Continuity and Change in Gender Relations within the Contract Labour System in Kavango, Namibia, 1925–1972

Abstract

The gendered historical investigation of migrant labour in Namibia (and southern Africa more broadly) has rightly considered the ways in which women left behind in the sending areas were obliged to take on additional agricultural duties in the absence of men. This has been viewed by some scholars as a form of material exploitation of women and a potential subsidy to white employers in these settler colonial spheres. While there is some validity to these claims, the relationship between the sending areas and the work site was not simply a material one, and contract/migrant labour recruiting systems entered spaces with existing gendered cultural repertoires concerning how to deal with absent men. The significance of these cultural frameworks is worthy of additional empirical, comparative and theoretical investigation. Through the use of oral interviews supplemented by archival materials, this article discusses these issues in the context of Kavango, north-eastern Namibia, which, for much of the 20th century, was a major source of contract labourers to the colonial economy in what was then South West Africa. The article argues that colonialism and labour recruiting schemes built upon and transformed existing precolonial cultural frameworks such as 'the people's child', women's observance of taboos and a local conception of 'home'. This article further posits that the maintenance of this migrant labour system was dependent upon its integration into local worldviews.

Dispatches

“…Mobility of the ethnic groups was restricted to their respective homelands or controlled through labor hire (contract labor). The homelands were created as labor reserves where the capitalist economy could draw cheap labor (Likuwa and Shiweda 2017;Silvester 1993;Werner 1993;2016). However, such consequences of the creation of the homelands were not reflected in the exhibition before independence.…”

Beyond Toxic Masculinity: Reading and Writing Men in Post-Apartheid Namibia

“…South African military forces are known to have been particularly brutal in their suppression of political rebellion, and it is likely that many civilians were killed during South African administration (Amnesty International, 1986). The contract labour system meant that men would be away from their families for extended periods (sometimes up to twenty months), living in areas in which violence was both normalised and rewarded (Likuwa, 2020; Hishongwa, 1992). For Sheila Wise (2007: 331), “the divisions created through the systems of colonialism and apartheid established, maintained and reinforced men's ideas about manhood, power, race, ethnic identity, class and sexuality”, with Apartheid comprising the “policing and surveillance of black men's daily lives and the violent assertion of state authority in demeaning ways” (Swarr, 2012: 964).…”