Waiting, Dying, Crying, and What Else? Black Women’s Political Action and Migrant Labor in Black South African Political Thought

Posted: 2 Nov 2011

Date Written: October 31, 2011

Abstract

In this essay I take up the question of how black women’s political action in South Africa helped shape and structure migration, the migratory labor system, and the construction of rural and urban spaces. I examine the repertoire of political action that shaped and responded to the forces that compelled labor migrancy and the position of black women as reproducers of a reserve labor force. Prompted by two post-apartheid characterizations across the political spectrum of the politics of black women in the migrant labor system, Njabulo Ndebele’s post-apartheid novel, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) and Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1999), I am concerned both about gendered views of the hardships created by migration to the mining centers that constituted South African industrial civilization and ideas by black women of being left behind as the reproducers of the labor force critical to the economic dynamism of the region. While rendered as "waiting behind" and grieving for their husbands and sons and inscrutably eking out a marginal living for minor children and grandchildren, there is a great deal of evidence about the political organizing that they engaged in, and the meanings that they constructed about their role in the system of migrant labor and their understandings of reproduction — both social and economic. Indeed, as we think about the global organizing of poor people’s movements, rate payers resistance activism, and the shack dwellers campaigns, part of the genealogy, and institutional history that has been at times overlooked is linkages to black women’s waiting that never had anything to do with sitting around and idly waiting to be mobilized by vanguards of political leadership. The post-apartheid political era has proceeded through dismantling and discarding some tropes that served as organizing issues for the era of apartheid and the struggle to end it. As cultural critics and social theorists of black feminist political economy have ably demonstrated, entire new political histories are being grafted upon complicated understandings and misunderstandings of widely circulating African Diaspora concepts like the theoretical engagement with memory, black consciousness, enslavement, and black feminist concepts such as intersectionality (Gqola 2010, Magubane 2003, Atkins 1993). I take up the question of black women’s action in the migratory labor system in one sense to think through what political visions are being made in the post-apartheid era but also to consider what theoretical resources are available from the legacies of black women’s political action and resistance to the constraints which the migratory labor system created for them and the ways in which their own thinking, writing, and organizing shaped the limits of migration, space, and their insertion into the economy as merely waiting and bearing reserve labor forces.

Keywords: post-apartheid, black women's politics, South Africa, migration, labor, work

Suggested Citation

Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany, Waiting, Dying, Crying, and What Else? Black Women’s Political Action and Migrant Labor in Black South African Political Thought (October 31, 2011). NCOBPS 43rd Meeting Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1952093

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (Contact Author)

University of California, Irvine ( email )

African American Studies Program
Humanities Gateway Bldg. #3000
Irvine, CA California 62697-3125
United States
949-824-7035 (Phone)
949-924-7006 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5561

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