reside elsewhere. In contrast to European practice, the sanctity of the two-parent household has not been maintained for black South African families. Berger (1986), writing during the late apartheid period, and Donaldson (Chapter 10 of this volume) observe a number of ways in which women bond: through kinship ties, the sharing of childcare responsibilities, and the sharing of grievances—all of which they have more time for due to fewer reproductive demands. Based on such observations, Berger (1986) concludes that the general atmosphere of political unrest contributes to class consciousness. Despite some ambiguity between gender and class, she suggests that women workers' inordinate family responsibilities may actually increase their activism in the workplace...

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