Skip to content

'The Great Migration' and 'The Greatest Trek': Some Reflections

Literature › Works

Philip Bonner (2004). 'The Great Migration' and 'The Greatest Trek': Some Reflections. Journal of Southern African Studies, 30(1), Special Issue: Race and Class in South Africa and the United States. Taylor & Francis (Carfax Publishing).
Type journal article
Scope Comparative and methods
Method synthesis review
Period studied 1900–1950
Regions Witwatersrand/Johannesburg, Orange Free State, Transvaal, Eastern Cape, Natal, Basutoland, US South, US northern cities
Themes comparative theory, origins segregation, mining migrant labour, agriculture land, labour markets wages, demography urbanisation, inequality poverty unemployment, resistance social movements
Citation key bonner2004

Argument

Bonner compares the African movement from white farms to the Witwatersrand in the 1930s-40s with the Great Migration of black southerners to northern US cities. He argues the paths of migration and urban survival were strikingly parallel despite South Africa's distinctive gold-based system of oscillating male migrancy. Both groups moved under pressure from depressed tenant conditions and natural disasters (boll weevil in the US, the 1932-34 drought in South Africa), but he stresses that causes differ from motives, and that servitude coexisted with high mobility in both places. In the cities both groups faced racial discrimination, despotic white foremen, very high job turnover, lodging and liquor brewing as family survival strategies, and low wages. He concludes that similar social processes produced very different political trajectories because of differing demography, state structure and legal systems, and he proposes further research on how local urban politics fed into national leaderships.

Evidence and method

Secondary literature on both countries (Grossman, Gottlieb, Fligstein, Cohen, Bodnar et al., Trotter, Greenberg, Bradford, van Onselen, Schirmer). Archival material: Central Archives Depot Pretoria, municipal archives, Native Economic Commission evidence (1931), and submissions to the Farm Labour Committee (1937-38). Johannesburg employment records 1936-44 (Native Urban Employment study). Press (Bantu World, The Star, Umteteli wa Bantu), SAIRR reports, and roughly 30 work histories and interviews with East Rand migrants collected by the author and others in the 1980s.

Findings

  • Gold-mining labour was cheap because of a system of contracted, oscillating single-male migrancy backed by the reserves. (p. 3)

    Low wage labour in the mining industry was secured by institutionalising a system of oscillating migrant labour, whereby single male migrants would enter into contracts for between six and eighteen months

  • Even as African urbanisation grew in the 1930s-40s, Johannesburg's workforce remained highly migratory. (p. 5)

    Of all those registered as employed in Johannesburg in 1938, only one-third remained employed in 1944.

  • Labour tenants' access to land and stock on Free State farms was squeezed in the decades after Union. (p. 11)

    In the Orange Free State in the 30 years after Union, pasturages allowed to labour tenants were reduced by 40-50 per cent and their numbers of stock were sharply curtailed.

  • The Depression sharply cut agricultural output value, worsening labour-tenant conditions before the 1932-34 drought. (p. 11)

    An immediate consequence of the Depression was a slump in the gross value of agricultural production from ?61,848,000 in 1929 to ?37,425,000 in 1933.

  • Leaving the gold standard in 1933 drove a recovery in gold mining and secondary industry that absorbed unemployed displaced tenants. (p. 12)

    This instantly increased the price of gold by 50 per cent and sparked an explosive expansion of gold mining, construction and related secondary industries.

  • Farm labourers were the largest single contributor to black urban population growth in 1936-51. (p. 13)

    farm labourers contributed 40 per cent of the increase of the black urban population, the other principal contributors being natural increase at 19 per cent, foreigners at 28 per cent and reserves at 8 per cent

  • Farmers kept labour-tenant children out of school; literacy was far lower than among US sharecroppers. (p. 17)

    The 1937 report of the Farm Labour Committee estimated only 1 per cent of the black labour tenant population in the Orange Free State was literate

  • The civilised labour policy displaced African workers from industrial employment after 1924. (p. 18)

    In the first year of its operation, African industrial employment dropped from 80,486 to 74,685 nationwide.

  • White foremen's control of hiring and firing produced very high African job turnover on the Rand. (p. 19)

    By the late 1930s, between 30 and 60 per cent of the African labour complement in many factories on the Rand were leaving their places of employment each year as a result of being fired.

  • Urban rents and poverty constrained African families, who turned to lodgers and illicit brewing. (p. 24)

    Rents in the Witwatersrand townships and slums consumed 25-35 per cent of an average black worker's wage.

  • The racial division of labour inherited from gold mining gave Africans better access to unskilled and semi-skilled work than African Americans in the 1930s. (p. 27)

    This reserved all skilled labour for white workers, excluded white workers from unskilled jobs and instituted a massive disparity in wage rates

  • The South African state's monolithic character after 1948 explains divergent political outcomes from the US. (p. 29)

    In South Africa, the state was not only more monolithic and impervious than its US counterpart, particularly after 1948