Black civil servants, traditional leaders and peasants are discovering Northern Province’s cheap source of labour, writes Mukoni T Ratshitanga
Hundreds of Mozambican children are working in Northern Province households and on farms for as little as R150 a month.
The child workers, some as young as 10, are employed across the province, from Madimbo near the border with Zimbabwe to farms near Louis Trichardt and Levubu.
Before 1992, Mozambicans fled to South Africa from their bitter civil war. Today they come to look for work as Mozambique battles with reconstruction. Most of them became exploited farmworkers. Now they are also being employed as house workers who are paid a pittance.
These Mozambicans are in South Africa illegally and employers can exploit them without fear of reprisals.
In the past, illegal Mozambican immigrants were exploited by white farmers. Today, the province’s black civil servants, traditional leaders and peasants have also discovered this source of cheap labour.
Jos Gomez (15) and Mawela Muraga (16), not their real names, work in the Sibasa area more than 200km north of Pietersburg. The two boys work for Christine Tshihule, a primary school teacher at Mandala village for R150 a month each. They are also housed and fed by their employer. She refused to discuss the plight of her two young workers.
Gomez arrived in South Africa via Nelspruit in June last year in a group of nine other Mozambicans – including his brother – searching for greener pastures. He finally arrived in the Northern Province in January this year with a woman he says now works at a banana farm in Levubu.
The events leading to Gomez’s arrival at Tshihule’s house – where he and Muraga work 12 hours a day – are painful for him to recall. “In March last year, my mother was killed by a landmine. I felt as though the world had come to an end and I asked myself why the war did not pass with us all dead. My other brother went to Maputo years ago,” Gomez says.
“Three months after my mother was killed, my elder brother and I decided to come to South Africa because we heard life was better. One night, we skipped the border with seven other people.”
But Gomez and his brother lost each other the night they crossed into South Africa and the two have not seen each other since.
“I don’t know where he is. But I will find him one day,” he said. Gomez’s tale of his journey echoes many heart-breaking stories told by other Mozambicans who risk their lives to come to South Africa.
When the Mail & Guardian visited Tshihule’s home this week, Gomez and Muraga were clearing a banana bush in preparation for planting another. Another Mozambican boy was also working in Tshihule’s neighbour’s yard.
Muraga came to South Africa this year with his elder brother who works in Sibasa as well. The two boys sleep on a mat in one of their employers’ rooms.
Unlike Gomez, the Muraga brothers still have parents they plan to visit next year in Mozambique. Muraga says he first worked for a chief at Makonde village, 30km north of Sibasa. “I looked after his cows and he paid me R230 a month.” They complained their working hours are too long and the sun is too hot in the Northern Province. They say their employer sometimes “shouts angrily at us for little things. But we want to work.” And as illegals they have no recourse to the law.
Takalani Nwendamutswu, a local businessman and teacher in a village east of Sibasa said: “It is wrong for people to exploit Mozambicans. We [South Africans] come from a situation of exploitation and we should be the last to exploit others.”
The boys were hesitant to expose their employers, and Muraga’s elder brother, who arrived during the interview, reprimanded him because he was talking to “people with notebooks and cameras”. Tshihule accused the M&G of “causing a storm in a tea cup”.
Northern Province health and welfare superintendent general Nicholas Crisp said his department has never received a formal complaint involving the employment of Mozambican children. “We hear of anecdotes such as you are raising. We don’t have indications of how widespread the problem is,” he said. Crisp called on people to report cases of child labour to the police.