During the festive season peaks in December, millions of South African workers in big and mid-sized urban areas “go home” to spend time in rural labour reserves where they were born. This mass movement, which appears to be a deeply ingrained cultural practice, reflects something far more insidious: the enduring legacy of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid-era migrant labour system. 

• Wehla nini ukuya ekhaya?

This system, designed to exploit cheap black labour for the benefit of a white-controlled economy, has not only persisted but continues to shape contemporary South African society. It is a striking example of how imposed colonialist constructs are presented as spontaneous indigenous culture, perpetuating economic and social inequalities.

The phenomenon of “home” being distinct from where one resides and works was engineered as a control tool. Under apartheid, the homeland system relegated black South Africans to rural “labour reserves” such as the Transkei, KwaZulu and Venda. 

These areas were deliberately underdeveloped and left economically stagnant, ensuring their inhabitants remained dependent on employment in urban centres, particularly mines, factories and households.

This separation between “home” and “workplace” was not accidental but strategic. It cemented a dual existence for the black working class, ensuring that urban areas could benefit from their labour while denying them permanent residence or social integration.

• Two South Africas with no interleading stairs!

Townships and hostels became the urban peripheries where workers were temporarily housed, reinforcing their non-belonging and ensuring they would return to rural areas during off-seasons or holidays. This is the system’s “object exemplar,” masking structural inequality as a cultural tradition.

Today, South Africa’s policymakers misdiagnose the legacies of this system, mainly through concepts like the ‘township economy’. Framed as a potential solution to unemployment and economic stagnation, the township economy is celebrated for its entrepreneurial potential and other colourful reasons.

However, this approach fails to address the root causes of inequality and the historical dynamics that shaped townships as spaces of exploitation, exclusion and marginalisation.

The notion of the township economy reflects an unwillingness to confront South Africa’s structural underpinnings. Townships were never designed as hubs of economic activity but as dormitories for labour, with rural areas representing their comparable form. They lack the infrastructure, resources, and investment needed to sustain thriving economies. 

By romanticising informal businesses in these areas, ideologues perpetuate a false narrative of self-reliance while ignoring the systemic barriers that prevent genuine economic integration. The migrant labour system’s most pernicious legacy is that cities are not “home.”

For generations, the township-mining-hostel-factory dynamic conditioned workers to view urban areas as temporary spaces for earning a living, not for building a life. 

This mindset persists today, with many South Africans oscillating between rural and urban areas. While some argue that this movement reflects cultural ties to ancestral land, it is crucial to recognise that these patterns were deliberately engineered to serve the interests of capital.

This oscillation has significant drawbacks. During the festive season, workers spend thousands of rands on transportation. This financial burden is particularly acute given the depressed state of the economy and the slave wages earned by many. 

The major routes, such as the N1 and N3 highways, become choked with traffic, leading to countless road accidents and fatalities. Deaths on South African roads during prominent holidays like Easter and Christmas have become a grim fixture of the national calendar. 

The economic and social costs of these patterns are immense but are rarely scrutinised as part of the broader legacy of the migrant labour system.

• A vampiric relationship between capital and workers

The endurance of South Africa’s migrant labour system demonstrates how capital structures society to maximise profit at the expense of workers. The system ensures a steady supply of cheap labour while externalising reproduction costs to rural areas as well as townships and squatter camps of late and as social dynamics change. 

As Karl Marx famously observed, “capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.” In South Africa, this vampiric relationship is evident in the exploitation of workers who are systematically denied the means to build stable, integrated lives in urban centres.

The migrant labour system also encourages unnecessary consumption and wastage, as workers are compelled to spend their limited earnings on transportation and other costs associated with maintaining dual households. 

This economic arrangement benefits the white-controlled economy, which profits from the exploitation of labour and the consumer spending it necessitates. It is a classic example of what Rosa Luxemburg termed the “expansion of the market” by incorporating non-capitalist spaces. This integration of rural areas and townships is limited to the exploitation of labour and consumption.

Breaking away from this state of non-permanency and exploitation requires a fundamental rethinking of South Africa’s economic and social structures. Localising economies and efforts to create sustainable, integrated communities in urban areas must become a central focus.

This would involve investing in housing and infrastructure and shifting how labour is conceptualised and valued. Labour should no longer be viewed solely as a commodity or something that exists purely to serve economic growth at the expense of individuals’ well-being.

• New spatial planning and rural development

One of the most pressing challenges is dismantling the township-work-hostel dynamic that continues to define urban spaces. This arrangement cramps blacks in zones of non-being and non-belonging by structuring urban spaces in a way that isolates communities, undermining efforts to foster integrated and cohesive urban development.

Cities must be reimagined as places where people can live, work, and thrive rather than as temporary sites of economic extraction. This would require addressing the historical inequities that have shaped South Africa’s urban landscape, including land ownership, spatial planning, and resource access. Even if it means starting new cities, this must be done to counter the fragmented, inhumane congestion in colonial settlements.

The current approach to economic development lacks a critical understanding of the historical and structural forces at play. Policies that celebrate informal entrepreneurship without addressing systemic inequality are akin to “placing bandages on open wounds,” as Frantz Fanon might have reasoned. Genuine transformation requires confronting the legacies of colonial apartheid head-on rather than attempting to adapt to their constraints.

Moreover, the continued focus on rural-urban oscillation as a cultural norm obscures its economic and social implications. By framing the dynamics of the migrant labour system as a matter of lifestyle or expression of cultural identity, the state and capital deflect attention from their role in perpetuating these patterns. Bantustanisation of the black workforce is counterproductive to whatever little achievement has been made since 1994.

• Social and psychological impacts of the enduring migrant labour system

The human cost of South Africa’s failure to address the migrant labour system is staggering. Road accidents during the festive season are just one visible manifestation of deeper structural issues. News media headlines like ‘Recklessness and alcohol blamed for Eastern Cape road death spike, as toll soars past 200’ have become standard as people sigh after making long journeys exceeding two thousand kilometres each they ‘go home’.

This has to be expected, as provinces like Gauteng are virtually emptied as people head to the underdeveloped hinterlands, much as their forefathers did centuries ago. More deaths and crippling injuries are expected when people head back to their state of temporality, engineered by vampiric capital in the name of jobs and social upliftment.

The social and psychological impacts on workers and their families are less visible but equally devastating. Constant movement between rural and urban areas disrupts family life, undermines community cohesion and entrenches cycles of poverty and instability. Increasing squatter camps or ruralification of old colonial settlements proves that the past is as alive as it was yesterday. 

• Resilience of colonial and apartheid-era structures

Thus, the endurance of South Africa’s migrant labour system is a testament to the resilience of colonial and apartheid-era structures in shaping the present. It reminds us that the past is not dead or even past.

South Africa must confront its history’s legacies with honesty and determination to build a more equitable and just society. The country’s challenges emanate from colonial imaginations that have been normalised and accepted as a way of living.

As Marx might have put it, the point is not merely to interpret the world but to change it. Localising economies, integrating urban and rural spaces and reimagining cities as permanent homes are essential steps towards this transformation.

Delays in land reform and similar processes equate to justice denied: the black majority belongs somewhere else and only comes to cities to serve the needs of capital.

Only by addressing the structural inequalities that underpin the migrant labour system can South Africa move towards a future where all its citizens have the opportunity to live with dignity and security.

Siyabonga Hadebe is a PhD candidate in international economic law and a labour market expert based in Geneva.