taking our jobs
Chiara Carter and Ferial Haffajee
South Africa has become a world in one country in more ways than tourism pundits could ever have predicted.
The boundaries of state are becoming less important as waves of migrants seek a better life.
Complex trade networks, energetic enterprise and entrepreneurial dreams are the stock-in-trade for the millions of migrant traders and labourers who throng South African city streets. Malawians control Johannesburg’s suburban gardening, Moroccans run Cape Town’s bouncer circuits, Nigerians control the cocaine trade and nobody can fashion a piece of kente cloth like a Ghanaian tailor sitting in the shade of a Yeoville tree.
Much of the hysteria about illegal immigrants flooding the country to flee their own poor living conditions, taking jobs and resources from South Africans, is nothing more than exaggeration and myth. It is fuelled by grinding joblessness and the legacies of this country.
Many immigrants are better educated than South Africans, with greater savvy and training in the world of business. Zimbabweans, for example, are taught craft-making and marketing at school – that’s why they dominate South African markets.
Immigrant trade networks expand to provide jobs for South Africans – they feed our wholesale industries and contribute handsomely to the gross domestic product.
“Immigration is by no means a chaotic and disorganised process,” says Vincent Williams of the South African Migration Project in Cape Town. From their home countries migrants identify new markets. They plan their trips, bring their own money and immediately find their brethren.
Those from Southern Africa often use public transport to get here and Africans from further afield have been known to make month-long car trips from Somalia and Morocco in jalopies that just about make the journey south.
Once in South Africa, a network will provide shelter – a couch in a house filled with 20 people, food and a job in a field they have made their own through decades of practice.
And with the Gauteng market already well served by immigrants, Cape Town is a lucrative new market for immigrant communities. Long Street’s faintly seedy flats and hotels have long been a first stop for newcomers to Cape Town. Recently the area has taken on an African flavour.
It is home to migrants from other Southern African states, West Africa, Angola, Congo, Liberia and even faraway Somalia and Rwanda.
Population estimates vary. Official statistics put the number of illegal immigrants at 500 000, while the Human Sciences Research Council says there are between 2,5-million and 4,1- million people living here illegally.
Mostly young men, Long Street’s newcomers live four or five to a flat and earn a living by trading, providing services such as hairdressing or working in the security industry.
Greenmarket Square, a tourist attraction in the city centre, has local handicraft stalls jostling alongside trestles piled with crafts produced elsewhere in Africa and sold by Malawian, Zimbabwean, Zambian, Namibian and West African traders.
Some of these traders employ compatriots or locals to assist in business. They use their earnings to purchase local goods which they then sell on the way home, while stocking up on goods to trade – a complex network extending across Southern Africa and in some cases still further. It is a trade network which historians say has operated in various forms in West and Central Africa for centuries.
Ahmed is a Somali refugee who trades on Adderley Street. Like many other traders he buys much of his wares at a wholesale dealer in nearby Woodstock. Through pooling resources with two relatives, he was able to put up more initial capital to buy stock than many of the local traders who sell goods near taxi ranks and stations.
Giving some of the Somalis an initial advantage over people from other countries is the assistance often given on arrival by Muslim organisations.
The war experiences of some Angolans who make their way to the Cape translate into jobs in the security industry, often as nightwatchmen or casual security guards. Pedro is one such guard employed on a casual basis by shop owners during the day and a nightclub after dark. He has survived one stabbing incident and looks forward to going home – a trip he undertakes at least once a year.
In Johannesburg, immigrants have been working in the service industries for years. They jealously guard their turf of suburban jobs like gardening and domestic work. Often a Malawian son will replace a retiring father as the master of a lush northern suburban garden.
The new wave of immigrants who came to the golden city after 1990 are largely entrepreneurs who own their own businesses. The South African Migration Project interviewed 70 immigrant entrepreneurs active in small business in the inner city of Johannesburg – still the most popular destination for migrants.
Far from taking jobs from South Africans, these business people were found to create between two and four jobs each and at least half their employees were South Africans. They also invested most of their profits in South Africa.
The migrants who came from Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries and other African states were mostly active in retail and service industries selling curios, ethnic clothes, food and music, as well as running car-repair and panel beating shops, restaurants, nightclubs, cafes and import-export. The migrants were mostly young single males who were prepared to work an average of 64 hours a week spread over six days.
Those who came from further afield than the SADC countries often had links with international trade networks stretching from West Africa to Canada, the United states and Europe. They were also better educated and had more start-up capital than SADC migrants, who mostly began their businesses with money earned while employed elsewhere in South Africa.
The project’s Sally Peberdy found that nine out of 10 entered the country at formal border points and three-quarters had a visa – but this was usually a visitor’s visa, denying them the right to trade. Seven out of 10 did not regard South Africa as home and did not want to live here permanently or bring their families here.
Half of all African traders and more than three-quarters of traders from the SADC countries invested most of their profits in South Africa, buying goods to sell elsewhere in the region.
At the huge hangar-like Jumbo wholesale store in Johannesburg, the Indian owners are laughing all the way to the bank. They run a foreign exchange desk for their clients, who spend an average of R2 000 to R3 000 between four and eight times a year on electronics, appliances, clothes, shoes, household goods and foodstuffs – the very products South African and SADC policy wants to see exported.
Not all migrant traders work and live in the city centre. Some, particularly Mozambicans and Zimbabweans, sell fresh produce or work as mechanics in surrounding townships, where they rent garages from township residents or live in shacks.
But migrants are not just self- employed traders. Many sell the only thing they possess – their labour. South Africa has since the last century employed migrant labour from neighbouring states, and during the Nineties this regulated system largely gave way to unregulated and often subcontracted systems, with employers attracted by the potential of cheap labour.
Mozambicans easily blend with local populations, given a common Shangaan identity. But illegal workers in rural areas, especially women and children, are vulnerable to exploitation. This has led to a strong lobby for the law to recognise migrant workers from SADC countries.
The South African Police Service has on occasion said a migrant enters the country illegally every 10 minutes and that there are eight million undocumented immigrants in the country – two estimates which Southern African migration expert Professor Jonathan Crush points out are both contradictory and ludicrous.
Much of the research has concentrated on African migrants, but Minister of Home Affairs Mangosuthu Buthelezi has pointed out that illegal migrants come to South Africa from most countries in the world.
Thousands of people are living here illegally from European countries, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China. They come to Gauteng, often via elaborate people-smuggling routes. These migrants are then often employed by countrymen or relatives already in South Africa, usually trading in electronic goods, so-called grey goods or the food industry.
Many are prepared to work long hours in order to earn money towards their next journey – a one-way ticket to Canada or the US.