More Than Workers’ “Bread and Sugar”? Labor, Mobility, and Stabilization in Namibia under South African Rule

This paper links issues of labor and mobility with literature concerning social provision and the politics of distribution in the Global South. In the decades preceding Namibia’s 1990 independence from apartheid South Africa, colonial officials and employers debated who should bear the cost of distributing wealth to Black workers whose labor had been expropriated using a network of regional, urban, and intra-urban boundaries.

Since the 1940s, the northern migrant labor system had barred Africans in populous northern Namibia from entering the zone of colonial investment and settlement, the Police Zone, except as male migrant laborers engaged on short contracts. This system required employers and the state—and increasingly township residents—to fund township housing that segregated migrant laborers in closed compounds and “local” Police Zone Africans in houses. In October 1977, South Africa repealed migration controls and decentralized powers to Namibia.

In the mining town of Tsumeb in 1987, township residents boycotted white-owned businesses and Black migrant laborers employed by Tsumeb Corporation Limited (TCL) went on strike to protest taxes placing the onus of “urban development” on them. After 1977, TCL sought to train migrant laborers into skilled, better-paid positions, but so slowly that most workers remained in the compound. Municipalities raised township residents’ taxes and rent. The boycott and strike involved TCL migrant laborers, longtime township residents, and their dependents—traditional targets of late colonial “welfare” in Africa—but also recent migrants to Tsumeb without jobs or secure housing. The paper thus examines whether participants’ demands surpassed benefits for the formal sector minority and the extent to which these demands reflected the politics of the liberation movement SWAPO. Did participants demand something beyond, in one protestor’s words, “bread and sugar” for TCL workers?