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CHAPTER TWO The Apartheid State and Migration to South Africa: From Rural Migrant Labour to Urban Revolt The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. The collective building up of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical scale (Fanon 1990:165). In this chapter, the relationship between political economy and the apartheid state, in other words the character of structural relations historically dominant in the Southern African region, is established. This issue is important because social divisions developed around migrant labour on the one hand and the character of state interpellations on the other, provide the structural context for the formation of ethnic and national identities and their changed character during and after apartheid. The core idea behind the argument is to stress the centrally divisive character of apartheid oppression and to elucidate how it worked with regard to the political economy of Southern Africa in the colonial and regional division of labour. The attempted forced creation of rural ethnic identities and citizenship by the apartheid state failed, as economic, political and social attempts at legitimising ethnic identities were challenged by an African nationalism which promised not only freedom in the nation, but also, as part of this process, to address the economic penury associated with ethnic identity and rural life. Free movement to cities was now said to provide jobs so that freedom was explicitly or implicitly identified with urbanisation, a view which dovetailed nicely with the ‘market freedom’ advocated by neo-liberal thought as markets are predominantly urban phenomena. The understanding of ‘nation’ which was politically asserted by the nationalist movement was thus a fundamentally urbanised one. It was also a conception for which the ‘migrant labour system’ was seen as the basis of apartheid. In other words, apartheid was not so much a form of state but a form of labour control based on rural migrant labour, moreover a labour which was kept in dormitory areas (Bantustans) against its will by the pass system, and hence ‘tribalised’ in the 20 From 'Foreign Native' to 'Native Foreigners' process. What this eventually led to is a conception for which the restriction of migrant labour from the Southern African sub-region (the restricting of would be migrants to their own countries) could be justified as part of the dismantling of apartheid itself, and as such as a democratic process. As a state discourse, this conception fed into creating the conditions for popular xenophobia as we shall see in chapter three. This process of creating a whole class of non-citizens excluded from claiming rights was common to the post-colonial situation in Africa and was not unique to South Africa (Mamdani, 1991, 1996).4 What has arguably been unique in the South African case, has been the extent and depth of the problem. These features resulted both from the character of the apartheid state and from the nature of the understanding of it and opposition to it, by the exiled nationalist movement. They resulted from a political relationship. In sum then, the form of ideological resistance to the apartheid state, which was founded on a conception of citizenship upheld by a nationalist organisation which largely equated migrant labour with oppression, could relatively easily form the basis of a discourse of national chauvinism, or at least was perfectly congruent with it. Thus, an understanding of post-apartheid xenophobia must elicit the history of the relations between apartheid state politics and the politics of resistance. It is with this issue that the present chapter is concerned. State and Citizenship in Southern Africa It could be asserted, although perhaps rather boldly, that the recent history of Southern Africa has been a history of the structuring and de-structuring of nationalities both in the ‘subjective’ sense of the formation and dissolution of national or ethnic identities and in the apparently more ‘objective’ sense of the destruction and making of nations and nationalities through struggles over state formation. One need only recall how the form of colonial state known as apartheid was built around an attempt to de-nationalise a large proportion of South African citizens, how relations between this state and its subjects were structured around ‘ethnic’ nationalities as were the relations between mining companies (and others) and their employees, and to observe how in the post-apartheid period a South African identity is still very much in the process of formation. This latter process...

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