GeoJournal 30.1 85-91 © 1993 (May) by Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Missing Women: Reflections on the Experiences of Swazi Migrant Women on the Rand, 1920-1970

Miles, Miranda., University of Swaziland, Private Bag Kwaluseni, Swaziland and University of the Witwatersrand, Department of Geography, PO Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT: The migration of Swazi women to the Witwatersrand in the period 1920-1970 marked an era of change in the lives of many Swazi women. Under the constraints of rural impoverishment, many women were forced onto the Swazi labour market, one which had little room for women. Bythe 1930s the exodus of Swazi women to the Rand had gathered so much momentum, that women quickly became objects of national concern to the British colonial government, Swazi traditional authorities and South African authorities. Their experiences as migrant workers in South Africa have largely gone unnoticed. As African women, they suffered the triple oppression of class, race and gender, and as foreign women were subject to a battery of laws designed to keep foreign Africans out of South Africa. The personal experiences of Swazi women as migrants and workers in South Africa are examined here, using life-history or personal narrative techniques which have considerable potential as a way of recovering hidden histories and reinstating the marginalised as makers of their own past.

Introduction

The exodus o f Swazi w o m e n to the Witwaters rand area of South Africa began in earnest as early as the 1920s and expanded rapidly in the late 1940s and 1950s. Il lustratively, whereas only 423 w o m e n were migrants in 1946, this n u m b e r had j u m p e d dramatical ly to 6,400 in 1966. Their reasons for migrat ing differed, but many sought employment . Dur ing the first half o f the century, Swazi w o m e n became the objects o f nat ional concern, not only to the British colonial government , and the South African Native Author i t ies bu t more important ly , to the Swazi ruling aristocracy. Surprisingly, li t t le scholarly a t tent ion has been paid to the emigrat ion o f w o m e n to the Witwaters rand in this period. The role o f Swazi w o m e n in the migrant labour system has at bes t been downplayed; their role as migrants in their own right, total ly ignored.

The deve lopment , and the nature of the Swazi labour marke t made little r oom for female labour. As a result , many w o m e n were forced, under varying ci rcumstances , to migrate to South Africa, especially to the greater Johannesburg area. Af te r the post-war manufactur ing b o o m in South Africa and the racial re-order ing in its labour market , w o m e n from many parts of the

subcont inen t f looded the Witwaters rand area where wages were higher. The dominan t e m p l o y m e n t avenue open for African w o m e n was in domes t ic service, The current paper is the resul t o f a s tudy carried out to invest igate and analyze the historical process o f the migra t ion of Swazi w o m e n to the Witwaters rand in the per iod 1920-1970, th rough the use of oral collection. The object ive of the ongoing s tudy is to provide an oral archive o f deta i led life histories o f Swazi w o m e n for the const ruct ion o f scholarly narrat ives of the individual and corporate exper iences of Swazi w o m e n as migrants (Miles 1991; Crush and Miles for thcoming) . The current paper will show how the personal exper iences o f these migrant Swazi women , which have long gone unnot iced , can bes t be captured using their l ife-histories. This research technique has been effectively used. It challenges convent ional me thods o f research that t reat informants mere ly as objects, by a t tempt ing to unvei l their subject ive experiences .

Swazi Labour Migration: A Historical Background

I started suffering after I had my child and my husband died. Then I realized that I was on my own and I had to fred a way

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to support my child. My husband worked in Johannesburg, at the mines. Yes, then he died. The reason why I decided to go to Jo'burg in particular was because so many people were going to Johannesburg at that time. So we would see people who have been there, when they came back, they always came back with many things like clothes and theywould give us their second hand clothes, and we would realise that we are wasting our time working in Swaziland. So I decided that since I was still young and capable of supporting myself, I should also go to Johannesburg. I asked a friend of mine who also worked in Johannesburg if she could get me a job there. She asked me what kind of job Iwas looking for, since I had never worked for white people before, but I told herto find me anything as long as it was a job, I would work.

The excerpt above is taken from the life history of Diana Khumalo, a Swazi woman. Her story is the stereotypical case of a migrant worker's wife who was forced into wage labour following the untimely death of her husband. Diana's unpredicted widowhood was clearly a major blow to her status and economic position and caused a turning point in her life. Left destitute, with no husband and no money, Diana was forced to earn a living to support her only child. By the 1930s, there was a way out and she took it: the young widow decided to seek wage employment. The local labour market, which had begun to expand dramatically, had very little room for women. Diana started working in Manzini but did not earn enough money to make ends meet or to pay her daughter's school fees: "I could only afford to buy a bag of maize-meal and after that I had no money to spend on anything else." She left Swaziland in 1946 for Johannesburg. With her limited education and work experience, and her black racial identity, Diana joined the ranks of black women in domestic service.

In the historical context, as is the case today, the movement of migrant workers to South Africa was composed predominantly of young, single males. The late 19th and early 20th century was a period of rapid change in Swazi society. The impact of colonialism and the penetration of capitalism, mainly of British and Boer origin, led to the mass extraction of male labour. It is common wisdom now that several forces encouraged and sustained this flow of male migrants to South Africa (Booth 1982; 1985; Crush 1987). These included intense land expropriation, economic depression and ecological disaster which promoted rural underdevelopment. In addition to the colonial state's need for revenue and capital accumulation, taxation became an active strategy in creating a Swazi male labour force. The incorporation of Swaziland into the South African migrant labour system proceeded in response to the combined pressure of colonial coercion, land alienation and rural underdevelopment (Booth 1982; 1985; Crush 1987). Through the male migrant labour system, the role of Swazi women also changed. Women increasingly bore the burden of sustaining and reproducing the homestead through subsistence agriculture. This ensured for a time that women were less likely to leave the land for the towns. Prior to the 1940s and in contrast to states such as Lesotho, Botswana and Mozambique, few migrant workers from

Swaziland were women. Those who did go to South Africa were simply accompanying their spouses. The numbers were therefore small and the movement sporadic - never more than a few hundred and usually only for short periods of time. This pattern was re-established from the mid- 1960s when South African legislative restrictions severely curtailed the legal movement of Swazi women to South Africa. In the intervening years, however, there was a significant movement of female migrants to South Africa.

Life-Histories as a Research Technique

The life-history research technique has proved indispensable in bringing out the subjective experiences of migrant women. The fieldwork for the current study was carried out in Swaziland in the summer of 1990. An initial sample of eight women had already been identified before I went out into the field. The women identified other former women migrants, hence allowing me to build up a network of informants. In this way, I was able to identify 27 former women migrants. Only nine were available for in depth interviews, however. Before beginning the interviews, I had the opportunity to meet with some of the women in the greater Manzini area. Of the nine women interviewed, the detailed life histories of three women have been written in the form of interactive texts, excerpts of which are used here to highlight the similarities, diversity and complexity of the experiences of Swazi women on the Rand (Miles 1991).

Conventional research methods that systematically exclude women from the agenda have recently been attacked by feminist writers. The Personal Narratives Group (1989: 3), for example, notes that "traditionally, knowledge, truth and reality have been constructed as if men 's experiences were normative, as if being human meant being male." And so in the last decade, great efforts have been made by women scholars to undermine this misconception by creating more inclusive conceptions of social reality (Cock 1980; Robertson 1983; Romero 1988; Obbo 1988; Davison 1989; Mirza and Strobel 1989). Traditionally, the experiences of the ordinary man, woman and child have been ill-represented. However, more recently, social historians have also attempted to rewrite the past from the point of view of the common people. An increasingly favoured research strategy has been the collection of personal narratives, or life-histories, which have proven particularly useful in exposing the otherwise "hidden" experiences of marginalized groups.

Over the last decade, Africanist scholars have also begun to explore the use of life-history techniques. One line of enquiry uses oral history to explore the corporate domestic, social and work experiences of groups of African women (Cock 1980; Robertson 1983; Stichter and Parpart 1988; White 1990). A second attempts to elucidate the life course of individual African women using life-history methodologies (Shostak 1981; 1989; Marks 1987; 1989; Romero 1988; Davison 1989; Mbilinyi 1989; Mirza and

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Strobel 1989; Bozzoli 1991). The integration of transcripts of interviews with Swazi women into geographical studies, both of the life course of selected individuals (Miles 1991) and the corporate experience of Swazi women as migrants (Crush and Miles forthcoming) has begun.

This current study has been greatly inspired by the extant literature and by current thinking in southern African studies that aims to bring the undocumented participation of women in the migrant labour system to the forefront. My objective is to begin to unveil the role that Swazi women played as migrant workers to South Africa during the period of rapid economic expansion in the post- war period. The history of Swazi women has been shrouded by a royalist view of the Swazi past, concerned only with the actions of"great men" of the realm and, more recently, by a marxian social history which has focused on male labour and which tends to rely on documentary sources (in which women left only the smallest of traces). While acknowledging that the activities and roles of women during the colonial period were many and varied, this work, as an exercise in historical geography, deals with one facet of women's experience the phenomenon of migration to South Africa which began in the late 1920s, accelerated dramatically in the late 1940s and 1950s, and fell off again after the mid 1960s.

The Development of Swazi Female Migration

The life course of the women interviewed for this study was clearly one to which the concept of"proletarianization" is most applicable. Many of the women began their life in rural homesteads, left these at some point (though for a variety of reasons and at different stages in the life cycle), became fully dependent on wage work, and are now (in their retirement) dependent on their own wage earnings and those of their offspring. It is possible, and even likely, that some of the wave of female Swazi migrants were not fully proletarianised since they did eventually return to the rural areas and were reabsorbed back into rural society. This however, remains to be explored.

Why then did these women experience a process of full proletarianization and why did they do so when they did? A reading of the archival evidence and their own personal accounts may suggest some answers. In the period prior to the mass emigration of Swazi women, colonial land alienation and the imposition of taxes (both of which were designed to extract cheap male labour) contributed towards the decline of the independence of the rural Swazi homestead. Gender roles shifted and women began to take on more of the household chores that were normally carried out by men, in addition to their own. Lowe (1990) gives an excellent account on the effect that the transformation of the rural peasantry had on the position of women in Swazi society. Notwithstanding the changes that so seriously undermined the self-sufficiency of the Swazi homestead, these changes surprisingly did not seem to force Swazi women into the labour market. The

emigration of men in fact reduced the mobility of women who took on ever greater responsibility for homestead production, and in this way, their workload intensified. Despite this restructuring of Swazi society, rural agricultural productivity continued to decline in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

In part, growing rural poverty was a function of the loss of male labour, land loss, overcrowding and ecological deterioration. Wages earned by male migrants did not always go to those who needed them most. Not all wages were remitted and there were numerous other claimants: a colonial administration hungry for revenue, chiefs who demanded a portion of the wages as tribute, and homestead heads who wanted the cash to invest in stock and consumer goods. Women struggled to gain access to migrant wages and, where they were successful, turned them to their own advantage (through such activities as beer-brewing). According to Crush (1987: 205), the advent of the migrant wage also encouraged some women to withdraw their labour from the fields, but it is difficult to say how widespread this process was.

Other major forces binding women to the rural areas identified in this study are the power of patriarchy and domestic gender relations, and the impact of missionary education which actively discriminated against females. The point is that the patriarchal elements in Swazi society and those within colonial/missionary society reinforced one another in keeping women bound to the land. This helps to explain the difference between the migrant experience of Swazi women and other women on the subcontinent. Their entry into wage labour, and the subsequent migration of many Swazi women to South Africa lagged behind that of their Basotho and Batswana counterparts. Like these women, Swazi women eventually experienced the pressures of being "left behind" and, with the rapidly increasing feminization of poverty, were pushed onto the labour market.

By the 1930s, the number of Swazi women migrating to the Witwatersrand area had begun to increase and the colonial government was pressed to take action over the control of Swazi women. Swazi patriarchs were also concerned about the loss of control over their women. And so a national crisis emerged. Over the next 25 years, colonial state and rural male authorities collaborated to control the crisis. Legal, cultural and economic measures were all used to try and force women back to the fields. They were largely unsuccessful because the forces were simply too powerful to control: women were migrating, in the main, out of necessity, not choice. The fundamental causes of poverty, of male absenteeism, marriage and family breakdown were rarely perceived by rural and colonial patriarchs, much less addressed. Women were simply seen as "rebellious", "immoral" and "lacking responsibility" as if this explained their behaviour (Miles 1991).

Why then did Swazi women leave Swaziland for work at a time when local employment opportunities were expanding and when foreign male labour was pouring into

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the country to satisfy local labour shortages? After the Second World War, the nature of the Swazi labour market had changed considerably with massive inflows of foreign capital in min ing and agrobusiness enterprises. Domest ic opportunit ies for employment in Swaziland increased dramatically with the development of commercial agriculture (Miles 1991). Yet this period witnessed accelerated migrat ion of Swazi women to the Rand. How is this paradox to be explained? Partly, it lies in the employment preferences of the employers themselves who preferred male labour for hard physical work whenever it was available. Partly, it lies in the extremely poor wages and condit ions on the mines and plantations which repelled all but the most desperate workers (although the estates did employ small numbers of Swazi women in seasonal weeding and reaping). The answer lies mainly, however, in the response of Swazi women work- seekers to changing regional labour market conditions. What these responses were can only be uncovered through oral research. Before 1945, the major employment opportunit ies within the country were in the local min ing companies and on settler farms. Except for small scale beer-brewing and prost i tut ion at the local mines, the main avenue of local employment for women was in domestic service. Seasonal employment in cotton picking and tobacco packing and grading was available, and there was limited access to the more prestigious teaching profession.

The Personal Experiences of Swazi Women: Tales of Service and Suffering

When Swazi women began seeking wage work in increasing numbers in the 1940s and 1950s they were confronted by two distinct labour markets. Despite the complex legislative machinery that delegated foreign black women to the bo t tom rungs of the employment ladder, South Africa still offered greater opportunit ies for w ome n than the Swazi labour market. To work in South Africa was also to escape the patriarchal pressures of homestead, chief and colonial state within Swaziland. To a Swazi woman like Wilma Fonseca, it appeared that everyone was going to Johannesburg:

There was nobody here. I had no more friends, they had all gone to Johannesburg. There were no jobs (and) everybody was in Johannesburg, so I asked my father ifI could go back to Johannesburg, and he let me ... because all the others were going to be in Johannesburg.

Before the 1960s, it was extremely easy for Swazi women to get to Johannesburg. There were no border controls in effect and they needed no legal documenta t ion to travel or to work in South Africa. Some w ome n migrated regularly between Swaziland and South Africa, others moved permanent ly to Johannesburg.

Most of the women interviewed were married women, a status valued in Swazi society. Except for those women who migrated to the Rand with their husbands, for many of them, migrating to Johannesburg mean t leaving the

children behind in the care of an extended family. A fairly narrowly defined spectrum of employment opportunit ies existed for Swazi w o m e n once they arrived on the Witwatersrand. The main opportunit ies were in domestic service and many Swazi w ome n started out in this sector even if they did not remain there. As domestic workers, Swazi w ome n experienced the triple oppression of colour, gender and class al though their work experiences varied. Rita Zwane recalled her first job in South Africa:

I worked as a maid for a white family in Pretoria. That was my first job and since I had never worked before, I wasn't very good at my job. I did the laundry even though I was not good at doing laundry, so my madam used to make me do the laundry all over again!! Sometimes I'd have to do it over and over again till she was satisfied. So it was on many occasions that I went back home crying. Sometimes when I am making up the beds, she would walk in and grumble at me, saying I have lice, so I shouldn't drop them on her beds. Do you know that she never wanted me to drink from any of her cups? I had to use a can, an old used jam tin! I couldn't eat in the kitchen either, I had to eat outside in the servants quarters.

Diana Khumalo worked under more pleasant conditions, bu t found that working for a Jewish family also mean t adjusting to different t ime and work schedules. Diana recalled how her workload increased on Jewish holidays. Because she was not Jewish, she had to conform to certain rituals:

When there were visitors, I was not allowed to even set the table because on special occasions, they used a"holy" dinner set, a dinner set that was not supposed to be touched and washed by the heathen, the gentiles. So, I was not allowed to go anywhere near that dinner set or their special cutlery. Even when I would cook, I was given a special soap which I had to wash my hands with, under the watchful eye of my madam ... She wanted to make sure that I had washed my hands 7 times! 7 times!!! So that I could handle their "holy" dinner set and cook their special meals since they were expecting other Jews for dinner. I would wash my hands, drain the water, wash my hands, drain the water, wash my hands again, ..., 7 times. Ha! Then I had to help her set the table, without touching the cutlery and the plates. On special occasions she set the table herself. She would set the table in the afternoon, with all the candies, plates, dishes... I was not supposed to touch them because I was "poor", and so if I touched their plates, they would also get poor.

That most Swazi w ome n worked as domestics, was partly due to their l imited education. Like many w omen of her t ime, Diana, at her father's direction, received only min imal education. The idea that w ome n did no t "need" educat ion was promoted by m e n and to some extent internalized by women:

Education was not important when we were growing up, we thought we never needed education. As long as we could read the bible and sing from a hymnal, we didn't need to go to school ... and yet we were in complete darkness! Well I did go to school, I went up to Standard II, then my father said since I had learnt to read the Bible, what more did I want, so he took me out of school.

Interestingly, in spite of their c o m m o n Swazi citizenship, employment opportunit ies for coloured w ome n were more attractive and certainly more secure than for blacks. Many of them worked in the factories of Johannesburg. However, regardless of where they worked, most migrant w ome n felt the discomfort of poor living conditions, as Lucy Holmes recalls:

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We had now found a place to live at Indian section. We found a place to live and we were paying four pounds per month. In this house, you could actually see the stars outside, the roof was torn. It was an old, old house. We paid four pounds and you couldn't even complain because the landlord would tell you that you could leave anytime because many people wanted that house. When it rains, you will wake up and stand in one corner where the rain will not get you. When its cold, there's nothing you can do. There are no other houses to go to, because the people are too many.

Township life was also dangerous. The crime rate was so high that children were socialized into crime at a very young age. This was a major factor in convincing Lucy and her husband that they should re turn to Swaziland before their children fell to the vices o f township life. In colonial Swaziland, w o m e n were subject to the laws and regulat ions of an alien regime. But these were relat ively benign compared to the apar theid laws of South Africa. As Rita Zwane discovered, Swazi w o m e n were forced to live under the same harsh laws and humil ia t ions which South African blacks had to endure :

The Boers were terrible people. In South Africa, black people had no say. You couldn't answer a Boer back, you couldn't argue or try and reason with them. If you are black, you are black and you could hardly even cough in their presence.

Politics through the Voices of Swazi Women

There were certain areas and topics that the w o m e n interviewed in this s tudy prefer red to stay away from or at least to be less than candid about . These included t rade union part icipat ion, part ic ipat ion in the pass protests , or any activities of a polit ical nature , and the issues o f brewing and prost i tu t ion. Several of my informants knew very little about t rade unions and polit ical deve lopment s in South Africa in the per iod o f the 1950s and '60s. Perhaps they were genuinely ignorant on these issues, but it s eemed to me that many of t hem did not want to be associated in any way with polit ical issues. One woman c o m m e n t e d that there were no trade unions in Johannesburg during her t ime, because Johannesburg was still a "good" place to live in. Those w o m e n who were member s o f a t rade un ion in South Africa always emphas ised that it had not been their choice to join. However , there was an interest ing will ingness to talk at length about con tempora ry South African politics and a re luctance to talk about Swazi politics.

Af ter 1948, the political a tmosphere in South Africa changed for the worse as the status of "foreign Africans" was increasingly challenged. As "aliens", Swazi w o m e n were cons idered "visitors" domici led in South Africa only for the per iod o f their contract. Af ter 1952, all w o m e n had to carry reference books - the dread "dompas". Prior to 1955, Swazi w o m e n needed no immigra t ion permits . Thereafter , they had to apply for a permit , al lowing t hem to be in South Africa for a specified per iod of t ime. As the great major i ty o f Swazi w o m e n were in domes t ic service, the restr ic t ions made life especially difficult. Diana Khumalo descr ibed the changes this way:

Then the reference book (bhukwana) was introduced!! Now that was what brought many of us home. Malan was dead. No, Malan is the one who introduced the reference book. Next we had to carry passports.We didn't have passports. I 'm telling you, we wore out that road to Johannesburg in our times, ten to fifteen years, just like that. But then things changed. Then things got tough, we knew after that how hard life could be in Johannesburg .. . It was in 1956 that things started to tighten up. From 1956 onwards to 1960, it was no longer easy to work in Johannesburg. It was not easy at all! No matter how much your madam liked you, you had to have a permit that stated where you worked and when you would leave (South Africa).

As "foreign Africans", Swazi w o m e n found their e m p l o y m e n t oppor tuni t ies were fur ther restr icted. To work in South Africa, they had to have a Sect ion 12 permit . This permi t al lowed them to work for only two years, while restr ict ing them from engaging in any o ther income- generat ing activities.

In 1963, condi t ions in South Africa changed dramatical ly for Africans who or iginated f rom the three British Protec tora tes when the Al iens Contro l Act was passed to expel all uncont rac ted foreign labour f rom South Africa. F r o m 1 July 1963, Swazis were p roh ib i t ed f rom enter ing the Republ ic to seek employmen t , and employers in South Africa requir ing Swazi workers could only employ them under permit . The aim was to e l iminate the uncont ro l led influx o f workers to South Africa f rom the High Commiss ion Territories. A l though the s t ream of w o m e n migrat ing to South Afr ica was not s topped by the legislation, the new bat tery of laws did slow it down. To some degree, the declining n u m b e r o f Swazi w o m e n on the Rand could also be a t t r ibuted to the efforts o f the then Paramount Chief, Sobhuza, whose visits to Johannesburg , were among o ther things, to persuade Swazi migrants to re turn home. It is difficult though to say how successful Sobhuza ' s efforts would have been. Never the less , the 1963 legislat ion placed a strong brake on the migra t ion o f Swazi w o m e n to South Africa, and pe rsuaded many w o m e n to re turn to Swaziland. Many o f t hem re tu rned against their will. One o f my informants , Rita Zwane, gives a clear indicat ion, not only o f how the Al iens Contro l Act angered her because she had no desire to re turn to Swaziland, but also of how depressing it was to re turn to Swaziland eventual ly:

It made us angry! They were saying we should come home. For what? Where are the jobs in Swaziland? Where are the factories? Swazis resident in South Africa don "t want to come back to Swaziland, because there are no jobs and there is no money. I wasn't happy about living in Swaziland. It was so different.., my heart was very sore. And what made matters worse was that there were no jobs anywhere.

Conclusion

The p rob lems of in terpret ing life his tories are difficult and are a controversia l area of debate at present . The quest ion of how to i l luminate th rough the exper iences o f the masses, and how to make a single life his tory (or set of life histories) sufficiently representa t ive , is difficult to answer. Portel l i (1981) concludes that because life stories

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are not appropriate sources for social research in themselves, they should be regarded as complementing other written research. It is this "other research" that would help the researcher, having collected life stories, answer the questions that crystallize from the findings of the interview; "what in the lives of the informants, of the processes and factors which our underdeveloped theories have failed to identify, what of combinations of processes which, although we may have previously identified singly, we have never thought of putting together?" (Bozzoli 1985:92).

This raises the question of representativeness. A researcher collecting life histories presumably has to be aware of how "typical" the informant is. The detailed life histories that have been documented in this study (Miles 1991), bear testimony to the fact that their social, economic and educational backgrounds impacted differently on their positions as women and as wage workers. The context within which each of these women's lives was shaped was basically quite similar, yet the reasons for their entry into the labour market, for their migration to Johannesburg and their experience in Johannesburg itself varied considerably. Each life history is embedded in a general context, but each in many ways is unique. Illustratively, this is shown in the life-histories of three women: Diana Khumalo, Lucy Holmes and Rita Zwane.

The story of Diana Khumalo presents the intersection of an individual woman's life course and specific historical events. This presents the context of Diana's story. Her life story is a reflection of colonial policy towards Swazi women in the early twentieth century. She presents the "typical" case of a migrant worker's wife. Diana's later experiences as a domestic maid in Johannesburg were tainted by racial prejudices against black people. Like Lucy, a central part of Diana's life were the relationships she carved out with family, kin (in this case, her in-laws), and her white employers. As an African woman in white South Africa, Diana was confronted daily with the concrete limitations of her life and the tensions between black and white culture.

Lucy Holmes ' story is set within the complex racial struggle that occurred in the South African labour market in the post-Second World War period. Her story suggests that women's lives are shaped through and evolve within relationships with others. This reliance on family and kin was a function of her powerlessness and was also a survival strategy. This is evident as she goes through her childhood, living with a step-father and later moving to join her father,

and throughout her stay in Johannesburg. It is in looking directly at Lucy's life and her relationships with family and kin that her life could be interpreted. While it must be acknowledged that racial oppression had no direct bearing on Lucy, her experiences as a migrant and foreign worker in Johannesburg were influenced by her racial identity and her gender.

The life-history of Rita Zwane portrays a transition from farm labour to domestic service. Her early childhood was spent on the farms of the Eastern Transvaal where her parents and siblings worked as farm labourers on a Boer farm. When she got pregnant, she left the farm and moved to Pretoria where she entered into domestic service. The struggle for life in the midst of the tension in black townships, political turmoil and racial oppression, forms the context of her story.

The life histories of Swazi women give a sense of the variety of individual women's responses to Swazi society, economy, and employment patterns in colonial Swaziland while also highlighting the impact of apartheid in South Africa on their options and experiences. Although the archival sources employed in this study give insights into the emigration of Swazi women to the industrial centres of the Rand beginning in the 1930s, they remain silent about the actual reasons whywomen were leaving Swaziland, and about their experiences in Swaziland and in South Africa at the time. Interviews with former women migrants to South Africa offer the opportunity to observe the otherwise undocumented migration of Swazi women to South Africa, to feel the tempo of this movement , through the lens and experiences of individual lives. They have yielded important insights about individuals, society and historical processes of change in Swaziland and in South Africa.

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks are extended for financial assistance to the Canadian International Development Agency and to the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern Africa.

Notes

This paper is based on the author's Master of Arts dissertation (1991) (Queen's University, Kingston, Canada). For full primary and secondary references, see Miles (1991).

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