Scalar Claims, Worker Strategies, and ‘South Africa’s Labour Empire’ in Namibia, 1943–1979

This article seeks to place Namibia’s contract labour system, and those whose lives it shaped, in histories of labour migration and South African empire-building in southern Africa. In order to do so, it traces South African and South West African (SWA) officials’ attempts to re-scale a trans-colonial migrant labour system to fit nominally decolonised, national scales. Secondly, it examines how African contestations of state power on a municipal scale undermined officials’ scalar projects. In asserting a transnational zone of migrant labour recruitment that straddled the SWA–Angola boundary and articulated with the sprawling recruitment networks of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), the SWA Native Labour Association (SWANLA) laid claim to the same scale of practice as recruiters for the Rand mines. Labour shortages in SWA and South Africa in the 1950s led then Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Verwoerd to place the ‘controlled bringing in and sending away’ of foreign Africans at the centre of South Africa’s labour empire. In the 1960s, in response to African migration and international pressures, South African and SWA officials sought to replace SWANLA with a territory-wide labour bureau system, run partly out of bantustan governments, that would support claims of decolonisation through ‘separate development’. The article then examines African engagements with urban influx control infrastructures and practices on a small scale, in the port and fishing town of Walvis Bay. Whether leveraging house rental payments as a promise of secure urban tenure or using beer to escape infrastructural ties to the state, African Walvis Bay residents emphasised the importance of the urban scale in the colonial exercise of power. Since these contestations had African urbanisation at their core, they proved the lie of bantustans as the physical and political homes of essentially rural Africans.